blackcatsec

All of these comments aged well.

When it comes to fossil fuels, there's no such thing as 'energy independence' because fossil fuels are traded on a global market. In addition, not all oil is the same. So you have to trade it because what you can extract may not be what is useful to you, but useful to someone else.

In short, the US cannot functionally be independent on fossil fuels even if we extracted every drop of oil within our borders--because we literally cannot use all of it, and most of it would be wasted just sitting around.

To be fair, though, electricity is usually cheaper at night. So discharging solar charged batteries well into the evening is still a net benefit for the grid (and your wallet).

people were worried about deepfakes with AI but instead the propaganda is doing pretty well, and arguably better, when it's not a deepfake but instead silly, catchy, youthful, and is playing up existing beliefs. The invasion is deeply unpopular in the US, and these videos only serve to amp that up.

They've fallen victim to a catastrophically easy scare tactic, unfortunately. "The sun only shines during the day therefore solar is bad!" Dumb, but easy.

I often wonder why tech has so many reductionist, materialist, and quite frankly anti-human, thinkers.

I think it comes from a position of arrogance/ego. I'll speak for the US here, since that's what I know the most; but the average 'techie' in general skews towards the higher intelligence numbers than the lower parts. This is a very, very broad stroke, and that's intentional to illustrate my point. Because of this, techie culture gains quite a bit of arrogance around it with regards to the masses. And this has been trained into tech culture since childhood. Whether it be adults praising us for being "so smart", or that we "figured out the VCR", or some other random tech problem that literally almost any human being can solve by simply reading the manual.

What I've found, in the vast majority of technical problem solving cases that average people have challenges with, if they just took a few minutes to read a manual they'd be able to solve a lot of it themselves. In short, I don't believe as a very strong techie that I'm "smarter than most", but rather that I've taken the time to dive into a subject area that most other humans do not feel the need nor desire to do so.

There are objectively hard problems in tech to solve, but the amount of people solving THOSE problems in the tech industry are few and far in between. And so the tech industry as a whole has spent the last decade or two spinning circles on increasingly complex systems to continue feeding their own egos about their own intelligence. We're now at a point that rather than solving the puzzle, most techies are creating incrementally complex puzzles to solve because they're bored of the puzzles that are in front of them. "Let me solve that puzzle by making a puzzle solver." "Okay, now let me make a puzzle solver creation tool to create puzzle solvers to solve the puzzle." and so forth and so forth. At the end of the day, you're still just solving a puzzle...

But it's this arrogance that really bothers me in the tech bro culture world. And, more importantly, at least in some tech bro circles, they have realized that their target to gathering an exponential increase in wealth doesn't lie in creating new and novel ways to solve the same puzzles, but to try and tout AI as the greatest puzzle solver creation tool puzzle solver known to man (and let me grift off of it for a little bit).

Sure, but this is absolutely not how people are viewing the AI lol.

This is a way too simplistic model of the things humans provide to the process. Imagination, Hypothesis, Testing, Intuition, and Proofing.

An AI can probably do an 'okay' job at summarizing information for meta studies. But what it can't do is go "Hey that's a weird thing in the result that hints at some other vector for this thing we should look at." Especially if that "thing" has never been analyzed before and there's no LLM-trained data on it.

LLMs will NEVER be able to do that, because it doesn't exist. They're not going to discover and define a new chemical, or a new species of animal. They're not going to be able to describe and analyze a new way of folding proteins and what implication that has UNLESS you basically are constantly training the AI on random protein folds constantly.

This is it right here. I've long thought about this one and whether I should bother with an AI agent that can do all of this stuff for me, but the reality is both what you said and I'm not rich enough.

Do I want the AI Agent to take my bank account and automatically pay some bill every month in full? What if you go a little over that month due to an emergency expense you weren't prepared for? And it's not a matter of "I don't have enough in my bank account for this one time charge", but it's "I don't have enough in my bank account for this charge and 3 others coming at the end of the month." type deal.

Agents aren't going to be very good at that. "Hey I paid $3,000 on your credit card in order to prevent you from incurring interest. Interest is really bad to carry on a credit card and you should minimize that as much as possible." Me: "Yeah but I needed that money for rent this month." Agent: "Oh, yeah! I should have taken that into account! It looks like we can't reverse the charge for the payment."

Yeah, no fucking thank you LOL.

Could you imagine hitting a rest api and like 25% of the bytes are comments? lol

To be fair, the first point is a good point. But I'd argue that you should deploy them everywhere in order to not be racist since we already generally know that the red light cameras are revenue generating devices. Is there some data on whether they increase safety? Preferably unbiased (probably not). Unsure.

