kbal

Pedestrians will need to pass an annual inspection to make sure they have the proper high-vis gear, flame resistant clothing, and signal lights.

arson, n. The crime of deliberately starting a fire with intent to cause damage.

The dictionary confirms my understanding that “unintentional arson” is a contradiction in terms. We must therefore find the defendant not guilty.

Is there even a single OECD government that’s firmly opposed to what Israel is doing, firmly opposed to what Russia is doing, and firmly opposed to fossil fuels? Asking for that doesn’t seem like too much.

After posting I instantly thought about whether I should’ve added to that last sentence “… in any society with a modicum of respect for liberty.”

Paid and freeware but either way non-free, unfortunately.

As far as I can tell from what’s reported there it’s empty rhetoric based on nothing concrete. It’s presumably more effective in Italian.

Yeah it was a big milestone. Many related developments soon followed. It’s an interesting coincidence that linux was first released the same year. Strong end-to-end encryption has in common with free software that it’s taken an awfully long time for ordinary people to begin understanding that it’s important and worth the effort to use. Like free software, once it gets going it can’t be stopped.

The secret of how to do strong encryption is out, since 1991. You can’t erase it from everyone’s minds. Criminals can not be stopped from using it by passing laws against it. Its only law-abiding people who will be made unsafe by that.

If it collapses due to the whole country having been blown to bits by Israel that could also be somewhat inconvenient for people in Iran.

Why would anyone want to do that? Wouldn’t it be more fun to hide your super-secret image in the innocuous-looking threads dot net profile text of hundreds of users?

I’m shocked! — shocked to find that LLMs aren’t superhuman intelligences that will soon enslave us all. Other things they’re not good at:

• Summarizing news articles. Instead of an actual summary they’ll shorten the text by just leaving things out, without any understanding of which parts are important.
• Answering questions about anything controversial. Based on subtle hints in the wording of your question they’ll reflect your own biases back at you.
• Answering questions about well-known facts. Seemingly at random when your question isn’t phrased exactly the right way they’ll start hallucinating and make up plausible bullshit in place of actual answers.
• Writing a letter. They’ll use the wrong tone, use language that is bland and generic to a degree that makes it almost offensive, and if you care about quality the whole thing will need so much re-writing that it’s quicker to do it yourself from the start.
• Telling jokes. They don’t really get humour. Their jokes tend to have things that superficially look as if they should be punchlines but aren’t funny at all.
• Writing computer code. Correcting their mistakes is even more laborious in computer languages. Most of the time they’re almost as bad at it as they are at playing chess.

Still they are amazingly clever in some ways and pretty good for coming up with random ideas when you’ve got writer’s block or something.

They’ve been warning us about the dangers of a Cyber Pearl Harbor since 1991 but I’m not too worried: Computer systems have become much more flaky and unreliable than they were then, so we’re much better prepared for none of them working.

I believe it is called “clickbait.” As in “Click here to find out what terrible thing just happened to which NATO ally!”

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when creating an account it asks your age.

Why would anyone create an account when they can just go to some random website on the far side of the world that doesn’t follow that system to get whatever they’re looking for? Even when people got their pornography from magazines the stereotype was of even supposedly mature adults being weird about it — wearing dark glasses, going to the 7-11 in a part of town where they won’t be recognized, and looking all furtive and embarrassed with their copy of Hustler at the till. Vilifying porn and trying to make people register for some kind of age verification service or anything else in order to see it is just going to make people even more secretive about it just like the good old days, and everyone will go to some dodgy unlicensed website hosted by a shell company in the Seychelles instead of the strictly regulated law-abiding Canadian purveyors.

This is not an investigation of any wrongdoing, it’s their attempt to impose “age verification” on the Internet starting with porn.

What makes you think they’d change prices on a whim? More likely they’ll change the prices based on whatever they learn from the browser fingerprint of whoever at your table is first to scan the code. Better get the intern to go first, just in case.

Makes sense to me. AI bullshit generators may be worse than useless for most of the things people try to do with them, but they might just be the perfect tool for rationalizing the systematic looting of formerly productive companies by private equity.

It must be about ten years that Taler has stood unopposed as a proposed system for digital payments that’s pretty good and might actually happen. It’s not perfect, but it’s better than anything else that exists. It’s been a lot of years of tests, audits, experiments, and demos that occasionally turn up in my news feed — it was beginning to look like vapourware. I guess it’ll be another several years before it gets to my part of the world, but it’s good to see it finally getting started.

The trick is to use a text editor with a fixed-width font.