mozz

mozz , 1 day ago (edited 1 day ago)

They took the guy who led the legendary team that made the search not only work instantly at a previously unimaginable scale, but also freakishly well as far as "finding exactly what you want based on almost any query," back in the late 2000s, if you remember... that guy, when he started pushing back against the people who wanted to fuck up search results to boost imaginary metrics that were theoretically (and, probably, not really) going to make more money from ads, they pushed him out.

This absolutely excellent article goes into detail about the exact moment, if you had to pick one, when Google stopped being a legendary tech company and simply became yet another behemoth coasting on its past successes until the market changes under it and it can't adapt, fades, and takes its place with all the others, all the way back to IBM and DEC. Nothing's changed in a big enough way for it to get knocked back into that obscurity yet, but it clearly will at some point.

mozz , 2 days ago

So, I saw this story and I typed a comment about how it was pretty much guaranteed (given Musk's cutting of the engineering department and the scale of Twitter's operation) that this would cause some slight amount of breakage for the forseeable future, and the unfixable and unflattering nature of the ensuing jank would be the nail in the coffin for Twitter (which for some reason still is home to a lot of journalists and primary sources and etc even to this day in its wrecked-up form).

Then I thought, you know what, I don't actually know that that's how it'll happen, and deleted the comment and moved on with my day.

And then just now I just tried to click on a Twitter link, and saw a black page with this:

Something went wrong, but don’t fret — let’s give it another shot.

(Button: "Try Again")

⚠️ Firefox’s Enhanced Tracking Protection (Strict Mode) is known to cause issues on x.com

Oh shit, it must be Firefox's fault! Yeah, must be causing issues. My bad man, you're right; I guess I will need to switch browsers now so I can have the privilege of using Twitter.

mozz , 2 days ago (edited 2 days ago)

Linux router + iptables + wireshark for debugging maybe? Esp if things are "just not working” sometimes, using simpler and more transparent tools so you can dig into what exactly isn’t working seems like it’d help

mozz OP , 7 days ago

Yeah. I've been out of the loop apparently, because today was the first that I heard of it.

mozz OP , 7 days ago

Yeah. Gaben has a strong track record of bringing technology to the market that works, from a company that wasn't already around and doing things better overall before he got involved with it.

mozz OP , 7 days ago

I hadn't heard of most of this, and it's sort of an avalanche, so I picked out one particular part to check out in a lot of detail and see if it held up.

The controller was stolen IP

Looks to me like they had buttons on the back of the controller in some way which infringed on one of 105 patents that SCUF holds on specific parts of controller design, and they sued Valve a year after Valve had stopped using the design anyway.

I'm not qualified to say whether SCUF actually invented something no one else would have thought of, and then Valve deliberately copied them on it, but I'm skeptical. I lean a little more towards the side of "SCUF patented something somewhat obvious, and then wanted Valve to pay them rent in order to set their buttons up in a sensible fashion."

But at the very least, saying that it's demonstrated that it was "stolen" is, to me, not accurate.

and is still currently fighting the lawsuit

This part is objectively not true, unless there's some glacially slow appeals process I'm not aware of. It looks like the whole thing finished in 2021. Am I wrong?

mozz OP , 7 days ago

Yeah. I was around in the games industry way back when the big publishers had a total stranglehold on the whole arena, and Steam was this magic thing that enabled non-AAA games to actually break in in a big way and achieve sales above the double digits, and on top of that I generally like Valve's games. I was sort of wondering if this is a "live long enough to see yourself become the villain" type of thing, where my good feelings towards Valve aren't warranted anymore in the present day.

But, judging by what I saw when I grabbed one of this person's assertions at random and held it up to the light to examine in it detail for objective truth, I don't think it's based on a reasoned and objective basis. What it is based on, I have no idea.

mozz , 7 days ago

I think a large part of this is that X is the only major social media which has no dedicated team for detecting and banning the propaganda bots / troll farms.

