Ashelyn

joined 1 year ago
[–] [email protected] 16 points 15 hours ago

So it's actually a secret third option! That's pretty rad.

[–] [email protected] 29 points 15 hours ago (9 children)

Is that because it's that simple, or just that the boilerplate is pre-written in the standard library (or whatever it's called in rust)?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 week ago

In some states, you can't vote by mail except under specific circumstances, such as being a senior citizen or swearing that you'll be out of state entirely on election day.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 weeks ago

Removing the homepage entirely, replacing the entire UI with the shorts-style format of "view video right now, tap button to see next/previous video". If you want a specific video, you must search for it.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

People developing local models generally have to know what they're doing on some level, and I'd hope they understand what their model is and isn't appropriate for by the time they have it up and running.

Don't get me wrong, I think LLMs can be useful in some scenarios, and can be a worthwhile jumping off point for someone who doesn't know where to start. My concern is with the cultural issues and expectations/hype surrounding "AI". With how the tech is marketed, it's pretty clear that the end goal is for someone to use the product as a virtual assistant endpoint for as much information (and interaction) as it's possible to shoehorn through.

Addendum: local models can help with this issue, as they're on one's own hardware, but still need to be deployed and used with reasonable expectations: that it is a fallible aggregation tool, not to be taken as an authority in any way, shape, or form.

[–] [email protected] 30 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (5 children)

On the whole, maybe LLMs do make these subjects more accessible in a way that's a net-positive, but there are a lot of monied interests that make positive, transparent design choices unlikely. The companies that create and tweak these generalized models want to make a return in the long run. Consequently, they have deliberately made their products speak in authoritative, neutral tones to make them seem more correct, unbiased and trustworthy to people.

The problem is that LLMs 'hallucinate' details as an unavoidable consequence of their design. People can tell untruths as well, but if a person lies or misspeaks about a scientific study, they can be called out on it. An LLM cannot be held accountable in the same way, as it's essentially a complex statistical prediction algorithm. Non-savvy users can easily be fed misinfo straight from the tap, and bad actors can easily generate correct-sounding misinformation to deliberately try and sway others.

ChatGPT completely fabricating authors, titles, and even (fake) links to studies is a known problem. Far too often, unsuspecting users take its output at face value and believe it to be correct because it sounds correct. This is bad, and part of the issue is marketing these models as though they're intelligent. They're very good at generating plausible responses, but this should never be construed as them being good at generating correct ones.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 weeks ago (3 children)

90 days to cycle private tokens/keys?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago

I've heard there are hyper-reflective stickers you can put on/near the plate that basically blind a traffic camera's view when trying to read it

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 month ago

Advertising is like the Kudzu vine: neat and potentially useful if maintained responsibly, but beyond capable of growing out of control and strangling the very landscape if you don't constantly keep it in check. I think, for instance, that a podcast or over-the-air show running an ad-read with an affiliate link is fine for the most part, as long as it's relatively unobtrusive and doesn't put limitations on what the content would otherwise go over.

The problem is that there needs to be a reset of advertiser expectations. Right now, they expect the return on investment that comes from hyper-specific and invasive data, and I don't think you can get that same level of effectiveness without it. The current advertising model is entrenched, and the parasitic roots have eroded the foundation. Those roots will always be parasitic because that's the nature of advertising, and the profit motive in general when unchecked.

[–] [email protected] 23 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

Years back, I had that happen on PayPal of all websites. Their account creation and reset pages silently and automatically truncated my password to 16 chars or something before hashing, but the actual login page didn't, so the password didn't work at all unless I backspaced it to the character limit. I forgot how I even found that out but it was a very frustrating few hours.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 month ago

Complete side note, I saw your pfp and checked your profile to confirm my suspicions. Thank you for your work on OpenRGB! It's been a great tool for managing the LEDs on my computer.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago

I'd also consider myself pretty tech-savvy, but that came from plenty of mistakes growing up including putting malware on the family computer at least twice (mostly ads for these "Pokemon MMOs" back in the mid aughts that were too enticing for my kid brain to refuse 😅).

It's very easy for me to forget how much of an outlier my tech experience is among most folks around my age. I had an acquaintance in the first year of college I helped by giving essay advice, and was very surprised to see that the only thing they really knew how to do was basic use of apps on their iPhone. They got a laptop for school, but no computer experience, no keyboard typing experience, and even just the iPhone Settings app was a scary place to be avoided for the most part. To this person, Microsoft Word was a new thing they had to learn on top of everything else. In college. It was also in the South so I don't know if I should be that surprised unfortunately.

Regardless, it was pretty wild to me, but a very real reminder that not everyone has access to the same resources education, and/or experience to draw on.

 

I use Firefox whenever I can.

On first install of the browser I usually end up following a hardening guide which includes stuff like blocking cross site cookies, setting a few things in about:config to disable Pocket/etc, and installing uBlock Origin. I've taken what I consider a relatively balanced approach, I don't use anything like noScript, uMatrix, etc that ultimately just cost a lot of time fiddling to get the 10th website of the week working.

I've been more or less fine browsing the web this way for years, but around the start of 2024 I've started seeing way more "Access Denied" pages than I used to. I think part of it is Cloudflare or similar, but I don't know exactly what's changed or what's triggering it to occur.

It usually goes away and I can re access the site in 10-30 minutes as usual, but I've had it occur in really weird instances, such as trying to change my Minecraft skin and getting blocked by the website. The server block often goes away immediately if I switch my user agent, so I know that it has something to do with how I've got everything set up.

Not sure what anyone else's experience with this has been. I'd like to hear some of your thoughts and tips

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