Father, Hacker (Information Security Professional), Open Source Software Developer, Inventor, and 3D printing enthusiast

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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 23rd, 2023

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  • Yes! Pro-tip: If you see an aeron chair on the side of the road for trash pickup, take it!

    99% of the time, when people throw out office chairs it’s because the gas cylinder failed (gets stuck down). A new cylinder is only $20!

    Just be prepared to whack TF out of that old one to get it out, haha. They can be really stuck in there after 5-10 years of people sitting on the chair.

    Don’t be afraid to use a huge ass plumbing wrench and scratch TF out of the old one 👍








  • Listen: Theft is a legal term, just like copyright. When someone steals something (theft), the owner of that thing doesn’t have it anymore. When someone violates copyright the owner still has the thing and can continue to make as many copies of it as they like.

    In the 80s, 90s, and 2000s the RIAA and MPAA had vast marketing campaigns trying to re-brand copyright violation as “theft”. Copyright existed for centuries before Congress decided to pass The Sound Recording Act of 1971 and the Copyright Act of 1976 which was the first time (ever) that copying something without permission could be prosecuted as a criminal offense (instead of civil).

    The “Piracy is Theft” thing is literally from one of their advertising campaigns! They invented it and it’s nothing but pro-corporate propaganda. Do not think for one second that anyone stands to lose significant amounts of money from piracy other than corporations and even that’s debatable.

    Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem. -Gabe Newell, founder of Valve Software (Steam)

    Individuals have been copying stuff since forever and nobody cared until some bean counter invented the disproven concept of “one pirated thing == one lost sale.” We all know that’s not how it works! That entire concept is another form of “Hollywood Accounting”:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_accounting

    So no. Fuck no. It’s not “splitting hairs.”



  • No, the vulnerabilities were always there, AI is just pointing them out publicly.

    I used to work as a professional hacker. Let me tell you something that the news never, ever talks about: If a company doesn’t have a bug bounty program, we kept those vulnerabilities to ourselves.

    A government has vast resources to do just that: Keep the vulnerabilities to themselves until they feel like using them. They will not disclose them. They will keep them in their back pocket until the day comes when they need them for an op.

    The only time they disclose vulnerabilities is when they think they’re too easy to find and there’s a public interest benefit to getting the problem fixed (e.g. the government is using those products).

    What this means is that AI really is making FOSS vastly more secure than it ever was. This is probably pissing off government red teams to no end.

    What we’re not hearing about as much is AI finding vulnerabilities in closed source products. Not because it’s not finding them, but because the disclosures are kept private (because companies treat it as bad PR and they’re assholes about it).

    You can bet your ass that AIs run by state actors are building up massive war chests of vulnerabilities in closed source products right now. We’ll only hear about them after these products get exploited and maybe not even then because so, so many companies have no idea WTF they’re doing in regards to infosec. Think about it: How many CEOs are right now demanding their teams reduce the amount of FOSS they use because of the recent news? These people are idiots and apparently never heard that old joke about a new employee making a $100,000 mistake… “We just spent $100,000 training them!”



  • You can simulate “ADHD brain” with drugs and conditioning, similar to how PTSD alters people’s brain chemistry.

    The human brain is plastic/adaptive and can change, depending on the cost/benefit of action/reward conditioning. Just like how people with ADHD can see some improvement with training, a neurotypical brain can see some ADHD-like changes with the same sort of (anti?) training. That’s what I’m suggesting is happening in this AI study: People were rewarded for using the AI initially (dopamine response) but then that reward (easy way out) was taken away, and they performed more poorly as a result.

    It stands to reason that their reward center was trained to behave like an ADHD brain in that it could tell there was not going to be an easy way to gain a reward from the activity, so it didn’t bother putting in the necessary resources to achieve the outcome it would have accomplished if they were never given AI in the first place.

    The usual dopamine response was overridden, thus behaving like an ADHD brain.



  • I don’t think it’ll happen like Radium or Asbestos because those rely on scarcity. They’re physical things that can be physically controlled.

    AI models aren’t like that. In less than a minute anyone can download the latest models. In under an hour, they can have all the latest models sitting on their PC. Right now, there’s a shortage of memory and GPUs which makes them prohibitively expensive for the average person but that won’t always be the case!

    Ten years from now, everyone’s phones will have enough capabilities to run models that currently require a PC with a 32GB GPU.

    What we could do is force AI companies and software to put warnings in the chat interfaces like cigarette cartons: “WARNING: Using LLMs for just ten minutes increases the likelihood that you will have trouble completing difficult mental tasks afterwards.” (That was in the news this morning)

    We also definitely need international treaties that prevent countries from allowing AI to make the decision to kill people or destroy infrastructure. Though honestly, we’re already in a state where countries are willing to kill hundreds of people just to assassinate a single target (e.g. US and Israel bombing an entire building because they think their target is inside).

