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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 14th, 2023

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  • Wouldn’t be a huge change at this point. Israel has been using AI to determine targets for drone-delivered airstrikes for over a year now.

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI-assisted_targeting_in_the_Gaza_Strip gives a high level overview of Gospel and Lavender, and there are news articles in the references if you want to learn more.

    This is at least being positioned better than the ways Lavender and Gospel were used, but I have no doubt that it will be used to commit atrocities as well.

    For now, OpenAI’s models may help operators make sense of large amounts of incoming data to support faster human decision-making in high-pressure situations.

    Yep, that was how they justified Gospel and Lavender, too - “a human presses the button” (even though they’re not doing anywhere near enough due diligence).

    But it’s worth pointing out that the type of AI OpenAI is best known for comes from large language models (LLMs)—sometimes called large multimodal models—that are trained on massive datasets of text, images, and audio pulled from many different sources.

    Yes, OpenAI is well known for this, but they’ve also created other types of AI models (e.g., Whisper). I suspect an LLM might be part of a solution they would build but that it would not be the full solution.


  • Thanks for clarifying! I’ve heard nothing but praise for Kagi from its users so that’s what I was assuming, but Searxng has also been great so I wouldn’t have been too surprised if you’d compared them and found its results to be on par or better.

    By the way, if you’re self hosting Searxng, you can use add your own index. Searxng supports YaCy, which is an actively developed, open source search index and crawler that can be operated standalone or as part of a decentralized (P2P) network. Here are the Searxng docs for that engine. I can’t speak to its quality as I still haven’t set it up, though.



  • Understandably frustrating, especially if you’re new to investing. But it’s expected that the market will have both ups and downs.

    The best advice I can give is to choose a good investment allocation and then stick to it. Contribute as much as you can each pay period or month and avoid looking at your balance as much as possible. You should figure out a rebalancing strategy, and you’ll probably need to look at your account to do that. Also, see The Best Order of Operations For Saving For Retirement.

    Right now you have unrealized losses, but you haven’t actually lost any money (i.e., you have no “realized losses”) until you withdraw it. As it’s a retirement account and you just started it, I assume you aren’t planning to retire in the next decade, much less the next three years.

    Is this your only retirement account? If so, why have you not been continuing to add money to it? If you wait to do that until the market recovers, you’ll lose out on all the gains between now and then.

    I know you haven’t said you’re considering selling, but I recommend you check out the “Maintain Discipline” section of the Bogleheads investment philosophy, just in case that’s on your mind. I also recommend that you read up on dollar cost averaging (if you’re investing in a retirement plan every pay period, you’re already doing this).

    You pointed out that the entire market has been impacted. I haven’t personally been paying attention in enough detail to confirm that (and my accounts that I just checked have gone up about 10% over the past three years, not down), but if so, that means you could change your asset allocation without selling low and buying high. I’m not saying you should change it, but if you take the time to learn about different investment strategies and decide a different one works for you, it’s nice to not have to sell your current investments while they’re underperforming relative to your new investments. (On the other hand, you can always change the allocation for your future investments without worrying about that.)


  • Your Passkeys have to be stored in something, but you don’t have to store them all in the same thing.

    If you store them with Microsoft’s Windows Hello, Apple Keychain, or Google Password Manager, all of which are closed source, then you have to trust MS/Apple/Google. However, Keychain is end to end encrypted (according to Apple) and Windows Hello is currently not synced to the cloud, so if you trust those claims, you don’t need to trust that they won’t misuse your data. I don’t know if Google’s offering is end to end encrypted, but I wouldn’t trust it either way.

    You can also store Passkeys in a password manager. Bitwarden is open source (though they did recently introduce a proprietary, source available SDK), as is KeepassXC. 1Password isn’t open source but can store Passkeys as well.

    And finally, you can store Passkeys in a compatible security key, like the YubiKey 5 series keys, which can each store 100 Passkeys. This makes them basically immune to being stolen. Note that if your primary interest in Passkeys is in the phishing resistance (basically nearly perfect immunity to MitM attacks) then you can get that same benefit by using WebAuthn as a second factor. However, my experience has been that Passkey support is broader.

    Revoking keys involves logging into the particular service and revoking them, just like changing your password. There isn’t a centralized way to do it as far as I’m aware. Each Passkey is only used for a single service, after all. However, in the same way that some password managers will offer to automatically change your passwords, they might develop a similar for passkeys.









  • Expecting everything for free with no ads is just greedy.

    In this case you’re not paying to not have ads. You’ll still get ads; they just won’t be personalized.

    Personalized ads are more valuable to advertisers, so it still makes sense for them to charge a bit for it, but it’s not something I’ve seen before.

    I’m guessing they charge a decent amount more than the difference, though - and probably even more than they make from personalized ads per person. On that note, I really wish ad free subscriptions were closer to the revenue providers get from serving ads - if they were, I’d be more willing to pay for them than just running an adblocker all the time. YouTube Premium, for example, costs 14 USD monthly, but annual ad revenue per non premium user was 1.21 USD.


