Kerfuffle

@[email protected]

github.com/KerfuffleV2 — various random open source projects.

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Kerfuffle,

Pretty sure it’s mainly non-furry non-gay hackers that take down the majority of websites.

Atheists of lemmy, what is your coping strategy when things goes downhill?

I am at an accepting stage that not everything that happens in your life is in your control. When things goes really bad and you dont have much control on it, I would assume a person who believes in god or religious figures has their belief system as a coping mechanism. For example praying to the god and so on....

Kerfuffle,

Can you provide an example where science cannot explain a situation, because I can’t honestly think of any.

Not OP, but there is some stuff. One big example is qualia. How does matter give rise to actual feelings, experiences of things? This isn’t something we can measure directly and it actually seems like it won’t be something we ever can measure. Might also be able to use something like “what was there before the big bang?” and that kind of thing.

Of course, the fact that science can’t explain something doesn’t really justify falling back on magic as an explanation though. Some stuff just may not have an answer.

Kerfuffle,

Like, those cells will require the same nutrients and same growing conditions, and they naturally 3D print themselves into the shape of themselves.

They’ll also naturally use the nutrients and energy to 3D print stuff that’s not useful to humans, like leaves, roots, flowers, etc. Basically this is how vat grown vegetables, meat, etc, can potentially be more efficient than the typical approach.

Kerfuffle,

Do we need to be more efficient?

I mean, it’s usually a beneficial thing. Using less resources (including land) to produce the same amount of food is probably going to mean less environmental damage. In the case of switching to vat grown meat it also means not torturing billions of animals every year.

We have the resources to feed everyone on Earth and have leftovers

Sure. No one starves because the food just isn’t on this planet, they starve because the people who have it won’t give it to them. That said, we’re also not using resources very sustainably so saying we produce enough food currently isn’t the same as saying we can continue this way.

We could also increase efficiency even further by reducing meat/dairy consumption.

I don’t eat any animal products so you can probably guess this is something I’m strongly in favor of as well!

Anyway, I was just responding to what I quoted not specifically arguing for 3d-printed foods. Depending on how it’s implemented, it may or may not be better environmentally than the status quo

Kerfuffle,

I agree it’s still better than walking away empty handed, but let’s not pretend that got their money back.

In the rare case the person has just stopped spending money at Amazon, I guess. For anyone that’s spending $10/month, it’s effectively the same as cash. (Also, you probably can transfer the credit to a bank account if you really want to.)

Kerfuffle,

From dealing with their support in the past and stuff they’ve accommodated, I wouldn’t be surprised if you could just ask them to do it for a small amount like that. If you do a web search, you can also find a lot of information and people claiming it’s possible to do stuff like transfer it to a Paypal account, etc.

I haven’t tried to do that personally, so maybe it really just isn’t possible. It’s still only something that will affect someone that’s never going to spend money at Amazon again, right? If I’m going to spend $5.99 at some point, it’s effectively the same as a cash refund for me. If I’m going to spend $10.99 at some point it’s almost the same as getting double the refund, since I would have spent cash instead in those cases.

Kerfuffle,

Easily hour+ long headache on your first time.

Whenever I read this kind of thing (and people seem to say it pretty often), it seems really weird to me. Same goes for complaining about distro installers. An hour of possible headache/irritation and then you use the machine for years. Obviously it would be better if stuff was easy, but an hour just seems insignificant in the scheme of things. I really just don’t understand seeing it as an actual roadblock.

(Of course, there are other situations where it could matter like if you had to install/maintain 20 machines, but that’s not what we’re talking about here.)

Incomplete disclosures by Apple and Google create “huge blindspot” for 0-day hunters (arstechnica.com)

Incomplete information included in recent disclosures by Apple and Google reporting critical zero-day vulnerabilities under active exploitation in their products has created a “huge blindspot” that’s causing a large number of offerings from other developers to go unpatched, researchers said Thursday....

Kerfuffle,

The timing and similarity highly suggests this is a problem with how almost all software has implemented the webp standard in its image processing software.

Did you read the article or the post? The point was that both places where the vulnerability was found probably used libwepb. So it’s not that there’s something inherently vulnerable in handling webp, just that they both used the same library which had a vulnerability. (Presumably the article was a little vague about the Apple side because the source wasn’t open/available.)

given that the programs processing images often have escalated privileges.

