News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

johnnyo

Re:Predictive intelligence to anticipate anything. on Sunday September 13, 2026 @12:02PM (#49685488)
I asked a question, server hung, then told me I had no more free questions without giving me an answer.
Re:Text AI watermarks will always be trivial to remove on Thursday August 13, 2026 @10:15PM (#49294065)
If it’s before publication date, does that prove the author used AI inappropriately in their writing?

Not really, there are any number of reasons why they might do that.

In my own personal writing, sometimes I run it through LLMs to give grammar or writing suggestions.

Re:Text AI watermarks will always be trivial to remove on Thursday August 13, 2026 @01:02PM (#49288851)
1. AI company buys and trains on an author’s book when it gets published, it’s now part of the training data.

2. Attacker asks the LLM for the opening sentences of the book, it goes into the generated responses database.

3. Later, a malicious user shows that the first few sentences of the authors book are identical to a previously generated response.

No, you cannot retroactively make something a crime as you have found.

That way lies madness.

If the govt could do that, they could arrest anyone, anytime simply by making whatever they did yesterday retroactively illegal.

Re: on Thursday December 11, 2025 @04:51PM (#46237706)
It’s not clear to me what the changing colors of the words mean as I scroll around?
Re:Vanity Activities on Monday December 08, 2025 @10:53AM (#46193741)
Voting is just one way people engage in the political process.
Re:Vanity Activities on Sunday December 07, 2025 @09:59PM (#46187827)
News consumption impacts political decision making, like who I want to support or oppose in local, state, and national elections.

That seems a pretty high impact decision we want all the members of our society to be making on a regular basis.

I wish the same rule applied to their site design. It’s 90% ads on mobile, almost completely unreadable.
Re:Project Gemini on Monday November 17, 2025 @11:39AM (#45955256)
“There are only two hard things in computer science. Cache invalidation, naming things, and off-by-one errors.”
> This feature will be available on Teams desktop applications (both Windows and Mac) and Teams mobile applications (both iOS and Android)."

Seems like it’s even easier, just join the meeting via browser.

I’m not familiar with a way to enforce this type of restriction in the browser.

My immediate thought was college kids on campus.

It’s basically your apartment building example (esp. something like the STEM dorms)

When this stuff breaks in the hours leading up to a homework assignment being due, it’s going to discourage the next generation of engineers from using it.

Re:Games Workshop and the big ambition of a miniatures business on Saturday January 18, 2025 @10:52PM (#42753403)
There are bunch of tabletop wargames, but Warhammer has the network effect going for it.

If you want to go the local hobby store and play a game, most other people are playing Warhammer, that’s what you play too.

You might prefer Bolt Action, but if nobody else in town has a Bolt Action army, it’s an uphill climb.

I recently attended a big Wargaming convention. While all sorts of games were present and being played, 40K has orders of magnitude more people playing it.

How are the SIPC premiums being paid?

Let’s say I invest $250k with you. From my research it appears the SIPC premiums on that amount would be more than $12/year.

How does that work?

Re:Valuing Humans in the Age of Superintelligence: HumaneRank on Thursday November 14, 2024 @04:45PM (#42141569)
Also consider that a good judge is doing a useful service to society, but isnt necessarily in the business of maximizing other people’s happiness.
Re:Valuing Humans in the Age of Superintelligence: HumaneRank on Thursday November 14, 2024 @04:43PM (#42141549)
One major point I don’t see addressed, are endorsements public or private?

I could see major (but different) issues with both scenarios.

That was my question as well. What is the user benefit of the monitor having a network connection?
Re:Twitter/X will let people you've blocked see your posts on Tuesday September 24, 2024 @06:18PM (#41641571)
Based on my reading of the article, this change would not start showing you Elon’s tweets if you have him blocked.

What it would do is allow Elon’s feed to show everyone, and not have holes in it from people who have blocked him.

I think the idea is that CrowdStrike doesn’t run in user space.

If an Nvidia driver had bricked the machines, would that be MS fault or Nvidia fault?

I’m not following your line of reasoning, can you clarify?

Is the argument that it was MS responsibility to bake something like this in at the OS level? And if they did it would be more robust?

I’m not sure I agree. MS has already gotten in trouble for monopolistic practices before, so from a legal standpoint, I’m not sure that’s the best course of action.

I don’t see how this is Microsoft’s fault or issue.

MS can’t prevent a software vendor from breaking the machine.

Re:The most confusing emojis in every US state in 2024 on Thursday May 16, 2024 @04:28PM (#40382738)
>> rebelled-against emojis, meaning the emojis that people use for different meanings than what their title suggests they mean. The top emoji people don’t use as intended is the persevering face, with only 5% using it as intended and the majority using it to signify frustration

I’m willing to bet money that less than 5% of the people using the Eggplant emoji actually mean eggplant.

Isn’t the claim that the issue is long term safety?

Saying “there is no immediate safety of flight issue” kinda dodges the question.

Perfect PR language

I love these sorts of unintended consequences.

I suspect it will be changed rather quickly once large business travel customers catch on to that particular loophole.

Re:Dow closes 500 points lower, worst day since March 2023 on Thursday April 04, 2024 @05:53PM (#39936245)
It’s best to ignore daily stock market fluctuations.

Focus on the long term.

I dont know about the details of this particular painting, but Rarity here could refer to something like the type of paint used, the size, or even the subject matter or time period.
It’s not clear to me, but can usernames be reused?

Let’s say I create a username and then later delete it as they suggest.

Can someone else then create the username and continue the conversation?

Is there a means to know if I’m talking to the same “Bob.smith.123” I was a few weeks back?

Re:A Canticle for Leibowitz on Saturday March 02, 2024 @09:23AM (#39572720)
A classic. I read it again every couple of years or so.

The idea of trying to piece things back together after the apocalypse always resonated with me

Re:Warning: $14k BigQuery charge in 2 hours on Tuesday February 20, 2024 @05:04PM (#39447595)
Can you post what a $14,000 SQL query looks like?

If nothing else, it can be an example in my SQL 101 course.

Insightful solutions aren’t always correct solutions.

Take a look at how Excel helpfully makes things dates or numbers, even when you don’t want them to be treated as such.

There’s no “insightful” way to understand that a column of numbers really wants to be treated like text or that 20-DEC-82 is a product code vs a date.

Re:Warning: $14k BigQuery charge in 2 hours on Tuesday February 20, 2024 @04:22PM (#39447087)
So, you gave someone your credit card number without understanding how or what they were going to charge you for?

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