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wang_li

2,131 karma · joined March 17, 2015

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wang_li··on Meta Uses A.I. Data Centers to Avoid Billions in Federal Taxes
It's a nightmare because one prosecutor may think that building out infrastructure for a technology that really might not be worth the cost is a perfectly valid research expense and a different one may not. Similar to how one person might think that the social safety net is for someone who lost the ability to provide for themselves through no fault of their own, and another might think that the social safety net is for anyone who doesn't want to work. These things need to be written down clearly expressing the intent so that society can understand and make choices appropriately. Like, if the tax code said you can have a 401k account and put a reasonable amount in it per year, then some people might think they can dump $400,000 tax free per year into their 401k while another thinks $16,500 is a reasonable amount.
wang_li··on Returning from vacation? The government can search your phone without a warrant
These are criteria that any police officer can use, a dog sniff outside your vehicle, a big bag of pills labeled "methamphetamine" sitting on your dashboard, an outstanding warrant when they run your id after a lawful stop. If they abuse them you have the right to argue for dismissal of evidence in court and if appropriate you can sue for damages and collect lots of cash from whatever level of government was the abusive one. Tort liability is a thing.

Sure, they can lie about probable cause, but they would then have that evidence thrown out in any case that derived from the search. Similarly, I can kick in your door and search your house and your only recourse is violence or the legal system. The whole question here is not whether a search is possible, but whether there is any legal consequences of it.

wang_li··on Returning from vacation? The government can search your phone without a warrant
They cannot enter a home without probable cause or a warrant. And outside of an actual port of entry, say at a random checkpoint they set up, they can only check IDs and look into cars the same as regular police. To perform an actual search of a vehicle in those circumstances still requires a warrant. From your first link at the cbp.gov website:

>Border Patrol checkpoints do not give Border Patrol Agents carte blanche to automatically search persons and their vehicles, other than in the manner described above. To conduct a legal search under the Fourth Amendment, the agents must develop particularly probable cause to conduct a lawful search. Probable cause can be developed from agent observations, records checks, non-intrusive canine sniffs, and other established means. Motorist's may consent to a search but are not required to do so.

wang_li··on NAND-16: a computer built from 277,248 NAND gates
A nand gate takes 2 transistors. So 554,000 transistors if this were manufactured in a physical device.

By way of comparison, the Intel i386 had 275,000 transistors.

wang_li··on Parley: Federated, decentralised chat that speaks plain IRC
CAP theorem suggests it is not solvable.
wang_li··on Two-tier encryption in the UK
> Border agents in America can search your phone or laptop without a warrant or sufficient suspicion at the border.

That is something that can happen at nearly every international border crossing. Before posting I tried to find a list of countries that require a warrant to search your stuff and the only place that came up was Hong Kong. New Zealand requires some suspicion, but that's effectively the same as they can simply state "they were acting suspiciously to my eye."

>Oh, and flock cameras and ICE aren't exactly a sign that America is this beacon of freedom that it likes to portray.

The US never said that you won't be observed in public nor that you can enter, remain, and travel freely around the country forever without permission.

wang_li··on I don't like passkeys
I don't want to have the security sensitivity of my devices be escalated by the fact that I access a very important service with that device. Currently I have separate passwords and a 2FA on my investing and bank accounts. I don't want to have to treat my cheap travel laptop as a SCIF because it is synced with my cloud services and has passwordless access to my entire financial life.
wang_li··on I don't like passkeys
>Apple has a vision where you have an iPhone and a mac at home and a mac at work and a vision pro and an Apple TV and all of that and your passcodes "just work".

I have many of those and I fucking don't want them to "just work". My iPad is not my iPhone. My Mac Mini is not my iPhone. Yet my iPad at home pops up the speech-to-text voicemail notifications from phone calls that I chose not to answer while I am miles away at work. It's so fucking annoying that you can't specifically turn that off.

wang_li··on Can we stop with the uptime percentages?
Services can have a 50% uptime (or a 50% downtime if you prefer) as long as it's the time when I need it to be up (or don't need it.)

