In the OpenAI blog post they mentioned "Albania using OpenAI tools to speed up its EU accession" but I didn't realize how insane this was -- they are apparently going to rewrite old laws wholesale with GPT-4 to align with EU rules https://t.co/7RZLwBYosK

— sophia (the deuteronomist) (@cis_female) March 6, 2024

Orange Site discussion

tl;dr: some leftoid bullied Truth Social into releasing their source code as per the AGPL which requires derivative source to be published, naturally he's very proud of himself

He also implies the code is shit and people should look for vulnerabilities (to report them responsibly, I'm sure)

Flagged comments:

(make an account and enable "show dead")

Could have done without all the left-wing whining.

The dispersal from left-leaning social media sites wasn't about needing a place to tell lies, moderation on them was ideologically driven and biased, much like the author of this piece.

Nobody likes to be censored, the left has just been doing the censoring for so long they've forgotten how it feels.

This comment and any others critiquing the author or supporting Truth Social will be flagged, effectively deleting them for anyone who doesn't toggle the flag on in settings. What a great site this is. Actually worse than reddit in this regard.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40028696

The tone of this article reads like the author expected this company to be evil incarnate, because they're Republican, and then they just...aren't.

Seems like there is some cognitive distortion going on where people are being vilified, and then that ends up not matching reality.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40028668

I haven't made an effort post in forever so here is me being about Apple.

I asked ChatGPT to give me the top 20 complaints about Apple and I went through and collated a list from there

Apple is expensive

Models

In general I find the price discussion a weird "gotcha" when discussing iPhones in particular. You can find a smartphone to match just about every price bracket you want to and the iPhone is no exception with the current gen SE as low as $429 or the a max spec'd iPhone Pro Max going for $1600. Of course these numbers aren't through a cell provider which offer discounts for a ton of models. This is also excluding used phones which are always a great idea in $CURRENT_YEAR if you're not a huge smartphone person or just want to get a deal.

Laptop-wise I feel the M1 MacBook Air is still an excellent choice at it's $650-$700 price point - clearly not a bargain laptop but the experience of using it is very solid and a great gateway into the Mac ecosystem.

The M2 Mac Mini is a very easy sell at $599 to for an ultra-slim desktops.

Storage and Memory upgrades

This is my biggest complaint with Macs.

The storage and memory upgrades are highway robbery. It's clearly a tool in their "price ladder" strategy and simply used to get you to work your way up to the next highest model.

While I feel like the base model M1 MacBook Air is an excellent machine for a lot of people, it's crazy they're shipping much higher priced models with 8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage.

The copium you hear from Mac fanboys about macOS running fine 8GB RAM because the "storage is so fast" makes no technical sense - NAND used in storage is measured in microseconds and DRAM is measured in nanoseconds. The latency differences we are talking about here are an order of magnitude different.

Privacy / Security Concerns

Privacy and security inspire the most religious fervor out of any IT topic. It's extremely hard to have discussions about privacy and security in a logical manner with nerds because they'll often see glowies that aren't there and ignore the glowies in front of them.

The most important question to ask for any security question is what is your threat model?

Are you trying to avoid nation state actors? Good news, you can stop worrying because they will win! Stop using computers for anything that will get Israel after you, they have an unlimited budget and carte blanche to ignore the law.

If you are expecting the glowies to lack the ability to infiltrate GrapheneOS or Tails supply chain, I have a bridge to sell you.

If your threat model is "I don't want my smartphone data to be cracked in a few minutes", good news - both Android and iOS are fully encrypted and your data is safe. The most important thing there is choosing good passwords (passphrases).

If your threat model is more privacy focused I think there's a better case to be made for custom Android ROMs but if you're anything approaching normie I think it's self-explanatory why Apple is easier than a custom ROM more trustworthy than an advertising company.

Apple is lacking repairability front

Planned Obsolescence

The planned obsolescence take is easily taken down by the fact of Apple's software support on iOS devices. Apple released the iPhone SE (1st Gen) in March 2016 and released a security update last month.

"Battery Gate"

The entire saga of battery gate I think I've argued about on here multiple times so I'll recount what I've argued before:

Lithium ion batteries degrade over time, they also are reduced in performance if they're too hot or too cold.

If old enough or cold enough lithium ion batteries can reach levels where they won't supply enough power for your device to function at all.