I have no idea how much of the Q / antivax / conspiracy material on social media is deliberate campaigns to destabilize American politics in general (as opposed to perfectly organic homegrown nuttiness which the US has always had plenty of anyway), but I know it's not 0.

mozz , 7 days ago (edited 7 days ago)

Musk is a useful idiot. He ruined Twitter and the US government quietly thanks him for it because it no longer serves as a tool to see unfiltered events happening on the ground (like Israel murdering Palestinians). So mission accomplished there

Yeah. Twitter back in the day actually used to be a usable substitute for print journalism, without the editorial bias and selective coverage. If you paid attention to who to follow, you could actually get a lot better picture of the world from Twitter than from almost anywhere else.

I don't think the US government is alone in wanting that gone so they can control the narrative instead, but they're definitely one party that was happy about it.

and now the new target is TikTok

And this is where you went straight off the fuckin deep end.

I do not know a single person who gets their picture of the world from Tiktok whose viewpoint isn't reliably dogshit takes on literally every single issue. (Specific e.g. antivax, "BLM protestors are just running around beating people up, they have to be stopped," "everyone's moving out of California to Texas and Florida because Republican politics are better") Maybe there's an accidental alignment of pro-Palestine-protestors news from Tiktok right now, but it's not like that narrative is un-heard-of in any MSM news or other social media. The whole landscape at this point is Palestine flags as far as I see, and the other platforms are usually a lot more nuanced and informative.

I don't know why you'd object to an algorithm controlled by Elon Musk or the US government or just a lawful-evil alignment to sell advertising and hook people to dopamine loops and nothing else (all very good things to be suspicious of, yes), but all of a sudden when the Chinese government's involved, you're like "finally someone trustworthy to put in charge of public opinion, no way this can go wrong."

mozz , 7 days ago

The person I was responding to, if I've read them right, was trying to argue that Tiktok was the next target because people could get unfiltered information about the world through it. My point was that Tiktok is about the worst possible tool for getting useful unfiltered information about the world that one could possibly imagine, and then adding some context and detail to that.

mozz , 7 days ago

I have this surreal experience sometimes where I'll say something like "I don't think the US government is alone in wanting that gone so they can control the narrative instead" and then find someone lecturing me about how exactly what I just got done saying might be true.

That said, the person I was talking to was clearly implying that banning Tiktok would be a bad thing because people can get unfiltered information through it. You can try to say they were saying something else that's more sensible, if you want. I won't stop you. They don't seem to want to clarify it themselves, so it's hard to say.

mozz , 7 days ago

But at the same time, it has helped radicalize and inform so many in the ranks of Gen Z, amongst other generations.

I know when I think of people I know who get most of their news from TikTok, I'm like "damn that person is super well informed and I'm always happy when I talk to them about politics and world events"

Out of all the platforms, every single other one of which including the one you're on right now and the elephant one and Usenet and ZMag and Hackernews and all the rest

I do not know which reality you inhabit where TikTok invented people knowing about Gaza, but I promise you that there are better platforms, where you're allowed to talk about drugs or alcohol or use the word "blood", or "Uyghur"

mozz , 7 days ago

Random question, what's your opinion on the Uyghur re-education camps? Or the treatment of the Hong Kong protestors and how it compares with the treatment of US protestors of aid to Israel?

mozz , 6 days ago

I didn't ask about how you felt about Israel's genocide. I'm assuming, based on what you already said, that you're against it. So am I.

If you had to narrow down your feelings on the Uyghur internment camps to one of three responses, would it be:

• I'm against them
• I'm for them
• It's more complicated than that

And, the same question for the police response in Hong Kong.

mozz , 6 days ago

Okay, just curious.

I mean, yes, it should be a shockingly easy question to answer and I'm happy that you're against them. I've just gotten in the habit of asking people who display one view that's surprising to me if they hold other surprising views which might not appear initially to be correlated. Most of the time, they do, which is a very interesting result to me.

mozz , 6 days ago

Every government in the world has good and bad in it, because every government is made of people. Different ones have different amounts; it's not like every country's government is the same or has equal good/evil levels. But sometimes people take it to the point of classifying "good ones" and "bad ones" and handwaving away the bad things that the "good ones" are doing. To me, that's not really a safe or sensible way to look at things. It's just not how things work. In my opinion.

mozz OP , 10 days ago (edited 10 days ago)

