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robhlt

468 karma · joined April 25, 2023

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robhlt··on Anthropic Is Building a Predictive Surveillance System to Monitor Activists
Your Microsoft example is only equivalent if Microsoft was also scanning hotmail and MSN messenger for threats against the company.
robhlt··on FBI Probes Service Selling 153M+ Drivers Licenses
The social security administration does have a central database of essentially everyone born in the US after 1986, when a law was passed that required you to provide the SSN of anyone you claimed as a dependent on your taxes. As a result essentially every child born in the US is issued an SSN along with their birth certificate.
robhlt··on Google Has Removed MV2 Extensions from the Chrome Web Store, Including UBO
This kind of thing has come up before with "murder for hire" advertisements [1]. The publishers were only found liable when the advertisement was very explicit. Seems like the bar is quite high and courts are currently unwilling to impose "undue burden" on publishers.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soldier_of_Fortune_(magazine)#...

robhlt··on Malicious Rust crate Arrayref runs a build-time payload
Just denying write access outside the build directory and denying network access would go a long way and won't break pretty much any well-behaved build systems.

Any C library that's also packaged by debian supports being built under these conditions because it's required for everything except non-free packages: https://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ch-source.html#main...

robhlt··on Apple announces changes for apps in the European Union
I do disagree. They've funded macOS R&D for decades without charging developers anything. Why should iOS be any different?
robhlt··on Google has acquired the data of failed US airline Spirit
The OP article is also wrong on multiple counts. "Customer behavior" data like call recordings and email addresses/activity is specifically not included in Google's purchase. See page 18 of the court document they link, the "Google's Data Purchase Request" column on the right lists what is and isn't included.
robhlt··on Google has acquired the data of failed US airline Spirit
None of that customer data is included in the purchase. Page 18 of the linked court document is the source of these record counts, and on the right is a "Google's Data Purchase Request" column that lists all of this "Customer Behavior" data as "not included".

The Register is not a serious publication and completely missed this. Other outlets reporting this story do not include the claim that customer data is included.

robhlt··on Weave Robotics launches Isaac 1, a $7,999 home robot with Fall 2026 deliveries
It's not really the same unless the human cleaner also wears a gopro to record and archive their entire cleaning session for later review (and potential sale to data brokers when the cleaning company wants more money).
robhlt··on Michigan bill would bar employers from requiring after-hours coms with workers
This is still a thing on Android if your work account is a Google account and uses the Work profile feature. You can pause all apps in the Work profile on a schedule (or on demand), so it includes any work apps you might have in addition to email.
robhlt··on Half-Life 2 in a Browser
Microsoft is not a GPU manufacturer, Apple is. The 3rd parties Microsoft left it up to are the GPU manufacturers.
robhlt··on Extreme Heat conference cancelled due to extreme heat warning
Air conditioners don't need to use fossil fuels. Solar power and AC work really well together because peak solar energy is exactly when you need AC the most.

No heat is created either, that would explicitly violate the first law of thermodynamics. An air conditioner powered by solar energy (or anything solar powered) ends up releasing the exact same amount of "excess" heat as the sunlight would have if it hadn't been absorbed by the panels.

robhlt··on Steam Machine launches today
For HDMI CEC they've already published their user-space daemon: https://gitlab.steamos.cloud/holo/linux-cec
robhlt··on Steam Machine launches today
It's a bit niche, but Steam can download games from another PC running Steam on your local network. 2.5GbE on both PCs makes that a lot faster.
robhlt··on Rent collections are down in New York
Your coop building is on the unfair side of the "eclectic sometimes regressive" property tax calculation the parent comment mentions. Large (10+) multi-family rental properties are taxed at a much higher rate than single-family and 2-4 family properties. Correcting this imbalance would lower property taxes on your coop building while still raising overall tax revenue for the city.
robhlt··on Starship's Twelfth Flight Test
That's not how it works. Probability of precipitation means exactly what it sounds like: the probability that precipitation will fall in a specific forecast area.

