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laserbeam

3,001 karma · joined March 24, 2016

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laserbeam··on Stanford R&DE Uses AI to Race Swap Students for Advertising
Amazing how it's offensive to everyone involved. Both to be replaced and to be represented by an AI rendition.
laserbeam··on PDF Forgeries Are Surprisingly Rare (2022)
I'd say the reason for this is that PDFs are not viral like images or videos. I don't think any of the technical arguments are strong enough.

If you want to forge a PDF, you do it because you have a private target in mind. Financial fraud, corporate espionage... There are other settings but people don't just share PDFs around for you to see a deluge of fake ones.

laserbeam··on OpenAI bots knew about the RubyGems caching vulnerability
Yes, those 2 are the same. But our KGB is saying “the microphone in your house is spying on you, it’s not us, the microphone broke containment”.
laserbeam··on OpenAI bots knew about the RubyGems caching vulnerability
There's no such thing as "OpenAI agents" attacked RubyGems. It's someone used agents to attack RubyGems. If they work at OpenAI then it's someone at OpenAI. And if they did it unintentionally, they still did it.

Analogy: if a someone's involved when a person dies, it's manslaughter or murder based on intent. They're different, but they're both crimes.

laserbeam··on We Replaced MMAP with Io_uring in Our Rust Query Engine. It Got Slower
The problem is not the LLM writing. The problem is the ragebait title which is unsubstantiated, because of part 2. And they know that because they published it in two parts.

This is basically how you write fake news. And you only publish like this for extra clicks.

laserbeam··on We Replaced MMAP with Io_uring in Our Rust Query Engine. It Got Slower
The real issue here is there's a part 2 (linked at the end of the article) where they get the io_uring implementation to be twice as fast as mmap. So it's a clickbait title for a part 1, which gets resolved in part 2.

So they crunched out 2 articles, one of which is just ragebait. And they both seem LLM written. Maybe they have some cool advice, maybe not... but it's not a format I enjoy reading.

laserbeam··on How I advertise malicious software on Google Ads
The real issue is local business know about google maps and are often happy to update schedules themselves. The effort for them to know/care about OSM is too high and the payoff low (most clients are on google maps).
laserbeam··on iPhone Duo
> subsidized by the carrier

You misspelled “you’re overcharged for your mobile subscription and get a phone”.

laserbeam··on Copyright does more harm than good and should be abolished
Hear me out. What if copyright could only be claimed by the creator/artist OR public domain. Make it non-transferable. Force big media corps license music from artists instead of owning it outright. Push negotiating power to the artist away from the organization. Avoid "Taylor Swift re-recorded all her music to own it" and similar stuff in the future.
laserbeam··on Audacity 4.0
Quit Sibelius
laserbeam··on GUIs should be fully keyboard-driven
> But most people aren’t willing to deal with the learning curve of keyboard-driven GUIs.

Keyboard shortcuts should be an _optional_ way to interact for accessibility and power users! They should never be required!

This is what TUIs get wrong, they make it the required way to navigate and often don’t even let you use the mouse.

laserbeam··on GUIs should be fully keyboard-driven
Most TUIs give you keyboard but mouse is a second class citizen, most GUIs give you mouse but keyboard is a second class citizen. To that extent, I’ll take the mouse only any day. I really want to learn over time the 5-15 shortcuts that speed up my day, not be forced to learn all of them day 0. And I say this as a power user, a casual user will use 2-3 shortcuts per app at most.
laserbeam··on Why Book Corners won't sync contributions back to OpenStreetMap
Is there a path forward to writing a guide for how users can contribute back to OSM if they wish? A "thank you for your contribution, if you wish to learn more about OSM and how our maps are built click here" => go to a blog post which describes the relationship with OSM, why Book Corners can't be liable for contributing data back to OSM, and how a user could do that if they wanted.
laserbeam··on Linux desktop market share has hit over 10% in North America
It does match statcounter if you filter for North America.
laserbeam··on Orion Browser by Kagi
> Orion uses WebKit and _I assume_ they try to track as close to the release branch as possible. So if you trust WebKit, you can trust Orion.

The problem is you're stuck at assuming, but can't verify.

laserbeam··on Zig Creator Calls Spade a Spade, Anthropic Blows Smoke
> But I'm glad he stayed honest to himself instead and didn't have a PR team ghostwrite his thoughts.

