nirava

when reading personal blogs, it's best to assume any statement as a reflection of their experiences and world-bubble rather than as verified facts. This is a blog, not a technical doc. while your frustration may be well founded, it's also self inflicted to a degree, you're expecting the wrong thing from the wrong place.

"Analysis of commercially available satellite images from ... 2018 shows brightly painted walls, soccer fields, assembly rows and play markings."

"Some US analysts took notice as early as 2019 ... logged remarks in a system"

> Iranian authorities failed their own people. Again.

Killing children with taxpayer money vs evacuating a school was part of a military base more than 8 years ago. It is clear what government is failing their people, and it isn't Iran in this context.

Fwiw these harnesses run appropriate tests before pushing anyway, so CI CD pass is almost a guarantee. Correctness is another matter.

I've been watching chess videos for many years but my own chess playing is just recreational.

Writing/programming as a specialization of just going through the damn thing is actually sacrosanct IMO. Spectatorship as a generalization of reading is second-class. You do become a worse programmer as you move to "higher order thinking", it just matters less in a world where LLMs exist.

> And reading and adjusting AI output requires substantial thinking.

It does, but less of that thinking translates to skills transferred. What amount of the creativity and magic of Tolkien transferred to his editor? I'm sure it took substantial thinking to edit Tolkien's work.

beyond a point of absolute comfort, the point of money is to accumulate power and power can be spent to make more money. musk doesn't need more money, he needs more power. dangling starlink to ukraine treasonously is that power that money can't buy but space x can.

moonshots are the external story told to maintain social acceptance. tax credits for spacex would be lot harder to sell to taxpayers if everyone unambiguously knew its just another profit seeking private company. tesla gets a lot of lenience because of its supposed pushing of frontiers.

musk can exchange his social capital to manipulate stocks to make others money in exchange for backchannel favors.

idk if musk actually believes mankind will terraform mars but he sure seems to be getting a lot back on earth from saying it.

You're wrong in comparing LLMs to a spell/grammar-checker (Syntax v Semantics) If LLM is a tool so is a ghost writer (not)

You're probably extending the logic from the idea that a programmer-llm is a tool. That is at least a defensible position. A written program isn't written to be experienced by people (usually), rather to create certain outcomes.

On the other hand, the written word is the entire experience of the person reading your thing, and that can all be created by an AI without your input. It has it's own biases and motivations and "alignments" (so to speak). Thus it is not a tool and actually a writer itself. And when it writes, you miss out on the experience of having written it, thus actually you end up becoming the tool (pun intended) that LLM is using to express itself.

I've found the only good way to write with LLMs is to absolutely not use it for the first few drafts, the using it as a tool to list specific kinds of problems in text (word repetition, unnatural hard to read sentences etc) and approaching those points with caution and skepticism. Even copy pasting a single sentence, I've found, is a slippery slope.

This is a completely reasonable take from a normal human being. YK some people become journalists because they enjoy the act of research, writing and investigating. And in all honesty, LLMs are still INCREDIBLY bad at communication. They get stuff done, sure, but god, for something named "large language model" all their attempts at human style communication makes me want to turn off the computer for good.

this is pointless pedantry. there's an implicit "functionally equivalent, for modern (apple) devices" bit.

> It would really help perspective sometimes

It objectively and absolutely doesn't help this discussion at all. Even if taken as hyperbole, the frustration with Apple charging $200 for 256 added gigs, and filling up ~20gigs of it without consent or requirement, is unaffected by floppy prices in the 80s.

This has been my line of thinking as well. I have developed a sort of paranoia when I'm working using AI on my projects. Who's to say Claude or OpenAI isn't using the final conclusion of all my ideas, trial and error, and adding it to their database of insights to be offered to the next subscriber for a price?

They have demonstrated both the intelligence at scale and the lack of morals for this to not be a problem at all.

load some games you think you'll enjoy. carry it around in your pocket. pull it out when bored. don't put a case on it, let it gather scratches and dirt.

I can lose 10 mins to a sudoku game or chase a highscore in some arcade-ish game without coming away with an impending sense of doom (which tends to happen with doomscrolling).

I'd compare it more with the iphone of micro handhelds than a LV bag. Tried Ambernic first, it was annoying and it randomly stopped working anyway. Steam deck and such are too much, they're for gamers and I'm no gamer. I just need a toy, and playdate happens to be the iphone of this weird niche I seem to enjoy.

Also, the devex is good, and I can build tools and apps in a weekend if I have to, and enjoy the experience.

fwiw yeah it's expensive and i much rather enjoy simple classics than most of the art projects pretending to be games in the catalog.

Not web devs per se, I’d be hard pressed to find a serious web dev who wanted to “forcefully sodomize users”. Thats a management thing

I've been enjoying his videos for years atp, does really cool stuff, and has the same fascination with flight as I do.

I remember Flowise app being well-intended but bad. I evaluated the self-hosted version to be used as a component in an internal tool so non-technical people can tweak their prompt chains without writing code. As far as I remember:

1. it became increasingly slow as I added flows (felt like a O(n^2) ish bottleneck)

2. There were many bugs and bad UX

3. the flow variable system was underbaked and underdocumented

4. feature gaps

I decided I was probably not the target audience for their app and moved on.