To support this let me quote, not Apple, but Sammy:

If you're experiencing frequent shutdowns, visit your nearest service center.

It may be time for a battery check-up, as batteries are consumables, which naturally wear out over time.

https://www.samsung.com/us/support/galaxy-battery/care-and-maintenance/

Apple of course outlines this on their own page too

https://support.apple.com/en-us/101575

The takeaway then is your can either 1.) let a phone shutdown when it can't get enough juice or 2.) reduce the amount of juice being used.

Apple chose to do two and, clearly communicated this poorly hence the lawsuit , but the act itself is the obvious correct choice. This is due to the nature of lithium ion batteries not the jews of planned obsolesce.

Overheating

Overheating was an issue of MacBooks in the past, my theory is that Apple simply believed Intel's roadmap which had them getting past the 14nm process much sooner than they ever did. I also think this was what finally pushed them to go Apple Silicon as the headache of transitioning to an entirely new architecture would be worth it if they could get chips that actually worked at their listed thermal specs.

I think that Apple Silicon has been a resounding success in this regard.

For my last post on this see "You turned Stack Overflow into a nuclear test site" - StackOverflow opens up voting to all registered users; jannies revolt (again).

Basically the SO staff announced that they were going to let all users be able to vote, in order to reverse the site's participation issues and problems with engaging new users. The jannies (many of whom are still on strike) hated this and downvoted the shit out of the announcement.

Today the staff announced that the decision has been reversed and the trial won't be rolled out.

I acknowledge the feedback shared by community members and by moderators. We felt that this experiment was important because it allowed users to participate and engage in a low-effort core action on the site. We believe a healthy community involves encouraging participation from new and existing users, among other aspects. We understand there are ways to engage with new users and to further de-risk the experiment other than how it is currently designed.

also

we would like to apologize for the concern, stress, and tension caused by this experiment

lol

The SO powerusers and jannies still shit on the wagies anyway:

However, I am a bit disappointed that it has been paused only after the general disagreement from the community on Meta, and not after all the moderators told you how terrible of an idea this is.

and a particularly enormous post from Catija who used to work as an employeed SO employee and has hung around just to shit on her former colleagues. I'll not even paste 10% of her screed but it includes subtitles and subsubtitles.

It's unclear to me (and to many others, it seems) what you actually want from SO—and SE. What are the goals of this or any other change?

Subtitles include:

Content Quality as a KPI

Step 2—Review and reward curation of old content

Voting as the key activity metric

Activity as a KPI

Someone makes the mistake of saying they wished that the trial would go ahead, and they end up on -4:

I support having experiments like this, even I don't like them. I share the gratitude shown on comments by some people so far. I'm glad to know that what I thought will happen regarding the user experience when the experiment was shared privately with Stack Exchange Network moderators and when volunteer sites were required, was right.

They are prohibited by law from adding functionality to download DRM protected content

And that's not the scope of the software. The scope of the software is to make it easier and faster to download shit from the web, not to specifically download shit protected by Widevine. If you assumed that JD2 is a piracy program you're a fricking r-slur. Plus, it's pretty clear that JD devs would absolutely love to add such functionality to their software, but because they are from a country with draconian laws they cannot do so, and to move to a freer country just to appease a few users that want to download shit from a few websites with DRM is just stupid.

JDownloader2 is great for many other things, including downloading pirated content. For example, you know those shitty download sites with multiple fake download buttons, waiting times and other bullshit like that? JDownloader2 is there so that you paste in a link, it figures out the right download link for you, and if there is a captcha, it'll automatically click it for you so it's as painless as possible.

One complaint I have is that in the recent years all those sites are getting protected by Matthew Princess and JD2 still hasn't figured out how to bypass Cuckflare's cockblock with shared browser cookies or something like that, so a lot of sites no longer really work in JD2.

However, another fantastic use for JD2 is the ability to add accounts and to do inline downloading. You can add a Google account and do 20 simultaneous inline downloads of a file from Google Drive that needs an account to download.

Or, and this is my favorite function, you know how Internet Archive is a safe haven for software piracy because of their DMCA exemption? And how their download speeds are painfully slow? And how their torrents are useless as they never contain all the files and no one ever uses them? And how some collections require you to have an account and direct download anyway?

