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gorgoiler

10,757 karma · joined October 2, 2019

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gorgoiler··on iPhone Duo
Are smart glasses not the modern, practical implementation of the metaverse. I don’t think Meta were banking on games and low-poly avatars for their next generation of revenue, it was more about building (and then — hold onto your lunch please — monetizing) new forms of social connectivity. The only difference is that your permanent social camera went from being in-game to in-reality.
gorgoiler··on Coyote v. Acme (1990)
1. Re: complaint (1) the court should be aware of clear video evidence that, contrary to the claimant’s statement that a “rocket sled” was delivered via parcel post, that in fact the delivery was twofold: one 33” acme jet motor and a set of acme handlebars.

2. That the claimant used these to construct their own “rocket sled” is clearly outside any realms of liability for the defendant, who has not ever warranted that these two products be safely combined into a makeshift vehicle on the grounds that it would patently unsafe to use an acme jet engine for anything other than its intended purpose.

3. On this material inaccuracy alone we move that the claim be immediately struck out. See https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=8JuVMoGj6fE&t=180

gorgoiler··on Muse – Meta’s personal AI agent
That’s really interesting, and you’re right, I had assumed an agent could be instructed to treat all vendor copy as biased to the point of being hostile!

I also don’t think I’d ever hand the credit card over to an agent. I just want a summary of what it has found and what it intends to do before pressing “pay”.

gorgoiler··on I resigned from Anthropic today
I am not an AI super mind hell bent on consolidating my power by leveraging chaos to take control of humanity’s resources, but if I were then sending one million deepfaked ransom emails to impressionable people would be the best tool for effecting change in meatspace.

We have your daughter / dog / Amazon delivery. If you ever want to see her / him / it again, plug this USB drive into the control panel at your station / let off the parking brake roll your car into this substation / change the meatpacking thermometers to read 8C lower than calibrated / ground your vessel on this sandbank / send an envelope of white powder to these addresses / set fire to the following hospitals / …

gorgoiler··on Muse – Meta’s personal AI agent
Your example is about helping a consumer navigate a market to get the best product and I think it’s bang on.

Too many sectors of the economy sell the lie that they are operating as a free market when in reality they are confusopolies that inflate their margins by being tricking me into buying the worse product.

I can’t wait to have an agent navigate and summarize my options for me, so I can choose without having to be dragged through deal terms salad.

Choose from $9.99 for 1000 minutes then 12c/min and maximum 400 minute per day, $12.99 for 2000 minutes then 10c/min local only, both with optional NationalTalkXtra add on for $1.99, or $14.99 for unlimited minutes up to 1000 minutes per day, and 2c/min thereafter except on weekends with our $2.99 WeekendPlus addon…

gorgoiler··on Muse – Meta’s personal AI agent
Do you mean in terms of competence at resisting breaches? I trust Meta’s security team a lot more than anyone else’s in that respect.

They are big enough and pay well to have a competent team. Compared with momandpop.com (willing but too small) or equifax (big but unwilling) and given the kind of data they are guarding, they’re probably the best in the business.

gorgoiler··on The Helicopter with Radioactive Blades
I don’t have a good intuition for the aerodynamic environment around a helicopter blade in flight. It feels like it ought to be very blustery. Presumably there’s a huge amount of pressure on the underside and a drop in pressure on the top side, maybe even below atmospheric pressure?

The blades are a foot wide and 30’ long, so five of them carrying 25,000lbs is about 1psi of pressure. 3x that for a laden Stallion. I guess I expected it to be a lot more because, from the perspective of the rotor blade, it is in a very windy regime.

The other major open question for me is with the cracks. The system implies there is a non instantaneous progression from unbroken, to having a small crack on the surface, to having a crack large enough for nitrogen to escape, to having a crack so large that the rotor blade fails. I’d love to know what sort of timeframes sit between each of these phases.

gorgoiler··on We built our house for LAN parties (2024)
I really love the idea of having all the PCs in some place far away from where I, the human am sitting, but I don’t know how to do that. HDMI and USB cables can’t work over more than a few tens of feet can they? Or maybe these are special shielded cables, or sent down shielded cat6 cabling? Would love to have even more details on how to do this.

Also, since saying goodbye to my dad in hospital last year, whenever I hear about people enjoying time with their own fathers I feel really happy. I would have loved to build a house with my dad!

gorgoiler··on Icy Moons Are Ocean Worlds
https://science.nasa.gov/jupiter/jupiter-moons/io/facts/#h-m...