What? That sounds like a really strange thing to say. I guess one could argue it’s technically true because browsers can be considered “a program that processes images” and a browser component can end up in stuff with escalated privileges. That’s kind of a special case though and in general there’s no reason for the vast majority of programs that process images to have special privileges.

Kerfuffle,

“This time you’re going to love Cortana. For reals!”

Kerfuffle,

Feet are like hands we walk on. Right? Complete with a thumb and all!

Would you be buried alive for 48hr for a million dollars?

You are buried in a coffin 6ft deep, with no light or cell phone. There is only a small tube connected to the coffin from outside that allows you to breathe (edit: you can breathe with no difficulty). After 48 hours, you are dug up and given 1 million dollars. Do you do it?...

Kerfuffle,

You probably ate or drank other stuff with water. The other person didn’t mean “water” specifically, just some means of hydration.

Kerfuffle,

It’s a briefcase full of cash.

I’m pretty sure you could just say “It’s tax free” or even double the amount to $2 million and it wouldn’t really change which people would do it and which wouldn’t.

I’d do it, as long as I was really convinced that the only danger was mental, not physical.

Kerfuffle,

Doubled down on the “yea were not gonna credit artist’s our AI stole from”. What a supreme douche

I don’t think it’s as simple as all that. Artists look at other artists’ work when they’re learning, for ideas, for methods of doing stuff, etc. Good artists probably have looked at a ton of other artwork, they don’t just form their skills in a vacuum. Do they need to credit all the artists they “stole from”?

In the article, the company made a point about not using AI models specifically trained on a smaller set of works (or some artist’s individual works). Doing something like that would be a lot easier to argue that it’s stealing: but the same would be true if a human artist carefully studied another person’s work and tried to emulate their style/ideas. I think there’s a difference between that an “learning” (or learning) for a large body of work and not emulating any specific artist, company, individual works, etc.

Obviously it’s something that needs to be handled fairly carefully, but that can be true with human artists too.

Kerfuffle,

You can’t tell it to find art and plug it in.

Kind of. The AI doesn’t go out and find/do anything, people include images in its training data though. So it’s the human that’s finding the art and plugging it in — most likely through automated processes that just scrape massive amounts of images and add them to the corpus used for training.

It doesn’t have the capability to store or copy existing artworks. It only contains the matrix of vectors which contain concepts.

Sorry, this is wrong. You definitely can train AI to produce works that are very nearly a direct copy. How “original” works created by the AI are is going to depend on the size of the corpus it got trained on. If you train the AI (or put a lot of weight on) training for just a couple works from one specific artist or something like that it’s going to output stuff that’s very similar. If you train the AI on 1,000,000 images from all different artists, the output isn’t really going to resemble any specific artist’s style or work.

That’s why the company emphasized they weren’t training the AI to replicate a specific artist’s (or design company, etc) works.

Kerfuffle,

Artists who look at art are processing it in a relatable, human way.

Yeah, sure. But there’s nothing that says “it’s not stealing if you do it in a relatable, human way”. Stealing doesn’t have anything to do with that.

knowing that work is copyrighted and not available for someone else’s commercial project to develop an AI.

And it is available for someone else’s commercial project to develop a human artist? Basically, the “an AI” part is still irrelevant to. If the works are out there where it’s possible to view them, then it’s possible for both humans and AIs to acquire them and use them for training. I don’t think “theft” is a good argument against it.

But there are probably others. I can think of a few.

Kerfuffle,

I just want fucking humans paid for their work

That’s a problem whether or not we’re talking about AI.

why do you tech nerds have to innovate new ways to lick the boots of capital every few years?

That’s really not how it works. “Tech nerds” aren’t licking the boots of capitalists, capitalists just try to exploit any tech for maximum advantage. What are the tech nerds supposed to do, just stop all scientific and technological progress?

why AI should own all of our work, for free, rights be damned,

AI doesn’t “own your work” any more than a human artist who learned from it does. You don’t like the end result, but you also don’t seem to know how to come up with a coherent argument against the process of getting there. Like I mentioned, there are better arguments against it than “it’s stealing”, “it’s violating our rights” because those have some serious issues.

Kerfuffle,

As a general statement: No, I am not.

You didn’t qualify what you said originally. It either has the capability or not: you said it didn’t, it actually does.

You’re making an over specific scenario to make it true.

Not really. It isn’t that far-fetched that a company would see an artist they’d like to use but also not want to pay that artist’s fees so they train an AI on the artist’s portfolio and can churn out very similar artwork. Training it on one or two images is obviously contrived, but a situation like what I just mentioned is very plausible.

