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46
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2,908
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2 yr. ago

  • nice to see the blinders coming off more widely:

    For instance, as Electrek reminds us, in 2016, Elon Musk made a promise. He promised that, by the end of 2017, a Tesla would be able to drive itself from coast to coast. We’re talking Los Angeles to New York, with no human intervention.

    That was bulls**t. Listen to any tech CEO nowadays and you will hear nothing but an endless stream of wild proclamations about how so-and-so massive shift will occur within the next 10 years! Five years! One year! Next week!

  • reminded of mordechai guri (from ben-gurion uni) whose whole dept just keeps popping out side channel attacks year after year, but most of them are in "the coil sits in the plate under the bagel (also ignore the PCB for data decode)" field of capacity (exactly because of noise etc)

    I mean, some legitimately interesting research on its own in this field - the stuff about cpu states through power sidechannel (most desktop/laptop PSUs are non-filtering and not isolated, so you can reverse-observe cpu state from minute differences on supply side) and such are pretty neat! impractical as fuck, but neat

  • Xanadu’s micropayment-oriented transclusion-and-royalty system is impossible to correctly implement, due to a mismatch between information theory and copyright; given the ability to copy text, copyright is provably absurd

    it kept being funny to me that even while xanadu had already shown the problems with content control the entirety of the NFT craze just went on as if it was full greenfields novel problem

    The details lie in the devil, for sure…you’d want the price [of making a change to a document] low enough (zero?) not to incur Trivial Inconvenience penalties for prosocial things like building wikis, yet high enough to make the David Gerards of the world think twice.

    some of these people just really don't know their history very well, do they

    on a total tangent:

    while xanadu's commercial-aspiration history is intimately tied up in why it never got much further, I do occasionally daydream about if we had, and if we could've combined it with more-modern signing and sourcing: daydream in the respect of "CA and cert chains, but for transcluded content", esp in the face of all the fucking content mills used to push disinfo etc. not sure this would work ootb either, mind you, it's got its own set of vulnerabilities and problems that you'd need to work through (and ofc you can't solve social problems purely in the technical domain)

    has there been any meaningful advancement or neat new research in agoric computing? haven't really looked into it in a while, and the various blockchain nonsense took so much air out of the room for so long I haven't had to spoons to look

    (separately I know there's also been some developments in remote trusted compute, but afaict that's also still quite early days)

  • much of the lore of the early/earlier internet being built is also full of some extremely, extremely unhinged stuff. I've had some first-hand in-the-trenches accounts from people I've known active from the early-mid 90s to middle 00s and holy shit there are some batshit things happening in places. often think of it when I see the kinds of shit thiel/musk/etc are all up to (a lot of it boils down to "they're big mad that they have to even consider other people and can't just do whatever they like")

  • I’m a bit split on this one

    on the one hand, the post as first posted had a lot of “victimised” language (“omg slack is extorting us”) and frankly that felt like bait - esp as many, many volunteer-type orgs that have had similar slack setups have been taking a hammer for months now (as I posted before, a local ZA tech setup was one, and more recently that big k8s one too). there’s enough precedent here that expecting slack to have behaved otherwise (even “honourably”) seems to me to have been almost foolish

    on the other, slack 100% only took action once this did hit hype and enough eyeballs, and only reacted since it was an embarrassment

    but…yeah. slack hasn’t been a good option for public use for literally years now :|

  • is the consensus solution on how to subvert the acausal robot god

    dunno if you've yet gotten to look at the most recent yud emanation[0][1][2], but there's a whole "and if the robot god gets too uppity just boop it on the nose" bit in there

    [0] - I mean the all-caps "YOU'RE ALL GONNA DIE" book that came out recently

    [1] - yes I know "emanation" is a terrible wordchoice, no I won't change it

    [2] - it's on libgen feel free to steal it, fuck giving that clown any more money he's got enough grift dollars already

  • heard people reached those by just deleting tweets by hand.

    yeah, the various backend interactions tied to web controls are extremely low-count limited

    you could probably do it by smacking together a userscript (or whatever the fuck is the these-days version of greasemonkey/tampermonkey/??? to use) with a moderately simple algorithm.. open a window, click execute, leave it going by itself for however long it takes to get through everything. it doesn't have to do everything in minutes

    I also heard blocklists put a high strain on the twitter so not going to look into removing that

    probably the feed compute stuff only has this computational expense incurred for any displayed feeds (pruning off calculating stuff for long-enough-inactive users is one of the cheapest easy gains in that type of content feed), so this might not matter much. don't have enough insight into real ops there to know one way or the other tho

  • thanks for linking this, was fun to watch

    hadn't seen that saltman clip (been real busy running around pretty afk the last few weeks), but it's a work of art. despite grokking the dynamics, it continues to be astounding just how vast the gulf between fact and market vibes are

    and as usual, Collier does a fantastic job ripping the whole idea a new one in a most comprehensive manner

  • from when I last looked into this: twitter 100% has[0] (unstated) web API ratelimits for various subservices[1], but getting direct API creds became a "give us your actual phone number" thing even before felon took it over...

    so I just decided to tombstone my account by making it private, updating bio, and never logging in again

    not willing to give them what they want for API access. might at some point go write some web automation to recurringly click a delete button? idunno

    [0] - ....well, 4 years ago, "had". probably maybe still does, on whatever parts of the haproxy or whatever config didn't get absolutely fucking destroyed in felon's mania to rebrand it to "x" overnight (a process which failed hilariously badly for weeks and I still think fondly of to laugh at)

    [1] - when going through the "your interests" list (hidden deep in settings), if you unticked too many boxes too quickly you'd hit a webserver-enforced ratelimit on request limits and then half the webapp would get a bit fucky for an hour. ratelimit was something like 30/min with a 1/m type token-bucket refresh. quite the shitshow

  • FreeAssembly @awful.systems

    a blind man stumbles into the activitypub

    TechTakes @awful.systems

    In which folks once again don’t learn the same lesson as the last few times

    TechTakes @awful.systems

    Quelle surprise

    TechTakes @awful.systems

    History of (extremely predictable) failures catching up to you? Quick, write a book!

    NotAwfulTech @awful.systems

    retrochat

    TechTakes @awful.systems

    A tale of well-designed systems

    NotAwfulTech @awful.systems

    Revision 2024

    TechTakes @awful.systems

    economics reporter learns "surprising facts" from no data

    bless this jank @awful.systems

    [idea] a “days since” counter

    TechTakes @awful.systems

    is everyone ready for the next wave of facile promptfawning on social media? google is

    NotAwfulTech @awful.systems

    better tools thread

    TechTakes @awful.systems

    the adults did not like these uppity EAs toying around with the share price

    TechTakes @awful.systems

    openai keeps on winning: the new guy is Pretty Grate too

    TechTakes @awful.systems

    Sammy's gotta go

    NotAwfulTech @awful.systems

    C64 Demo: E2IRA by Arise! 29 May 2022!

    TechTakes @awful.systems

    I present to you: the New Computing paradigm

    TechTakes @awful.systems

    Github has decided that people aren't copiloting hard enough

    TechTakes @awful.systems

    the measure of a man ^W AI ^W something

    TechTakes @awful.systems

    The promptfans reckon you can fix moderation in post

    NotAwfulTech @awful.systems

    demoscene: area 5150