rusty_venture

Wait, other people don’t make decision trees and mind maps and pro/con lists and consult chatbots before making decisions? Are they just flying through life by the seat of their pants? That doesn’t seem like a very solid framework for achieving desired outcomes.

This person is on HackerNews, implying at least enough technical expertise to use a website. Google Drive is a website. Other people have offered this person alternative devices free of charge. Yet they are so fixated on a specific outcome (Google just fixing this for them) that they can't see another solution when it's offered up on a plate. They are also neglecting to think beyond the immediate problem: say they get the firmware rolled back somehow - what happens when the device stops charging/is stolen/is dropped and all their files are still on it? Have you never know anyone like this before? Someone who needs all their problems solved for them because they refuse to take responsibility for the situations they have created for themselves through action or inaction?

I'm sorry to have to say this, but this whole thread reeks of someone refusing to help themselves. Several people have given you legitimately helpful advice and you have just come back with excuses as to why it won't work for you. This includes:

- Using a wireless power bank. Android phones will work with a completely dead/useless battery if they are plugged into a power bank. If your power bank doesn't work that way, then you need a new power bank.

- Using a different device. Of course your important files are on this phone. Do you think this phone will last forever? Backup those files to the cloud so you can access them from any device. You get free cloud storage with your Google account.

Instead of blaming all your problems on an external entity like Google, if you take accountability for solving your problem, you will find it is not nearly so intractable. Others here can offer advice, but it is ultimately up to you to decide on a course of action and pursue it. I wish you the best of luck.

Thank you for this concise and comprehensive summary. The DDoS threat had never occurred to me.

> short-term motions can get you stopped out with a big loss before realizing profits

Can you elaborate on that a little? How does that happen?

IMO it's pretty obvious it's being built up for short sellers to have a banner day. I'm guessing the hype bubble will burst sometime after Jan 20 when EV credits are slashed and FSD and the stupid 2-seater with no charging port mysteriously fail to materialize.

Yikes. I am very, very lucky to do fulfilling and meaningful work at a place that values me, with people who are a pleasure to work with. But from what I hear this is the exception and not the rule. Knowing this is possible, however, I'm not as scared by the job search as I once was, since I know that when I someday decide to look for my next job, I'll know more of the qualities of the places I want to work at.

For me the key seems to be getting out of the corporate world, away from companies with a singular focus on profit-making and competition and the endless feature churn, corporate ladder climbing, disruptive managerial edicts to change horses midstream, ridiculous metrics to meet, and the inevitable burnout that environment seems to create. Has anyone else had similar (or contradictory) experiences?

Does it say "I am a lamp. I am a lamp."?

That's a poor analogy - a house is private property which only you and invited guests may enter. A website you publish on the Internet can be viewed by anyone who discovers it. Not including accessibility features excludes disabled users from reaping the benefits of your site. So a better analogy would be "if I build a public space do I have to make it accessible?" You betcha!

>> Emulating the policies of a country 'we' think 'is bad' isn't great policy.

The paradox of tolerance.

>> A highly politicised Supreme Court, a violent attack on the Capitol, a lot of people who don't accept or believe the election result.

2 out of 3 of these were precipitated by foreign influence campaigns on social media actively undermining Americans' trust in our political institutions, so yeah, prohibiting foreign-owned social media networks in advance of the upcoming election is definitely a step in the right direction.

This is fascinating. I think this nuanced approach to shifting the perspectives and beliefs of the population of an adversarial nation is exactly the threat that is being missed by other commentators saying "what does TikTok do that's so bad anyway?" The point is that it is extremely subtle and yet very powerful...if China can convince US citizens that China deserves to rule Taiwan, for instance, the US government may find itself without the popular support or political will to take action to protect Taiwanese democracy in the event of an incursion by China.

What's your point? China literally has a nationwide firewall to prevent Western ideas from entering the minds of its subjects. Why should we throw open our digital borders to Chinese influence campaigns? "The supreme art of war is to defeat the enemy without fighting", e.g. to undermine Americans' faith in our democratic institutions, to gain the ability to compromise our critical infrastructure, and to influence our politics. All explicitly stated goals of both Bejing and the Kremlin, and the misinformation and distraction campaigns carried out by Russia in the last presidential election are about to ratchet up again. I don't believe we should be making these objectives any easier for our ideological rivals.

