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mmcwilliams

703 karma · joined June 20, 2014

hi at username dot com
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mmcwilliams··on Felony charges for citizen deleting phone data at US Border
I suppose you could word it that way but the statement given, that Trump's influence is failing with federal judges, isn't demonstrated by a jury refusing to convict someone. That is shown by judges throwing out cases; which has been happening.
mmcwilliams··on Felony charges for citizen deleting phone data at US Border
Sandwich guy was acquitted by a jury, not a judge.
mmcwilliams··on Apple sues OpenAI, accuses ex-employees of stealing trade secrets
Not sure you're being clear about what you mean, here. Is OpenAI's company culture something you consider "low trust"?
mmcwilliams··on Confidential submission of draft S-1 to the SEC
That may be the case but the idea that non-technical people didn't pay cash for internet products before the dot com boom is fanciful. I would say AOL's acquisition of a legacy media company did signal the peak of a mania the way these IPOs are.
mmcwilliams··on Confidential submission of draft S-1 to the SEC
This seems to ignore the fact that millions of non-technical people did pay cash for a product: AOL. And in fact the AOL buyout of Time Warner coincided almost exactly with burst of the dot com boom.
mmcwilliams··on Google to pay SpaceX $920M a month for compute capacity at xAI data centers
What people are describing here is the colloquial definition of "server", being compute hosted in space. Not a broadcast signal that is interpreted on Earth.
mmcwilliams··on Google to pay SpaceX $920M a month for compute capacity at xAI data centers
You believe that GPS is hosted on servers in space?
mmcwilliams··on Google to pay SpaceX $920M a month for compute capacity at xAI data centers
Can you provide a good example of something that is currently hosted in space and distributed via satellite?
mmcwilliams··on GitHub confirms breach of 3,800 repos via malicious VSCode extension
There are plenty of exfiltration examples out there that could go through known, commonly-greenlit domains. Even exfil via DNS requests has been demonstrated.
mmcwilliams··on The 'paperwork flood': How I drowned a bureaucrat before dinner
Seems potentially libelous to claim this person isn't actually blind.
mmcwilliams··on ICE and Palantir: US agents using health data to hunt illegal immigrants
I deal regularly with landlords that owe government agencies hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars for years or even decades. None of them are in jail or even at risk of it.
mmcwilliams··on Generative AI and Wikipedia editing: What we learned in 2025
Not that it's likely but there were publicly-released LLMs, like GPT-J, that were released in 2021.
mmcwilliams··on Retiring GPT-4o, GPT-4.1, GPT-4.1 mini, and OpenAI o4-mini in ChatGPT
Odd, I've found that Gemini will completely fabricate the content of specific DOIs despite being corrected and even it providing a link to a paper which shows it is off about the title and subject of a paper it will cite. This obviously concerns me about its effectiveness as a research aide.
mmcwilliams··on ICE and Palantir: US agents using health data to hunt illegal immigrants
Palantir holds over £1B in contracts with the UK government, some of them of an undisclosed nature. Must be some impressive CSV.
mmcwilliams··on ICE and Palantir: US agents using health data to hunt illegal immigrants
You're under the belief that private actors can't influence state actors to use violence on their behalf, completely isolating them from responsibility? If a private business calls the police on a suspected trespasser and the police shoot that person, is the business held liable? Ever? Seems like they have the better end of the bargain than the state.
mmcwilliams··on ICE using Palantir tool that feeds on Medicaid data
Preserving the status quo is a political position.
mmcwilliams··on Lock-Picking Robot
This is a class of device usually called an "auto dialer" and have been around for quite some time. This one appears to be fairly low-featured. Newer devices will automatically send a text when a safe has been opened and the better ones are programmed with knowledge of the internal plate schematics so they can shorten the brute force process.
mmcwilliams··on More than one hundred years of Film Sizes
This is true but it is far cheaper to scan and develop. Labs have to reset the machines to switch over to 65mm/70mm but are running 35mm every day.
mmcwilliams··on More than one hundred years of Film Sizes
VistaVision is being used more often as a cheaper way to get to IMAX or 70mm projections sizes. The gear and filmstock is less expensive for production and you can laser out to the other formats at roughly the same resolution you capture at.
mmcwilliams··on The No Fakes Act has a “fingerprinting” trap that kills open source?
The moat is building GPU infrastructure to serve inference at scale.
mmcwilliams··on Trump says Venezuela’s Maduro captured after strikes
NYT published confirmation from the USG that at least 40 people were killed.
mmcwilliams··on Trump says Venezuela’s Maduro captured after strikes
Videos from the event already show that civilians were targeted during the attack.
mmcwilliams··on The battle to stop clever people betting
After the platform takes its cut the actual percentage is not as appealing.
mmcwilliams··on That Secret Service SIM farm story is bogus
They don't like tripping over their own gear, either.
mmcwilliams··on That Secret Service SIM farm story is bogus
The point that people tape off cables to prevent tripping over them is irrelevant? Not sure that's the case. Just because you don't care about cabling doesn't mean everyone else doesn't. I've watched network engineers do marvelous work on short order.
mmcwilliams··on That Secret Service SIM farm story is bogus
Why not? That's the standard on film shoots in locations that are absolutely "one-time events". People do that all the time.
mmcwilliams··on De minimis exemption ends
The alternative here is the exploited worker will no longer have any job. Doesn't seem like that is a legitimate concern for their well-being.
mmcwilliams··on Complete silence is always hallucinated as "ترجمة نانسي قنقر" in Arabic
Similar in the English model. Pretty clear they trained on YouTube videos where creators will put that in otherwise silent sections to ensure it shows up for people with CC on.
mmcwilliams··on ICEBlock, an app for anonymously reporting ICE sightings, goes viral
How many of those countries are subject to the US constitution?
mmcwilliams··on US Supreme Court limits federal judges' power to block Trump orders
What you're describing is the "check" in the term "checks and balances".
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