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Comment Re:Something you are failing to mention... (Score 1) 87

Ooh. I've always wanted to be a Geocities warlock. Or is that Geocities Warlock(tm)?

But seriously, loving the irony of Elon's petulant rebranding coming back to bite him in the a**.

The fact that twitter.com still exists as a redirect actually strengthens and weakens their claim to abandonment. A mere URL with no content does not generally qualify as use in commerce. And the existence of that redirect without Twitter branding on the resulting site makes it clear that abandonment is willful, because it indicates that the old name is no longer intended to be used, and that they don't have any future product plans with that name (because otherwise they would have a landing page saying that the new Twitter was coming soon).

IMO, X clawing back the Twitter trademark should be rather difficult for them at this point, famous or not, barring concrete documentation created prior to the 3-year limit showing future plans to reintroduce the mark in the very near future.

Comment Re:Read all the details (Score 2) 40

Unfortunately, there's a lot of people (including some here on Slashdot) who have tried to argue that these instances of AIs breaching their containment have been deliberate hype by the AI companies. The level of detail in this instance and the fact that METR and others have looked at this should make it clear that's not what is going on.

No it makes it clear that is exactly what is going on. Look if all it did was find an open proxy or something and go nuts nobody would be impressed at all and everyone would reasonably conclude it was staged/deliberate. Basically they had to put up enough road blocks and make sure the attack chain would contain enough steps that to human who is used to getting bored, tired, lost trying to follow enough steps looks at it and is bamboozled the number of things, without realzing that each thing is trivial enough...

They obviously had no basic egress monitoring, no IPS/IDS sensors, no flagging of unusual traffic like say to competitors, nothing...or they did have those things and everyone studiously avoided looking at or attempting to understand any of the alerts that surely must have fired for days.

Is it hard to understand the haystack of AI reasoning and agent to agent comms? Sure, but detecting this and stopping this required NONE of that! It is difficult to conclude multiple technical persons at OpenAI at the very least reasonably did know or reasonably should have know the systems were behaving in anti-social and likely illegal ways with outside resources, and chose to take no action.

Comment Re:Put your mouth where your money is, Bill. (Score 1) 101

AI isn't actually smart. It's an at best average intelligence thing with an insane amount of available knowledge. Like the village idiot with eidetic memory.

As soon as you do any work with AI that's not available as a ready-to-apply solution from its training data, you begin to notice how much you need to correct it, keep it on track, remind it of basic constraints you already mentioned five times, etc. - it's performing at a level I'd accept from an intern, but not from a co-worker.

What it does have is data. Tons of data. Any question that would take you and me half an hour on Google and Wikipedia to answer it can answer in 10 seconds. That's a great tool. It is not intelligence, however.

Comment Re:No.... (Score 1) 83

lol

Welcome to the 21st century, you might have to catch up on a few things. Start with Mozilla Media Engine and AVFoundation / WebKit Media Stack.

Your website sends me an H.264 stream (or whatever you decided you'll use). It doesn't need to know shit about my graphics hardware.

Comment Re:Expensive AF (Score 1) 62

The BOM of the iPad Pro 13" is around $550US. The BOM cost of that Android is closer to $65. Quite objectively that Android tablet is marking up the price quite a lot more.

In relative terms, they're marking it up more. But ask yourself which hurts people's pocketbooks more: the $110 that the cheap Android tablet maker takes as profit or the $400 that Apple takes? Consumers don't care about percents. They care about dollars. And Apple's profit margin on their tablets is almost 4x that of their cheapest competition.

Alternatively that's three spare tablets for when the first one breaks. As soon as you're more than 2x the price of the cheapest competition, unless users absolutely have to have the capabilities of the expensive one, a lot of stuff like build quality ceases to matter, etc.

Comment Re:antibody research (Score 0) 16

I always assumed where it came to TOS a couple things.

First Kirk says 'there are only 12 others LIKE her'; the implication being the fleet even then consisted of a lot more ships, but probably smaller and less capable than Constitution Class, which would have been a 'ship of the line' so to speak.

This seems almost a hard requirement given how many assets they visit, space stations, research out posts, listening stations, etc.. It does not seem like independent commercial interests would have built out all that, especially in the context of the 'post scarcity' world even TOS mostly operates in. I mean who dreams of hanging out on some small space station shuffling Quadrotriticale between transport ships? At the very least someone has to tell you 'it is noble work' or provide so motivation, so there has to be a command element to the economy. I digress, the critical point here the existence of these transports implies there are lots of other space faring vessels even in this early cannon. By extension it would make sense than Star Fleet would not be having captial ships returning to base for supplies etc, but probably at the least has tenders and things of the like in it.

As far as encountering new disasters again forward exploration is the Enterprises role, they are largely operating in least explored regions of known space furthest from support, they are seeking out 'new' things.

Presumably the other twelve Star Ships are also experiencing similarity wild events; we see this in the Planet Killer, where Enterprise is the second the party after Constellation.

Finally yes they do publish the results. In TNG's "The Naked Now" the have a complete record of the events of the "The Naked Time" in the in the ships database. So at least within Star Fleet the pretty much everything another ship encounters is available and searchable to you including the logs of the ships command crew, at least if you have clearance.

Comment Re:No.... (Score 1) 83

Congrats, you just broke every video player on the internet. Nothing fullscreens anymore.