  • Synthetic media should be required to be watermarked at the source

    Bit late for that (even in 2023). Best we could do now is something like public key cryptography, with cameras having secret keys that images are signed with. However:

    • That would require people to purchase new cameras (though phones could likely do this without a new device, leveraging the secure enclaves to sign)
    • Depending on the implementation of the signing, even applying filters to images, color grading, or cropping an image could make it stop matching. If you remove something from the background or make other overt changes, it’s definitely not going to match.
      • Adobe has a system for handling changes and attesting that no AI was used. Optimally other major photo editing tools will do something similar. However, I don’t think it’s feasible to securely sign such an attestation history locally, so all such images would need to be uploaded to be signed remotely.
    • This won’t work for traditional art

    For artists and photographers with old school cameras (“old school” meaning “doesn’t compute and sign a perceptual hash of the image”), something similar could still be done. Each such person can generate a public / private key pair for themselves and sign the images they’ve created manually. This depends on you trusting that specific artist, though, as opposed to trusting the manufacturer of the camera used.


  • This isn’t true or how it works, but there is a law being proposed that would sorta make it so: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/08/senates-no-fakes-act-hopes-to-make-unauthorized-digital-replicas-illegal/

    (In the US), your likeness is protected under state laws and due to case law, rather than federal laws, and I don’t know of any such law that imposes a responsibility upon sites like Twitter to take down violations upon your report in the same way that the DMCA does. Rather, they allow you to sue the entity who used your likeness for damages in civil court. That isn’t very useful to Jane when her ex-boyfriend uploads revenge porn of her or to Kate when a random Twitter account deepfakes her face onto a nude.

    However, if a picture you have copyright to (like a selfie) is used as an input into an AI, arguably you do have partial copyright to it, as the AI elements are not copyrighted and it could not have been created without your input. As such, I think it would be reasonable to issue a DMCA takedown request if someone posted a nonconsensual deepfake of you, on the grounds that you have a good faith belief that you do have copyright to it. However, if you didn’t take the picture used as an input yourself, you don’t have copyright to it and therefore don’t have partial copyright to the output, either. If it’s a deepfake face swap, then whoever owns copyright of the original scene image/video would also have partial copyright, and they could also issue a DMCA takedown request.


  • It’s like how they slapped ‘Smart’ on every tech product in the past decade. Even devices that are dumb as fuck are called ‘Smart’ devices.

    I’m not a big fan of “Smart” as a marketing term, either, but “Automatable” doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue, and “Connected” doesn’t really have the same appeal. That said, “smart” was used pretty consistently to refer to devices that could be controlled as part of a “smart home.” It wasn’t supposed to refer to a device that itself was intelligent, though.

    I always thought of AI as artificial consciousness, an unnatural and created-by-humans self-aware and self-thinking being.

    Sounds like you’re thinking of AGI (artificial general intelligence) or that your understanding is based off sci fi as opposed to the academic discipline/field of research, which has been around since the 1950s.

    And yes, marketing is often inaccurate… but almost every instance I’ve seen where they say they’re using AI, they were.

    In fact stuff like ChatGPT would’ve made more sense to actually be called ‘Smart’ search engines instea of ‘AI’.

    IMO “Smart” would be more misleading than “AI,” even if “Smart” didn’t have an existing, unrelated meaning. I do think we could use better words - AI is such a broad category that it doesn’t say much to call a product “AI-powered.” Stable Diffusion and Llama use completely different types of AI, for example. But people broadly recognize the term (even if they don’t understand it properly) and the same can’t be said for terms like “LLM.”

    They might be technological achievements, but they’re not AI.

    You’re illustrating the AI effect - “discounting of the behavior of an artificial-intelligence program as not “real” intelligence.” AI is used in a ton of different ways that you likely don’t ever think about or even notice.

    I recommend reading over at least the introduction to the Artificial Intelligence article on Wikipedia before proclaiming that something that fits cleanly into the definition of AI isn’t AI.




  • It doesn’t matter if it’s emulated legally or not. They can issue a takedown for showing gameplay captured from an NES hooked up to a CRT if they want.

    A fair use defense has to be defended in court, and it’s not just about whether you’re right but also about whether you can afford to fight.

    It’s also not certain that a fair use defense would fly. One of the elements for determining whether fair use is market impact, and I suspect that Nintendo’s lawyers would argue that demoing that their games can be emulated - even if the specific demoed games are not being sold - has a negative market impact, since it makes people who might buy a Switch and a Nintendo Online membership to play the official emulated games less likely to do so.


  • That makes sense, and that engine and some of the other games they feature look interesting.

    Does that mean that Balatro (and presumably other LOVE 2D games) is packaged like Doom with its WAD files, where there’s an engine (a generic LOVE 2D one) that runs the game, interpreting the Lua game code, which is basically just packaged like an asset? Or is there a Balatro engine that needed to be built for each platform? I saw that BMM downloads a base IPA and an APK patcher, so I’m assuming it’s closer to the latter, but I could see it going either way.