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lconnell962

Re:Smear Campaign Towards GrapheneOS on Saturday October 31, 2026 @10:43PM (#50322284)
It's a psychology thing I admit, but having the post spilt up across Mastodon posts immediately makes this take a hit to their ability to speak with authority.

It might just be due to my age but constraining their writing to the post limits also hurts the statements. It makes the whole segment seem reactionary in an internet drama kind of way on one end, or conspiracy theorist writing on the other.

I hope someone in tech journalism picks up the story so we get a proper article on this. Right now it's just a "they said" and "they did" without supporting substance.

Some variation(s) of 5 is carrying a lot of weight. Need a person with an Idea. Need someone to refine their idea. Need someone to spend the time filtering through the slop to find the good bits. Much better to sell people on the idea of their dream being created while you sell them tokens to do that.

That all said, A person trusting the big AI companies with their golden goose idea seed leaves a lot of concerning openings down the road if that idea gets "leaked" out to others. Similar concern of mine with if the LLM outputs that made your idea happen to be reused by the big company if someone else asks similar enough questions or otherwise coaxes the AI to reveal what it did for you.

All this AI generation is gonna be a lead to a wild time for IP law.

Some of the more widely spread and tolerated LLM outputs seem to be AI slop replacing Journalism/Blog slop. Places where people complained about quality already, but tolerated it if important enough.

So to name some of the more common ones Translation, Summarization, and Reiteration of a source material.

Humans put spin on things, how much you trust a source might not reflect the source's factual accuracy. It might just mean you liked reading it better from one source than another.

Re:No Man's Sky Cosmos on Wednesday September 09, 2026 @01:59PM (#49630633)
I think some people don't understand what a procgen survival-craft game is. They're not wrong about it being an open sandbox, that's kinda the point. People talking about taking too long getting to space might not know about the limited time expeditions you can just start in for a different take, or turning the game to creative mode so they don't need to spend time resource farming to get their ship working so they can go fly around if that's all they want from the game.

The story and those quests will be rooted in building something. The space exploration will be rooted in finding a cool place loosely intended for your next base. The space battles and encounters will be part of the same core procgen survival craft cycle.

I won't deny there's probably only 20-40 hours of "real content" in the game. Most of what is there is shallower, or easilly missable, without the expedition(limited-time event) that launched it. A lot of things do seem like "grind X yourself, order team to do Y every few hours, fly to Z and talk to someone" which will get repetitive if/when you keep getting the same ones.

An article about the complicated issue that is a child with a non-lethal developmental disorder getting a treatment that ends with the tragedy of the headline. The article might be sensationalizing the situation, but it makes the doctor out like a monster and as the facts read I can't say I disagree.

That the treatment was inconclusive in the animal studies isn't particularly shocking. The brain is one of the more complicated parts of a human body after all. Ethics and safty concerns seemed to get ignored all the way to the actual treatment speaks like the money and potential fame was all the medical staff involved were concerned with. The parent's aren't blameless, they wanted to fix a child who probably would have lived with a below average quality of life. The article claims they were mislead to believe this treatment was safer than it actually was.

The treatment vehicle seems like the cause of death as reported toward the end, but there are words about the animal testing that imply this could have been a known risk with the treatment as a whole. The number of things being found with hindsight remind me of "move fast and break things" development. It really sounds like cutting edge (bio)tech has ethics get ignored when money and fame are on the table.

Re:12k AI-generated blog posts added in a single commit on Saturday April 04, 2026 @02:51PM (#47642042)
Something I've recently started seeing, maybe even an emerging #4 is AI generated translations. You could have someone very intelligent, making well written subject matter expertise. Or just someone who has valid thoughts they wish to express to the world in a language more of a common tongue than their own.

Or on the other end you could have someone who wrote a sentance or two in their language and had some combination of AI generation and translation algorithm bloat it out.

In both cases you will get something that can look right and well thought out or explained, but probably will have at least some of the AI slop signs present. I don't know what the solution is for this type given claims Google Translate has started to do this kind of translation for people. An AI translation is probably just as prone to hallucinations as any other AI, but it probably will look more natural to readers than a direct translation.

Windows has made improvements in that area in the last decade, but I don't disagree much. It could be the bias of having dealt with IT related issues for long enough, but I do think the "average" user might be regressing closer to that grandparent level as far as (needing, if not wanting to admit) that child-proofing the OS is needed. Chromebook and tablet PC stuff will probably continue to draw more entry level users in. As that marketshare grows we will have to wait and see how malicious programming evolves with it...

Same general guesswork, but everyone on here can make reasonably educated guesses at what the AI evolution process will do to the tech landscape. Nobody knows enough yet to have anything in cement, but it's out there, and the small changes of the last few years make it seem that we are going to regress rather than improve the level of technical knowlege needed to be "average" when working on a computer.

Comment threads on the Closed Source OS topics like this regularly remind me about the large disconnect between skilled technical users and the "average" user. That average probably isn't your (great) grandparent who never learned how to type suddenly needing to learn the rapidly evolving early-days internet, but it's still just as dangerous to suggest "Use Linux" as the solution for everyone when plenty of "Average" users still don't know enough to be doing things safely in the console.

The "sudo rm -rf" and equivilant horror stories get told all too often as mistakes even made by "skilled users" who were in a hurry, and while that particular problem is becoming less common there is still a minefield out there. Wider use case where we need IT support is worse since there are plenty of Microsoft and Mac favoring restrictions and lockdowns required in the name of corporate level security requirements and certifications add to the mess and "security concerns" you can't get corporate to move away from.