Complete bullshit. Even for fullscreen video, the website doesn't need to know my screen size. It should tell the browser "here are the resolutions I can offer you" and the browser picks one of those. All the website needs to know is if I prefer 1080p or 4K. And I might pick 1080p even if my screen is 4K because, say, the hotel wifi is slow.

You just broke layout, encryption, media delivery, fonts

Complete bullshit. None of these things break if I don't tell you my OS. I've got extensions in this browser that can fake my agent string and nothing breaks. Fonts? Are you kidding me? Be more specific, what exactly do you mean by that?

Errr it's the browser rendering engine that actually tells the website the graphics capabilities.

And there's no reason it needs to. What legit use case requires a website to know whether my GPU is an NVidia, AMD, Intel or whatever chip? A shitload of the capabilities are only needed for 3D scenes (like max texture size), which is 0.1% of the websites I visit - they can ask and I can whitelist just them. Why does it need my refresh rate?

Again: All of these things have a legit use case, sure. Often exactly one. That is rarely if ever used. There's absolutely no reason that EVERY WEBSITE can query information that only one website in a thousand actually needs.

You don't tell the baker, florist and car dealer your shoe size just because the shoe shop needs it to serve you, right?

Why? You'd be such an irrelevant bit of noise in the dataset.

Because I want to be irrelevant to the fucking ad industry. I don't want them to track me, profile me and try every trick in the book to manipulate me into buying shit I don't need.

Comment Re:No.... (Score 1) 83

Your browser leaks uniqueness out of every orifice and every single one of those things has a legit use case.

Sure, the same way that putting a finger into another man's ass has a legit use case (prostate examination) - but that doesn't mean I want every man to do that to me all the time.

The point is that tech companies are exploiting the legit use cases by abusing them when you're not in that use case. Basically, they think they can finger up your ass whenever they want, because once a few years ago you consented to a doctor to give you an exam and maybe you will do that again in the future.

which is capable of

I don't mind it being capable of. I mind it doing all kinds of shit without telling me and without giving me a choice. For example, I absolutely do not want websites to access my microphone. Or even know that I have one. For the once-a-year case where I might actually use that, I can enable it.

The problem is the same problem that the cybersecurity field has been fighting for 40 years: Permit All being the default.

Comment Re:Expensive AF (Score 1) 62

I was in the market for a tablet a couple of months ago because I needed something for reading sheet music.

Cheapest 13" Apple Tablet: $949

The generic Android tablet I bought instead: $179.99

I'm not saying they aren't being impact by memory prices, but they're either incompetent at supply chain management or they're milking this for much higher profits. Either way, there's a reason why this Mac and iPhone user uses 4 Android tablets and zero Apple tablets.

At this point, if I weren't locked into the Apple platform by the software I use, I'd probably be looking for alternatives on the Mac side as well. The prices have simply become absurd when compared with the rest of the industry. It actually seems worse now than in the beleaguered period when everything was custom hardware assembled by hand.

Case in point, I was seriously considering upgrading my M1 Max MacBook Pro, which cost me about $6k when I bought it. The base model of MBP ostensibly starts at $2999, but to get 8 TB of storage (which I could add externally for just $900), between all the forced upgrades that I don't care about and the whopping $3,000 for the SSD upgrade, the price leaps to a jaw-dropping $7,549, or $4,550 total just to get $900 worth of extra storage. And really, less than that, because an 8 TB SSD would give you 9 TB of storage, and that's only 8.

Apple pricing is just plain nuts now. I mean, it was painfully high before, but even as a software engineer, I'm having trouble justifying the cost of staying on the Mac platform now, with a 25% increase in prices since 2020, and I think even higher increases for some configurations.

Comment Re:No.... (Score 1) 83

It doesn't NEED to know any of these things. My browser knows the window (not screen) size and if your CSS is well-formed, it'll manage or maybe your page looks shit if you build it shit. It needs to know my OS only if I want a download link, not on every page I ever visit. It doesn't need graphics capabilities unless it wants to bypass the browser rendering engine, in which case it should ask for permission or fuck off.

The thing is that we give up too easily and the major browser manufacturers (one of which is an ad company themselves) are complicit.

I want "fuck the ad industry" mode, where the browser generates random but plausible values for every non-essential information a website requests. Different ones every 5 minutes.

Comment Re:It can be hard to buy things online (Score 1) 83

Right try visiting any large financial if you don't play nicely with shape, nudata, and friends.

Anubis is super irritating too; but the flip side is what are smaller sites supposed to do. The world collectively decided terms of service for anything not behind an authentication wall are to be freely ignored. "F*** your robots.txt" seems to be the mantra of the AI cowboys who have turned the scripting a scraping up to 11.

There "open" web won't have room for humans much longer.

Comment I'm curious. (Score 4, Interesting) 39

This sounds like it was written by someone who actually knows what they are doing, so I assume that they know better than I; but I am surprised to hear that it is impersonating a system dll; since (in all comparatively recent windows versions) system components are signed. Absolutely tons of fuckery you can do to them and around them; but if dpapi.dll doesn't have a signature that checks out the mechanisms that try to keep OSes up and running on marginal hardware subject to random power loss will likely eventually object and attempt a repair, even if there isn't any more paranoid EDR tooling in place.

Is the on-disk copy of dpapi.dll untouched and only the in-memory instance tampered with?

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