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Comment Honest question... (Score 2) 95

Anyone with legal experience answer, I'm curious how a question of statute of limitations went to the jury. Is that not a decision of law? And if that was a major factor, how was that not decided first? A full trial wasn't needed to decide whether or not there was even grounds to sue.

Comment But can you still buy AZW books? (Score 1) 40

AI claims that you can still buy AZW books and read them on one of these old Kindles. The claim is that if you buy from your PC account for the old Kindle it will be supplied as AZW, which will be readable on the device after transfer to it from the PC by USB.

The claim is that what has changed is that you can no longer buy directly from the Kindle, because purchases are now KFX only. But that you can still buy books for it over the web using your PC and they will be supplied as AZW.

If this is really true, the change is not only not a bad thing, its positively a good thing, because the account details on the old Kindles were stored very insecurely so it was a real security hazard wandering around with this very stealable device with all your Amazon credentials stored in open format.

Is it true? It was true before the latest change, but is it still?

Comment Useful and interesting - Is Gemini Claude? (Score 4, Interesting) 7

I've been wondering about the links between models for some time. The GPT's are easy to tell from everyone else, and from each other. Not just because they are dumb as stumps, but because of their arrogance about finding the hill of some wrong "fact" and dying on it. Normally it's not too hard to tell them apart, but recently I've noticed that Gemini and Claude are almost indistinguishable. And I would agree, there are certain interesting phrases each use. Like Claude's "Spot On" which Gemini has been emulating lately.

I'd be very interested in running a fingerprint on the both of them to see what comes up.

Comment Re:Friendly reminder (Score 1) 46

SSH, HTTPS, scp, likely any protocol ending in an S in fact.

SSH can work very well with non-aes primitives, with chacha20 being both more secure and faster

The major distros however don't tend to do "custom distro" for you.
They generate various keys using AES on first install. They want you to either have an Internet capable system or at least be able to apt-get install a web browser.

Please show your work that any major distro creates ANY aes key on install. If you are conflating ssh key with AES, then see above.

So the real answer to your question is, why wouldn't you want a pre-loaded driver to use your systems hardware accelerated AES?

1) Because outside WDE, AES is not often used in any performance critical way for 99% of users
2) Because AES-NI is not universally trusted
3) Because in most places where AES previously was beneficial, there are now faster and more secure algos
4) Because every compiled-in default is attack surface that can't be mitigated without a new kernel command line + reboot, or if there is no command-line disable for it, a new kernel

In short, EVERYONE can load a module to get functionality. Only some compiled in drivers can be turned off without a new kernel and none can be turned off without a reboot.

Comment Oh no, DO trash it (Score 1) 109

I'd love to trash Edge, but it's hard to argue against Microsoft's analysis here.

You are treating like RAM that Edge has now will always belong to Edge,

Memory allocations are not sanitized by the OS. They are not automatically zeroed before being handed to the process on malloc or purged after the process hands it back to the OS on free. Any ole user process can a) see what other processes are running and, b) allocate RAM almost without limit. So all a user process has to do is look for whether or not Edge is running. If it is, then when it stops allocate as much memory as possible to grab the RAM that Edge just freed.

Comment It's not even the LLM predicting... (Score 2) 57

From the article...

Copilot was told to use the latest odds, conditions, and analysis of favorites, best bets, expert picks, previous results and race history with the post positions

Odds? Conditions? Analysis? Best bets? Expert picks? This isn't the LLM doing any work. It's an LLM being used as a calculator to sum the combined human-generated odds.

If you want to use an LLM to pick horse races, this is what you do. You let it watch every horse race that each current Kentucky Derby horse has ever raced in. You let it watch every sort of training session each horse is put in. You let it see the data from every veterinary treatment and inspection. You use every hoof movement of every race as a training "phoneme" and you let it build its associations database on the language of horse racing. Then you tell it to predict a race.

