• 3 Posts
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Joined 6 months ago
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Cake day: September 29th, 2024

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  • tl;dw is that you should say “please” as basically prompt engineering, I guess?

    the theory seems to be that the chatbot will try to match your tone, so if you ask it questions in a tone like it’s an all-knowing benevolent information god, it’ll respond in kind, and if you treat it politely its responses will tend more towards politeness?

    I don’t see how this solves any of the fundamental problems with asking a fancy random number generator for authoritative information, but sure, if you want to be polite to the GPUs, have at it.

    like, several lawyers have been sanctioned for submitting LLM-generated legal briefs with hallucinated case citations. if you tack on “pretty please, don’t make up any fake case citations or I could get disbarred” to a prompt…is that going to solve the problem?


  • short answer: no, not really

    long answer, here’s an analogy that might help:

    you go to https://yourbank.com/ and log in with your username and password. you click the button to go to Online Bill Pay, and tell it to send ACME Plumbing $150 because they just fixed a leak under your sink.

    when you press “Send”, your browser does something like send a POST request to https://yourbank.com/send-bill-payment with a JSON blob like {"account_id": 1234567890, "recipient": "ACME Plumbing", "amount": 150.0} (this is heavily oversimplified, no actual online bank would work like this, but it’s close enough for the analogy)

    and all that happens over TLS. which means it’s “secure”. but security is not an absolute, things can only be secure with a particular threat model in mind. in the case of TLS, it means that if you were doing this at a coffee shop with an open wifi connection, no one else on the coffeeshop’s wifi would be able to eavesdrop and learn your password.

    (if your threat model is instead “someone at the coffeeshop looking over your shoulder while you type in your password”, no amount of TLS will save you from that)

    but with the type of vulnerability Jellyfin has, someone else can simply send their own POST request to https://yourbank.com/send-bill-payment with {"account_id": 1234567890, "recipient": "Bob's Shady Plumbing", "amount": 10000.0}. and your bank account will process that as you sending $10k to Bob’s Shady Plumbing.

    that request is also over TLS, but that doesn’t matter, because that’s security for a different level of the stack. the vulnerability is that you are logged in as account 1234567890, so you should be allowed to send those bill payment requests. random people who aren’t logged in as you should not be able to send bill payments on behalf of account 1234567890.


  • Bloomberg reports that “Humane’s team, including founders Imran Chaudhri and Bethany Bongiorno, will form a new division at HP to help integrate artificial intelligence into the company’s personal computers, printers and connected conference rooms,” per an HP executive.

    congrats to HP on the launch of their new “you thought inkjet printers were shitty now? hold my aquifer and watch this” division.

    but also:

    HP is buying Humane’s CosmOS, bringing on Humane technical staff, and will get more than 300 patents and patent applications, Humane says in its press release.

    this is a relatively cheap way for HP to set itself up as an AI patent troll and extract rent from other companies that are trying to do AI-related bullshit. (from 2017: Stupid Patent of the Month: HP Patents Reminder Messages)


  • Encryption lengths are getting long so you’d think it was high time.

    that’s unrelated - AES-256 for example can be executed just fine on either a 32- or 64-bit machine. in theory there’s nothing stopping you from running it on an 8-bit or 16-bit CPU (although other considerations related to the size of AES’s lookup tables make this unlikely). from some random googling, here is an implementation of Chacha20, another 256-bit encryption algorithm, for 8-bit microcontrollers.

    when we talk about 32 vs 64-bit CPUs, in general we’re only talking about the address space - the size of a pointer determines how much RAM the computer is able to use. 32-bit machines were typically limited to 4GB (though PAE helped kick that can down the road)

    CPU registers can also be sized independently of the address space - for example AVX-512 CPUs have a register that is 512 bits wide even though the CPU is still “64-bit”.


  • What’s the relevance of either of those questions for an election that happened three months ago? I don’t like relitigating unspooled events.

    my brother in Cthulhu, you started this post by saying:

    this is where thinking Biden wasn’t doing enough has led.

    you should decide if you’re for or against re-litigating things

    Projecting your political beliefs and rationales on others is not Beeing Nice.

    meanwhile, one paragraph above, you’re projecting an opinion onto me that I don’t have:

    You’re welcome to your opinion that Biden or Harris would have been worse


  • I just find it almost comical that anyone thought Trump would be an improvement if not for the drastic outcomes we’re going to see.

    OK…just to make sure I understand you correctly - the people you’re mad at, are people who either voted for Trump, or didn’t vote at all, because of their opinions about Biden’s response to the genocide in Gaza.

    if that’s accurate, two questions:

    a) what is your estimate for the size of that group of people?

    b) how many actual individual people in that group can you identify by name? how many do you know personally? (vs having read a news story quoting them)



  • I fear I’ve become something of an accelerationist in the past few days…

    yeah, go ahead and pass this, you tech-illiterate xenophobic fucks.

    we need to divide and conquer the fascist coalition. make them hate each other. make them consumed by infighting. give them more “oh I didn’t realize there would be negative consequences that affected me personally” moments.

    there’s a whole lot of Silicon Valley techbro types who are on board with Musk and Trump because they think it’s all lower taxes, less regulations for their startups, and less “wokeness”. go ahead, pass a law that makes it a federal crime for them to click a GitHub download link. make it so that every Hacker News thread about AI is filled with American engineers bemoaning that they’re legally prohibited from keeping up with the state-of-the-art. make their startups uncompetitive because they’re required by law to pay inflated prices to subsidize OpenAI and other “American-made” plagiarism machines.













  • And I’m pretty sure that’s the approach that lawmakers have taken with this

    well, sometimes…I linked in this comment to some statements made by the Republican congressman who sponsored the original bill. he was pretty clear that he wanted the ban because he thinks TikTok is pushing propaganda, not just from the Chinese, but the Chinese Communist Party (which has been a long-standing right-wing bogeyman - that congressman was even the chair of the “House Select Committee on the CCP”)

    I believe that’s the primary angle they’ve taken to get around First Amendment concerns.

    this is true, in the same way that Trump in his first campaign promised a “Muslim ban” and then when they tried to actually implement it they realized they needed to frame it as a “travel ban…applying to countries that happen to have a lot of Muslims…oh and also North Korea because look at us, we’re definitely not discriminating against people based solely on religion”

    everyone (except the right-wing hacks on the Supreme Court) saw through the “travel ban” facade pretty easily. it’s been disappointing to see how many people uncritically repeat “well, there’s a data privacy angle to it too…” as if it’s a legitimate justification and not just another facade.