Which is to say that the significance of downtime depends on the user. Talking about nines only makes sense internally when you are evaluating your infrastructure and operations. It doesn't tell you squat about impact to your customer.

wang_li··on Matt Mullenweg tells Automattic staff in Slack he's back in control after ouster
The new Derek Smart.
wang_li··on Measuring the sloppiness of code
Code and software and applications are an intermediate stage. The final stage is an AI/LLM that just does the thing that is needed without any code being written, there are no applications or programs, just an AI that does everything.
wang_li··on iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone 18 Pro Max
>Or feature Thunderbolt rather than normie USB-C so you can record 4/8K ProRes to an SSD,

My iphone 16 pro max can do 4K ProRes HDR or Log at 120 FPS when plugged into a SSD. If I had more builtin storage I could do it without the SSD. If you don't mind more dongling you can also have an external display along with the external SSD.

wang_li··on iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone 18 Pro Max
I'm waiting for a software release for my iPhone 16 Pro Max that will let me plug in a dock that has an attached SSD, keyboard, mouse, and display, and an option to pop up on my phone to reboot into MacOS.

Also, if they make a neo 2 from the A19 with 12 GB that'd be cool.

wang_li··on Apple Watch Series 12
And a crime in plenty of states. It shouldn't be, but it is.
wang_li··on Apple Watch Series 12
Apple needs to move the health data storage, at least optionally, to the home pod/apple tv. My phone is my main interface, but it's not the only interface. And many of the devices that interface with the health app are not mobile. My blood pressure monitor, my bathroom scale. Test results from my doctor. And so on. These should be synced/stored on either my home device and exposed through an app on my phone/desktop/laptop.
wang_li··on Paramount Caught Using 'Astroturf' Group to Drum Up Fake Support for Merger
It's not exclusively random people doing random stuff, but it also doesn't require a large, well funded, conspiracy. People see a fake poll that confirms their preferences and then proceed to propagate the message.
wang_li··on Arm Mali G2-Ultra NX GPU: desktop-class mobile gameplay with AI-native graphics
That's called a Lazy River.
wang_li··on Paramount Caught Using 'Astroturf' Group to Drum Up Fake Support for Merger
People just randomly get excited and make up shit online. See Median Strategies aka Rahil Prakash just making up polls and publishing them this month. Then declaring it was a social experiment and shutting down his website. After affecting prediction markets in some minor ways.
wang_li··on ICE Has a $2M Contract for Spyware That Can Hack Phones Without a Click
I know you all are here getting ready for a circle jerk, however ICE stands for Immigration and Customs Enforcement. They monitor all goods and such coming and going from the country.
wang_li··on Tooltips need a delay, and then they need to skip it
If there is a primary UI element on screen that the user can interact with and moving the mouse towards that causes a secondary, alternative, UI element to appear, the second element needs an active modifier key to bring it up. Tooltips and such are total trash and get in the way of usability. If you have something important then put it on the screen to begin with don't have it randomly jump in front of the user who is already mid action with something else.
wang_li··on Apple introduces M6 and M5 Ultra
These improvements are showing that we're producing plenty so that the cost is driven down and distributed to wider and wider portions of humanity.

But my personal observations of AI is that it's producing more and more of the same stuff and not moving the front forward much. The human innovation and invention seems to be lost.

wang_li··on c100
Cost of RAM and SSD seems like a secondary challenge. Trying to piss up a waterfall is more in line with the reality that products that are first about design and second about capability face when entering the current workstation and laptop markets that have been iterated on for decades and haven't seen a dramatic new redesign ever.

