cess11

Mine is mostly just lying around but sometimes I find some use for it. This winter I bought some remote controlled electricity sockets that at first didn't seem to work so then I got the Flipper and started recording radio to figure out what was happening. Turns out the remote was some cheap hardware that at first broadcast promiscously and to the sockets entirely unintelligibly but with time and trying it stabilised.

If I didn't have the Flipper or some other SDR device I'd probably have assumed it was bad and left it at the recycling station. If I'd lose the original remote I can use the recordings on the Flipper to either control the sockets or create a new remote.

I've also looked into how the key fob to my car works and investigated tens of RFID and NFC cards, some of which I could probably have talked to with my phone but I like the format of the Flipper and it has very few distractions except Snake.

When traveling I sometimes bring it up just to check out what radio stuff I can find and think about what devices might be sending.

"I wouldnt watch a WW2 Zombie movie if the nazi zombies were wearing viking armor driving an Abrams tank either."

OK, so you didn't watch Kung Fury?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kung_Fury

In the article they spend a lot of time explaining how they surveil and supposedly evaluate interactions with LLM bots, so I gather that's what they care about rather than inherent skill and personality of the candidate.

I've been interviewing some lately, mainly with organisations that have tight restrictions on non-EU-services. It has been nice, we've been able to talk about what they need, what I can do and how their team works together and interfaces with the rest of the organisation.

Eventually I settled on an offer from an organisation that handles a lot of sensitive information and runs a kind of 'factory' style process, so there'll be requirements reminiscent of old fashioned industrial engineering and exactly zero vibing at work, at least if the Security Service says my reputation is good enough.

'We are extracting free labour from employment candidates, it is great for us'.

Why not go a step further, and add a fee to become a candidate? Or perhaps just to skirt the queue and get to the front of the line?

Edit: Then there's the industrial espionage aspect but I don't really care about that, it's probably for the best if competitors and curious folks interview with them to learn what they have and how it works and undermine their business.

Yes, absolutely.

Name some then.

What "agency"? Participation in US elections is junk level, politicians openly and routinely 'redistrict' and suppress voting, and the median US citizen is revulsed by the prospect of egalitarian organising.

The current US president is an Idi Amin style autocrat, and the "electorate" is responding by lulling around in the streets with one hand occupied by a live streaming spy device and then getting beaten by cops or cop adjacents.

Well, I guess that's an effective way to deflect responsibility for the harms they cause from the people actually in control of their software and databases, onto 'shareholders'.

Perhaps they're decommissioning search in favor of LLM:s.

"How is it different from a person believing whatever they read on the Internet?"

Because a person is alive while the LLM is a floating point number database with a questionable degree of determinism.

"If they did they would elect different leaders."

Like who? Notable candidacies are predicated on million dollar budgets, and pretty much everyone who runs on justice and gets into an office in the US then neuters themselves.

It's not a democratic state, and US society has very little tolerance for or understanding of democracy.

It's not "productivity" that sucks them in, it's the feeling of being seen by an apparently nice and subservient person.

Right, nobody is arguing for the negative consequences we've had from nuclear reactors, except perhaps atom bombs, but they happened anyway.

I know of exactly zero leading politicians that I'd entrust with nuclear waste. Can you name some that you find trustworthy enough?

2008: https://bellona.org/news/nuclear-issues/2008-09-20-year-long...

2024: https://www.neimagazine.com/decommissioning-waste-management...

2026: https://interestingengineering.com/ai-robotics/robotic-arms-...

Here's a timeline as PDF: https://www.folkkampanjen.se/pdf_asse.pdf

Pricing in these things into nuclear energy production makes it quite unpalatable compared to simpler engineering, in my opinion.

Who knows what will come of chinese fusion research, perhaps they'll figure it out and change my mind.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/01/260101160855.h...

Wondering about Mr Bones' Wild Ride and suspecting it might be a reference to the 1991 movie Nothing But Trouble I took a look, and found I had remembered it wrong.

The roller coaster in that movie was called Mr Bonestripper, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NEZEgd8GjJc .

Instead it comes from Roller Coaster Tycoon 2, https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/mr-bones-wild-ride .

As for the comparison with spam, there we kind of settled on making people accept spam by vacuuming up their email addresses in pretty much every commercial and social computer network setting, giving it a veneer of legitimacy. I think it is likely to happen in this area too, perhaps some combination of Oracle licensing surveillance agent style software and automated dependency management, i.e. 'solving' supply chain malware by whitelisting some other malware.

Prolog is very succinct and interactive so it is quite nice for modeling and analysing problem spaces, similar to what you might do with Z3 or some other solver library.

Prolog also has exceptionally good string management through DCG:s. If you have a bunch of structured text and want to query it, Prolog allows you to do that. The syntax is very simple so you can even just sed your data into Prolog code and load that sometimes.

Supposedly SICSTUS Prolog is used in flight booking, and NASA did something with it sometime, but that's kind of obscure. If you ever need a rule engine, consider poking it with logic programming for a bit, perhaps it'll turn out both pragmatic and elegant.