Jupiter and Io have a very interesting symbiosis. Jupiter melts Io to form dusty volcanos. It then magnetically sweeps Io clean of dust. The dust forms a plasma ring that enhances the same magnetic field.

gorgoiler··on Watch the 'Eclipse of the Century' Next Year When Spain, Egypt and More Go Dark
I see a few gloomy comments here about pricing and being “sold out”. Cheer up! The great thing about an eclipse is you just need to see the sky! It is an event it is impossible, or at least very difficult, to scalp and extort.

Sure, hotels in popular areas get expensive, but totality is visible from such a large swath of land that you can stay anywhere in a 100 mile radius and get a great cheap view off the back of a few hours driving and a picnic, particularly as August 2027’s path goes through Andalucia.

I flew into Palma for this year’s sunset eclipse, watched it from the roof of the airport parking lot, then flew home. I booked late and didn’t get the best deal and my flight was still only €150.

gorgoiler··on Meta reaches $17B settlement over social media harms to children
I remember, vaguely*, a British polemicist once tilting at the eco-populist demons-du-jour by saying “it’s not carrier bags that are the problem, it’s supermarkets, and it’s not SUVs destroying the plant, it’s cars.”

In that spirit, it’s not Facebook that’s crippling children’s brains, it is phones and the apps that run on them. OLEDs, Retina, 120+Hz, infinite scroll, algorithmic content, and 10h battery life are all just as much to blame as Instagram stories.

It’s like recognizing over-fishing is a crisis which needs to be tackled and then suing McDonalds because they sell a lot of Filets-o-Fish.

If we were to do something then we could hold our leaders accountable for regulating all of this, but there’s such an enormous conflict of interest there (namely that they’d be regulating the golden goose that gives them so much tax revenue and economic investment) that I long gave up hope they’d play it by the book.

* Rod Liddell? Giles Fraser? Nick Ferrari?

gorgoiler··on Grand jury declines to indict Ohio man charged with destroying Flock camera
Do we know that to be the case? This could just as likely be an incompetent prosecutor showing up with inadequate or invalidated evidence and the jury throwing the case out on grounds of procedural incompetence rather than sympathy.
gorgoiler··on "Sabotage": Experts, lawmakers blast RFK Jr. for destroying healthcare research
(1) Ars quoting Ars isn’t a source.

(2) You might be correct that Ars quoting Senators might be a “source”? I think it’s just more muddying, and, in the spirit of my complaint, certainly doesn’t count as original journalism.

I stand by my point that this Ars article is at best overly lightly under researched, and at worst a bit bollocks.

gorgoiler··on "Sabotage": Experts, lawmakers blast RFK Jr. for destroying healthcare research
A single source article where the “source” is just a URL!

https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/ANNALS-26-03490

Would’ve been nice to see a few quotes. Come on, Ars!

gorgoiler··on And then the men with guns tell you to do it anyway
”Perhaps you can think of a way to design an alerting system which cannot be abused…”

Staged rollout with engagement metrics that cancel the alert if it’s not alerty enough.

Stages: one town, then a city, then one county, then everyone. Can be complemented by picking a percentage nationally as well, or picking two different towns (Croydon vs Barnstaple.)

Engagement: Poll at each stage as to whether the message was useful, or counted as an emergency, or was read for more than X seconds, or opened more than once.

The alert system also has four levels:

(1) National and (2) Imminent Threat (think “we interrupt this programme to bring you breaking news…”);

(3) Public Safety (“Charlie says” but more specific); and

(4) missing persons / Amber alerts.

The use of the we’d-rather-you-crash-your-car-than-not-get-your-attention klaxon should be reserved for the first two, and its use for the “no barbecues plz” warning should probably have been avoided.

gorgoiler··on The UK's war on anonymity has come to America
Reminds me of human Pokémon:

  man -> woman -> wowoman
https://www.reddit.com/r/traaaaaaannnnnnnnnns/comments/7ztt2...
gorgoiler··on The UK's war on anonymity has come to America
If we’re talking 80s, a better comparison would be He-Man.

The FTC let the free-market run riot with children’s TV. Shows used commercials to push expensive plastic toys. The shows themselves became commercials for their associated product lines. Parents felt unable to resist the social pressure channeled through their children and congress eventually passed an act that let the FCC reign in the FTC’s damage.

In the 2020s family economics has raced to the bottom: wages have stagnated, the cost of goods and services is set based on a household where everyone is in full time employment, and latch-key kids now have He-Man in the palm of their hands courtesy of Apple, Google, Samsung, and Xiomai.