Honestly I agree. I don't think Elon Musk has demonstrated the good judgement that means a company he's in charge of should be in there fuckin with people's brains, but reading the article it sounds pretty frickin cool what they're doing. I hope it works out and good things come out of it.

mozz OP , 7 days ago

How in the WORLD had I not heard of this

mozz , 12 days ago

Prediction: It's shit

mozz , 12 days ago

1. Sounds like it requires that your DHCP server is hostile, which is actually a very small (though nonzero, yes) number of the attack scenarios that VPNs are designed for
2. "there are no ways to prevent such attacks except when the user's VPN runs on Linux or Android" is a very funny way of saying "in practice applies only to Windows and iOS".

mozz , 12 days ago (edited 12 days ago)

When I use a VPN, I very rarely imagine that the coffee shop / home internet that I'm hooked up to will have a malicious actor or compromised host physically inside it. I mean, maybe. But more likely is that I'm protecting against a malicious ISP, or effectively doing an extra level of authentication to my work network before I get access to non-world-visible elements of it (that shouldn't be exposed to anyone in the world that wants to poke at it). The "someone else at the cafe is malicious" case isn't un-heard of, but it's not the most common threat model. That's my point.

From the article:

When apps run on Linux there’s a setting that minimizes the effects, but even then TunnelVision can be used to exploit a side channel that can be used to de-anonymize destination traffic and perform targeted denial-of-service attacks.

"Deanonymize" and denial of service are very very different from hijacking the connection and rerouting destination traffic to a hostile device, which it sounds like are what's possible on iOS and Windows.

I don't really know the full details (e.g. what does it mean that "there's a setting", and is activating that setting starting this week any different in practice from applying the patch that will surely come this week for Windows and iOS). But it does sound fair to say that there's a serious level of vulnerability that's exclusive to Windows and iOS.

mozz , 12 days ago

For this scenario, are you imagining that a person may have physically entered the coffee shop who's both tech savvy and malicious enough to run a malicious device there?

Or were you thinking a remote compromise of their router? That one seems moderately more probable, but eliminates anything special about the coffee shop's router specifically as opposed to your home router or your workplace's router.

mozz , 12 days ago

I have done, and friends of mine have done a lot more than that. My point is that I'm unusually nerdy and the number of people who've ever been subjected to it by me being near them is probably in the double digits for a few minutes over my entire life.

I will bet you any amount of money that you can go to any coffee shop and set up an insecure VPN there all day and not a single person will randomly come in, set up a malicious DHCP server, and reroute the VPN traffic through their hardware so they can spoof it and spy on your traffic.

The fact that it's possible means it's worth defending against, sure. If it sounds like I'm saying it's not a big deal I am not. I'm just saying that it is not the most common threat that you need to defend against most urgently or even in the top 10 (primarily because it requires one of this little handful of people nearby to you to be a malicious actor, where most of the ones that are really commonly-encountered threats are the ones that literally any one of billions of people on the planet could at any time randomly target you with, so you're going to run into a lot more frequently.)

mozz , 12 days ago

Okay, how much?

I can enumerate the ISPs that have will-hand-your-traffic-over-for-general-vacuuming-up deals with the American government, and the ISPs worldwide that do some form of traffic editing on behalf of differently-repressive-than-the-US regimes, and I can go to Starbucks tomorrow and we can compare that proportion of ISPs to the proportion of people I find actively tampering with my traffic from the cafe.

mozz , 12 days ago

What?

I am comparing the question, is my traffic being spied on by the ISP (in practice, passed off from the ISP to the NSA for sure and in practice maybe whoever else) actively as I'm running my connection, versus is my traffic being spied on by my fellow patrons. I would describe harvesting all my traffic and giving it to the government as "malicious." That, to me, is more likely (I mean, more or less 100% chance, within the US) than someone randomly being at the cafe acting maliciously to the point of setting up a spoof DHCP server randomly during the time that I am there.

(Part of the Snowden revelations were that the NSA had deals with more or less every major data carrier to harvest in bulk more or less everything that goes over the long-distance internet.)

What percentage of people in the world do you imagine set up spoof DHCP servers at cafes? 1%? And what percent of their time do you imagine they spend doing it? I cannot possibly make the math work out to make it make sense unless the cafe literally has at bare minimum thousands of people in it at all times. I mean, sure, it's worth making sure your VPN is secure against it.

