CJefferson

My big problem with leaving Google is I’ve clicked on far too many ‘login with google’ boxes. In retrospect this was a mistake as it now ties my own domain to google basically forever, but lots of sites don’t even have the option to undo it.

I'm a software developer. This is clearly bad, and we can decide what it should be called. It might not be 'hacking', but you are clearly abusing the computer to steal a space in a class you shouldn't have.

My gym class operates on 'write on a piece of paper, cross off your name if you want to cancel'. I could cross someone else's name off and write mine in. They would have trouble figuring out it was me who did the malicious cross-off.

That wouldn't make it remotely acceptable of course.

I find it amazing people don’t believe this. I lost about 50kg and people treated me better. They didn’t randomly shout ‘fat fuck’ in the street for a start.

P.P.S.

Assuming you are replying to me, you seem to be projecting very powerfully. Rust isn't my favorite language, and I just asked about how much of your code was safe vs unsafe.

Do you find most of your rust code is unsafe? Because I also find I do some unsafe stuff, because of the algorithms I work on I often end up with some unchecked array accesses and a couple of raw pointers into those arrays I pass around. But 98% of the code is safe and I find this makes it easier to reason about.

Except it's 1,000x worse with the American models, because Trump might just decide that everyone in Europe get their access cut off, or gets a 5,000% tarriff. Or the companies just all agree to hike prices 10x one day. With open Chinese models, we can, in principle, run them ourselves.

The problem is you can't ban open models.

All you can do is say that Americans have to pay whatever stupid prices OpenAI / anthropic / Google / Grok wants to charge you, while China uses, and attacks with, open models.

I'd much prefer NFC if I could see how much I was paying and had to always confirm it -- I understand this wouldn't have worked with physical cards but I wish it was an option on my phone.

This type of thing (scan QR code) is how basically all payments were done when I was recently in China, via wechat or alipay (either you show your QR code for big shops, or scan their QR code for small shops / vendors. They can just print them out if they want and hang a copy).

I found it superior to other systems I've used in basically every way. Particularly for small market stalls -- I scan their QR code, I enter how much I want to send them. They never get my details, I don't have to trust they didn't fat-finger the price. It also makes it amazingly easy to send money to friends, just scan their code and send them their share of dinner.

This is where 'reasonable doubt' comes in from a jury. Would I believe that someone set up a 'wipe my phone' code, something that would be catastrophic, it was one digit different, and they accidentally typed it, or would I think they were trying to wipe their phone.

Honestly, given what I know here (a full case might be different), I would believe they did it on purpose.

From the article there's this. If this isn't proof, well, I don't know what would be:

A 97-page internal presentation, “Teen Fundamentals,” in May 2020, described its goal as to “look … to biological factors that are relatively consistent across adolescent development and gain valuable unchanging insights to inform product strategy….”

That presentation conceded, “due to the immature brain they have a much harder time stopping even though they want to – our own product foundation research has shown teens are unhappy with the amount of time they spend on our app.”

Because most people can't set up a DNS blocker. There are lots of things we, as a society, decide we want to ban. I think social media is closer to illegal drugs.

We don't need to let multi-billion dollar companies maximise profits while ruining people's lives. We can just decide to ban them, as a society.

No, not at all. Students all have different voices. Yes there are similarities but if I read two pieces of work that sound in the same voice I assume there has been cheating — except this year everything is in the same voice.

This is my biggest concern. Speaking as someone who recently had to read 60 AI generated reports (the whole issue of how much students are using AI is one discussion), it was genuinely soul-destroying reading the same phrases, seem sentence structures, same arguments over and over. Depressed me the whole of the next day.

I feel this is on of those examples of where humanities and the softer sciences can teach us things. This is exactly how 'normal' languages work. New things are introduced and people (particularly older people) hate them. Over time common words (or even sounds) become shorter, in some cases disappearing entirely when they are 'understood from context'.

Has writing secure C really changed that much? Lots of the world still writes in C99, 27 years old at this point. I think they can use a 9 month old AI model is they want.

