vld_chk

While general vibe of Sam and OpenAI losing steam is correct for me; I genially disagree with all “hate” of GPT-5. It was indeed not a crazy breakthrough, but, honestly, 5.2 model at extended thinking path in Pro version is utterly scary to me. I can give it some complicated multi-tier question which requires modeling, abstract thinking, computation, and rationality; it can walk away for 45 minutes, produce CoT with a length of Empire State Building and give me fairly good and well written response. I can’t speak for all industries, but 5.2-Pro-extended is really scarce when it comes to math and reasoning. Here I am a bit on Sam side when he said that most of people severely underutilize modern AI by using it same as in 2023. The capability of recent models sounds to me way beyond current typical use cases.

Does it mean that if internal DB of internal numbers will be leaked anytime in the future, it will give to anyone power to wake up all Tesla cars in a few clicks?

Oh boy, years after years, after everything we went so far, there are people in the world who believes that Big Tech invests billions dollars into AI (including data centers and infra) with only socially good intent and we should not at all touch anything Big Tech do …

Idk, subjectively it feels as end of Apple we all know.

Clear stagnation in terms of innovation; no new fundamental interface (no smart glasses, AVP looks too expensive and too narrow); abandon on car project; AI for Apple is nowhere close to others; sales decrease; Apple Watch sales ban; Epic Games court; DMA — after taking a leading position at the market, Apple clearly fails to offer anything new and instead invest too much resources into protecting their market position.

Wonder what will replace Apple. Will we see a slow stagnation here or radically new interface for human-to-technology interaction is around the corner?

Whenever I read about Planet Nine search, I have a very naive (as a non-physicist) childish question: if we detect anomaly in our Solar System just less than a decade ago and can’t find anything visual which explains it, assuming there is giant planet/piece of ice floating somewhere at the edge of Solar System, how we are sure that there are not a lot of such objects and real space is not as “empty” as we think it is? Simply, what is the probability that let’s say space between us and Alpha Centaurs is not filled with objects like this? Invisible and leaving a tiny gravitational trace at the edge of our ability to detect it?

Durov was indeed an opposition to Russian govt for some time and TG was banned in Russia for some time.

But then “SEC-incident” happened. He and his brother wanted to build TON and fund it by kind of ICO (without naming it ICO). SEC decides enough is enough and blocked launch of TON with charging Durov for selling unregistered securities.

At the end, issue was settled, Durov returned all money and settle the deal with SEC, but it shrinks his finance by a lot and he ran out of money for TG.

Then he was seen in Russia and issued bonds for $1 bln. According to Russian financial press [1], bonds were underwritten by Russian banks closely affiliated with government or directly stated-owned (all of them are in sanctions list now), and even some money was invested by Russian Fund of Direct Investments [2]. Last summer he again issued bonds for TG for $270 mln. You can buy TG bonds at SPB stock exchange where they were listed 2 weeks after the issuing [3].

Surprisingly (repeating my comment below), around same time, Russian govt withdrew all their claims to Telegram and started to use as the official communication channel.

Not to say that other “transformations” happened like Duriv publicly denounce US declaring it is a “police state” [4]

All links in Russian, sorry:

[1] https://www.rbc.ru/finances/15/03/2021/604f11019a79478034130... [2] https://www.bbc.com/russian/news-56501991.amp [3] https://www.forbes.ru/finansy-i-investicii/424665-shirokiy-k... [4] https://te.legra.ph/7-prichin-ne-pereezzhat-v-Kremnievuyu-do...

More to this “lucky coincidence” it was unbanned exactly when Durov failed in trouble with SEC and raised Russian-state money to solve his problems. Around same time almost all official Russian institutions open TG accounts and Russian Parliament (if we can call that silly thing like this) representatives was saying like “we solved all problems with them”.

When war started, and Russia banned a lot of services like FB, they created list of communication platforms they have questions about loyalty and cooperation with Russian government. TG was not on that list and through the whole war the only issue was about Telegraph — supplementary platform to publish long notes. AFAIK there was 0 questions or criticisms to TG in those 2 years.

As for me, it says a lot

Thanks for the clarification on last seen, I certainly misread it. About messages: hm, I was sure it existed before but maybe again my brain just lags.