I don't really want to argue continuously back and forth about this for too too long. I feel like I've said what I needed to say to communicate my piece about it at this point.

mozz , 17 days ago

Maybe not directly related, but this talk makes to me a very compelling point about how magic should work in satisfying fiction.

"The Last Unicorn" has magic that works this way, and it's pretty good.

mozz , 20 days ago

Tor's obfs4 protocol is pretty difficult to block, and it has some other transports that are options if obfs4 is unusable in a heavy censorship regime. This page is a good overview of how to start; with the right transport and bridge setup it'll be extremely difficult for your ISP to prevent you having access.

You could make your home server a securely-accessed onion site and connect to a remote-access-via-web service you're running there. That part might be a little challenging (and this process overall may be overkill) but it'd be very challenging for them to block it, I think, so if you've tried some things and had no luck, that might be the way to do it.

Be careful obviously

mozz , 23 days ago

But not 5.0 yet - they still got critical proprietary stuff in EDIT and SMARTDRV.SYS that they don’t want their competitors to get a hold of.

mozz , 25 days ago

"Flaws"

mozz , 26 days ago

Honestly having GPT write one-off code for you for particular selected pieces (esp ones that require a lot of domain knowledge) works pretty well in my experience

mozz , 1 month ago

This needs to have a voiceover at 0:18, quietly asking "Do you have stairs in your house?"

mozz , 1 month ago

I suspect that they deliberately played into the creepiness to make a more effective viral video

mozz , 1 month ago

😀

mozz OP , 1 month ago

Are you talking about MoE? Can you link me to more about this? I know about networks that do this approach for picking the next token, but I'm not aware of any real chatbot that actually runs multiple LLMs and then votes on the outcome or anything. I'm interested to know more if that's really what it is.

mozz OP , 1 month ago

You are overestimating the alt-right's appetite for honest work. To all appearances they just took a fully-stock model, slapped a racist prompt on the front of it, and called it a day.

mozz OP , 1 month ago

😃

I regret using up all my free credits

mozz OP , 1 month ago

There's a myth that climate scientists made the whole thing up to be able to publish papers and make their careers without producing anything of value. Because, you know, climate science is a glamorous and lucrative career where no one will ever examine your work closely or check it independently.

There are think tanks that specifically come up with these myths to be vaguely plausible and then the good ones get distributed deliberately because people are making billions of dollars every year that action gets delayed. There's a bunch of them. On the target audience they work quite well. I actually had someone whose family member died of Covid tell me that his brother-in-law didn't really die of Covid, he died of something else, because it's all overblown and the hospitals are doing a similar scam to this myth (i.e. making it out as a bigger deal than it needs to be.)

mozz OP , 1 month ago

They definitely didn't train their own model; there are only a few places in the world that can do that and Gab isn't one of them. Almost every one of these bots, as I understand it, is a frontend over one of the main models (usually GPT or Mistral or Llama.)

I only spent a short time with this one but I am pretty confident it's not GPT-4. No idea why that part is in the prompt; maybe it's a leftover from an earlier iteration. The Gab bot responds too quickly and doesn't seem as capable as GPT-4 (and also, I think OpenAI's content filters just wouldn't allow a prompt like this.)

mozz OP , 1 month ago

Holy shit I didn't realize that until you said it

You right tho

mozz OP , 1 month ago

“Black sheep” I took to be in the sense of, you can throw a bunch of criticism at the person you’re oppressing and make it clear they’re an outlier from humanity and make it more palatable that you’re doing that and change the subject.

“You shouldn’t be killing Gazan children on an industrial scale” “But they’re monsters, look at how terrible was Hamas’s attack on our music festival!” Things like that.

mozz OP , 1 month ago

"I looked at something Lincoln said, and it didn't right away make sense to me. Clearly, then, this Lincoln guy needs to get on my level."

mozz OP , 1 month ago

There's more than one species that can fully change its biological sex mid lifetime. It's not real common but it happens.

Male bearded dragons can become biologically female as embryos, but retain the male genotype, and for some reason when they do this they lay twice as many eggs as the genotypic females.