smiletolerantly @ smiletolerantly @awful.systems

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737

Joined

1 yr. ago

• LLMs are a complete dead end when it comes to actual intelligence, understanding, or sentience
• constant fearmongering from decades of media makes you afraid of sentient AI. I think it's important to recognize that. I'm willing to bet that if people would have grown up with, say, Iain Banks' Culture instead of Terminator, the idea of sentient AI would be exciting. (Not a value judgement, just pointing it out.)

Well... In my case it would be "calculate how much loss you've been making by growing your own veggies!", lol.

(Container gardening and watering add up, but I am not complaining, I am not doing this to save/earn money)

I was SO confused until I checked the community.

Thought this was about literal, real-world vegatable gardens as a hobby.

I hate the HA implementation of voice assist. It's either "what you are saying has to be recognized as EXACTLY this string" or it's "try an LLM lol".

Hie the fuck do you influence if your voice recognition model spits out "To-do, ToDo, todo, To-Do, To Do or to do"? Because if you try to add an item to the ToDo list, then this difference matters to HA.

The answer is: by matching what is recognized against all known entities, and picking (with a threshold) the closest match. But that's just not possible currently.

Thanks for sharing that link! Interesting post and interesting blog in general!

Yes, any version of age control which would realistically get passed will be bad. This:

additionally, in my opinion no one who wants to enact such a thing is doing it in good faith. it is a pretense towards an ulterior goal[2]

is absolutely true. The fact that those privacy preserving approaches exist but aren't used is all the proof I personally need of this.

I'd have imagined something along these lines:

• USER visits porn site
• PORN site encrypts random nonce + “is this user 18?” with GOV pubkey
• PORN forwards that to USER
• USER forwards that to GOV, together with something authenticating themselves (need to have GOV account)
• GOV knows user is requesting, but not what for
• GOV checks: is user 18?, concats answer with random nonce from PORN, hashes that with known algo, signs the entire thing with its private signing key
• GOV returns that to USER
• USER forwards that to PORN
• PORN is able to verify that whoever made the request to visit PORN is verified as older than 18 by singing key holder / GOV, by checking certificate chain, and gets freshness guarantee from random nonce
• but PORN does not know anything about the user (besides whether they are an adult or not)

There’s probably glaring issues with this, this is just from the top of my head to solve the problem of “GOV should know nothing”.

Yes, of course, it's everywhere. What's left but becoming a hermit...?

But you know what makes me extra mad about the age restrictions? I don't think they are a bad idea per se. Keeping teens from watching porn or kids from spending most of their waking hours on brainrot on social media is, in and on itself, a good idea. What does make me mad is that this could easily be done in a privacy-respecting fashion (towards site providers and governments simultaneously). The fact that it isn't - that you'll need to share your real, passport-backed identity with a bunch of sites - tells you everything you need to know about these endeavors, I think.

ChatControl is back on the table here in Europe AGAIN (you've probably heard), with mandatory age checking sprinkled on to as a treat.

I honestly feel physically ill at this point. Like a constant, unignorable digital angst eating away at my sanity. I don't want any part in this shit anymore.

... are entirely possible, even if rarely the right choice.

Hm, yes, that sounds annoying indeed. Maybe I just have not encountered such an app/site yet, but louckily, the bitwarden integration has been working flawlessly for me.

Bitwarden / Vaultwarden are OSS and work fantastic across all my devices. IMO it's more convenient than passwords now, ESPECIALLY if you'd have to enter a 2fa code as well.

Haha, perfect 😄

Would you mind opening a PR to fix that typo? Would be useful for others as well!

Or a CLI with clap.

Curious what you are talking about. Multi-threaded sharing of memory for example is also easy with rust, it just doesn't let you wrote and read at the same time, and so on.

Yeah. Once you get used to the (verbose, but by no means unergonomic!) syntax, you'll probably never be happy with another language again. Job-wise, I am currently mostly using Go, and while also a nice language, I miss the confidence and security I took for granted with rust.

Not to mention just how goddamn expressive rust can be. Let bindings like if ok/err, else return? Assign from a match on Some(Ok(x))? Filter, map, and friends on any iterator? Oh my GOD the error handling with the question mark iterator? 100% confidence that if it compiles, no error, possible null value, or case is unhandled.

And all this WHILE giving you the amazing security benefits!

Ah, damn, caught me proselytizing again.

• if your skill is so great that you would never cause the kinds of bugs the rust compiler is designed to prevent, then it will never keep you from compiling, and therefore your complaint is unnecessary and you can happily use rust
• if you do encounter these error messages, then you are apparently not skilled enough to not use rust, and should use rust

In summary: use rust.

Nice, that's great to hear!

Viel Spaß! War im Mai 3 Wochen dort, absolut begeistert, jetzt wird fleißig Japanisch gelernt 😄