    These are small potatoes, though, compared to what AI could do to capitalism and inequality. The rate at which it is advancing is faster than people/jobs can keep up. It’s like half the population is ferriers and suddenly everyone was just given a free car.



  • No, no. You’ve got the wrong idea.

    Will AI completely ruin a zillion people’s ability to think (beyond what social media already accomplished)? Quite possibly!

    I’m just saying there’s nothing we can do to stop it at this point.

    You’re about to head down a long, lonely road as normies start using and accepting AI more and more into their lives while you scream into the abyss. I’ve been there with fossil fuels, copyright, software patents, and Linux.

    People saying “Just use AI!” Is about to live rent free in your head as your most-hated phrase. Just like, “stop driving gas guzzlers!” Or, “stop bitching about Windows and just install Linux already!” Lives in so many others.

    At least most people don’t think of AI as a core part of their identity (e.g. pickup trucks) 🤷



  • (And we do all the fancy shit, looping, custom harnesses, orchestrations, handovers, savepoints, post delivery pipelines, autoremediation, blablabla, context, graphs blabla)

    Yeah that’s not what I’m talking about. That’s just coding stuff and I think everyone is learning a hard lesson right now that there’s really two ways to do AI (for code):

    1. You let the AI write all the code. Using those techniques you mentioned to try to keep it from fucking up too much.
    2. You use the AI to fix/write a little bit of the code at a time. Manually. As in, someone who knows software architecture really well tells the AI to write a function or two or maybe even a whole module and that’s it. They do this repeatedly until their task is complete.

    #1 is a very expensive way to do it but it seems to work, albeit with a huge learning curve and a much longer horizon before you get something stable. Even then, what you get can be a giant fucking mess that’s really, really hard to understand.

    #2 is much safer and works quite well, IMHO. When the AI fucks something up, it’s only a tiny little thing that’s easy to fix. This method really is just a way for developers to improve their productivity.

    With #2, it only takes a small amount of tokens to have the AI help you troubleshoot as well. At least, that’s been my experience.

    Having said that, the places where we are seeing the most growth in AI is small shit. For example, at my work they implemented an agent that scans customer complaints and filters out false positives. I work for a huge company that has a zillion products/services and the AI has tool calls into our ticketing systems to check if there was an outage at the time the customer complained. It’s not that smart, but it’s smart enough to tell if a ticket about system X was opened when system X had an outage. It can even tell if the customer was complaining about something relevant to the outage.

    Stuff like that runs 24/7 and eats up bazillions of tokens, but only on our local hardware (we have thousands of enterprise GPUs). At other companies, they’re doing similar things and slowly realizing they can replace OpenAI/Anthropic API calls with local ollama stuff.

    Even if your token bill is $10,000/month for a service like that, it’s still cheaper than paying an entire team of humans to perform the same function.

    That is the growing use of AI automation I was talking about.


  • It’s too late for that scenario. LLMs are already widespread on millions of computers.

    On my old 4060 Ti 16GB I can run Qwen3.8:14b and that’s actually good enough for loads and loads of things. It’s actually overkill for a lot of stuff too which is why tiny models are all the rage right now (e.g. 0.8b models).

    Let’s say the government banned LLMs. Are they really going to want to halt pharmaceutical and biomedical research like that? Are they going to start inspecting/requiring everyone’s computers be scanned regularly for AI models?

    No. It’s unrealistic to think they can do anything at all to stop AI. If we ban it in the US, the world will just use AI services offered from other countries and then the US won’t be able to compete because those countries will become vastly more productive.

    As much as everyone on Lemmy believes all AI output is “slop”, it really does do useful stuff! It’s just most of the useful stuff doesn’t make the news. It’s boring things like checking if an uploaded image is NSFW or if an uploaded document has everything it’s supposed to have or follows the correct format.

    AI/LLMs are also checking the grammar of basically everything that gets published. Anyone who’s not using AI for that is an idiot. It’s just way too fucking good at spotting grammatical errors, incorrect word use (often innocent typos that normal grammar checking tools miss), and similar problems.

    There’s fucktons of super useful, good ways to use AI. We’d be stupid to just ban it and pretend it isn’t good for a lot of things.

    We can regulate its use but that’s not really “regulating AI” as much as it is “regulating capitalism” or “regulating people”. Because the AI isn’t just going out on its own to spam misinformation or mislead consumers with generated product photos. Someone told it to do those things.

    What we need isn’t “AI regulation” is regular regulation that prevents companies from behaving badly.