The cost of propane and electricity has become so expensive in California that we use our wood burning fireplace insert during the winter whenever possible. It's the kind that has a blower that will heat up the whole house quickly while exhausting all the fireplace gasses up the chimney. If you want to encourage environmentally friendly behaviors amongst us regular folk, make electricity cheap and plentiful, and sourced from non-greenhouse gas generation itself. Modern, safe nuclear as a primary, stable source backed by wind and solar, or eliminate the nuclear component if battery storage is sufficiently advanced and plentiful. (it's getting there...) We like our fireplace but would prefer to use it only when we want to feel cozy once in a blue moon, not consistently to save money.

When the price of owned solar comes down, that is an option as well. (leased solar is a scam) We plan to include owned solar in our next home, whether if it comes with it or we leave out money from the down to purchase it. We are in the process of selling our current home and it's easier financially to do that transaction when changing homes.

There are two camps out there, people who want artificial scarcity and a lower quality of life for no good reason, and those of us who think that energy can be both environmentally friendly AND abundant. Contrary to what you have been led to believe, those two things are not mutually exclusive. But the whole nature of how semi-public utilities (at least in California) are run needs to change, and decentralize. It's a huge mess.

Apparently, the elite also own all the newline characters.

Pica FTW!

LinkedIn is primarily a convenient platform for state sponsored IP theft, hacking and espionage via asset recruitment of highly positioned individuals, and funding of totalitarian regimes (North Korea) through remote work scams. And just when you think it can't get worse, video and audio spoofing by AI has made it much worse. You can pin the blame on the HR departments not doing their due dilligence, but LinkedIn sure is a big enabler.

Those kinds of shenanigans are a good example of why I remain self employed to this day. You can keep your Office Space style bullshit. Modern corporations, especially aggressive companies like Amazon, have gamified the workplace into just sucking every last ounce of energy out of their 'human resources'. You're more a slave and less an employee every year.

As I understand it Mythos’ “big leap” is not in finding specific flaws it is in chaining them together into a “bigger” flaw. So finding a minor issue in curl that lets you put a file where you shouldn’t, plus a flaw in something that assumes some file location is “safe” and it doesn’t have to parse things with an advassery in mind, plus a flaw in something that relies on that thing, and so on.

When doing that kind of security work you don’t need to find a bunch of significant flaws in each tool, just a minor flaw in places that turn out to be useful when combined with say up to 9 other minor flaws. So from the viewpoint of cUrl which doesn’t rely on a lot of other tools to provide its services nothing has changed. The pain is experienced on a wider scale like over a whole OS where there are a lot of tools any of which might contribute a minor flaw so Mythos can find way to gain “the prize” (maybe remote execution, or a privilege escalation, or both).

Maybe a better way to think about Mythos is it doesn’t have to hyper focus on one tool like “can I break into the system using cUrl?” (and is not actually any better at that question then prior AI), but it does a far far better job at answering the question “can I break into the system using up to a dozen or so flaws together out of this pool of 1000+ tools?”. I assume it may be a bit better at finding flaws in single tool if the flaws require putting more bugs together or more steps to reach the state where an existing flaw shows up, but again that isn’t the big deal. The big deal is at a system level it puts multiple sub-critical flaws together to combine into a critical flaw. (queue transformers joke here)

Is Cuda a lock in because there is a critical mass of solutions written in Cuda and people that think about problems in terms of Cuda already so nothing is really going to unseat it that isn’t a close clone of Cuda and making one of this is for some reason impossible, or is the problem that you can make something else that lets you be expressive in the imprint ways Cuda is while giving the backend the same kind of flexibility to schedule operations, but nobody else has made one that isn’t “too buggy” to use on real world problems?

In the distant past very few C/C++ complies existed, they were “too complex” for small companies to make, and now we have very few commercial compilers and a billion open source projects that are all forks of gcc or llvm (or a fork of a fork of the llvm derived clang). We don’t have a billion non-C derived programming environments though (we have a few, JavaScript is popular, and I’ll argue Java is C-derived, although removing pointers form C doesn’t leave a lot, so I’ll also accept it as a distinct environment, but if so, so is Swift, and Rust also counts as distinct...still that is only handful). It doesn’t prove a lot, but I would say even the moat of a programming language and environment only lasts so long.

Do you actually believe that? I mean, yeah sure “we asked them what was up and they gave a flimsy excuse” doesn’t mean you have to believe it!

The only thing that points towards them maybe telling the truth is it might be obvious if the data center were operating and you don’t want to get caught in a provable lie. However it is also possible the data center is partly operating while construction continues and they figure “hey there aren’t people coming and going, who will know if the data center is operating as opposed to testing equipment if we get caught!”.

Some intrepid sould would be forever thanked if they hosted a site (offshore, safe from DMCA takedowns) with user-contributed instructions on how to remove or disable the cellular modem on popular car models.

If they want my data, they need to pay for it. By, for example, making the car free or steeply discounted. Until then, fuck off.

As a matter of fact, yes. Specifically, to the Greenland region.

Although a golden bridge of grossly outsized proportions and festooned with tacky ornamentation would be much preferred.

At the time, Apple promised that the AI features would be available on the iPhone 15 Pro and higher models. (They weren't going to be on the plain iPhone 15, I guess because it has an older CPU.)

Apparently, its current purpose is a demo for their "Copilot" AI technology.

A lot of the audio production in individual videos is really bad. This isn't anything to do with YouTube per se, not their compression algorithms or other features. A lot of YouTubers have absolutely no concept of microphone placement, of using audio compression, of reducing background noise. All of which are things which will drastically affect audio quality and the ability of a speech-to-text model to create subtitles.

It would be nice if YouTube would normalize all the uploaded videos to one set standard. Note I'm not suggesting that they compress the videos as that might change the intended presentation of professional audio productions. I just mean peak-finding normalization which could be implemented losslessly and without breaking existing video links.

Having said that, when I look at my own channel - and I am not claiming to have great audio; I have a host which would destroy a lavalier microphone in mere seconds. YouTube's subtitling is really good. It automatically switches between English and French and Hebrew, and even with a fair bit of background noise (welding, grinding, cooking, crowd noise, music) it generally gets the text correct. So I don't know what the original complaint is, except that it's not perfect. Well, guess what, neither is human hearing. How about that famous Jimi Hendrix line, "Excuse me while I kiss this guy."

With all of GitHub's great new AI features, it writes all your code for you! It doesn't matter whether the site is up at any given moment; just download your newly completed app at some point then the site is online. You're free to kick back, relax and scroll your social feeds because you don't actually have to do anything anymore. This is truly a golden era!

This is why NASA always packs a tin of Bondo with the mission supplies.

Side mirrors almost always leave a large blind spot directly behind and close to the vehicle. There's a reason that when firefighters are reversing their appliances they always have at least one of the crew physically get out and watch the area behind the vehicle.

Even a rear window and rear view mirror almost always leave a significant blind spot low and close behind the vehicle, which is why reversing cameras became a thing. When they're done well, they really are significantly safer, as well as sometimes making it a lot more reliable for most people to park the vehicle in difficult spaces.