I don’t know whether Altman or the board is better from a leadership standpoint, but I don’t think that it makes sense to rely on boards to avoid existential dangers for humanity. A board runs one company. If that board takes action that is a good move in terms of an existential risk for humanity but disadvantageous to the company, they’ll tend to be outcompeted by and replaced by those who do not. Anyone doing that has to be in a position to span multiple companies. I doubt that market regulators in a single market could do it, even – that’s getting into international treaty territory.

The only way in which a board is going to be able to effectively do that is if one company, theirs, effectively has a monopoly on all AI development that could pose a risk.

I don’t know about that. It seemed to have a pretty rapid impact on the phone in that video, and it’s not like those are exactly open. And they weren’t pressurizing it.

Hydrogen

This says that hydrogen isn’t just a problem, just helium:

https://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/669763/why-is-a-mems-device-affected-by-helium-but-not-hydrogen

It seems that MEMS is very sensitive to helium, but only helium. This Link stated that hydrogen does not affect MEMS, which surprised me.

Hmm.

That seems like it’d open a lot of potential abuses.

I wonder what the failure mode of various electronic locks is when they’re exposed to helium?

using an admin portal’s default credentials on an IBM AIX server.

I think that there are two ways to solve that.

The first is to have the admins actually complete setups.

But, humans being humans, maybe the second is a better approach:

When creating a computer system, don’t let a system be used, at all, until all default credentials have been replaced with real ones. If you do, someone is invariably gonna screw it up.

Your directions may say “Before pulling lever 2, pull lever 1 so that machine does not explode”. And maybe you feel that as the manufacturer, that’s covered your hind end; you can say that the user ignored your setup instructions if they get into trouble. But instead of doing that, maybe it’s better to not permit for a situation where the machine explodes in the first place; have pulling lever 2 also trigger lever 1.

Neat!

I have already looked in XMPP, but it required SSL certs and I did not have the mood to configure them.

There are definitely XMPP clients that do end-to-end encryption that do not rely on TLS for key exchange, though.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Off_the_record_messaging

Off-the-record Messaging (OTR) is a cryptographic protocol that provides encryption for instant messaging conversations. OTR uses a combination of AES symmetric-key algorithm with 128 bits key length, the Diffie–Hellman key exchange with 1536 bits group size, and the SHA-1 hash function. In addition to authentication and encryption, OTR provides forward secrecy and malleable encryption.

The primary motivation behind the protocol was providing deniable authentication for the conversation participants while keeping conversations confidential, like a private conversation in real life, or off the record in journalism sourcing. This is in contrast with cryptography tools that produce output which can be later used as a verifiable record of the communication event and the identities of the participants. The initial introductory paper was named “Off-the-Record Communication, or, Why Not To Use PGP”.[1]

I’ve used Pidgin with the libOTR plugin that implements that protocol.

The ~/.ssh/known_hosts file only contains public keys. I mean, maybe someone doesn’t want to hand out the list of hosts that they talk to, but exposing it doesn’t expose the private keys, which are what you really need to keep secret.

Those are in ~/.ssh/id_rsa or the like, depending upon key type.

wordfreq is not just concerned with formal printed words. It collected more conversational language usage from two sources in particular: Twitter and Reddit.

Now Twitter is gone anyway, its public APIs have shut down,

Reddit also stopped providing public data archives, and now they sell their archives at a price that only OpenAI will pay.

There’s still the Fediverse.

I mean, that doesn’t solve the LLM pollution problem, but…

deleted by creator

https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-appservice-discord

It looks like there’s software to bridge it to Matrix. I have no idea whether that violates ToS. It does look like it’s getting development, though, so I can’t imagine that Discord has been cutting people off en masse for using it.

I get that.

Honestly, though I’m still a little puzzled as to why people initially got into Discord; I never did.

I can understand why people wanted to use some systems. Twitter does massive-scale real-time indexing. That was a huge feature, really changed what one could do on the platform.

Reddit provided a good syntax (Markdown), had a low barrier to entry (no email verification at a time when that was common), and third-party client access. It solved the spam problem that was killing Usenet and permitted for more-reasonable moderation.

There were a whole host of services that aimed to lower the complexity bar to get a web page and some content online associated with someone’s identity; it was clear that lack of technical knowledge and the technical knowledge required to get stuff up was a real limiting factor for many people.

But I just didn’t really get where Discord provided much of a win over stuff like IRC. I mean, I guess maybe it bundled a couple services into one, which maybe lowered the bar to use a bit. IRC really seemed pretty fine to me. Reddit bundling image-hosting seems to have lowered the bar, been something that people wanted. Maybe Discord doing images and file-hosting made it more-accessible.

I have no idea why a number of people who liked Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead used Discord rather than Reddit; it seemed like a dramatically-worse system if one was aiming to create material for others to look back at and refer to.

kagis

https://old.reddit.com/r/RedditForGrownups/comments/t417q1/can_someone_please_explain_discord_to_me_like_im/

It’s just modern day IRC with video.

Ahaha, thanks. This is indeed an ELI60 response, although it doesn’t really explain how Discord suddenly got so popular. But if I couple this with /u/Healthy-Car-1860’s response, I’m kind of getting the picture.