I'm a daily Linux user who has had to put years of a software developer career's time into learning the easier system administration aspects and working with those who handle the harder issues, but doing this in my career I have had to step back every time someone comes to me with a problem. Once I understand the problem then go on to ask "at a guess, how much time will diagnosing this even take?" with the estimates varying based on how standard the OS install or deployment is.

Time and a relatively small amount of training is the problem with switching users from Windows to Mac or the reverse. Switching to Linux is training and introducing a technical mindset into a person. Idiot-proofing the system is a major issue Linux hasn't solved yet. VDI systems and the like might be a step in the right direction, but as soon as your use case for Linux requires a "average user" to open a terminal the problems will pile up and the minefield is exposed.

Years removed from using a Mac I still think of it as the most "child-proofed" OS. Windows being less restrictive but still doing a good-enough job of locking up the more dangerous things while also not drawing attention to them on a regular basis. Linux is like seeing the dangers left out in the open with few useful warning signs beyond some generic unspecified danger signs around the worksite.

Re:Bill to Eliminate H-1B Visa Program Introduced in Congress on Wednesday January 07, 2026 @04:00AM (#46524161)
Recent years have made me realize that as bad as reading political threads in online circles can be, it still does bring a greater ability to self-innoculate yourself to emotional influences than watching and listening to other groups editorialized political media.

But yes, I also do wonder with these political topics on all online sites using text, votes, and comment trees what kind of things would become red flags about users if sites chose or were forced to make more metrics appear in them. "Lurker" votes, Estimated Geolocation or VPN use of commenters, anythings that could be shown in "suspect" topics even if not "bannable or confirmed" manipulation was happening.

Or maybe just a politics filter. I know I have a bad habit of getting into reading these topics and their comments when my sanity would prefer I filter them out entirely.

The select few lawyers on the right cases probably will be the only ones coming out ahead on this after the dust has settled.

The issue is that unpaid average people are being used, or rather forced, to act as QA and Beta Testers for this mad dash into the AI space. Customer Service was already a good example of negative preception by design, and AI is just being used to make it worse.

A production database being corrupted or deleted causing a company to fail sounds good on paper. But if that database breaks a bank account, healthcare record, or something life altering for a person who has nothing to do with the decision of using it the only chance they have for making it right is probably going to be the legal system.

So unless AI advancement really does force the legal system to change the only people I see coming out ahead from the mess we are starting to see is the Lawyers who actually know what they're doing and can win cases against companies that screw up in their rush to go to AI.

Re:Accepting US car standards would risk European lives on Wednesday December 03, 2025 @06:04AM (#46133058)
The answer you get will depend on how much a person has to travel or has traveled in the US. If someone lives, works, and never travels outside (for example) a 100 KM radius then what they do every day will play a big part. Frequent road travel for work, family, or other reasons probably will look towards the smallest or most efficiant car that can fit their need.

The average weather pattern of the region a person lives in plays a part, the amount of public transportation avaliable plays a part, how densely packed cities near you are plays a part. What car is avaliable is obviously a big part. All that stuff will be probably be considered before the "overall safety" of the car you want (and can afford) to get.

The people who can afford to think about safety will most likely be considering "passanger safety" rather than at the societial level. The more big cars around them the more someone concerned about safety will feel the need to own and drive in a big car. Sometimes you need the bigger car for the larger range a bigger gas tank allows. There are still places where you can find around 400 km between gas stations, especially if you are driving outside normal buisness hours.

One topic for the American car market has been how the "mid-sized" or "mid-range value" car space has been vanishing. That the options are increasingly moving towards either minimal passanger/storage Eco-Cars or the larger Trucks and SUVs. That plays a part, the used car market plays a part, and other world events play a part.

So at least from one point of view here all that leads to a lot of topics like this where there are people who have only lived in the US (and often not even moved around to other parts of the US) pushing their world view on others. You also have people who "have been to the US" claiming qualified expertiese based off their point(s) of reference, valid or not. The "US needs better public transportation" crowd will usually come out as well with sometimes more militant views against car use and ownership.

But all this circles back to the idea that the "normal American" has time to think about this or try to act on any of this. Some do, some don't, most won't really think about this unless a headline prompts something from their brain. The hard thing for the "normal European" to understand is the economics of distance and scale at play in the US given just how much space between cities and towns there can be.

People can blame the "American Dream" or the auto-industry, or whatever else you might want to imagine has contributed to the damage done in the last century of road construction and sprawl. The end result is that most Americans don't have a choice but to own a car, and may be far too tired to be trusted at the wheel of a vehicle. Multiple people driving less than a few miles to work may be involved in an accident with someone who had driven hundreds. Miles driven in a year is part of insurance calculations for a reason.

This was much more comment than I intended to give.

Re:Homeschooling Hits Record Numbers on Friday November 21, 2025 @06:28PM (#46010325)
There are 13 years required (K-12) in the US. The way non-compliance is peanlized varies depending on the state.

Education in the US is a complicated subject given the "extreme individualistic American culture" as you say. That will be present in the teachers and school districts, and the lesson plans can/will differ greatly between teachers and school districts for getting students to the general standard.

Re:Ask HN: What are people doing to get off of VMware? on Monday October 20, 2025 @12:30AM (#45640189)
I've just enjoyed the realization that I attended a meeting where our VMware support rep used "Just think about how much money using bare metal hardware is costing" as an argument to my management during that meeting after these price increases were becoming common news.