A Chinese company isn't bound by US laws, so this is a necessary precursor to that.

Edit: I stand corrected, they are bound by our laws, but it's orders of magnitude easier to enforce those laws on a company based in the US than a company based in China.

You truly didn't read the comment you replied to:

> And [AI is] increasingly promoted as a way to reduce human effort in writing, ensuring that people will continue to use it without supervising its output, especially if they are trying to mass-produce content to make money.

Yes, editing is still a thing, but all the crap content producers and SEO junkies jumping on the generative AI bandwagon and slathering AI-generated content across the Web can't possibly proofread all the content they're publishing - that would be counterproductive to their goal of producing as much content as fast as possible.

Photoshop can't produce anything on its own; unlike AI, it needs a human to control each step of the process. AI generates statistically-likely text to follow a human prompt with no further intervention required by the human. And this lack of intervention means there is no human QC to ensure the statistically likely text meets any criteria for stylistic, semantic or logical correctness.

As the author points out, young children have no context for good vs. bad text. And when we are young is when we learn our language skills.

> Certainly the printing press can enable the spread of a lot of low quality content and misinformation, but we managed to work out the kinks.

I think the author's point is that generative AI is a completely different animal than the printing press. The printing press could be used to spread both factual information and misinformation alike, and for various reasons factual information seems to have predominated, and high quality information is at least readily available, even if it's not the majority of printed work. Then there's the Internet, which can similarly be used to publish both information and misinformation. Perhaps due to the lower bar for entry and the speed of dissemination, the balance of information to misinformation and high-quality to low-quality content doesn't favor information or high-quality content as strongly as it does in the world of printed text, but at least the Internet always has the potential to spread factual information and high-quality content.

Then there's generative AI. Unlike the two communication technologies referenced above, AI can ONLY produce low-quality content. It is by design a statistical inference technique that generates content remixed from its training data. Without substantial human rework and rewriting, AI will always produce such low-quality drek as "it's hard to learn volleyball without a ball". And it's increasing promoted as a way to reduce human effort in writing, ensuring that people will continue to use it without supervising it's output, especially if they are trying to mass-produce content to make money. So now we have a new situation in which the majority of content produced going forwards is likely to be extremely low quality and perhaps contain substantial misinformation as well, whether intentionally or unintentionally. The author seems to posit that exposure to this type of content will negatively affect people's ability to learn to produce good, original content of their own, as they are not exposed to even passably good writing from a young age, so they cannot learn to emulate it.

A fascinating article that raises so many questions. How and why does someone accumulate and store one hundred thousand dollars worth of horse semen? That sounds like a mind-boggling amount of horse semen. Are there special horse semen freezers with backup generator systems? God forbid all that horse semen should go off if there's a power outage. Is there a special market for horse semen? How do you demonstrate the provenance of your horse semen to potential buyers? How do you test the potency of horse semen after taking out out of storage? Does anyone freeze horse egg cells, or just horse semen? Is horse semen a sensible investment vehicle? How does the value of horse semen change over time? I wish the article had gone into significantly more detail about this important aspect of the story.

> There was a software engineer who went to our church, and I was so excited to show him and get feedback, but he just kind of blew me off.

I'm sorry to hear that you had this experience. I'm sure your Pokemon battle simulator was cool!

In the header image for this article, it appears that the Fibonacci spiral is superimposed on the spiral galaxy in the incorrect orientation, and if the spiral were flipped around the horizontal or vertical axis, it would indeed match the galaxy's arms.

The lack of attribution on this organized and well-financed operation is the most concerning part of this attack, in my opinion. It seems unlikely that any APT would burn ALL of its 0-days for the iOS platform in one campaign, so they likely have more which they can pivot to. Of course there are 3 nation-states who are most likely to be behind this operation, but which one was it? If possible, we should be looking for other victims of this attack using the IOCs discovered at Kaspersky. If we find other instances of this attack on Taiwanese government officials or members of the Uighur population, for instance, that would be a smoking gun for attributing it to one particular nation. Finding traces of this attack on the devices of Ukrainian government officials would point in a different direction. Either way, we need to be able to attribute this attack, and the other victims of this APT might not know to check themselves for indicators. Does anyone here know if there are efforts by cybersecurity researchers to uncover other victims of this attack in vulnerable or potentially targeted communities?