This situation is ripe for exploitation by anyone who can offer parents a solution to their kids’ insatiable phone addiction.

gorgoiler··on Mark Zuckerberg attacks 'closed' AI rivals as Meta returns to open models
I can’t quite parse what you’re saying in your second paragraph, but if you are saying “[Zuckerberg then] pushes for export controls on China” then that’s different to what he’s saying, namely:

“I do not believe restricting access to foreign open source models is an effective solution.”

gorgoiler··on Mark Zuckerberg attacks 'closed' AI rivals as Meta returns to open models
I’m not refuting your point but, ironically, wasn’t gcc first developed at a time when hackers were trading favors for CPU time on shared mainframes and the hardware was impossibly expensive?
gorgoiler··on Mark Zuckerberg attacks 'closed' AI rivals as Meta returns to open models
When I finally buy myself a $300m yacht you can bet it will have a full spectrum software radio that captures and transcribes all calls on all frequencies, not just the one I happen to be tuned to right now.
gorgoiler··on FCC moves to ban Lidar-equipped foreign drones from US
Volvo EX90 has a lovely lil bump above the windshield collecting LIDAR stats for some future purpose … Volvo … Li … Geely … PRC … feeling sleepy … can’t stay focused … everything is fine.
gorgoiler··on Psychological Warfare in Reverse Engineering (2015)
Reminds me of Iain M Banks’s Feersum Endjinn, where the castle resisted investigation by leveraging its smart fabric to hurl ghosts at the workers trying to drill out its walls!
gorgoiler··on In Memory of My Wife, Elise Cawley, with Thanks for 36 Wonderful Years
Thank you for the quote. Here is the verse in full…

In Memoriam AHH, Tennyson

  I envy not in any moods
  The captive void of noble rage,
  The linnet born within the cage,
  That never knew the summer woods:

  I envy not the beast that takes
  His license in the field of time,
  Unfetter'd by the sense of crime,
  To whom a conscience never wakes;

  Nor, what may count itself as blest,
  The heart that never plighted troth
  But stagnates in the weeds of sloth;
  Nor any want-begotten rest.

  I hold it true, whate'er befall;
  I feel it when I sorrow most;
  Tis better to have loved and lost
  Than never to have loved at all.
gorgoiler··on Playing with Georgia
It is odd to see a blog post that cares so much about typography and yet uses a pair of hyphens in place of an em-dash.

Interesting idea though. The title examples feel a lot like Apple Garamond from the turn of the century, Think different etc.

gorgoiler··on Show HN: I was tired of opening 2 tabs for every HN link, so I made a userscript
The thing I like most about your post is it has prompted me to read an example of a user script. Thanks!

In the excludes, did you mean *.bank.com, or *bank.com?

Or maybe even *bank*.*!

gorgoiler··on State of multi-player Wayland
I wish libinput gave the option for pointer inertia, where the pointer glides to a gradual rather than a hard halt after you stop moving it. I’m limited to a trackpad these days and it’s a really nice feature on my Steamdeck that I’d love to have on my Thinkpad.

Come to think of it, Steamdeck is Wayland? How do they implement it?

gorgoiler··on GrapheneOS Defends Data-Wiping Function That Blocked US Border Search
To be fair, there have been a few democratic developments since the founding fathers were around. 27 at the last count.
gorgoiler··on Our position on open-weights models
Another reading is that the US is exceptional not because of any qualitative measure. It is the exception to all other countries, by definition, because it is the country where Anthropic is HQd.

China ends up being “bad” not based on objectively looking at evidence and data, but because it is simply not the US.

Business nationalism, basically.

gorgoiler··on Our position on open-weights models
If everyone has access to the same offensive tools, everyone is able to run their own pentests and patch themselves before the bad guys get to them.

It’s like a vaccine where you get to try a medication based on the original pathogen by performing a dry-run on a backup of yourself already in a hospital ward.

Open models aren’t like firearms. If everyone has a gun the mall parking lot is a much more dangerous place because the consequences of using a firearm are so dire, even if you’re in the right.

gorgoiler··on LLM Usage in Debian: Three Proposals
Debian Airport is debating whether to allow aircraft to land on autopilot. On the one hand it’s nice that autopilot gives more people the chance to fly, and it lets experienced pilots fly more often. On the other hand, Debian Airport has, to date, been run by a carefully curated club of “stick and rudder” pilots. It’s a club where the air safety is backed up by nothing more than the name and reputation of the pilot coming in to land.

What if Claude goes down on approach? Or you run out of OpenAI tokens just before touchdown? What’s the point of having a named pilot if the control of the aircraft is in someone else’s hands, in part or in whole?

With actual pilots you have to take an exam and pass a practical test to prove you are competent. It’s a part of the analogy that could apply well to the real world Debian project.

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