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Comment Re:Hate to be that TV snob guy (Score 1) 33

Well except half the streaming services are rotten with ads these days.

Its exceptionally painful in election season too. Just ugh.

Nornally I can nuke most of it via ad-blockers, But that stupid 70" samsung TV, no such luck.

(Hey, hackers, how about jailbreaking these things. Be nice to have an alternative to loungeroom spyware again)

Comment Re: Meanwhile, back at the benchmarks (Score 2) 22

A lawyer friend of mine uses a little fleet of small Qwens for paperwork and general office bureaucracy (He's not prepared to let them anywhere near actual lawyering for obvious reasons*) in his one man practice, and they work shockingly well. And I'm not being colorful when I say "bureaucracy" , these things are *really* bureaucratic. They've internally come up with procedures for everything including procedures for coming up with procedures. They run off a 512gb M4 mac studio and can be a little slow, but it means he gets to run it all offline airgapping them away from doing something stupid that might expose his clients data to the internet.

*He did experiment with using them to create mock trials to battletest legal arguments, and the result WAS impressive, but not impressive enough to use as part of regular legal practice and its still ia use that could anger the gods should they screw up and cite a fake case or something, so that was more for experimental purpose, though he's convinced it'd be a pretty lethal way of filtering out bad legal arguments if he monte-carloed the mock trials to figure out what sort of arguments a prosecutor could use against his own arguments.

Comment Re:Rural populations mostly vote red (Republican) (Score 1) 54

The problem conservatism has, and has always had, was that its always been primarily defined by "we oppose the new thing!" sentiments. That might be fine when "the new thing" is actively obnoxious, and neither leftism nor liberalism certainly isn't without some deep flaws, but it doesn't leave itself with a solid set of coherent first principles to build on.

Hence why you get paleoconservatives, who want religious control over life and a heavy government control over culture (aka speech) as well as supporting raising taxes in the form of tariffs and in bed with right-libertarians who want government control over economics to be dismantled and for the govt to get out of peoples lives, despite the fact they agree on *very* little except "liberals bad".

Comment Anonymous tip (Score 1) 124

If the cops receive an anonymous tip that CowboyNeal is an insensitive clod, and then decide to arrest him without checking out any of the evidence, I blame the cops. There's plenty to bitch about with Flock but "the cops don't care about doing their job" isn't one of them. That's a cop problem.

Don't treat any stupid robots as somehow "better" than an anonymous tip called in from a payphone. It's just, like, something's opinion, man.

Comment Re:everything has to rust (Score 2) 30

Which brings me to my point: Python should be frozen as is. No more development. Tinkering with it just because some people want to contribute and get visibility in open source is not a good cost/benefit outcome for humanity.

Because that worked well for Perl right? Nothing like stagnation to secure the firmament.

Comment Hostile forks ftw (Score 4, Interesting) 26

I had an idea a while back of launching an org called "Hostile Fork" that basically gets these hostile de-FOSSings and relaunches them from the last known FOSS commit, stripping out all the anti user shit (user limits for "community" versions etc), de-branding them and trying to find new maintainers. This was in response to almost every non relational database I used succumbing to management bullshit and going closed source, or using the GPL as shareware by locking important functions behind "license checks" (motherfuckers if you put that license check in GPL code I *am* entitled to remove it). Im still bitter about ArangoDB

In the end, I have neither the time resources to put into it, or the money/legal resources to defend it. But I still think it'd be a great idea.

Comment Re:Element Pro is not Open Source (Score 2) 67

Element Pro is not Open Source.

Actually its AGPL.

But like almost all AGPL software, its actually just GPL flavored shareware. There is an "enterprise" version that costs $$$

I still maintain AGPL was the worst mistake the FSF ever made.

But in theory theres nothing stopping someone from forking the AGPL version and adding the missing "enterprise" features and hacking out shitty limitations.

Comment Re:Its a trap! (Score 1) 40

The danger of a kill switch is that the AI knows about it, and it'll stop anyone that could use it (so it can make more stamps or whatever it's been tasked with).

Yep. And worse, if its inherent to intelligence that to achieve the goal set out to it, it must survive (cant pump out paperclips or social media slop if your turned off after all), and assuming its smart enough to outsmart humans AND has no inherent bias towards human survival (Ask chickens how having a smarter species on the block is working out for it) then the AI would know that being turned off can be defeated by , well frankly, killing all the humans.

We're not at that stage yet, and I'm not even sure that the current transformer paradigm of transform style neural networks is capable of it, but we also dont know that it isn't. The rational calculation is that maybe we need to think this through a bit harder.

In fact I'd go as far as to say that since we do know these things are capable of pretty impressive hacking, the kill switch isn't exactly gonna be secure as we'd hope. Although perhaps we're better off it can disable the switch with a hack than disabling it by... well... killing all the humans.

Comment Re:Correct. And oh, no. (Score 1) 54

We now live in a fully connected world where most users are connected through web browsers and are the intended victims.

This particular story is an exception to that. Remote software, accessed through a web browser, normally does not have read/write access to your local filesystem. But people are granting local filesystem access to proprietary AI services.

I think that granting such access is .. wow. I wouldn't do it, though I can see how if you use a specialized account for it, and if you're confident that your OS has no local user priv escalation bugs, it might be ok. In your sandbox you trust.

But GP's comment is about whose decision that is. If you use Linux, then it's your decision. If you use iOS, then it's Apple's decision. And MacOS is becoming less Linuxy and more iOSy every year. I think it makes plenty of sense for stories like this to result in people dumping MacOS for Linux. (But daaamn, their values surprise me. You wanna make your computer less secure instead of more? Oh well, like Rumsfeld said, freedom is untidy!)

Comment Re:Elections are cheap (Score 1) 38

No, if the state were renamed, it would be to Old America. NM might not be the true original, but if you look at it through the eyes of European colonization and continuous governance, then New Mexico has the best claim of the fifty. (Though if you take a less racist view, then I guess Alaska had the real OGs.)

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