Would I sell you something if there was a 1 in 100 chance that I have to steal it back from you sometime in the future? Nope.

Would I at least refund you for stealing back that thing you cherish and have possibly watched with your family and kids many times? Absolutely. Wouldn't be able to sleep otherwise.

But I guess that's the morality speaking, and we must kill it violently for marginal profits.

there are obviously measures in place to ensure the added noise is statistically homogeneous. the changes don't affect the final aggregates significantly, just enough to avoid saying much *about any individual person*.

know how you can buy "anonymized" data from data brokers and drill down until it's not anonymous anymore and in many cases point to the exact person? differential privacy would prevent that kind of thing.

If someone actually wanted to achieve political objectives by tampering with census data, there are better means than tampering with homogeneous statistical fuzzing.

Couldn’t you do this by turning off Siri and Apple Intelligence, two global toggles?

I really enjoyed this comment! The right intersection of everything to fire reward receptors in my brain lol.

Edit: "fire reward receptors in my brain" is probably nonsense scientifically but hopefully it gets the point across

Any (sealed) container designed to hold hot things should have a pressure release system.

It can be seals that buckle before the lid. It can be a tiny hole with a soft rubber stopper. It can be one of many things that cost a couple of cents extra and a bit more engineering and testing effort.

The cheapest disposable coffee cups I've used have a tiny hole for the express purpose of not pressurizing and spilling hot liquid everywhere.

There's a lot of conversation in the comments about "was there was an expectation that the pressure release valve would be there" There absolutely is a safety expectation that a sealed container of hot food is designed with a pressure release system.

BTW the fermented food thing is a misdirection. The pressure release system should have released pressure way before it even reached ballistic territory.

at the same time, I've never had any faith in that software.

maybe because of it's association with really cheap, buggy hosts i explored in my teenage years. maybe because of their largely unnecessary complications (except enterprise maybe). maybe because of the tendency of large bloated depressing organizations to use these even in places they shouldn't.

not that many software have faith in are faring any better in this cve-storm.

Exactly. Any security person absolutely KNOWS that the distros are still going to be vulnerable. They're exploiting this process loophole to knowingly cause chaos and gain notoriety.

At this point this is not really white-hat/ethical hacking anymore.

Ofc the kernel-distro security loophole is stupid and should be patched ASAP, but that doesn't absolve this company of wrongdoing.

If the return policy explicitly allows "change of mind", I'd say it's in the gray area. Though ofc it isn't sustainable if everyone starts doing this. I assume there's a ((returns:buys)/payment identity) metric to ban the largest offenders.

Also, there should be some universally accepted way to have access to your data and a secure personal computer in the duration your device is getting repaired.

No practical way I should say. Realistically, it's pretty clear that lawmakers really just want to shove it through in the simplest way possible. Which is probably private third parties.

And private third parties are very shady. They have effective monopolies and no significant public face to care about. I think we have seen this pattern play out in healthcare, compliance and other industries already.

Also idk about banks being the effective gatekeepers to the internet and eventually all technology. Just feels like its not their place to do that.

Private companies now can link all your online activities to you. Not an advertisement ID, but directly to you and your loans and your health data and whatever they're selling in the black market. Every data breach is a 100 times. It was already almost possible to directly know about you by buying data, now it's easier.

The point of this is not to verify age really. It is to verify identity. There's no way to prove someone is some age without presenting a legal ID.

Also, it's not just porn, facebook, online gambling etc. It is the OS based on some bills. So ALL your activities.

That's true. But leaking an age threshold is not the same as private companies being able to link all your online activities to a single legal person.

Read every alternative volunteered here. Imagine any world where in the next 5 years they can't be enshittified, sold to a predatory private equity, their support lines AI-ified, their headcount reduced by 40% without your knowledge, etc etc. 27 years is a very long time.

A competent IT person can have a backup plan for every expected failure. They can't control registrar level screw ups.

Companies explicitly selling you "bulletproof domains" like MarkMonitor have screwed up big time.

Also as an IT guy, asking to register a new domain with X is much easier than asking to transfer a long held domain away from Y.

500mg from a capsule and 500 from cough syrup 4 times a day is still fine. With a 100% safety margin still.

If you’re taking more meds than that without clinical supervision Id say something is wrong in the system or your medicine practices.

Where I’m from it’s common to walk to the nearest pharmacy and get meds when needed. Even over the counter stuff like paracetamols. And talking to the pharmacist. They’ll ask what you’re already taking and tell you what else to get.

At this point not assuming malice is probably naïveté, but I respect your optimism

There is no other technology to do age verification at scale.

Apple, Google and such will contract out this age verification to a third-party which will ask you to upload your ID and a 3D face captcha, which the third party will delete within 15 days, but somehow magically still make it into an unfortunate, unavoidable data leak a couple of years later.

I agree. App store is really horrible. Why is it that when I'm searching for a first party or a very very popular, the first result and many of the other results are weird scammy malware like things? I don't particularly care about the stupid homepage ads tho, I think thats just because I have "personalize app store recommendations" turned off.

Search inside Settings (both mac and ios) was also really really stupid for a long while. Why are you taking me to some random accessibility toggle when I'm looking for "displays" ? But I checked right now and it's good.