With JDownloader2 it's actually feasible to grab shit from there by direct download, because you can add your IA account to JD2 to access those login only collections, and then you can start an inline download, so if normally you have that horrendous download speed of 700Kbps, now you have that, but multiplied by 20 times, so you can hit 14Mbps download speeds. Now it takes a few minutes to download a multi-gigabyte ISO instead of a few hours, because you're simultaneously downloading it 20 times. You could try and bop this up even further with advanced options, but JD2 limits it to 20 by default to not overly stress various servers when people use the software out of the box.

There are also other useful functions of JD2, like scanning links so you can grab all the images from a website with a gallery to easily batch download those, or the aforementioned YouTube downloader that's a good way to download and archive YouTube videos if you're a BIPOC, fear the command line and therefore cannot use yt-dlp like a white man, or you're just lazy. But JDownloader2 is not all-encompassing, and yeah, for different sites you'll want different tools, maybe even purpose written.

That is not to say that JDownloader2 is shit and gay because jewish chads and g*rmans and hurr durr they do not appease to my neurodivergent standards. It's irreplaceable for many things, but there are also many things that other software does better or simply do something that cannot be done in JD2. I still use it for inline downloading large files because I don't know other downloaders that let me do so and use site credentials to bypass login restrictions.

orange site: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40107370

related drama: https://rdrama.net/h/slackernews/post/262545/marseychudindian-marseyautism-cannot-stop-seething-about

Eelco Dolstra is the creator of Nix and CppNix, […]. However, he exhibits several corrosive social behaviours that have created a culture that directly led to today's governance problems, which are an existential risk to the continued viability of the project as a going concern — especially the years-long pattern of unforced errors by the NixOS Foundation.

The signatories of this document intend to switch to, as well as actively support, any fork efforts for the entire Nix community unless something significantly changes soon. If there is no satisfying progress in action on Eelco's resignation from positions of authority in all parts of the Nix project by Wednesday May 1, 2024, we intend to ensure this letter reaches a wide audience.

This is a recording from an official conference/workshop/whatever for xorg- something that is used by most Linux distributions for their desktop environment, so it's not some small or unknown project by any means.

I won't mention anything else, just skip around the video and tell me if you notice anything

>AngryCommieSt0ner

Yeah, I was under the impression y'all had literally any clue what you were talking about with this line, but seeing as the NYT case has now proven that you absolutely do not need an overfitted model (and can, in fact, use an overfitted prompt to replicate the body of copyrighted texts) I'm not sure why anyone would find this line of thought convincing.

"Overfitted prompt"? 🤣 🤣 🤣

You don't know what overfitting is, yet you still have the audacity to share your opinion on the thing.

Please continue loudly declaring that you know nothing.

Overfitted prompt

Yeah. What else would you call what the NYT case has put up for display?

Edit: Actually nvm u probably wanna ignore as much of that as possible huh?

If the work its transformed enough to get away with saying it is your own, it is no longer a copyright violation.

LMFAO HOLY SHIT THAT IS SO NOT HOW COPYRIGHT OR PLAGIARISM WORKS HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

Strangely enough it is.

In United States copyright law, transformative use or transformation is a type of fair use that builds on a copyrighted work in a different manner or for a different purpose from the original, and thus does not infringe its holder's copyright.

What an actually fricking pathetic piece of shit you have to be to try to lie so blatantly. If you take someone's written work and re-edit it so that it follows a different narrative structure but still use their work completely word for word, saying the words you stole in front of a camera and making the written work into a video, you're still a fricking plagiarist, and if people believe you when you call it your own work, you're still a plagiarist.

So what you have is a for-profit "tool" for the mass violation of the copyright of all training data for any user who knows the right prompts to use. Does that not present a massive security and copyright concern? Not just for image generative AI, but also for text-based LLMs? If literally anyone can recreate the full body of copyrighted text with "overfitting" as simple as "what is the next paragraph?", should the people carelessly profiting from these "tools" not be held liable for that?

Whatever device you used to post this comment is a copyright violation.

It's really just "haha you use iPhone capitalism good ooh-ooh-aa-aah-throws shit" logic this morning?

BIC sells copyright-violators for less than a buck.

Well that would be a great argument if you lazy wastes of human sperm could be bothered to pick up a pen and learn to draw.

Aww, thread wasn't going the way you would like?

No, I was expecting people to actually contribute thoughtful conversation, rather than pretending buying a pen and tracing the Mona Lisa's face is the same as a generative AI recreating the Mona Lisa's face in full when told to draw a smiling woman in a Renaissance style. Guess that's my mistake to expect anything resemble critical thought from the people who can't grasp Starship Troopers and Helldivers.

