Law enforcement AI is a terrible idea and it doesn’t matter whether you feed it “false facts” or not. There’s enough bias in law enforcement that the data is essentially always poisoned.

The problem with any excuse you make for Elon is that Elon is too stupid to keep his mouth shut and give the excuse any plausibility. After the nazi salute he went on Twitter to make nazi puns about it. It is certain beyond reasonable doubt that he knows exactly what the salute was. Even if you give him the insane benefit of the doubt that it was really “his heart going out” and accidentally looked like the salute, his having shown he knows what it looks like but never stating he does not actually believe in the ideology or want present himself as an ally to nazis is just as damning.

How is this any less meaningful than any other use case? Is downloading a distro to play video games ok? To shitpost on social media? To watch clickbait videos on youtube? Why is this in particular a bad use of resources?

Maybe in some cases. But I’ve been requested by Google support to provide a video for a very simple and clear issue we were having. We have a contract with them and we personally brought up the issue to a Google employee during a call. There was no concern of AI generated bullshit, but they still wouldn’t respond without a video. So maybe there’s more to this trend than what you’re theorizing.

I find that very unlikely to happen. If AI is accepted as fair use by the legal system, then that means they have a motive to keep copyright as restrictive as possible; it protects their work but allows them to use every one else’s. If you hate copyright law (and you should) AI is probably your enemy, not your ally.

Bold of you to assume this wasn’t always the plan for Pokemon Go. A ton of online services are basically designed from the get go to be mass surveillance machines and the founders know they’re eventually going to be sold as exactly that.

Well it’s not going to be the same engineering challenge as it was for Valve, because they only need to integrate proton, not develop it. If proton works on Lutris (via umu), an open source project with no corporate backing as far as I’m aware, surely CDPR can at least attempt it. This is probably the best time to do it, too. SteamOS has been well received and is likely to end up on even more handhelds, and Windows 10 is nearing its EoL. If GoG is one of the first storefronts to allow its users to play outside of windows it might generate a lot of positive sentiment in the community, just like they did with their anti-DRM stance.

I see. Thanks for sharing. This will be good to know next time I’m looking for a printer.

Microsoft has project Silica where they store data in glass. Being electromagnetic field-proof is one of the stated goals.

but they’re a different kind of hassle

Can you elaborate on this? I thought they would be straight up better to work with and I was thinking of buying one in the future. Is it just about the drying up issue you mentioned or are there other drawbacks?

The DMCA takedown seems to be specifically about Ryujinx’s ability to decode ROMs. Circumventing DRM is in fact illegal according to the DMCA so they appear to have a valid argument. However, in their takedown notice they assume that the decryption keys are obtained illegally. I’m wondering if the DMCA forbids extracting the decryption keys (without distribution) from your own legitimately owned Nintendo hardware for personal backup. If so, then the Ryujinx feature might also be defensible.

This also raises the question of whether an emulator could be made to work on already decrypted media and let you figure out how to do that yourself. Nintendo could argue that its main use is still to play illegally decrypted ROMs but the emulator would have a decent defense imo.

No, the implied solution is to reevaluate the standard rather than hacking around it. The two humans should communicate that the standard works for neither side and design a better way to do things.

This is really funny to me. If you keep optimizing this process you’ll eventually completely remove the AI parts. Really shows how some of the pains AI claims to solve are self-inflicted. A good UI would have allowed the user to make this transaction in the same time it took to give the AI its initial instructions.

On this topic, here’s another common anti-pattern that I’m waiting for people to realize is insane and do something about it:

• person A needs to convey an idea/proposal
• they write a short but complete technical specification for it
• it doesn’t comply with some arbitrary standard/expectation so they tell an AI to expand the text
• the AI can’t add any real information, it just spreads the same information over more text
• person B receives the text and is annoyed at how verbose it is
• they tell an AI to summarize it
• they get something that basically aims to be the original text, but it’s been passed through an unreliable hallucinating energy-inefficient channel

Based on true stories.

The above is not to say that every AI use case is made up or that the demo in the video isn’t cool. It’s also not a problem exclusive to AI. This is a more general observation that people don’t question the sanity of interfaces enough, even when it costs them a lot of extra work to comply with it.

It’s much more complicated than this. Given that models have been shown to spit out verbatim copies of some training material, it can be argued that the weights do in fact encode the material, just in some obfuscated way. Additionally, it can be argued that the output of the model is a derivative copy of the original work regardless of whether the original work can be “found inside” the model weights, just by the nature of the process. As of now, there is no precedent that I know of on whether this constitutes redistribution of copyrighted material.

Agreed. A few year back the devs looking for quick fixes would go over to StackOverflow and just copy answers without reading explanations. This caused the same type of problems that OP is talking about. That said, the ease of AI might be making things even worse.

Getting the entire world to switch to something better would be quite the undertaking.

But that’s probably not necessary. You could install something on your phone that does phone number lookup and then just dials the number as normal. The service doesn’t need to be built into the old phone networks this way.

As far as I know, the apps are not intercepting the text messages for passcodes. The messages have a specific format and a hash to indicate which app they are targeting. It is up to the messages app to read the message and to forward the code. This design should not need to give the apps any access to your messages.

EDIT: Basically the immunity system doesn’t work like a muscle.

I think the immune system can be likened to a muscle if someone really wants to go with that metaphor, but only if you consider vaccines to be the gym and getting sick is uncontrollable and dangerous physical exertion. So, wanting to develop natural immunity is like wanting to get into street fights to build arm strength. It might kinda work, but you’ll also be in a lot of unnecessary danger.

Your encryption key can be stored encrypted in the cloud. This isn’t a fundamentally bad thing, but they should allow better protection than the short pins they allowed last time I checked.

Do you have access to Signal servers to verify your claims by any chance?

That’s not how it works. The signal protocol is designed in a way that the server can’t have access to your message contents if the client encrypts them properly. You’re supposed to assume the server might be compromised at any time. The parts you actually need to verify for safe communication are:

• the code running on your device
• the public key of your intended recipient