IphtashuFitz

joined 1 year ago
[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Tesla Model Y owner here (never again, either). I hate the touchscreen, and also hate the way they’ve shoehorned functionality into the button/scroller controls on the steering wheel to try to address complaints.

When I first got the MY, the only way to control things like the wipers was through menus in the touchscreen. A software update introduced the ability to control them from the steering wheel controls, but even that “solution” sucks. You have to press & hold the control down while simultaneously scrolling it with your thumb. And most times you can’t scroll it from all the way off to all the way on in a single motion, so you press, scroll as much as you can, release & press again then scroll the rest of the way. A real PITA.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Lots of houses/apartments in places like Boston, etc. have old, drafty windows that landlords don’t bother to improve. Lots of hardware stores here sell kits containing double-sided tape and sheets of a special type of plastic. You surround the window with tape, place the plastic over it, then use a hot hair dryer to shrink the plastic until it’s snug. You can hardly see the plastic if you do it right, and it does a great job of dealing with drafts.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Exactly. I know somebody who died when a deer came through the windshield…

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

I’m in New England and have had a Tesla for 3 years now. Two years ago we drove it down to South Carolina & back. No issues at all thanks to their supercharger network.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 weeks ago

When I was a junior dev back in the 90’s one of my primary tasks was to tackle customer bug reports. Basically grunt work. I doubt AI tools could do that kind of task very well, unless the bug was something like a buffer overflow. I would think it would be terrible when it involves business logic flow.

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

I doubt it would help. My employer uses Akamai as a CDN & security provider for our websites. Their bot analysis tools regularly flag distributed bot activity that can come from a handful or a few thousand IPs. They do a range of browser fingerprinting, TLS fingerprinting, etc. to uniquely identify traffic across ranges of IP’s. I’m sure Google/Youtube has the ability to do this as well.

Any given client would need to regularly randomize the order of headers in requests, randomly include/exclude optional headers, and also randomize TLS negotiation to try to circumvent all the fingerprinting these big corporations perform.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 month ago (3 children)

Back in the 90’s I worked for a guy whose first name is “H”.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 month ago (1 children)

The problem is computer vision has a LONG way to go before it’s truly on par with human eyesight. Musk loves to crow how cameras are sufficient since we use our eyes to drive.

The thing is, eyes have special neural circuits that detect motion. They essentially filter out unnecessary information and send just the motion details to the brain. This prevents the brain from being overloaded with every detail the eye constantly sees.

And being overloaded with everything is exactly what computer vision currently does. It’s just a stream of images that the computer must analyze completely. So it’s working exactly opposite to how the eye & brain works.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Ugh. I didn’t realize that & haven’t checked out their site in ages…

I just searched for their app in the Apple App Store and it looks like there are at least a few competitors out there now, so if you’re interested in something like this then I’d suggest shopping around to see what alternatives are available.

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

ANI and CallerID serve two very different purposes. Suppose you managed the telephones for something like an insurance company, where you have lots of customers calling in, but also have lots of employees calling out. You want the Caller ID on your customers phones to show the main # for your company whenever you call them, so it would show something like 1-212-555-1000.

Because the company has a lot of employees, it has 100 individual phone lines, so 100 agents can be on calls at the same time. The phone company actually allocates 100 numbers in that case, and those numbers could be very different than the above -1000 number. So the numbers 1-212-555-7000 through 1-212-555-7099 all belong to the company. Each time an employee makes a call their telephone system finds any one of those numbers between -7000 and -7099 that isnt in use and uses it. The call is billed to that specific number, and the bills for all 100 lines are combined & billed to the company at the end of the month.

If the company couldn’t configure its phones to display 1-212-555-1000 as the Caller ID then customers would see random numbers in the range of -7000 to -7099 any time the company called them.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 month ago (5 children)

I’ve never personally used it, but https://www.trapcall.com is a service that can reportedly unmask spoofed/blocked numbers and provide you with the actual number a person is calling from.

I did computer telephony work many years ago and have a general understanding of how this works. Caller ID is trivial to spoof, but there’s an underlying protocol called Automatic Number Identification (ANI) that was historically used for long distance billing when those calls were billed by the minute. Since it involves billing it can’t be spoofed by the caller, and the telephone companies are careful to ensure it’s accurate. What Trapcall apparently does is replace the spoofed Caller ID with the ANI.

 

This just popped into my head after a similar question came up with a coworker…

Back a few decades ago I worked in Kendall Square in Cambridge, MA. My office window looked out towards another building about 15 feet away, and for some reason our floors were about 8 feet higher than the other building. So we could look down into the offices across the way.

The person in the office I could see into had his desk set up so that his back was to the window and he faced his office door. This gave me and my coworkers a clear view of his computer screen over his shoulder. He played Microsoft solitaire constantly, except when somebody walked in. He would very quickly close it so he wouldn’t get caught.

My coworkers and I actually tried to figure out his phone number, but never did. We wanted to call him up and tell him he should have played the red 9 on the black 10…

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