Nonetheless, a fair point that deserves analysis. (My vote, to be fair, is ask the community what they want and put it up to a vote. With honest information on safety data versus revenue generation)

Likewise. I once got pulled over by the police because they insisted that my license plate had been turned in and I was driving without valid plates.

They called other officers, ran the plate, ran the VIN, ran the plate, ran the VIN. I dunno I think we sat there for almost an hour before they told me why they pulled me over and what was up.

While I'll make no judgment specifically on whether or not she is telling the truth, because the article itself isn't enough validation to say she is telling the truth here; I'll comment more on the comments in this thread.

At what point is automated enforcement a good or a bad thing for law breaking? We have yet to grapple with that as a society, and the short answer is there's no easy answer to this problem. Both for precisely the reason this article calls out (that overnight location of car is not a 100% accurate representation of residency, and fixing it seems like a mess); but also because people ARE inherently selfish and REALLY do not like the rules applying to them equally.

A great many people in the United States, particularly white (sorry, I'm going to bring race into this because it's important) enjoy some level of flexibility on what laws they follow and when. Certainly more flexibility than the average black experience. In fact, this problem is so bad that states like California have had to institute policies that allow things like license plate lights being out to exist because the profiling is so catastrophically bad that it's completely unfair.

So now, we have an automated system that at least tries to provide some level of fair enforcement. At least for now, things like speed cameras, red light cameras, license plate readers, etc. don't appear to openly consider racial bias in the immediate decision making process on whether the law is enforced or not. (There are other biases, of course, and even indirect bias with regards to where these things are placed, but I'll digress a bit here).

But even aside from the racial divide, the class divide on enforcement is a problem. And the upper classes have generally enjoyed a level of insulation from complying with laws, which just continues to go up the higher you climb (See: Epstein files). But that's on the more extreme end.

At any rate, better enforcement of laws that are now crossing the lower to middle class divide because automation allows us to do so is certainly an interesting social problem.

I hadn't considered this so eloquently with LLM text output, but you're right. "LLMs make everything sound profound" and "well-written bullshit".

This has severe ramifications for internet communications in general on forums like HN and others, where it seems LLM-written comments are sneaking in pretty much everywhere.

It's also very, very dangerous :/ Because the structure of the writing falsely implies authority and trust where there shouldn't be, or where it's not applicable.

I can't believe the person you replied to thinks that they're going to get some magical more amount of equity because you can hopefully do more with fewer people. That's assuming the entire business landscape doesn't also change with AI, disincentivizing so much investment in companies in the first place because someone else with AI can create a competitor in a shorter amount of time...

I question that as well, it's also why Go is extremely popular. Could it just be a pendulum swing back towards static linking?

Wonder when some enterprising OSS dev will rebrand dynamic linking in the future...

Why are you excited for this? They’re not going to give YOU those peoples’ salaries. You will get none of it. In fact, it will drag your salary through the floor because of all the available talent.

Wanted to reply though it's been 10 days! You are correct. But the one thing the words do is lend credibility to the eventual overthrow of the terrible regime, by allowing the words to be used to back that overthrow. In the hearts and minds of people, this is important.

I think in practical terms I think it helps limit the extent of the damage by giving everyone a social contract that they can point to in order to keep the "others" in check. In reality it's pretty variable. But I suspect having agreed upon social contracts tilt the odds towards the favored outcome over extended datasets. If that makes sense.

No, it's a solved problem for ad blockers, a very specific problem case that extensions have traditionally solved. But the entire concept of extensions is far greater than just "ad blockers", although that's the use case for which 99.9% of people have used them for.

But there are other uses cases, like cloud2butt.

I mean on iOS you do have a raw home storage path you can save arbitrary binary data stuff to, although Apple generally just has the option of "Save to Files"--but you have at least some basic folder structure there you can use and have full access to.

It's just not commonly used for the reason the other person mentioned (share buttons between apps that are file type aware)

Or in your scenario, understand the concept of 8.3 file names and why they existed, and when they were removed, and how :P

Thanks! That's one of them :) I had to look it up as it was bothering me. The other is "September" by Earth, Wind & Fire.

I'll distill it down into something you might understand a bit easier. On social media, such as Instagram, or Tiktok, you'll find a bit of a meme going around that shows the difference between an influencer video of a vacation destination and then a follow-up video from someone with their iPhone, often showing overcrowding of tourists, brown water where there was blue; with these videos often with a poor-sounding Recorder being played over them (I forget the song that it's attempting to play).