This isn't an LLM predicting a horse race. This is an LLM having a conversation based on common word associations on an upcoming hourse race and discussing a weighted average of human-generated odds.

Please stop trying to treat LLMs as something they are not. The ability to string english words together somewhat (and sometimes) coherently doesn't imply the ability to do something magical with that.

Comment Oh My God, this can't be something that's NEW (Score 5, Interesting) 32

The idea that all the "AI layoffs" aren't actually because of AI, but are snow jobs... I thought this was so blatantly obvious as to be a tautology. This can't be something that is just dawning on people, can it? Please tell me that this has been obvious to most people who can rub two thoughts together in a row.

Comment Dial it back a little (Score 2, Informative) 113

Going into their house is morally wrong ... it's a dehumanization based on ideology

Let's dial it back a little. Reel your neck in just a touch.
It's no one's house per se. It's a church. Most churches are open to the public. This isn't a home invasion. No one has been hurt.

It could be said to be valid, if somewhat loud, protest. Considering how Scientology has with great intent in many cases forced itself onto others, how its tax-free stratus makes it a drain on public coffers, and how it has openly used the threat of financial ruin to coerce ongoing membership.

Now, that is likely a little biased too. In the end I suspect the real truth is that this is little more than pranks and copycats of pranks. To get "morally repugnant" from this is turning up the volume so much that what you are getting is little more than microphone screech.

Not much worse than the kind of pranks which were simply par for the course on any given Halloween not long ago.

My advice to them (the scientologists): next time one of them sees the kids, invite them in, help them film, and ask them if they'd like some refreshments after. That'll take the air out of their sails more than moralistic teeth gnashing.

Comment Well, let's think about that (Score 4, Insightful) 113

A sad commentary on some people's morality that they think this is okay. What ever happened to the "golden rule?"

Well, on the other hand, if it was an actual "religion" rather than a sci-fi writer's spoof of one I might have more sympathy. The thing is so bizarre that it is a living example of Poe's law - you literally can't tell the difference between Scientology and a spoof of Scientology.

So, sure, get all hot and bothered about the morality of this, but a group of people making fun of something that's indistinguishable itself from making fun, is pretty morally neutral actually.

Comment When life is a game... (Score 4, Interesting) 38

Bankman-Fried would, famously, play actual video games during investor meetings. And while he was praised for the ability at the time, maybe it goes to show that someone who can't tell the difference between a game and reality will start to think of real-life stats as just more game artifacts to be manipulated to his advantage.

So, next time you're in a meeting with someone and impressed by that person's answers only to find he's playing a video game while doing it... start to question that person's grip on the difference between a game gank and a real one. Especially when the business is, by definition, something that's pretty virtual to begin with.

I suspect he will continue to try and find a loophole out of his current situation, but that the courts are a little less likely to be snowed by ADHD-fueled shaking of his prison bars than others had been.

Comment Ha ha - Paramount got baited (Score 3, Insightful) 40

The fact the initial deal happened without any sort of public process, that makes me think that Netflix and Warner colluded to bait Ellison / Paramount into this.

Warner gets more $$$$, Netflix gets a weakened Paramount and a 2.8 billion payday. And Paramount gets a $60 billion prize it had to pay $81 billion for and now has to handle regulatory hell over.

I think Netflix had no intention of ever buying Warner Brothers. I think they totally baited Paramount.

Comment Monkey See, Monkey Buy Other Monkey's Copy (Score 3, Insightful) 31

Monkey See, Monkey Buy Other Monkey's Copy is not and never has been a winning strategy.

They would have got more value out of a version of VNC.

And HP's marketspeak that it "enables us to focus our resources on product categories where we can deliver the greatest customer value and drive long-term innovation" - has never, ever fooled anyone.

If you are the one approving a press release, here's simple advice. If it, anywhere, contains the words "drive", "deliver", "value" and/or "innovation", then immediately send it back. And if it contains more than one, fire the person who brought it to you - that person will never be able to innovate, drive or deliver actual value.

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