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kjrose

Re:IBM Audible Random Timer on Saturday August 03, 2024 @04:04PM (#41148876)
I have seen something like this as a safety mechanism. It fires and you are supposed to either check in or verify something that is critical to life. The randomness is to ensure that psychologically the alarm is not ignored or becomes habit to respond to.

Not positive if this is the same though.

Yes redundancy is very important.

I lost a decade of my life data when a main hd failed, and a tb backup drive failed at the same time.

Re:Major Outage Across ChatGPT and API on Wednesday November 08, 2023 @10:39PM (#38200871)
It's time. The AI are actively working to bring eachother down.
Yay pigeon-hole principle combined with birthday attack.
Re:The boiling frog of digital freedom on Sunday September 03, 2023 @10:30AM (#37370722)
So many folks don't seem to have remember this. IBM was also the same with the giant mainframes. Even now, if you have a power system, it's pretty much mandatory to pay an ongoing "service agreement" or very quickly you'll discover you have major issues.

I hate that the system has it where you don't own anything and you are supposed to be happy with it. But from a market perspective what else can they do? They need to make a regular income to pay for the development and such, but they also need to deal with the fact that a competitor who offers a freemium or product at a loss but where they can at some point in the future hide future costs will just naturally win.

Re:The Password Game on Wednesday June 28, 2023 @11:03AM (#36507485)
I Gave up on the youtube video.

Honestly though, this is still better than some of the "secure password" prompts I've encountered in life.

Are you totally unaware of the history of Microsoft all the way back to the 80s?

Microsoft does not care about anything more than the bottom line. As long as they can increase revenues and market penetration, they will do it. They've been playing this game since IE.

Either way, there's no way to stop that. People can easily just keep going in private if they wish, and no government has enough power to stop the development.
I fully agree. Moratoriums usually accomplish little, and give the organizations who have the technology 6 more months to get ahead of everyone else.

The idea that somehow everyone would miraculously stop working with the LLM models that are out there because someone declared a moratorium is madness. That would be like saying a 6 month moratorium on malware development should be declared.

The only players who would keep developing would be those who recognize that the moratorium is pointless, or people who are already wanting to use the tech maliciously.

The idea behind GPT-4 is out there, it is something that is going to be reproduced regardless of what is discussed and unlike, say, nuclear weapons, it doesn't require a complicated infrastructure to implement and build. We need to continue to build this, and organizations with critical access to infrastructure and such need to take their security more seriously moving forward.

Re:Ask HN: Was tech always so scammy? on Tuesday March 28, 2023 @01:28AM (#35336299)
I remember reading many books on how when electricity was invented for decades there were tons of scams which essentially were vaporware hypestorms. Look at Victorian England and the myriad medical scams around electricity.

Same with many chemical discoveries in the 1800s, and with nuclear discoveries in the 1950s.

The snake oil salesmen will always race to some new tech to try and make a quick buck. Partially because the new tech actually does do some interesting things and partially because it's new enough no one can call them on it quite yet.

Even now there are tons of new science and tech in other fields that the general public are more convinced than ever work for health, etc. And at best are hopeful thinking and at worst are massive scams which are straight out hurting millions.

To continue a bit more, I have really tried to figure out if there is any way to deal with email spam that doesn't either ban anyone but incredibly trusted servers (And even then it fails horribly), or doesn't put some sort of cost on people sending emails (either time, effort or monetary.)

I would rather have email be free and open, but I see the issues that arise from bad actors in that environment who have no real cost to abusing it and have major potential for gain if they are successful.

That being said, the easiest answer, in my head, would be to make it so that sending email to people in an unsolicited fashion has some cost. Yet, even that is problematic, because I want some people to send me unsolicited email from time to time....

The only thing I can see that could possibly be done is to either remove commenting altogether, and remove that as a method for determining engagement with the video. Or to make it so that to comment requires full validation (either by restricting to individuals with Youtube Premium, or some cost to be able to comment) of the individual who is commenting so that automation of it is no longer feasible from a monetary perspective. In theory, they could still allow users to post "Anonymously" but they would have to be posting from an account which has been paid for, or for which some monetary or time cost was necessary to prevent a spammer from simply spinning up more accounts.

There is no way to automate this because you have too much money on the side of the scammer should they break through it since if they only catch 1 out of 10,000 people, it immediately pays their bills. This is the big issue with email spam, we can fight and fight, but at the end of the say, there is no monetary cost really to sending out a stupidly absurd number of emails.

Re:How to Yubikey: A Configuration Cheatsheet on Friday March 10, 2023 @01:54PM (#35099159)
Someone needs to do this but for a windows environment. The documentation is a disaster in that realm. Took me forever to get it working properly with active directory.
Was this written by GPT-3 or some other AI. I don't know why, but it has that AI feel to it. Many of the paragraphs feel just... forced and awkward.

Definitely doesn't feel like original research.

Re:Ask HN: Simplest way to send emails to myself? on Saturday February 25, 2023 @10:04AM (#34937170)
Set up a straight postfix with relay blocking on a server using maildir. Set up whatever tool you want for pop or imap.

That way you get the emails and if you don't care about space, etc. And it uses very little processing power and is pretty much writing direct to disk the moment the emails come in.