Don't quote me on this but I believe you can also violate any copy right with a pencil

Wow, crazy. It's almost as though there's a difference between the fair personal and/or transformative use of copyrighted work and generating the body of copyrighted works to present as your own.

The U.S. is a failed society actively in decline. The contradictions of capitalism are sharpening, and AI is seen as a golden goose for an ever more enshittified tech industry that has for so long been drowning in cheap venture capital and wall street investments that simply don't exist anymore, almost entirely on the premise that AI will eventually be able to automate much of the skilled labor that these venture capitalists still have to pay so much for. Between Disney's deepfakes, or video games and animation studios trying to use AI-generated assets and voice actors, or even this most recent class of utterly incompetent programmers who just have ChatGPT write their code for them and they just tweak it until it just barely passes muster, it's clear what the suits at these big tech companies pouring so much money into AI want to do with it, regardless of whether or not the technology even has the potential to do so. If you want to talk philosophically, why should we treat generative AI like technology that came before it? It's clearly not being used like other technology that came before it, and this isn't the turn of the 19th century.

I mean....ok. You threw a bunch of labels I barely understand at me in an attempt to ignore my point. I guess if that's your coping mechanism, more power to you.

Given your post, these comments, and well our interaction I don't think you're in a very stable position mentally. This isn't the behavior of a rational or productive person, and I admit I probably shouldn't keep goading you on. Have a good life, and hopefully one day you stop jumping at shadows.

I don't speak for anyone else, but I fundamentally don't respect copyright or IP and think both that is has no moral basis and that practically speaking it's detrimental to mankind.

Ah, got it. Just loudly yelling that all art should be subsumed for profit until eventually there's nothing left. Lemme guess, you're also one of those who don't get the satire of Helldivers 2 and Starship Troopers?

I know some of you make music, I've even heard some OC that was posted here.

Anyways, I'm trying to get into all kinds of synth stuff as a hobby and I'm not about to spend 2000$ on plugins, so instead I found this. You input the name of a particular synth or plugin VST, and it checks several whitelisted sites to see if any uploads match your query. Supposedly it's reliable, but like any pirated software- use it at your own risk.

Personally, I fail to see where the issue with this image is. This is clearly an Asian man with his Caucasian (Kalmykian) wife.

4chan explains it better

!nooticers you need to nootice harder

The recently-enacted European Digital Services Act (DSA) gives the Dublin-based body substantial enforcement powers over social media and video platforms in the area of policing illegal and hateful content.

The Irish regulator has been seeking to recruit trusted flaggers on three-year terms, with specific conditions and rules against conflicts of interest attached. It says that while experience in reporting hateful and illegal content is an advantage, it's not a pre-requisite.

“Approved Trusted Flaggers will have a fast lane when reporting suspected illegal content, where online platforms will be legally obliged to give their notices priority, and to process and decide on these reports without undue delay,” the regulator says on its ‘flaggers' application form

Areas to be policed include illegal speech such as discrimination and hate speech, non-consensual behaviour, online bullying and “negative effects on civic discourse or elections”. It also includes scams, offences to minors, sexual-based abuse, incitement to self-harm and other topics.

main document he drafted as a general code of conduct

https://gitlab.com/dwt1/the-foss-code-of-conduct

main document in video, being solution to political divisions

https://gitlab.com/dwt1/the-foss-code-of-conduct/-/blob/master/solutions-for-political-division-in-foss.org?ref_type=heads

honestly I think the solution document is pretty good, basically call people by whatever username they have, don't make echochamber's on groomercord or reddit and people should only be in those for genuine reasons, not so they can call themselves a "Rustacian" despite never using or contributing.

This whole thread is so peak HN, it even has a couple of idiots arguing "Bayesian priors" over whether another HNcel is a genuine chomo or not

“Our societies have not previously tolerated spaces that are beyond the reach of law enforcement [mass surveillance]” seems like a more complete statement. But can you imagine the Orwellian dystopia we’d live in if the statement was true?

— Matthew Green (@matthew_d_green) April 21, 2024

• A level 10 OS command injection vulnerability was found in GlobalProtect

• This bug is arguably worse than the Windows-Rust exploit which let attackers execute arbitrary shell commands