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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • (please attend to primaries next time…)

    So… should I have voted for Marianne Williamson or Dean Phillips, keeping in mind Dean Phillips formally withdrew from the race before my state’s primary, and Marianne Williamson couldn’t have won if she had sweeped every state after and including mine?

    I think the problem is mostly that the US system of elections is turbo mega fucked.




  • Not quite. Their “malicious” extension only got a few hundred installs. Using the data gathered by that extension and via other means they were able to locate other actually malicious extensions. Those total in the millions of installations.

    Through this process, they have found the following:

    1,283 with known malicious code (229 million installs).
    8,161 communicating with hardcoded IP addresses.
    1,452 running unknown executables.
    2,304 that are using another publisher's Github repo, indicating they are a copycat.
    

  • To add, let’s do some math!

    Let s be the total annual salary of every employee using Adobe. Our goal is to find the productivity ratio r such that changing to Gimp and open source more generally is a net positive from the standpoint of productivity and labor.

    s/r will be the total annual salary after changing over, because (for instance) if r = 0.8 then LTT will need to either hire or work his existing hires 1/0.8 times longer, giving (at best, ignoring overtime and so on) s/r as the new labor cost.

    We then subtract the current labor cost to get the switching cost s/r - s, and if this is greater than $10,000 then the switch is not worth it.

    For instance, let’s say LTT employs 1 person at $50k/year. He’s a bit of a skinflint. We solve for r and arrive at a ratio of 5/6 or 83.33%.

    If we have a different world where LTT hires 10 people and pays each of them $100k, we solve for r and get about 99%.

    In other words, the switch is worth it only if the labor cost is small, so the extra labor is not very expensive, or the difference between the two software is negligible.



  • “Early in the Reticulum – thousands of years ago – it became almost useless because it was cluttered with faulty, obsolete, or downright misleading information,” Sammann said.

    “Crap, you once called it,” I reminded him.

    “Yes – a technical term. So crap filtering became important. Businesses were built around it. Some of those businesses came up with a clever plan to make more money: they poisoned the well. They began to put crap on the Reticulum deliberately, forcing people to use their products to filter that crap back out. They created syndevs whose sole purpose was to spew crap into the Reticulum. But it had to be good crap.”

    “What is good crap?” Arsibalt asked in a politely incredulous tone.

    “Well, bad crap would be an unformatted document consisting of random letters. Good crap would be a beautifully typeset, well-written document that contained a hundred correct, verifiable sentences and one that was subtly false. It’s a lot harder to generate good crap. At first they had to hire humans to churn it out. They mostly did it by taking legitimate documents and inserting errors – swapping one name for another, say. But it didn’t really take off until the military got interested.”

    “As a tactic for planting misinformation in the enemy’s reticules, you mean,” Osa said. “This I know about. You are referring to the Artificial Inanity programs of the mid-First Millenium A.R.”

    “Exactly!” Sammann said. “Artificial Inanity systems of enormous sophistication and power were built for exactly the purpose Fraa Osa has mentioned. In no time at all, the praxis leaked to the commercial sector and spread to the Rampant Orphan Botnet Ecologies. Never mind. The point is that there was sort of a Dark Age on the Reticulum that lasted until my Ita forerunners were able to bring matters in hand.”

    “So, are Artificial Inanity systems still active in the Rampant Orphan Botnet Ecologies?” asked Arsibalt, utterly fascinated.

    “The ROBE evolved into something totally different early in the Second Millennium,” Sammann said dismissively.

    “What did it evolve into?” Jesry asked.

    “No one is sure,” Sammann said. “We only get hints when it finds ways to physically instantiate itself, which, fortunately, does not happen that often. But we digress. The functionality of Artificial Inanity still exists. You might say that those Ita who brought the Ret out of the Dark Age could only defeat it by co-opting it. So, to make a long story short, for every legitimate document floating around on the Reticulum, there are hundreds or thousands of bogus version – bogons, as we call them.”

    Excerpt from Anathem by Neal Stephenson

    Welcome to the brave new bogon world.



  • I spent an hour and a half arguing with my brother about probability, because he asked ChatGPT what the probability that he and his daughter were born on the same day.

    ChatGPT said 1/113465 which it claimed was 1/365^2 (this value is actually 1/133225) because there’s a 1/365 chance he was born on such and such day, and a 1/365 chance his daughter was too.

    But anyone with even a rudimentary understanding of probability would know that it’s just 1/365, because it doesn’t actually matter on which day they both happened to be born.

    He wanted to feel special, and ChatGPT confirmed his biases hard, and I got to be the dickhead and say it is special, but it’s 1/400 special not 1/100000. I don’t believe he’s completely forgiven me over disillusioning him.

    So yeah, I’ve had a minor family falling out over ChatGPT hallucinations.




  • Well, the problem is you don’t know what you don’t know. One of the first example tasks in the paper was regarding implementing a symmetric cipher. Using a weak cipher was recommended by AI tools sometimes, these developers didn’t know that some ciphers were weak. Additionally, even when the AI tool recommended a strong cipher, such as AES, it generated code that screwed up an implementation detail (failing to return the authentication tag), making the result insecure. And the user didn’t know it was wrong because they didn’t know it was incomplete.

    There’s no substitution for domain specific knowledge. Users who were forced to use traditional tools got the answer correct significantly more often because they had to read, process, and understand the documentation for the libraries, which meant they understood why the symmetric cipher was the way it is, and what additional information needed to be reported and why.




  • So please forgive me if this is a rather naive question. I haven’t seriously used Windows in nearly 15 years.

    I seem to recall runas being a lot like su, in that you enter the target user’s credentials, rather than your own as in sudo. This works because sudo is a setuid executable, and reads from configuration to find out what you’re allowed to do as the switched user.

    Is the behavior of windows sudo like unix su or unix sudo with regard to the credentials you enter? Can you limit the user to only certain commands?




  • OmnipotentEntity@beehaw.orgtoMemes@lemmy.mlvery upsetting
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    5 months ago

    If this is what it takes to get copyright reform, just granting tech companies unlimited power to hoover up whatever they want and put it in their models, it’s not going to be the egalitarian sort of copyright reform that we need. Instead, we will just getting a carve out just for this, which is ridiculous.

    There are small creators who do need at least some sort of copyright control, because ultimately people should be paid for the work they do. Artists who work on commission are the people in the direct firing line of generative AI, both in commissions and in their day jobs. This will harm them more than any particular company. I don’t think models will suffer if they can only include works in the public domain, if the public domain starts in 2003, but that’s not the kind of copyright protection that Amazon, Google, Facebook, etc. want, and that’s not what they’re going to ask for.