The difference between the "real" video and the "influencer" video is the artistry from the artist(s) involved. (And yes, top influencers often have a person or a team of people involved)

Because you're unable to understand art, honestly. Photography isn't just "taking a photo and making a grayscale image in Photoshop"; but rather a combination of a couple of different artistic expression styles that involve understanding how to use the tools you have (a camera, the lens, film or a sensor, and lighting) to capture an expression of an event. Technically speaking, a photo of a mountain isn't just a "photo of a mountain" that you would maybe throw into AI slop--but an actual, legitimate photo of a mountain and how it's captured and presented (no matter the post processing done) is an actual artistic expression of the capture of that mountain. Because absolutely nothing, nothing at all will capture actually standing there looking at the mountain. A photo is the best approximation, and sometimes doesn't even have to be, depending on what the artist wants to express with the image.

In short, your inability to understand photography doesn't justify the use of AI slop to prompt "give me a grayscale image of a mountain" and assume that it's the same thing as a human being taking an actual photo. They're not even close to the same thing.

It's certainly amped up in coordination over the last decade with the mixing of the tech oligarchs and the traditional religious oligarchs.

What it reminds me of is the situation in Saudi Arabia. The religious elite allows the Saud family to rule all of the politics and economics of the government so as long as the religious elite have the ability to enforce religious law on the population. It's an unholy union of church and state and this marrying of those two in the United States should absolutely fucking terrify everyone.

Let me reframe a bit on this one.

You are correct that it's not a distinctly organized group, but very loosely organized with people continually carrying the baton forward in the relay race to remove our rights. Each runner is going to be slower or faster than the previous one, but they're still running in the same direction.

A cornerstone of NCLB was to expand the funding for Charter Schools across the United States (rather than fund public education). And while these schools are supposed to be non-religious, a small provision of NCLB allowed parents to choose private, religious options if their schools fell behind (which, given the draconian testing expectations, made it pretty easy).

So maybe the NCLB Act took the long way around to get where we're at today, but it was still always headed in this direction as soon as it offered private schools as a funded alternative to public school, rather than investing in our public schools with our public funds.

On the larger issue of what you're saying, it can be difficult to distill the information down in a way that makes sense when all of it is a very complex web of people and power and ideaologies.

At the end of the day, it took 50 years, but they did succeed in getting rid of Roe vs. Wade eventually. The relentless pursuit of this effort which took 50 years of adaptation and pushing as hard as possible in every area without relenting, even when they hadn't succeeded in every direction, is what made this happen.

I expect no less from these further pushes now that we're over that hump. Maybe these efforts fail today, but they will continue to push where they can until they figure out ways in which they can succeed.

It's quite relentless and those of us whom are on the other side of this definitely need to recognize the threat for what it is. Which, to your statement, makes this so much more dangerous than if it were just a single headed hydra.

Yeah I'm not sure many of the commenters realize that this is the targeted plan. They're already succeeding with over 20 (mostly Republican) states requiring age verification to access pornography.

The whole point of this plan is to then gate LGBTQ content behind the age gates, and then criminalize with extremely harsh penalties if teenagers somehow find a way around the age gates.

It's a slow process that's taking years and is slowly eroding our 1A rights, which is precisely how we've ended up in this mess to begin with. They didn't start with "Let's dissolve the Department of Education"--they started with "No Child Left Behind" and "mandatory testing in public schools".

No doubt they'll also age gate anything around women's health, including birthing and abortion information.

Oh, and every last one of these things will be felonies so they can strip away your right to vote in the process.

I'm sure at some point user-generated pornography like cam sites will also be outlawed.

I mean there are an increasing number of states that are requiring age gating for pornography access for sites like PornHub. It's only a matter of time before that age gating expands to non-pornographic entities, which is the ultimate goal of the plan.

One of the unspoken parts of the open source social media movement is to put the 'social' back in the 'social media'. There has been a fine line between true user-driven content and centrally-controlled (and often authoritarian-lite) algorithms; with major players (advertisers, oligarchs, governments) putting their thumb on the latter half to ensure that everyone stays isolated, divided, and pacified.

Everything you called out is a symptom of that control: engagement baiting, algorithmic manipulation, censorship and suppression. Absent these items, social media can be an incredible force for good and a hopeful longer term future of more peace.

I think you're misunderstanding at least a little bit here. The Constitution created separation of powers, but what it did not do is explicitly block a particular branch from either abdicating their duty or simply delegating their power back to the executive.

It's certainly an interesting situation that wasn't explicitly spelled out in the law. But as far as everything that's working, it's realistically all within the legal framework of the Constitution. There are procedures to remove an unfit President, sure; but there's no requirement baked into the Constitution that requires those parties to act upon those procedures.

In short, it's a whole lot of short-sightedness of the Constitution combined with willing participants across multiple branches of the government.

The problems unearthed and the damage being done will take decades to fix just our internal issues, and it's very likely we will never resolve our international problems.

I don't know what the future holds for the United States, but we are certainly going to be operating from a severe handicap for quite a while.