Here's the definition from the NWS: https://forecast.weather.gov/glossary.php?word=probability%2...

robhlt··on No more JetBrains products for me
My problems are mostly with the language servers. I've always found them to be slower, consume more resources, and provide worse results compared to the equivalent JetBrains IDE. I've tried Python, Rust, and Go within the last few months and found this is still the case. Go is the worst of them, on larger repos gopls will easily consume 3-4x more memory than GoLand with far worse responsiveness on completions.
robhlt··on US is starting to see heavy job losses in roles exposed to AI
Tech as a whole may not have too many employees, it's just Big Tech that has too many. If those employees were distributed among many more smaller companies the tech market as a whole would be much more competitive.
robhlt··on OpenAI is connecting ChatGPT to bank accounts via Plaid
Plaid's login flow also requires a 2FA code if your bank requires it. The same 2FA code that banks say to never provide to anyone else.

They're literally proxying the bank's login page just like a phishing site would, and I assume they're also selecting the "trust this computer" option so their access is more persistent. My bank does require re-2FA for larger transfers, but there's still a lot of damage I can do on a "trusted" computer without triggering another 2FA prompt.

robhlt··on OpenAI is connecting ChatGPT to bank accounts via Plaid
Plaid requires your bank username and password, so they have full read-write access to your account. They can do anything you can do when logged in to the bank's website, and so can anyone else who gains access to Plaid's database.
robhlt··on Chrome removes claim of On-device Al not sending data to Google Servers
The same metrics any site uses to identify bot behavior. It's a closely guarded secret because if the attackers knew what metrics they used the attackers would know how to not get caught.

Another reply pointed out that AdNauseam just makes an http request to simulate a "click" and throws away the response. A real click would load and execute the response so it's trivially easy for ad networks to detect AdNauseam "clicks".

robhlt··on Chrome removes claim of On-device Al not sending data to Google Servers
Basically zero ads are just static images with a link, they're dynamically loaded by JS when you open the page. The JS collects as much tracking data about you as it can, sends that off to the ad network servers which run a live auction to determine who will pay the most to show an ad to you right now, then returns that ad for the JS to display.

AdNauseam not loading the response to the "click" request makes it trivially easy to flag as fraudulent, because a real click would load and run the response.

robhlt··on Chrome removes claim of On-device Al not sending data to Google Servers
These "clicks" are likely identified as fraudulent and dropped by the ad network. So you still pay the cost of downloading and running all the advertising JS and you still get tracked by the ad networks, all for nothing.
robhlt··on AI uses less water than the public thinks
Thankfully the Great Lakes Compact prohibits water from being diverted outside the great lakes drainage basin, with very limited exceptions.

https://www.glslcompactcouncil.org/program-areas/water-diver...

robhlt··on To Protect and Swerve: NYPD Cop Has 547 Speeding Tickets
The Dangerous Vehicle Abatement Program was meant to deal with drivers like this, but it was allowed to expire in 2023 after the NYC DOT failed to actually implement it.

The program allowed the DOT to make drivers with more than 15 speed camera or 5 red light camera tickets in a year to take a safe driving course or have their car siezed. The DOT only took action against a small fraction of eligible offenders however.

More: https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2023/09/22/analysis-dangerous-ve...

robhlt··on Supreme Court Sides with Cox in Copyright Fight over Pirated Music
The timer on copyright starts once a work is published, not when the work is first started. So works that spend a decade or more in development would be unaffected by this.
robhlt··on US national debt surges past $39 Trillion
What leads you to believe $12B includes normal things that would be spent regardless? The source of that quote makes no such claim. They have every incentive to quote as low a price as they can reasonably defend, and it would be very easy to defend a quote that only includes new and additional expenses that are directly attributed to the war.
robhlt··on Meta and TikTok let harmful content rise to drove engagement, say whistleblowers
I don't think we even need to go that far. Just remove protection for paid advertisements. It's absurd that Meta cannot be held liable for the ads they promote when a newspaper can be held liable if they were to publish the same ad.
robhlt··on The 100 hour gap between a vibecoded prototype and a working product
How does that test suite get built and validated? A comprehensive and high quality test suite is usually much larger than the codebase it tests. For example, the sqlite test suite is 590x [1] the size of the library itself

1. https://sqlite.org/testing.html

robhlt··on Why the global elite gave up on spelling and grammar
More like signaling that a specific human wrote it themselves instead of one of their human assistants. The article is mostly about emails from the Epstein files so non-human authorship wasn't really a possibility at the time they were written.
robhlt··on Uber is letting women avoid male drivers and riders in the US
The legal standard that must be met for this kind of discrimination is called "Bona fide occupational qualification" [1]

Generally customer demand is not enough use this defense. Airlines tried using it to defend hiring only female flight attendants and lost.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bona_fide_occupational_qualifi...

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