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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 6th, 2023

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  • Hah yeah, I’ve definitely pulled the plug on my router before because I wasn’t sure what I was seeing.

    I mean, cybersecurity I would consider to be a research field. In practice, yeah, it’s a bunch of people just doing their best.

    I tend to keep everything inside my network and only expose what I need visible on non standard ports, one of those being a VPN. It’s not that I couldn’t run these services public facing, it’s that the people taking the time to constantly update, configure, and auditing everything full time to head off red team are being paid. I don’t need to deal with an attack surface any larger than it needs to be, ain’t nobody got time for that.


  • The ability to generate a bunch of traffic that looks like it’s coming from legit, every-day residential IPs is invaluable to disinformation campaigns. If they can get persistence in your network, they can toss it into a bot net which they’ll sell access to on the dark web.

    A sucker opens insecure services to the open internet every day, that’s free real estate to bot farms. Only when the probability of finding them is low enough is it not worth the energy/network costs. I think hosting on non-standard ports is probably correlated with lowering that probability below some threshold where it becomes not worth it…don’t quote me, though.

    At the end of the day, the rule is not to depend on security by obscurity, but that doesn’t mean never use it.









  • If they were required to leave all meta platforms, then what would the experiment show? It sounds like the intention was to see where people shifted their time when they stopped using one meta product. If FB users primarily went to IG and vice versa, then it would indicate they held a monopoly. But it sounds like IG users primarily switched to TikTok and YouTube, not FB, indicating they are different products from each other and have different competition.







  • Hold up, what did I read into it? I directly quoted you and asked for clarification on whether you currently believe that is the state of AI, or whether you’re saying that’s what automation used to be.

    If you’re saying that’s what automation used to be, then we agree. But if you believe that modern AI can only do the “tedious bullshit no one wants to do”, that’s literally not the case.

    Sora 2 is generating realistic video of anything you want given just a text prompt, rivaling the best VFX artists.

    Hollywood is currently clamoring to “work with” AI celebrities who don’t exist, with a synthetic voice, singing songs no one composed with lyrics generated by an LLM. Why give a cut to a pop artist or band if you can synthesize it from nothing?

    The education system has been completely upturned because every assignment can be completed by an AI, and there’s no way for the teacher to detect it. And it’s having a measurably damaging effect on students’ intellect.

    A popular quote floating around right now is, “I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for AI to do my art and writing so that I can do my laundry and dishes.”

    And right now I literally can’t know if someone is running an AI with the prompt: “respond to this comment as though you are an out of touch older American who still thinks the capabilities of generative AI are limited to simple automation of tedious tasks no one wants to do anyway.” And you don’t know if I’m an AI with the prompt, “respond to this comment like a condescending tech literate young adult who is afraid of the impact that generative AI owned and funded by an oligarchy is going to have on every aspect of their future.”

    I honestly feel stupid even bothering to type any of this out. I’m surely being had.



  • If coding is the means to an end they want, they will learn it.

    I started learning how to program because I wanted to mod Halo 20y ago. Gaming is often a motivator. I had a co-worker who started in the 80s, whose only option to play games on his C64 was to type up a bunch of BASIC from a magazine. He had to take care not to make any typos, then play the game, and then didn’t have any persistent tape to save it to, so he just lost it all on a reboot. Turns out, if you’re “forced” to type code in all the time, you start to figure out which bits do what, and you start changing it to behave how you want.

    “Hacking” could probably work as a motivator, though with great power comes great responsibility.

    But yeah, a kid won’t be interested in programming unless they see it as their only option to do what they want to do. PICO8 might be a good entry. Or something like Minecraft modding.