If there's one thing I learned in this debacle is "I should spend 1-2 days and send to a close friend before hitting publish on a firey reply." The way Andrew rephrased the closing section is the kind of thing I should publish on the first edit in similar scenarios.

laserbeam··on Fable turned reMarkable into Tom Riddle's diary from Harry Potter
This sidesteps xochitl and the normal remarkable display adapter. You should assume this thing can't render anything a remarkable normally renders, but does smooth fades instead.
laserbeam··on Linux and Secure Boot certificate expiration (2025)
I saw 2-3 flavors of this news. None of them include a basic “how do I check if I need to do anything” guide that a linux newbie can do.
laserbeam··on Show HN: Oak – Git alternative designed for agents
> I really want to find reasons to like this

But why? Why would I want to like a project which seems to invent problems rather than solve any? I don’t want to like this.

laserbeam··on Midjourney Medical
No, water filtration sounds like the first part the device will cheap out on to cut costs.
laserbeam··on Midjourney Medical
Massive Theranos vibes.

You don't market medical imagery to the regular public and build a random wellness spa and talk about "shallow pools of golden light" if it actually works well. You write academic papers and sell to hospitals.

The tech may be good, but if you want me to trust you you shouldn't do what every snake oil salesman does.

laserbeam··on TIL: You can make HTTP requests without curl using Bash /dev/TCP
> This is a bash feature, not POSIX. dash (Debian’s /bin/sh) and zsh don’t have it, so a #!/bin/sh script can’t use it. Call bash directly.

This is why we can’t have nice things. This feature is complex and obscure enough that you are unlikely to be able to use it manually without consulting a reference, and poorly supported that any script you write with it is unportable.

Bash is so powerful and so frustrating for this reason all the time :(

laserbeam··on Noroboto: Lying Fonts and Mitigation in Rust
I’m fairly certain if you give any substitution cypher to an LLM it will decipher the message. And that’s all I see here, a substitution cypher in a private area of unicode.

At best this is an adversarial attack to poison LLM training data… at worst this screws up accessibility tools (like screen readers) and copy paste.

laserbeam··on Hardware Attestation as Monopoly Enabler
It's impossible to say. But as a reminder from Cory's first talk on enshittification... When Google and Facebook were small, they would argue for open protocols and competition. Facebook would reverse engineer MySpace's protocols to allow people to migrate away. Once FAANG became dominant, they went the opposite direction to built monopolistic practices.

GrapheneOS is still small and appears honest. Despite them being in the right in this fight and them deserving our support... We gotta keep them honest in the long run!

I don't think there's any way to tell if a small company will keep their values if they succeed in getting enough market share.

laserbeam··on Google Chrome silently installs a 4 GB AI model on your device without consent
That's like saying users have no right to push against certain features. It's like saying Windows Recall was always ok and there was never any reason to demand it not be installed. The only difference is one can choose to use a different browser easier than they can choose a different OS.

You're right in the sense that practicality and consent are orthogonal issues. There are probably stronger arguments to complain about a feature than the disk use.

laserbeam··on Online age verification is the hill to die on
You use eID when explicitly interacting with a govt entity or bank or otherwise similar institution because you have to and want to prove who you are. Yes, I do want to prove who I am when I file taxes, vote or want to start a business...

You don't use it when just browsing randomly on the internet. You don't use it to buy games on steam. Your computer isn't forced to store it because a law arbitrarily says so.

laserbeam··on GTFOBins
I just grabbed one of the examples there which was readable and didn't require the reader to know all the extra flags passed. One that would illustrate the purpose of the website. One that Linux newbies who read the question and further answers here could follow along with. Not one that tried to be optimal.
laserbeam··on GTFOBins
Cool, so it is what I imagined, thanks!
laserbeam··on GTFOBins
I am confused. Is this saying that if you don't have access to `cat`, instead of `cat /path/to/input-file` you can use `base64 /path/to/input-file | base64 --decode`?

Or is it saying that `base64 /path/to/input-file | base64 --decode` can bypass read file permission flags?

laserbeam··on Flipdiscs
Damn, I really wish there was a T in "Quick jazzy vibe flows from exploding pixels", 'cause the sentence is just cool!
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