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I keep running into autoplayed videos in Firefox even with everything turned up to 11. My solution to this is for the entire website to go straight into the DNS blocklist. TrashCrunch is one of those sites, and for even better reasons than just obnoxious ads.

I am using both Linkding and Linkwarden self-hosted and archiving my bookmarks as HTML, PDF, and screenshot (I might be overdoing it) without the need for any additional dependency like client software or extension. Linkwarden works better at archiving things like Reddit, but now with the anti-scraping mechanisms in place it might het harder to do anyway.

I realized I really need this when one website which was a treasure trove for PowerMac technical information and assembly guides just went dark. Some of that info I could never find elsewhere. Linkrot sucks if you're in the middle of an (admittedly drawn out) personal project and your source of information vanishes with no trace. Belt and suspenders from now on. Might give Hister a try.

The general point related to the topic of the article is that the many controllers running on your device (not limited to Lenovo BTW) are black boxes almost impossible to inspect. The encryption engine on a hardware encrypted USB stick is making everything even harder. It can implement something like this but it's probably made to be extremely difficult to dump the firmware or inspect the features implemented in silicon.

If I'm doing software encryption like dm-crypt or zfs encryption then I don't need to bother with hardware encryption too. It's easier to trust software encryption. We have many interoperable and even open source implementations of the same encryption methods, the output is readable in open formats, so they can be validated against each other if needed.

> Data sharing is under the customer's control unless a judicial warrant is involved.

The police routinely has access to Ring footage. The people who installed them give that access. Occasionally Amazon did it too even without user consent.

I’m equating the 2 because those people contribute to the internalizing of the surveillance status. When people walk down the street they are filmed by dozens of cameras and they are starting to expect this everywhere. Flock is “another one”. Flock would have had an uphill battle in a society where private surveillance is unacceptable.

When it becomes totally normal for others to use their own private (not so private n the cloud) surveillance footage of public spaces against you, Flock stops raising people’s internal alarm bells.

Why do you think Flock is big exactly in the society that was told private surveillance of public space is perfectly fine and even expected?

Ring cameras recording outside people’s doors are what catalyzed the installation of more surveillance. After all people can’t complain one camera but not another when they all have the claimed justification of safety and security.

That’s not validating an implementation. You’re just comparing the output for a few known inputs to known results.

The hardware is still a black box and you’ll never know how it behaves in conditions you didn't test against.

I didn’t make any mention of backdoors or bugs, intentional or accidental, or the prevalence of either. You aren’t wrong but you addressed a point I never made.

The point was that there are special products, implementations of already known algorithms, sold only to TLAs. They have the code validated to the Moon and back, unlike the commercial products.

“Correctly” is a big caveat. Almost no HW implementation is auditable in any way.

My baseline assumption is that even the good commercial products are only secure from a non-determined attacker, not TLAs. Anything safe from TLAs is what’s being sold only to them.

Budgets are limited and there was cooler science to do in space and the newer more modern (and in one case even larger) ground-based ones.

It was built in the ‘60s and started losing its relevance and funding in the 2-3 decades before the collapse. A lot of time for issues to develop, be noticed, but not have enough money to fix.

If I remember correctly this seaweed accumulates arsenic. They tried to use it as fertilizer before discovering this, and made the crop and the land unusable. Even burning it is dangerous.

This is a losing battle. The conditions in the environment are such that they favor the seaweed. Shoveling or fishing out more of it won’t change this.

They didn't start with games. At least they had plenty of arbitrary limits for what it wouldn't do usually citing safety. What they do now is introducing a new arbitrary reason - this time because it hurts other deep pocketed buddies, large companies in the gaming industry. You can bet your tokens this isn't where the list of arbitrary reasons ends.

This seems like an oversimplification and one of your own examples shows it. Aren’t “the Jews” today in power or in very close proximity, not just locally but on the world stage? Are they redirecting the anger to themselves? Or is there more to the reasons people would direct their hate or dislike towards an entire group of people?

Not saying that you’re wrong, but there’s more to it. Even when not directed by those in power, some people need an external reason for their own failures. They need a target for their anger that is not themselves.

Honestly no idea. But after receiving multiple fire trainings and talking to trained firemen, I have to say that all else being equal (and gun to the head because I actually want neither) I'll take a diesel fire over a battery fire any day.

A lot of dangerous fumes come from the other material burning around the source. And at 1000C plenty of neighboring stuff decides to burn.

Diesel fires are put out much faster than battery fires especially when the battery is huge and fully charged. Battery fires are also much hotter, up to 1000 C (~1800 F), metal fires are no joke.

Diesel damages the asphalt more in different ways. It attacks the binder in the asphalt and softens it up (after all they are both byproducts of the same crude oil precursor and just want to recombine). This process takes even days so if the cleanup is fast there's minimal damage. Most of the fuel that doesn't burn runs to the side of the road anyway.

> I'll be interested to read the final safety reports

Are you still confident that the final reports will be free of interference and the agency investigating anything Tesla (Musk) related won't be gutted before it gets the chance to issue anything damaging?

> Headline makes it seem like ICE just did this in a vacuum.

The headline makes it look like they run "One of the Largest Anti-Left Surveillance Ops in US History". The only way the trigger matters is if the response to that trigger is justified. These justifications, once you consider them valid, just start a vicious cycle. Most of the people are being put under surveillance by this "massive anti US citizen campaign" with no reasonable suspicion, no judicial supervision, by an agency which should have no business doing any of this. Just another flavor of authoritarianism. Is it justified for them to escalate? If not then your argument is bunk. The title says what it really is and justifying the extremist actions of one side only betrays a bias.