This entire counter argument is nothing more than being pedantic.

So this isn’t true. What you said isn’t accurate with the literal interpretation and it doesn’t work with the more general interpretation either. The person higher in the thread called it stealing: in that case it wasn’t, but AI models do have the capability to do what most people would probably call “stealing” or infringing on the artist’s rights. I think recognizing that distinction is important.

Furthermore, if I’m making such specific instructions to the AI, then I am the one who’s replicating the art.

Yes, that’s kind of the point. A lot of people (me included) would be comfortable calling doing that sort of thing stealing or plagiarism. That’s why the company in OP took pains to say they weren’t doing that.

Kerfuffle,

It’s actually not that hard to start having them pretty frequently. I always had that same problem though: I’d realize I was dreaming, say “Wow, I’m actually dreaming and aware of it. This is amaz-” and wake up. There are supposedly tricks you can use to prevent yourself from waking up like spinning around, but it didn’t seem to help even when I remembered to try in the dream.

You can make them more frequent by just thinking to yourself “Am I dreaming?” and checking if you are a bunch of times a day. 5-6 is probably enough. Keep that up for a few weeks and you’ll probably start having frequent lucid dreams. I read that lucid dreams aren’t really that restful compared to normal sleep though, so don’t try to induce them unless you can spare the sleep time.

Kerfuffle,

You can wing it with baking, at least for some types of stuff. Oatmeal raisin cookies don’t really take precision, as an example.

Kerfuffle,

Ahh, I hate Snap so much. It actually what drove me to switch to Arch (btw). It was just so annoying going to install something and having it try to pull in snap and all its dependencies… And of course, if you don’t want Snap you have to deal with the inconvenience of finding another way to install the app.

There are reasons to dislike Snap on principle and also very practical reasons. It liked randomly preventing the system from shutting down. Installing a new OS on a slow or unreliable internet connection and want a browser? How about we install Snap and then tell to download that thing and maybe a bunch of random internal dependencies with no visible progress and unreliable error handling? Get it away from me.

Kerfuffle,

As sad as it is to say, “in general” no product is. Some stuff is worse than average like cocoa and child slave labor or meat/eggs/dairy and cruelty death for animals but overall unless there’s really visible evidence showing a product was produced ethically (or more ethically), then it probably wasn’t. After all, if the business selling the item could brag about it, they would.

About electric vehicle. If you add the maintenance cost for battery, how does it fair compare to gasoline vehicle? On cost we have to pay.

I heard someone said that, at the end EV will cost you almost the same as gasoline vehicle, if you have to change the expensive battery every so often. Can someone please give me more info on this? Thank you so much.

Kerfuffle,

“They found that in a community of 15,000 electric cars only 1.5 percent of batteries have been replaced if you exclude massive recalls […] The team also points out that most battery replacements happen when the car is still covered by a warranty.”

I’m not sure looking at the stats like that is really all that useful.

There are two situations where the battery replacement happens:

  1. The user forks over the money to replace it personally.
  2. They manage to convince the manufacturer to cover the cost.

It’s definitely not a given that everyone who wants to replace their battery can and does. This post is about longevity, so presumably most of the time in that situation the person will have to cover the cost of replacement themselves.

I want to be clear, I’m not arguing against EVs. I’m just saying this article doesn’t really have enough information to draw a conclusion.

Kerfuffle,

Letting them know what mankind is all about seems like a terrible idea. We’re jerks.

Kerfuffle,

If I got vored, promptly being upvored seems like the best case scenario.

Kerfuffle,

Right, but you can’t give it the variable names you’re using and have it fill them in, and if you want to do something inside that loop with

Why are you actively trying to avoid learning how to write the loop? Are you planning to have ChatGPT fill in your loop templates for the rest of your life?

But you do you, I’ll keep using ChatGPT and looking like a miracle worker.

It’s going to be slower overall than just using the reference and learning how to do it. I really, really am skeptical that a developer at the level where they need that feature is going to seem like a miracle worker to anyone other than people who are just impressed when you can do anything with a computer.

Kerfuffle,

First, how is this different from having your IDE fill in your loop templates?

I don’t do that actually, but I think there are some differences.

  1. One is if there’s a loop template in your IDE, you know it’s going to work. With LLMs you have to double check stuff (or just have it be wrong some of the time).
  2. You don’t have to type in a bunch of instructions to use a loop template. You also don’t really have to wait for the filled in template to get generated.
  3. People don’t usually use that because they just don’t know how to write the loop themselves, it’s a convenience feature.

