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3 yr. ago

Linux server admin, MySQL/TSQL database admin, Python programmer, Linux gaming enthusiast and a forever GM.

  • It's technically correct, as far as I've read (not an expert!). Just because the police own a limited subset of the data and their copy is deleted after 30 days doesn't prevent flock from stockpiling all the data permanently. It also doesn't stop Flock from having a separate contract, entirely unrelated of course, giving the police access to FlockOS. That platform has all sorts of data from all available sources.

  • Some of the first people to go in Nazi Germany were the Jewish German WW1 veterans. When a population is purportedly 'weak' and 'incapable', perhaps even 'poisoning the nation', the absolute worst thing you can have are patriotic members of that minority as living counterexamples.

    That's why for the fascist, they must go quickly and quietly so as to not undermine the message.

  • Today I also saw Biden raising prices in my local store. This is especially impressive considering I don't live in the US. He got confronted by the manager about it, so he hissed and hunched his back over, then transformed into a puddle and escaped down a drain.

    Not an hour later I saw him stealing candy from a baby and kicking a puppy off a cliff. This was unusual because I live in a very flat part of my country, but I know what I saw.

  • Salting the water doesn't help with that as far as I know. Salting pasta water helps with exactly one thing: it tastes better.

  • Aww, I'm not on the list. Is this a personal failing of mine? Am I just too agreeable?

  • As someone physically capable of playing games with the blinky shiny lights, they aren't all they're cracked up to be. My top two games atm are Manor Lords and MENACE, both of which should be perfectly accessible to you.

  • Just out of interest, what do you make of this situation in my country? Roma people make up less than 5% of the population of the country. They are heavily discriminated against. The majority of the population are racist against them. By your logic, we should ignore and maybe even embrace the racism to steer the conversation back to economic issues?

  • From your comment history, it looks like you're an American leftist. Maybe don't throw rocks at allies? You're going to need all the help you can get with your current government structure.

  • The point is I don’t think LLMs normally use copyrighted code in a way that would hurt open source projects.

    I don't know. I'm not a lawyer, and copyright for code was a hot mess even before LLMs got involved. With how many opportunistic copyright/patent trolls there are and how easily convinced judges have been in the past, it could go either way.

    Lol, so how do humans code in comparison?

    The good programmers normally code by breaking down the problem into constituent parts and logically working through the problem, step by step. What differentiates this from tokenization is that instead of just looking for code that is similar for a similar problem, programmers can usually understand the effects of each line of code, visualize what the state of each variable will be in that step (or dump out the variables to look directly if unsure), and then move on to the next step. This logical problem-solving approach is fundamentally different from a tokenization+noise looking for a similar-looking problem approach. For one thing, you can solve problems that haven't been solved before.

  • That would rely on the contact of that user using the admin's public key. In most systems I've seen that'd result in a big flashing warning that the user's key has been changed. So, dangerous for people contacting you for the first time, much more obvious if the 2 users have been talking before that point.

    Other people have raised the much more interesting and potentially dangerous point that it's very difficult in this context to make sure that a particular public key corresponds with a particular user. I'm way more used to sysadmin style issues where you have a small number of known keypairs, while in this context it's a large number of mostly unknown keypairs, so you need some way of confirming that. I'm starting to understand why this is a much thornier issue than it appears on the surface.

  • LLMs don't "create". Under the hood, they're tokenizing the queries, looking for "clouds" of tokens that are similar to the query, then returning a sequence of tokens (with some random noise thrown in) that match what their training data says the answer should be.

    In short: all LLM code is an amalgamation of their training data by definition. If there's nothing similar in there, it's literally not possible for it to be part of any response.

  • How much do you know about cryptography?

    I'd describe myself as a relatively knowledgeable layman. Essentially I know enough to use it effectively in a sysadmin/dbadmin capacity, but not got a good grasp of the underlying math.

    This was my earliest blog post on the topic, if you want a place to start.

    Thank you, I'll take you up on that.

  • As long as the admin doesn't possess the private key, that solution still prevents the latter issue. If the admin swaps out your public key for one they control, they could technically impersonate you and read messages after the swap, but not read any messages from before. The user would be unable to use E2EE as soon as the key is swapped, so the only real issue here is impersonation.

    An admin could theoretically take over a user's account today, so there's not really a new vulnerability here. And with E2EE, there'd be a big clue about something funky happening with the public key changing.

    EDIT: Oh.

    These aren’t encapsulation keys (a.k.a., asymmetric or “public key encryption” keys). Encapsulation keys belong to the MLS KeyPackages, which are NOT planned to ever be logged in a key transparency system. The KeyPackages will be signed by the keypair whose public component is stored, however.

    That seems... strange? Not sure why that approach was chosen.

  • Or, far more likely, installed some devious listening device somewhere that records and occasionally phones home.

  • Maybe it was a mistake to try and use natural language for this kind of job, it's too fuzzy and interpretable. Maybe we need a new language, one with a much stricter syntax and no room for interpretation. If you make it simple enough, and use some natural language for important keywords, shouldn't be too difficult to learn.

    We could call it "language for programming" or something like that.

    Eh, who am I kidding, that'll never catch on.

  • Not if you have pets. You'll need a screen to stop hair getting into the case if you have cats/dogs.

  • My cat used to do that all the time. Burrowed under the blanket and then turned around and stuck her head out.

  • These antibiotics are awful though. So big I had to break in half just to swallow and they gave me an awful tummy ache even though I ate with yogurt like the Dr suggested.

    Sounds very unpleasant. Get well soon.