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zerobees

986 karma · joined June 3, 2026

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zerobees··on Lockdown Mode
"Prompt injection is not currently a major risk, but its impact could grow as attackers develop more sophisticated methods." - that's such a weird statement to make. It's one of the most significant factors limiting the adoption of the technology in business.

I have mixed feelings about this feature. We're playing with tech that's supposed to do human-shaped things but can't be trusted nearly as much as a human employee (and can't be held responsible for what it does). Restricting the tools available to that patently untrustworthy entity doesn't solve the problem, it just makes the entity less useful, forcing you to sooner or later let it out of the jail.

zerobees··on The Quiet Numbers Station: Decoding Nineteen Years of GPS Cryptography
"Numbers station" is a weird analogy, because the idea of a numbers station was to broadcast messages to undercover operatives in a way that can be received using unmodified (and therefore non-suspicious) household radio receivers.

Here, it appears to be a rekeying system for specialized military gear.

zerobees··on New York just passed a one-year temporary ban on data centers
I'm surprised by your interpretation. As a deliberately polarizing analogy, the first Trump administration pushed for a policy that boiled down to the same principle: pause immigration from certain places "until our country's representatives can figure out what is going on".

I don't think anyone here would describe that example as a good-faith policy. I feel the same goes for the NY bill. It's not a sincere attempt to consider the pros and cons, it's just an effort to shut down unpopular projects to appease the electorate. Maybe that's right, but no need to pretend it's anything more.

zerobees··on New York just passed a one-year temporary ban on data centers
New York doesn't have many "empty lots". If it's agricultural land that's getting converted into datacenters, it probably supports a comparable number of temporary and permanent jobs per acre in the region's climate.
zerobees··on Dear Microsoft, enough is enough
It doesn't. Apple has its share of anticompetitive behaviors, but Microsoft is uniquely bad. I recently went through both experiences and, at least for the US region, the number of weird pop-ups and nags you get on Windows as you try to change the search engine and install Chrome is absolutely bonkers. It almost feels like some sort of a malware situation.
zerobees··on Journey to JPEG XL: open-source experiments shaped the future of image coding
Based on what I've heard, Google is monitoring per-org usage and strongly / incessantly encouraging teams to experiment with the technology, so a lot of tokens get spent on pointless stuff like that. The preceding diagram, which is needlessly busy and blurry, appears to be AI-generated too.
zerobees··on Mathematicians issue warning as AI rapidly gains ground
Culturally, mathematics is a jobs program for nerds. The field very explicitly takes pride in working on problems that have no obvious applications, and most practitioners are funded publicly or supported by private endowments, with zero pressure to deliver specific results.

Of course, this produces useful results every now and then, but it's not like we pursued ruthless efficiency / maximum rate of knowledge advancement before. We just let them do their thing, essentially treating them as artists and letting them pursue the craft for its own sake. If we weren't interested in maximum throughput before, why is that an objective now?

zerobees··on DaVinci Resolve 21
Maybe, if there's anything left to change?

If you look at the ten top-grossing films in the past 15 years, it's almost exclusively computer animations or SFX showcases with some token, quip-based acting thrown in every now and then (all the Marvel universe stuff).

Basically, I'm not even sure if replacing actors with AI would be stylistically perceptible for the average moviegoer. There are interesting films still being made, but almost no one is watching them, because you have the option to watch some SFX explosions and flying superheroes in Avengers VII.

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