That said:

I’m usually doing this for a customer in a language I’ll never use again.

Maybe you’re the one in a million exception where this approach is a benefit. Most of the time when you talk to people on the internet, they’re going to assume you’re a reasonably typical case and not the extremely rare exception.

Kerfuffle,

This is great. Although…

when you see something that sucks, you know exactly how to fix it.

I wish! “Fix” is wayyyy too optimistic.But maybe, just maybe, I could make it suck a tiny bit less. Still left with utter garbage, of course. Okay, well didn’t you just say you could make it suck a tiny bit less? So do it again. And again, and…

Kerfuffle,

And it jumped on the man and scratched him all to pieces!

I do like a happy ending. The jerk had it coming. Hopefully the dogs were okay though.

Kerfuffle,

I painted my profile picture a million years ago in another life (sadly back to stick figures these days). I like it enough to use it, even though it has major flaws.

Kerfuffle,

I have a 16 gallon shopvac I bought… about 15 years ago, maybe more. Honestly, I think that’s the way to go. They can handle wet, dry stuff, huge capacity, really powerful, simple system. Not even expensive compared to normal vacuums.

If you have a husky/husky mix, good luck with bags. You will need about 1 billion per year.

Kerfuffle,

Doesn’t the article contradict what you just said?

“We believe, and Apple’s Security Engineering and Architecture team has confirmed to us, that Lockdown Mode blocks this particular attack,” Citizen Lab said.

Kerfuffle,

Could a feeling or emotion be more fascinating than fascination?

Kerfuffle,

A lot of people don’t understand the limitations/weaknesses of AI. The carelessness was probably more in not actually learning about the tool he was relying on (and just assuming it was reliable information).

Kerfuffle,

It’s fairly entertaining but you really have to suspend disbelief. I’d call it fantasy with some sci-fi jargon more than actual sci-fi. I guess I could say overall plot doesn’t make a lot of sense but scenery on the way isn’t too hard on the eyes.

Just curious, to you speak Mandarin?

Kerfuffle,

Ah, I see. I was going to recommend you a link to the audiobooks that I found.

I managed to find what I assume are English fansubs.

It was on Amazon Prime’s streaming service for a while so there should be official subs at least floating around.

Kerfuffle,

That certainly sucks all the joy out of pirating it.

Kerfuffle,

So is the question how many it would take for me to believe that I should give my life, or how many before I’d actually have the willpower to choose to die?

Kerfuffle,

I hope you’re just looking for interesting responses rather than a definite answer!

I genuinely wonder if saving a negative number of people would be better overall. Humans, especially ones in developed countries like those privileged enough to be posting about stuff like this are responsible for a lot of negative effects we don’t really like to think about. We benefit from exploiting other people, animals, using resources in unsustainable ways.

I think even if someone takes a lot of individual steps like going vegan, trying to recycle, minimizing transportation and other consumption, not having children, etc that they’re still not even going to break even with the harmful effects just existing causes.

If it wasn’t for effects like that I’d probably say 2-3 but in reality I’m not really sure if I truly should save anyone. (By the way, you don’t have to worry about me going out and murdering people.)

Kerfuffle,

As for me, it would have to be a number of people that, by their sudden absence, manifestly affects the life of people I do know and care about. Like, at least a billion or so if randomly chosen

If they ask someone else, you’d better hope that other person doesn’t think like you - for your sake and the sake of people you care about.

HOA banning dogs on grass - suggestions?

Hi Lemmy, My HOA sent out a email saying dogs are no longer allowed on any grass in common areas or front yards including grass between sidewalk and curb which is… everywhere except our own tiny backyards. The reasoning is some dog urine effected dead spots. Honestly I didn’t even notice them, it’s 95° here and all the...

Kerfuffle,

They’ll fine you, and if you don’t pay they’ll put a lien on your house. You can’t really just ignore them.

Kerfuffle,

Sounds like you have a problem with extremely irresponsible people who happen to have dogs.

Kerfuffle,

Sadly many people who own dogs fall into that category.

I think we can just say “many people fall into that category”.

Kerfuffle,

Then my awkward ass is sitting there knowing I need to say “I’m good. How are you?”

You don’t have to say that.