As someone who for some time created and moderated fairly popular chat (200+ people) for anti-war Russians, I have very long and complicated history of relationship with this service and have a lot of different grey-zone stories where it is hard to understand whether it is a mistake from users and whether it is a leak from the service.

Hence I have a little low expectation and overreact on their recent changes

This is a fundamentally different problem for a fundamentally different audience.

If we take privacy issue, it can be divided into 3 segments:

* Privacy of user data. The basic level. When you use Google or Apple, they collect data. Even if you minimize all settings — data is still collected. This data is used to train models and models is used to sell ads, target you or do anything else you have no clue about (like reselling it to hundred of “partners”).

* Privacy against undesired identification. Next layer of privacy. When you want to have some personal life online without sharing much about you. Like Reddit, anonymous forums, or Telegram (to some degree).

* Privacy against governments. The ultimate boss of privacy. When you want to hide from all governments in the world your identity.

Signal was perfect at first layer strong but not perfect at 3rd layer (e2e encryption, no data collection to share nothing with governments who seek for data, good privacy settings, always tell you if your peer logged to new device to protect from cases when government operates with telecom companies and use sms password to make a new login), and almost non present at 2nd because they have no public features except group chats where you share your number.

Now they in one move close gaps at 2nd layer — you can hide phone number and stay fully anonymous, and strength their positions in 3rd layer, leaving the last piece open: government still will know that you have some Signal account.

As for me, this setup solves 99,999% cases for regular people in democratic and semi-democratic countries and address the most fundamental one: privacy of data and actions online.

Yes it is not perfect but barrier for government to spy on me is that high that I reasonably can believe that in most cases you should never be worried about being spied, especially if you live in some places which are named not as Iran or Russia.

The only scenario, in my perspective, you can want to have a login without phone (with all sacrifices to spam accounts, quality of peers and usual troll fiesta in such places) is when you want to do something you don’t want ever be found in your current country.

But in this case, IMO, Signal is the last worry you usually have on your mind and there are a lot of specialized services and protocols to address your need.

For example, now you can’t restrict who can send you a message unless you have a premium. Also they added a “feature” that premium users can bypass non-premium users privacy setting “last seen and online” and TG will tell that info regardless of your choice unless you are premium too.

Telegram and Signal solves very different types of privacy issues.

Telegram is good, as you mention, to be relatively private in groups/chats/channels without a need to expose neither your phone nor even a nickname (unless you live in autocratic countries — will come to this later).

But it comes with costs. First, their p2p communication is not e2e encrypted by default. Not to say that all comments/group chats are not encrypted too, unlike let’s say WA.

Second, Telegram API. It gives too much information. You can do a lot with it: read history, track changes of usernames, etc. For example, it is quite easy to obtain an internal user ID and there are black market services and databases where they promise to connect that ID with phone number if that account ever had privacy settings switched off in the past.

Claimed that they kind of scrape all accounts and pair ID for those where privacy settings set poorly. Even if you change it later — your internal ID and that scrape will state forever.

Third, Telegram was funded by Russian government since Durov had issues with SEC. He raised money from different Russian state-owned banks like VTB, issued bonds which are traded in Saint-Petersburg stock exchange, and even take some money directly from Russian government though a Qatar proxy-company. Not to say, that there are cases when TG was involved in criminal charges against people (the most famous one is story with Ryanair plane being forced to land in Minsk to arrest Lukashenko’s critique) and it was never directly addressed and explained by company how exactly those people was caught and how company protect against “SIM card replacement” cases (Signal at least inform me everytime my peer logged to new device).

Selecting between Signal with AFAIK no known cases of charges in dictatorship countries like Russia, funded by non-profitable charity, and TG without default e2e encryption, public API and Russian-state funding, is quite obvious for me.

Quite funny last statement.

There are no more supporters of nuclear than people who live and work in this industry. So if you are trying to say that people who live next to NPP are “against” it, you say a wrong statement.

Very sad to see that such important topic and message are going to be delivered by such freak. Now people who are against nuclear power will have even more emotional arguments against it.

P.S. Specially for people who “if you don’t live nearby: shut up”, I have lived near NPP my entire childhood and both of my parents worked 30+ years in this industry.

The Twitter suicide is the most crazy thing I’ve seen in my career. Rich and bored billionaire bought a “socially valuable service” just to drop its revenue by half and destroy it completely