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Cake day: March 3rd, 2024

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  • We enable OCSP in hard-fail mode, meaning that if the revocation status of a certificate cannot be verified because the CA cannot be reached, then it will be treated as broken.

    The fact that not every application that uses TLS certificates does this blows my mind. Certificate revocation should be a valid tool to deal with the compromise of cryptographic credentials, but if applications don’t check, then they’re opening themselves (and their users) up to a security vulnerability.



  • Part of the reason that this jailbreak worked is that the Windows keys, a mix of Home, Pro, and Enterprise keys, had been trained into the model, Figueroa told The Register.

    Isn’t that the whole point? They’re using prompting tricks to tease out the training data. This has been done several times with copyrighted written works. That’s the only reasonable way ChatGPT could produce valid Windows keys. What would be the alternative? ChatGPT somehow reverse engineered the algorithm for generating valid Windows product keys?


  • The thing is it’s been like that forever. Good products made by small- to medium-sized businesses have always attracted buyouts where the new owner basically converts the good reputation of the original into money through cutting corners, laying off critical workers, and other strategies that slowly (or quickly) make the product worse. Eventually the formerly good product gets bad enough there’s space in the market for an entrepreneur to introduce a new good product, and the cycle repeats.

    I think what’s different now is, since this has gone on unabated for 70+ years, economic inequality means the people with good ideas for products can’t afford to become entrepreneurs anymore. The market openings are there, but the people that made everything so bad now have all the money. So the cycle is broken not by good products staying good, but by bad products having no replacements.


  • The technological progress LLMs represent has come to completion. They’re a technological dead end. They have no practical application because of hallucinations, and hallucinations are baked into the very core of how they work. Any further progress will come from experts learning from the successes and failures of LLMs, abandoning them, and building entirely new AI systems.

    AI as a general field is not a dread end, and it will continue to improve. But we’re nowhere near the AGI that tech CEOs are promising LLMs are so close to.


  • The change doesn’t reflect unprecedented temperatures, with Fairbanks having reached 90 degrees twice in 2024, Srinivasan said. It’s purely an administrative change by the weather service.

    I think this is a bit disingenuous. Sure, it’s not technically “unprecedented” because it has happened before, specifically last year, but the change is because they want to better help people, and better helping people means making this change because hotter temperatures are happening more because of climate change.

    Thoman also clarified that the term swap doesn’t have anything to do with climate change.

    They may not be directly citing climate change, but it’s absolutely the root cause. I wonder if they’re just trying to stay under Trump’s radar so he doesn’t make them roll it back because they said the C phrase. In bad political times doing good sometimes means speaking the party line while doing good works behind their backs.




  • The size of the cut is what they use for the appeal to the public to build their social narrative, but legally/economically speaking it’s not really the problem. The problem is that Apple effectively forbids developers from having any other mechanism to transact with customers except through their marketplace where they take the 30% cut, hence the lawsuit being about monopolistic practices, not the amount they’re charging.

    Valve handles things completely differently. Sure, listing on the Steam store requires giving Valve a 30% cut of the purchase price, but Steam doesn’t demand a 30% cut of any and all transactions that happen within or related to the game like Apple does. You also don’t have to buy a game from the Steam store to load it and launch it from the Steam client. And Proton works with a lot more games and applications than just those on the Steam store.

    The fact that the two companies charge a similar price for a single relatively similar business case oversimplifies a lot of how the two companies operate.







  • Intent matters, and methods matter. But I think what the friend is missing is that the methods aren’t bad; op is using methods developed from scientific analysis of abused animals with the intent to ethically care for them. Coming back to intent, she clearly wants to help this guy who her training is identifying as having some kind of background of abuse. The methods might be a little crude in the sense that they were developed for animals and not for people (who are animals, but animals with several distinct qualities from other animals, like the ability to communicate complex ideas), and there are different, more well-adapted methods for people, but they’re only crude in comparison to those modern human-focused methods. They’re still quite effective, and I would still consider them ethical for use on humans when paired with an altruistic intent, which she seems to be conveying. As long as she still views the guy as fully a person, a peer, then I see nothing wrong here.


  • The criminal networks will just immediately switch to VPNs and using end-to-end encryption services hosted in another country. VPN technology for phones is already available and has been for a while. On day one this legislation will be useless for its primary (purported) purpose. No exceptions or winner-choosing necessary.

    Then they’ll go after VPNs with the argument of criminals using the technology to skirt law enforcement backdoor requirements in end-to-end encryption.



  • People are making fun of the waffling and the apparent indecision and are missing the point. Trump isn’t flailing and trying to figure out how to actually make things work. He’s doing exactly what he intended: he’s holding the US economy for ransom and building a power base among the billionaires.

    He used the poor and ignorant to get control of the public institutions, and now he’s using that power to get control over the private institutions (for-profit companies). He’s building a carbon copy of Russia with himself in the role of Putin. He’s almost there, and it’s taken him 2 months to do it.


  • The author hits on exactly what’s happening with the comparison to carcinisation: crustacean evolution converges to a crab like form because that’s the optimization for the environmental stresses.

    As tiramichu said in their comment, digital platforms are converging to the same form because they’re optimizing for the same metric. But the reason they’re all optimizing that metric is because their monetization is advertising.

    In the golden days of digital platforms, i.e. the 2010s, everything was venture capital funded. A quality product was the first goal, and monetization would come “eventually.” All of the platforms operated this way. Advertising was discussed as one potential monetization, but others were on the table, too, like the “freemium” model that seemed to work well for Google: provide a basic tier for free that was great in its own right, and then have premium features that power users had to pay for. No one had detailed data for what worked and what didn’t, and how well each model works for a given market, because everything was so new. There were a few one-off success stories, many wild failures from the dotcom crash, but no clear paths to reliable, successful revenue streams.

    Lots of products now do operate with the freemium model, but more and more platforms had moved and are still moving to advertising ultimately because of the venture capital firms that initially funded them have strong control over them and have more long term interest in money than a good product. The data is now out there that the advertising model makes so, so much more money than a freemium model ever could in basically any market. So VCs want advertising, so everything is TikTok.