This kind of automation takes the execution away from you, not the decision, and even that execution only concerns you. You wanted to shift into a higher gear, the car's computer does it for you. The result is what you wanted. A fully autonomous car that decides everything for you would be a better example.

If you let an AI grade an exam then a big part of what comes next is a decision that you didn't take or validate. You didn't remove yourself just from the execution, you removed yourself from the responsibility and cognitive effort to take the decision, and from the accountability for that decision.

If you can simplify and call every button press "just the computer doing things", then someone else can exaggerate and say a fully autonomous drone hunting humans is the same, business as usual, computers doing things.

The dollar had just over 30% inflation since the start of COVID. But not all prices increased equally, for anything with RAM or NAND they skyrocketed in the past year.

The prices will come down eventually, even if not all the way down.

But I'd be more concerned about computing staying open in general - not only as open source but at least open and accessible standards, interfaces, open to individual development, open to tinkering.

I see a concentrated push from almost all sides to lock down any platform, lock the hardware and build black box devices, lock the software under layers of attestation and certifications, all in the name of "security". I use the quotes because I don't believe security is the top concern, or even a concern at all, it's about taking the control away from users.

For now the open-computing world is still bustling and accessible but the intention to curtail this is there, with technical or legal measures.

> Just like Intel not shipping ECC for client SKUs when DDR5 design makes it really necessary

The ECC in DDR5 is on-die ECC and that's not "real" ECC, it's what DDR5 needs to not fail. Side-band ECC is the standard method, employing extra memory chips and 72bit memory. OEMs mix these in the marketing materials to fool the users into thinking they buy the better option.

That is one of the biggest gripes for almost anyone I ever met who deals with AI generated content. Nobody really cares that someone else's work was generated with AI as much as they care that it's slop and they need to put in extra effort to work around the author's laziness.

Lazy or incompetent colleagues always forced people around them to overcompensate and correct. AI increased their firepower and blast radius.

The ProMotion screens have variable refresh rate depending on the content displayed. 10Hz to 120Hz for iPhones and 24Hz to 120Hz for iPads. So in theory the power consumption should be even better than a regular screen for static content like reading text.

> people talking about 100s of tabs

This is a form of bookmarking in practice. I know people doing this and none could list what the tabs are without checking each one. In the physical world you have the equivalent of people having the desk full of stuff they never use but don't put away because they might use it later.

I get it. I meant it applies to everything. For the mobile phones I started the conversation with the crazy designs sometimes had nothing to do with the core functions. But it made them stand out and it was a learning opportunity for the manufacturer. I remember my partner's Nokia 7280, so original and impractical by any standard. At some point phones started being a proper tool to have in your pocket so the practical aspects took priority.

It's the manufactured equivalent of carcinization.

> don't comment to complain about bad parenting if you haven't had kids or had 1 or 2 neuro typical, easy kids and a wife who did most of the parenting

So I'm allowed to complain, and then some :). Screens are horrible especially when they come attached to a device made to be addictive, like an Amazon tablet.

But kids don't raise themselves no matter how "easy" they are. Parents have to make unpopular decisions that the kids will benefit from and maybe even understand when they're older. Those decisions suck the life out of you because the kid "hates" you for it, and you have to fill the void with something else that takes more parental effort. Sometimes maybe it's impossible to avoid "the screen" because of some special family situation. But at "3+" these are exceptional situations, don't treat them like the baseline.

The consequences of addiction from such a young age to screens (or sugar, junk food and every other mistake parents make to make their own lives easier in the moment) are documented and lifelong. As a parent you won't escape them, you'll live them through your child's life. Might as well take the hit for them now, even if it costs you. It doesn't get easier anyway, a pre-teen with no phone surrounded by friends who have one is no joke.

> ended up in a bonfire along with my first edition Harry Potter book collection when my mum was doing a "clear out"

Do you mean a literal bonfire to burn them? A first edition Harry Potter book collection would be a nice gift to someone or a donation to the library. The last place books should end up is in a fire.

That was exactly the point. Early in the life of a new type of device (like a mobile phone, smart or dumb) there's a period of experimentation. Then everything converges towards an optimum.

Keep in mind that the phone's primary interface wasn't always a keypad, it used to be a dial or a lever. The speaker and microphone were distinct parts rather than a single "receiver". And they all slowly converged to a couple of very similar optimized designs.

Reminds me of how mobile phones used to have very varied, even whimsical designs and slowly we settled on the rectangular slab. There's probably a point where form and function converge and then everything hovers in that region.

> I know they monitor peoples chat logs.

> I'm not uninformed on this

Sure, that’s why in your previous comment you were making it sound ridiculous to believe OAI is “secretly monitoring everyone’s logs”. You dug that hole.

> What I'm saying is that its highly unlikely that in this case that Sébastien Bubeck from OpenAi decided to steal some critical idea from Buckmasters chat and feed it "Bell" the unreleased model that produced the solution.

Why "highly unlikely"? Because OpenAI like all other big tech would never (ab)use a mechanism they even already officially have in place to boost up their valuation? Because they never used people's data in the past? Because they aren't famous for ingesting all of the internet's data with or without permission?

You choose to give them the benefit of the doubt despite every bit of past evidence and experience. That's not an argument, that's wishful thinking that "this time it's definitely different".