  1. “It goes.”
  2. “Another day, another doughnut.”
  3. “How’s it going?” - people really won’t be surprised if you just don’t answer at all.
  4. “I’ve been worse.”
  5. “If I complained, who’d listen?”
  6. “Hi.”
  7. “Hey.”
  8. “No news is good news.”

In the context of random people who don’t know each other, it basically just means “I acknowledge your existence”. Acknowledge their existence and you’re good.

Kerfuffle,

Wow, you’re not joking. That actually was terrible. He does sort of have a point that if you positively prove something that excludes something else, you have essentially proven a negative. It doesn’t work for stuff outside of abstract logical rules though and the way he argued his case is pretty bad.

you can prove that you aren’t nonexistent. Congratulations, you’ve just proven a negative. The beautiful part is that you can do this trick with absolutely any proposition whatsoever. Prove P is true and you can prove that P is not false. Some people seem to think that you can’t prove a specific sort of negative claim, namely that a thing does not exist. So it is impossible to prove that Santa Claus, unicorns, the Loch Ness Monster, God, pink elephants, WMD in Iraq, and Bigfoot don’t exist. Of course, this rather depends on what one has in mind by ‘prove.’

"Can you construct a valid deductive argument with all true premises that yields the conclusion that there are no unicorns? Sure. Here’s one, using the valid inference procedure of modus tollens:**1. If unicorns had existed, then there is evidence in the fossil record.**2. There is no evidence of unicorns in the fossil record.**3. Therefore, unicorns never existed."

I bet if we wait 10 years, we’ll find evidence of a new creature in the the fossil record. Prior to that point, we could “prove” that the creature doesn’t exist?

“Someone might object that that was a bit too fast—after all, I didn’t prove that the two premises were true. I just asserted that they were true. Well, that’s right. However, it would be a grievous mistake to insist that someone prove all the premises of any argument they might give.”

Hahaha. In other words, some might object that to prove something we need to prove something. How about we just don’t prove it and say we did?

Kerfuffle,

There are basically two main possibilities:

  1. They’re unreasonable.
  2. You’re unreasonable.

If it’s the first one, it doesn’t really matter how you respond. The best policy is to avoid dealing with people like that as much as possible.

If it’s the second one then you should work on trying to fix it. That’s the best way to respond.

Kerfuffle,

Get people to fund their own smear campaign? Creative!

Could you compress text files by mapping a word to how commonly it is used and translating it with an application?

It’s a bit of a weird shower thought but basically I was wondering hypothetical if it would be possible to take data from a social media site like Reddit and map the most commonly used words starting at 1 and use a separate application to translate it back and forth....

Kerfuffle,

it would be possible to parse any program or any bit of software into its text equivalent and then generate the URL that attaches to this algorithm for that entire page reducing a thousand characters to 16.

This can’t work. Let’s use a simpler example, instead of 16 characters for the link let’s say it’s a single digit and let’s say the content of the “page” is 4 digits. One digit has 10 possible values: 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9. 4 digits have 10,000 possible combinations. With only one digit to index into the 10,000 possible combinations, you can point to only 10 of them.

It’s the same thing for pages of text. If you have a 16 character link and the content you’re trying to index with it is more than 16 characters then you can only point to some of the possibilities in the larger set.

Kerfuffle,

First just think about the logic of what I said before: if there are finite number of combinations in the link, how can you possibly link to a larger number of items? It’s just logically impossible.

Then how is it that I was able to link to 800 words with 5 characters, (stripping aside the static portion of the links)?

The fact that you were able to link to 800 words doesn’t really mean anything. somesite.com/a could point to a file that was gigabytes. This doesn’t meant the file got compressed to a. Right?

There also might be less combinations for that site than it appears. For an 800 word chunk of grammatical English text, there are a lot less combinations than the equivalent length in arbitrary characters. Instead of representing each character in a word, it could just use an id like dog=1, antidisestablishmentarianism=2 and so on. Even using tricks like that though, it’s pretty likely you’re only able to link to a subset of all the possible combinations.

Regarding compression in general, it’s a rule that you can’t compress something independent of its content. If you could do that, even if the compression only reduced the file by the tiniest fraction you could just repeatedly apply the algorithm until you end up where the problem I described is obvious. If you could compress any large file down to a single byte, then that single byte can only represent 256 distinct values. However there are more than 256 distinct files that can exist, so clearly something went wrong. This rule is kind of like breaking the speed of light or perpetual motion: if you get an answer that says you have perpetual motion or FTL travel then you automatically know you did something wrong. Same thing with being able to compress without regard to the content.

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