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kombookcha

950 karma · joined July 28, 2023

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kombookcha··on US citizen charged after GrapheneOS phone wipes during airport search
That sounds sensible to me. But I am likewise NAL.

If you've refused to answer questions and giving them the password, and they don't have a warrant, taking your case off and inputting the mysterious number they found in there seems a lot more like them destroying your (data) property by oafishly trying to force access to a phone they have no business messing with, rather than you ostensibly destroying evidence of a theoretical undiscovered crime.

I'm sure they would still try to mess with you in a dozen ways for annoying them, but at least you'd be on decently solid ground in court as far as that goes.

kombookcha··on US citizen charged after GrapheneOS phone wipes during airport search
'I don't want some sketchy phone mugger to end up with sexy photos of my girlfriend/myself' would seem like a plausible reason to me, if I was a juror.
kombookcha··on Has_not_been_viewed_much
I know there are communities of people dedicated to doing this with old VHS-tapes and DVDs, so I am guessing somebody is likely chipping away at CD's like this in some capacity. It would be wonderful it it could grow into something like what you're suggesting.

A major surface area for this sort of work is oddly enough on youtube - you can find truly obscure demo tapes and records digitized and uploaded there. You'd think the copyright demons would eat these videos alive, but it seems like they don't.

kombookcha··on It's not about physical vs. digital games, it's about ownership
It's really cocky of them to do this immediately after deleting everyone's purchased movies from their accounts. Nobody should have any illusions about what "buying" a game means when they can do this at will.

https://www.playstation.com/en-gb/legal/psvideocontent/

kombookcha··on Has_not_been_viewed_much
Yeah, I think this is an unfortunate casualty of the AI age. Instead of discovering a weird fast food employee orientation CD or somebody's niche garage album from 1996 that was semi-accidentally uploaded by whoever happens to own it now, you're just getting thousands of fake songs made by bots.
kombookcha··on Meta building cloud business to sell excess AI capacity
It contextualizes all the strange Metaverse and VR-goggles stuff quite well. It always seemed like a weirdly forced product without any particular market fit - who is clamoring for a version of Teams where you need a bulky helmet, and can theoretically buy pretend digital land in order to have a... less useful corporate website? Who is interested in buying dorky goggles that instantly mark you as a weird creep who is probably recording everything you see?

Owning A Platform being the point instead of any actual use-case tracks perfectly with all these weird, forced pitches. These are all products for nobody.

kombookcha··on Meta building cloud business to sell excess AI capacity
This is an interesting angle. I had not considered how fundamentally exposed Meta is, should Apple and Google decide to break omerta.
kombookcha··on Tidal AI Policy
Are they paying for the AI music, or for the human music on the platform that is now being thinned out with the AI music?

They're fine with it now, but at what does the bread taste more like sawdust than flour to these same customers? 20%? 40%? Half? 70%?

You can only deteriorate your core product so much before people start going somewhere else.

kombookcha··on The operating cost starts after the demo
It's continually evolving, but a gold standard tell is being very punchy and listy without any semantic content whatsoever. I don't think you can really fix that without heavier human involvement, which undercuts a lot of the slop use-cases. You have to know what you want to say, or the robot will just spin its wheels - and having something to say and a way to say it is kind of the part that requires the most work, so that's not attractive if you're running a bot farm.
kombookcha··on Tidal AI Policy
After many years on audible, I left because there was a deluge of AI generated works or AI voice 'readings' of (especially public domain) works on there. It's especially galling because they make up fake names for their AI voice and force me to trawl IMDB to figure out if this is a real guy who just randomly has really inappropriate tone and tempo for the passage I just heard, or if I have been scammed. Regardless, it's a clear and unacceptable deterioration of my product quality as a subscriber, so I'm off.

I don't know exactly how the incentives work for uploading shitloads of different slop readings of old novels on there, but it seemed to show no sign of slowing down.

kombookcha··on The operating cost starts after the demo
If it wasn't worth writing for the author, it won't be worth reading for you and I. If you have a point to make, putting it into words is part of how you structure and understand it yourself. I would much rather read a point imperfectly made by a person, than a bunch of algo-noise around the fuzzy outline of a point that nobody has thought through.

If you value your finite human time and attention you have to somehow sift through the deluge of slop and the simplest, most effective filter is to immediately ditch anything that fails the slop sniff test. You are not owed readers.

kombookcha··on Anthropic CEO: Open-Source AI is getting dangerous (2023)
'These tools will become dangerously powerful, which is why nobody should be allowed to have them except through buying them from specifically me' seems a lot like motivated reasoning to me.
kombookcha··on An entire Herculaneum scroll has been read for the first time
It was in part this, and that when contrasting with the more common tradition of oral transmission and memorization, ancient teachers lamented that their students were not only failing to learn things by heart because they knew they could look them up in the book or notes later, but also as a consequence failing to learn the important life skill of really good memorization and contextual recall. I think this too aligns with modern education theory in that it's not just about students learning the material, but also the meta-skills they are acquiring while doing so.

It's not that they didn't see the usefulness of books, it was more so about the overreliance on them and the effect it had on the education students would come away with, just as you say. A pretty reasonable concern, I think!

As an aside: One of the techniques students would be exposed to was the use of memory palaces, which remains helpful to this day where everyone has a computer in their pocket. Pretty cool stuff - technology of the mind!