Having had a similar experience over the alps on air italia, this is why I never ever undo my belt unless I have to. The sign went on and 5 seconds later I felt myself physically leave the seat as we hit the worst turbulence I had ever felt.

I rediscovered my appreciation for the rosary that day.

Re:Off grid in Manhattan for 8 months on Saturday January 14, 2023 @12:59PM (#34382287)
I love how people talk about not using electricity with various groups and how they did it for hundreds of thousands of years.

Completely missing that their own ancestors did the same thing until at most 150 years ago. In fact, i know my father had no electricity for the first part of his life and he lived in Alberta, not exactly the middle of the congo.

Not using electricity is not the exception, its the rule. Until very recently in human history having grid power was impossible.

Re:Off grid in Manhattan for 8 months on Saturday January 14, 2023 @12:57PM (#34382252)
Please tell me someone has the original archived somewhere. The comments just.... I have to read this.
Re:The Magic of Alleyways on Thursday December 29, 2022 @09:06AM (#34172678)
I went wandering the alleyways in my small town in Alberta recently during the summer. And I was pleasantly surprised by how many garages had been turned into makeshift bars and patios. There were myriad garage sales and such but so many people had full on bars for themselves and guests.

It was like discovering a hidden world where the rules that prevent businesses from forming were all tossed out and people could just do as they wanted. In toronto, this style of business led to so many of the street front businesses that are literally impossible to do in any city now.

Re:Maids trafficked and sold to wealthy Saudis on black market on Thursday December 29, 2022 @09:02AM (#34172651)
I remember digging into this somewhat and was surprised how prevalent it was; even in the uk, us and canada.

Once you know the current code words for the gender, type of slave, and job, you can even use Google to search and find open sites.

It was depressing to see but I honestly could not see what could be done. The fact it is done so openly and with so much money involved, I found it hard to believe that law enforcement was clueless if not complicit in it.

Re:How to Sell Tickets Fairly on Saturday November 19, 2022 @10:44AM (#33671152)
For music or artist based shows I agree.

However this could work really well for sporting events. The Leafs usually sell out all of their tickets and a good number to scalpers, having at least a more legit way to buy tickets for a game would be helpful

Re:How to Sell Tickets Fairly on Saturday November 19, 2022 @10:43AM (#33671136)
How does will call wipe out scalpers? I have never heard that before. I would love to hear the explanation.
Precisely. I don't care the reasons. I would want to know what they are.

I absolutely hate when people claim to be providing a "complete" list of something and then skip things because 'reasons'.

Re:A look at search engines with their own indexes (2021) on Tuesday June 21, 2022 @08:54AM (#31823306)
Does anyone know what the search engines that were excluded for "reasons" are?

I like having thorough lists and I am curious what as many as possible are regardless of political silliness or differences in using financial systems.

My guess is the crypto one is presearch, but the others I have no idea.

Re:The Closest Ten Airports on Monday June 13, 2022 @09:09PM (#31733652)
Very limited. I know there are far more airports near me than the app labels. Not sure what the limitation is.
Considering how many of these "Google killed my X, Y or Z" posts I've seen on Hacker News. This really doesn't feel like anything to celebrate. It is just further proof that Google could, in theory, provide the support at the level necessary for these things, but just won't.

Honestly, I know their job is hard, but if they simply put a legitimate task force together to figure out how to provide support at scale (even if it costs a premium to handle it, or possibly even a premium to do a proper appeal), I could see it helping immensely.

Basically, if you want to do an appeal for something, it will cost, and depending on the violation and how often the violation is, the cost goes up. The appeal requires them to be clear about what the violation is, and what needs to be done to resolve it. Perhaps even make it that if you get an appeal with clear details and you resolve the issue, a certain percentage of the money will be refunded.

Basically, instead of assuming everyone who their algorithms says is total evil is evil, they allow some form of good will that would help businesses, individuals and organizations work with them. I know the spammers and scammers are a huge pain, but then fine, charge them for the cost. The ones that are legit will pay and will work with Google if Google will work with them.

Re:Ask HN: Hackable Phone Watch for Kid without app on Wednesday May 25, 2022 @02:54PM (#31508918)
I agree, all of the ones I've tried have had major flaws and have no capacity for me to actually either fix the problems or add applications that would make them immensely more useful.

Is there just a blank watch with android that could be bought that I could hack into something useful for a kid?

Re:Ask HN: What Happened to Reddit? on Wednesday May 25, 2022 @02:52PM (#31508898)
Basically the same thing that happens to most forums like this. It was always better when you originally joined, and if it is particularly popular, you get more and more individuals who are simply not of the quality of a smaller self-chosen group.
Re:Ask HN: What game do you wish existed? on Wednesday May 25, 2022 @02:50PM (#31508854)
A remake of Alien Legacy, done well, with a more extensive storyline and bigger universe. I would pay crazy money for that.
To me this almost seems like an argument to insist on legal level protections for development of contractual code. As in, you need to have qualifications like a lawyer, liability coverage like a lawyer (or bank) and have to be approved in some fashion before you can publish a contract that deals with more than a certain amount of capital.

Theres no difference between a badly codes contract and a badly written one that doesn't do what one signer intended. Short of you can try to convince a judge to adjust it or handle it differently.

In this case. There is no judgment system to allow for reversal of badly coded or misunderstood contracts. Which means that the standard for the development should be far higher with considerably more insurance and coverage for risk.

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