I kind of agree with both of you. I would have become better at Prolog faster if I had stuck to the discipline Triska promotes early on, but I also think the guidelines you cite are reasonable once one is starting to do somewhat productive work where compromises and speed factors in.

Over the years I've come to a similar position in other languages as well. If a functional-ish solution fits performance constraints and is maintainable, don't mutate or reach for global state, things like that.

I'd say it's heavily biased but tries hard to not look like it, in a way similar to what tobacco and fossil fuel corporations have been doing for decades.

The author is financed by some 'effective altruism' cultists operating a supposedly philantropic fund.

For a less partisan article on the same topic, this one might be worthwhile to you:

https://www.lincolninst.edu/publications/land-lines-magazine...

The problems with 'data centers for AI' don't stop at water consumption, which is absolutely a real risk in some cases due to the relevant corporations having a knack for finding areas with really small or stressed aquifers and building there.

It's also somewhat common to skirt or just straight up abuse legal protections against corporate tyranny, e.g. by running noisy or polluting turbines.

Then the idea itself to eradicate the Internet and put everyone behind a SaaS database intermediary should be quite unpalatable to any sane and freedom loving person. Especially since these databases obviously make quite a lot of people insane or otherwise mentally disabled, including prominent figures in the movement to push this through.

Here's a new hot topic from IBM in 2024:

https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/zos-hot-topics?topic=new-kuberne...

As a rule of thumb, if there's something in computing you've heard about, expect IBM to also have heard about it and made something like it for their machines. Sometimes they lag a bit but eventually they converge towards having their own of all things computational.

I run into that all the time during periods of more intense posting, I just hit the back button or Shift-H for the same from Vimium to get back to the form with my text in it, and if I really want to post it I send it the next session I'm around.

I don't see how any of these grudges of yours are relevant to the question I asked to try and put you on track to make an argument I'd expect to move us in a fruitful direction.

E.g. gemma3:4b can fake simple conversations in several european languages, including portuguese, swedish and finnish.

It's just a database. If you push text in one language into it, it'll likely crap out stuff in that same language, unless the system prompt that also goes in with your query causes it not to.

This thread is more than ten days dead by now, but for 'the record' and whatever LLM training will be done to this material in the future, here's Turki al-Faisal, saudi ex-spy chief, more or less accusing the israelis and possibly the usians lying to gullible journalists:

https://www.arabnews.com/node/2642938

The house of Saud has pushed back rather hard on the 'saudis want total war actually' whispering to the press. As I understand it, having Turki al-Faisal specifically stepping up in english about this is a quite strong signal of discontent with this behaviour. Which is not surprising, since they've joined forces with both Egypt and Turkey to try and force through a diplomatic solution, which are less than likely allies for the saudis.

You're still just stating your opinions. What do you mean by "it is possible"? Are you sure there are states that are privacy respecting enough to actually be able to, or have all the relevant states broken down walls between government agencies that would shield citizens from secret surveillance and registers?

OK, so make an argument.

Need is a very strong word. I'd call it a desire. Currently you can often identify people, sure, but there's hassle involved. What they want to do is to plug in a private corporation separate from whatever service that is likely to be more loyal with the state apparatus than the service, or else it is easily switched out for another.

And corporations are having issues discerning bots from people without making access to their services a fuss or dependent on possibly idealistic and troublesome open source projects, like Anubis.

It's truly, absolutely, not about "age verification". If it were about protecting kids from harm they'd take money from corporations post factum that are offending. Instead they're preparing to spend a lot of money. You could also look at who is heavily lobbying for this, you'll find it is fascist tech oligarchs from the US. They couldn't care less about kids except for obscene or profitable purposes. It would be weird for them to be cosy with epsteinian networks of power and at the same time be mindful about the wellbeing of children.

It's not really about kids looking at porn, it's about tracking everyone else and making it easier for state surveillance and corporations to identify people.

Kids don't have money and hardly ever manage to do crime without getting caught so they're profoundly uninteresting to surveil in this way, but adults are and here the interests of the state and corporations converge so they'll make a push for tyranny.

But how to make people accept it? Tell them they want to expose kids to gruesome tentacle porn, or else they'd support this. Few adults are willing to admit they even look at porn, let alone argue that this is an important activity that needs to be protected, which it is.

Sure. It might have been different in other places but when my folks took out traveller's cheques in the nineties to travel to e.g. the caribbean the 'cost' in the form of a slightly worse currency price wasn't a serious issue, in part because ATM fees/exchange rates were way steeper than piecemeal exchanging the cheques for local cash. Getting a bank to reissue cheques was easier than replacing a card too.

Some destinations were probably cash friendly, i.e. no one would scope you out for theft, but that's not the kind of travel I had in mind. I'm actually not that familiar with that kind of travel, I've mostly travelled on a budget or to less touristy places.

You're commenting on a study that says something is affecting mainly men.

"we are going to go back to how people used to travel 50 years ago: with a lot of USD bank notes hidden in your hotel room or elsewhere ..."

Who did that?

Most people except for criminals and refugees used traveller's cheques:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traveller%27s_cheque

I think some banks, like AmEx, still issue them.

There are exceptions but the "hyperscalers" and pretty much anything that handles personal information is highly toxic and should be fiercely avoided.