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

kombookcha··on AI agent bankrupted their operator while trying to scan DN42
I used to have a coworker who could get by using her Office programs fine, but would freeze completely the moment something unexpected happened or there was an error message. She didn't really know how to find stuff independently or navigate the menus, but she had carefully memorized all the little paths and procedures she would need. She did good work with it, but any time there was an update that reshuffled some buttons she would be very distressed about it.

In hindsight I suspect she was dyslexic and having this mental map was her workaround for reading a bunch of buttons with unfamiliar words without clear contexts.

People are very good at figuring out ways to get by in their day to day and get around various personal challenges and limitations. Sometimes so good, you don't even realize they're doing it!

kombookcha··on Dostoyevsky isn't difficult
I recently started reading Anna Karenina, and even for me as an adult, there's a lot of people with a lot of interconnected relationships to keep track of. But I am surprised by how moving I find it - I guess I expected it to be more distant somehow, but the people really spring to life. If I'd read it as a kid, I imagine I would be relating differently to all of these very adult concerns.

One of the best gifts I ever got was when my dad plopped down a big box full of old classical adventure novels (Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas, King Solomon's Mines, Captains Courageous, Three Musketeers, Count of Monte Cristo type of stuff) and I devoured all of them over the course of the next year or so. I'm sure I would appreciate a lot of different things about them if I read them now, but they certainly held up in terms of being engaging in spite of them all being 100+ years old by the time I got my hands on them.

I was a precocious reading kid too, and I sometimes wonder how much I understood of all the stuff I read. I feel like I remember it decently enough, but there must have been a lot going over my head.

kombookcha··on Ice water drowning survival of young patient (2025)
I believe this is common to attempt when dealing with very cold water drownings. Obviously this is a very extreme case, but I believe you'd generally be instructed on the phone to start CPR but not try to heat them up until the ambulance arrives. Just in case.

The case below had a person conscious in the water for 40 minutes (with an air pocket under the ice) before going into circulatory arrest, and then spent another 40 minutes clinically dead in under water. The combined 80 minutes in the water lowered her body temperature very dramatically, and played a large part in her almost complete recovery.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna_B%C3%A5genholm

kombookcha··on Ice water drowning survival of young patient (2025)
That's really interesting, thank you - do you know how this was done, like in a practical sense?
kombookcha··on Ice water drowning survival of young patient (2025)
Weird! I wonder if there is some exponential complexity going on. More neural pathways leaving more stuff that can potentially break from an uneven freeze/thaw? Or is it literally that the freezing and thawing can't happen evenly when you're too big? A brief transistional period with unfrozen outsides and frozen solid insides is probably not great for you.
kombookcha··on If you are asking for human attention, demonstrate human effort
I always have a strong hunch that it would be vastly more efficient if they just sent me whatever the prompt was, rather than the output. If you blow 2-3 sentences of intentional information up into a verbose e-mail, you're needlessly wasting both your and my time. Just send me the 2-3 sentences of actual stuff!
kombookcha··on AI agent bankrupted their operator while trying to scan DN42
Frankly it's unfair that I should bear the hangover of Past Me's drinking. I feel terrible now, and it's all that other guy's fault!

Maybe I should get some takeout, Future Me can burn it off at the gym.

kombookcha··on AI agent bankrupted their operator while trying to scan DN42
> JertLinc3522: the mistake was from AI agent not from Human, since it was the agent I should have refund

Expensive way to learn this lesson.

kombookcha··on Job: Head of Stonehenge
God, I had that entire Dress To Kill show loaded up on my old timey mp3-player along with Definite Article, Glorious and Sexie. Barely any room for music, but I was giggling my way through every day trying not to look too insane in public.

Izzard probably rewired my brain more than any other single comedian.

kombookcha··on Job: Head of Stonehenge
You bastards, you never told me 200 miles. 200 miles in this day and age! I don't even know where I live now!
kombookcha··on Cannibalism
That's my approach as well. When I try to mentally compare the cost of the subscription to the performance, I think it's extremely dubious at best.
kombookcha··on Cannibalism
I am convinced the people who swear by them either have very different work tasks from me, or they have very different ideas about what a job well done looks like.

I feel like everything I apply these things to sends me up a much messier and long winded route to a useable result, when compared to just doing it myself from the jump. Even the things they're ostensibly good at like sorting data comes out so messy it's practically net zero by the time you're done with quality control.

kombookcha··on How liminalism became the defining aesthetic
MyHouse.WAD is a genuine work of art. Anybody who is even tangentially interested in video games as an artistic medium should look into it, because it really is astounding.
kombookcha··on U.S. to dismantle system tracking Atlantic currents that are at risk of collapse
The system measures other currents too, as detailed in the article. The coast of Oregon was just one of the places mentioned.
kombookcha··on U.S. to dismantle system tracking Atlantic currents that are at risk of collapse
I'm guessing you need permission to go deploy a bunch of buoys off the coast of Oregon, and that permission may be difficult to obtain for foreign research projects in the current US political climate.
kombookcha··on I made my phone slow on purpose
There is a similar app called ScreenZen that can be set up with a timer like this, or small math problems. It's exceedingly effective at breaking the loop by forcing you to do a tiny task first - you're not impeded from doing anything important, but the mindless loops get broken up.
kombookcha··on Dune's Butlerian Jihad and the Future of AI
Hey, you're right, I don't think mentats get the conditioning as part of their training. I must have misremembered Thufir having the diamond tattoo.
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