Wow, that might be the worst name for a project I’ve ever seen. I think every programmer who sees this is going to assume it’s a Python thing.

With regards the library itself —- I think it’s generally known the c++ standard library is a poorly designed mess in places but if you make an entirely new one you lose all the software already written, at which point why use C++ nowadays?

They are going to make it a thousands times worse.

It wasn't perfect before, but it at least took some time to fake a paper. The problem is now people can produce a very plausible looking completely fake paper in minutes. Peer review is in the process of completely collapsing, in fact I think it's already basically done.

The only way this might fix things is if we require all papers are completely reproducable (that doesn't help in subjects like biology of course. They can still provide all the experimental data in the rawest format possible which doesn't break any laws).

I think what upsets me the most isn't that companies do this, it's that no government seems to have any interest in stopping them.

To me, it should be a fairly easy, short, and extremely popular law that if you say you are 'selling' someone something, with a time-frame extremely clearly specified in a simple way, at least the same size as the price (say), you can't take it back later without giving a full refund. If they want to offer a multi-year rent, call it rent.

So do we get rid of all laws which distinguish children? Why bother with limiting selling alcohol to children if we can just let the parents do it?

My problem is I don’t think anyone is (seriously) suggesting we get rid of the laws protecting children in the physical world, and having nieces and nephews, they nowadays spend more time in the virtual world than the physical world, often with their friends so it’s hard to track what they do.

While you could send a letter anonymously, it was also trivial for the government to read any letter it wanted.

The problem is we have switched from a world where it was easy to let the government read selected communications (single phones, letters), to one where it's hard not to give them access to everything or nothing.

Personally, if there was some 'magic wand' way I could let the government keep it's previous levels of control in the internet age (they could individually pick users and put work into monitoring their communications, with a clear low limit on the number they can previously watch), I personally would.

But that's hard to do -- it's not obvious it's possible at all, so we need to define a 'new normal', but let's not pretend we aren't taking a huge amount of existing power away from governments with large scale encryption.

The problem is there used to be a fairly high correlation between ‘security report’ and ‘real vulnerability’. Not perfect but good enough. Now the two are almost entirely disconnected.

Many people run older versions of Mac OS X (because their machine won't upgrade), so their safari is aging -- they use an alternative browser, firefox and chrome support older mac os x.

Of course using unsupported OSes isn't the best idea, but Apple give you security updates longer than they give you 'fun' safari updates.

One big advantage I’ve found — people get attached to models (including me). With open models if you find one that works perfectly for you but the next version doesn’t, you can run the old one forever (or someone will for you)

In the UK I see a medical practitioner before any tests, always.

Even at a smaller scale, I was shocked to go to the hospital in China and literally the first thing done was a blood sample, scanned under about 30 metrics, took about 15 minutes after the same was take. The results were sent straight to my phone. That sample had some horrendous results, so I then skipped the queue and got straight to see a doctor who already had all my numbers up on screen before he spoke to the for the first time, meaning he could immediately put me on an antibiotic drip.

That's genuinely good to know.

The thing that often hits me nowadays is using pandoc (or pandoc via quarto) to go markdown -> latex -> pdf, which tends to bury these issues (and in markdown it's more tempting to just write emojis / unicode maths symbols.

Why use markdown, because I want good HTML output (which I realise is getting better in latex, but still not as good as markdown -> HTML.

I'd much prefer bad looking unicode characters to just skipping them and having broken output honestly. This is currently the main reason I'm considering moving from LaTeX to typst -- just always having broken output as I use more unicode (maths symbols, emojis) in my documents.

I tool which pulls all details from my Garmin and keeps a '5 day rolling average' series of stats -- my lifestyle means I can't keep up 'X steps a day', but I feel I can keep up 'average X steps a day for the last 5 days'. What's perfect is I can tweak it, I even added a special 'the weather is truely awful today, you can dip under average but you need to make it up later' option by getting it to automatically pull the weather forecast, or 'The weather is perfect today, really push'.