The closest such advance in recent years didn't happen and instead turned into the macbook neo. Apple could have released an OS for the iphone pro max model of phones that allow them to boot Mac OS when attached to a docking station. And sold a laptop formfactor docking station.

wang_li··on Grand jury declines to indict Ohio man charged with destroying Flock camera
Not real recent. Nullification like this goes far back. It just requires a certain level of bias across the jury pool. After which, some people or companies will be unable to be protected by criminal law.
wang_li··on Grand jury declines to indict Ohio man charged with destroying Flock camera
Law & Order often takes from reality. The ham sandwich phrase is attributed to Solomon Wachter who was a judge on the New York court of Appeals and is anecdotally dated to the mid or late '80s. And then went widely into the culture and has shown up in novels, academic papers, and tv.
wang_li··on Civic Hygiene – avoid building technologies that could be used by a police state (2013)
Technology isn’t going to be a moderator of a police state. We already have technologies that are used for oppression, exploitation, abuse, and so on. They’re just not being used this way by governments in the same way they are being used by criminals. Bitcoin is used to collect ransoms. Telegram/signal is used to plan conspiracies to commit crimes. GPS and location services are used to monitor trafficking victims. There are stories of cartels running their own cellular networks.

A lack of technology doesn’t restrict a police state, see East Germany in the ‘60s-‘80s. It does, however, create more opportunity for crimes. In Seattle there was a shooting at the bite of Seattle festival. They don’t have firm ideas about the identities of all the suspects. There would be a greater chance that they would know who they are looking for if there were more securities cameras deployed at large public festivals.

To prevent a police state you need public participation in governance and a population that lives in the real world and not fantasy lands created by a intentional misinterpretation of events.

wang_li··on How do I permanently disable random Google Photos popup to backup photos? (2024)
Not just some cloud protocol, but an abstraction layer at the OS for the apps to talk to so that the cloud storage back-end can be replaced with no knowledge, participation, or consideration from the applications that a user uses.

I take my shiny new phone, go to settings, then cloud provider where I specify Acme Cloud Bit and Bobs Inc. And now everything just works with Acme Cloud. I switch it to Globodisk Corporation and everything just continues working. Maybe the OS does a nice one and asks if I want to migrate all my storage from Acme Cloud to Globodisk and performs said migration. And the apps never know or care.

But it would need to be mandated by some large political entity as no tech company would do this and give up the lock in that they desperately want.

wang_li··on How do I permanently disable random Google Photos popup to backup photos? (2024)
The thing that is needed is a cloud storage API that is mandatory by law and is required to be honored by the OS. The OS vendors create a virtual cloud storage layer which has a backend that can be implemented by any cloud storage provider and then all the apps use these abstractions when loading, saving, and so on their data to the "cloud." Which can be anything from a third-party online service to a self-hosted solution. It should be implemented in all apps that support cloud-based content, music, books, movies, home environmental data, medical data, exercise history and the like. Silicon Valley has developed an arrogance, and they need to be reminded that they are subject to laws and regulations like all of us and that it could be much worse for them if they continue to be wankers.
wang_li··on Tax cuts for the wealthy only benefit the rich (2023)
Are you thinking specifically of the US or you thinking of all the countries that were part of the data they reviewed? Also, how does leaving the wealth in the hands of citizens prevent it from being taxed in the future if needs be?
wang_li··on Tax cuts for the wealthy only benefit the rich (2023)
The question I have is that at some point X taxes are collected and the economy is growing at Y, then the policies change and now X-5 taxes are collected and the economy grows at Y. What was the function of the 5 under the first regime?
wang_li··on Humans missed 1 in 3 threats approving AI agent commands across 40k game runs
I think that solving a problem they have that has a side effect of generating more revenue is not lost on them. Particularly in the situation where the cost to improve the models goes vertical for minimal improvement in an asymptotic fashion. The decision to spend 6-7 figures regularly on training or bill every customer 3-4 figures per month isn't hard. While I don't think they will explicitly impair the models, they will certainly make choices that externalize the shortcomings of the model to their customers.
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