Got popular because it spread through the entire gamer/twitch community like wildfire due to actually being a more complete package and easier to use than anything prior. Online gamers have been struggling with voip software forever (Roger Wilco, Teamspeak, Ventrilo, Skype, and many others).

Once it was rooted in the people who are on their computers app day every day it was bound to spread because the UX is incredibly easy compared to previous options for both chat and voip.

Maybe that’s it. I never had a lot of interest in VoIP, especially group VoIP. When I was playing online games much, people used keyboards to communicate, not mics. There was definitely a period where people needed the ability to collaborate in games and games didn’t always provide that functionality. I remember people complaining about Teamspeak and Ventrilo. I briefly poked at Mumble – nice to have an open-source option – but I just had no reason to want to do VoIP with groups of people.

But I suppose for a video game clan or something, that might be important functionality. And if it’s also a one-stop shop for some other things that you might want to do anyway, it maybe makes sense to just use that rather than multiple services.

If it makes economic sense to break them down for parts and locking doesn’t stop it, I suppose that it might make sense to introduce security holes in phone cases, with a chain that links to a belt or similar.

Bonus – if you’re going to have a chain anyway, can maybe run a cable along it and have attached battery or other phone peripherals elsewhere on you that don’t add to phone weight.

If I need to do an emergency boot from a USB stick to repair something that can’t boot, which it sounds like is what you’re after, pretty much any Linux distro will do. I’d probably rather have a single, mainstream bootable OS than a handful.

I’d use Debian, just because that’s what I use normally, so I’m most familiar with it. But it really doesn’t matter all that much.

And honestly, while having an emergency bootable medium with a functioning system can simplify things, if you’re familiar with the boot process, you very rarely actually need emergency boot media on a Linux system. You have a pretty flexible bootloader in grub, and the Linux kernel can run and be usable enough to fix things on a pretty broken system, if you pass something like init=/bin/sh to the kernel, maybe busybox instead for a really broken system, and can remount root read-write (mount -o rw,remount /) and know how to force syncs (echo s > /proc/sysrq-trigger) and reboots (echo b > /proc/sysrq-trigger).

I’ve killed ld.so and libc before and broght back systems without alternate boot media. The only time I think you’d likely really get into trouble truly requiring alternate boot media is (a) installing a new kernel that doesn’t work for some reason and removing all the old, working kernels before checking to see that your new one works, or (b) killing grub. Maybe if you hork up your partition table or root filesystem enough that grub can’t bring the kernel up, but in most of those cases, I’m not sure that you’re likely gonna be bringing things back up with rescue tools – you’re probably gonna need to reinstall your OS anyway.

EDIT: Well, okay, if you wipe the partition table, I guess that you might be able to find the beginning of a filesystem partition based on magic strings or something and either manually reconstruct the partition table or at least extract a copy of the filesystem to somewhere else.

Internet Archive creates digital copies of print books and posts those copies on its website where users may access them in full, for free, in a service it calls the “Free Digital Library.” Other than a period in 2020, Internet Archive has maintained a one-to-one owned-to-loaned ratio for its digital books: Initially, it allowed only as many concurrent “checkouts” of a digital book as it has physical copies in its possession. Subsequently, Internet Archive expanded its Free Digital Library to include other libraries, thereby counting the number of physical copies of a book possessed by those libraries toward the total number of digital copies it makes available at any given time.

This appeal presents the following question: Is it “fair use” for a nonprofit organization to scan copyright-protected print books in their entirety, and distribute those digital copies online, in full, for free, subject to a one-to-one owned-to-loaned ratio between its print copies and the digital copies it makes available at any given time, all without authorization from the copyright-holding publishers or authors? Applying the relevant provisions of the Copyright Act as well as binding Supreme Court and Second Circuit precedent, we conclude the answer is no. We therefore AFFIRM.

Basically, there isn’t an intrinsic right under US fair use doctrine to take a print book, scan it, and then lend digital copies of the print book.

My impression, from what little I’ve read in the past on this, is that this was probably going to be the expected outcome.

And while I haven’t closely-monitored the case, and there are probably precedent issues that are interesting for various parties, my gut reaction is that I kind of wish that archive.org weren’t doing these fights. The problem I have is that they’re basically an indispensible, one-of-a-kind resource for recording the state of webpages at some point in time via their Wayback Machine service. They are pretty widely used as the way to cite a page on the Web.

What I worry about is that they’re going to get into some huge fight over copyright on some not-directly-related issue, like print books or something, and then someone is going to sue them and get a ton of damages and it’s going to wipe out that other, critical aspect of their operations…like, some random publisher will get ownership of archive.org and all of their data and logs and services and whatnot.

considers

You could probably do these automatically, given an automated loom – one of our first forms of programmable industrial hardware – and a chip layout description.

kagis

Here’s an inexpensive computer-controlled loom for $10k-$15k:

https://www.camillavalleyfarm.com/weave/weavebird.htm

I assume that the same design could be scaled up with larger motors and parts, worst case, so that probably puts a ceiling on about what it’d cost to do this automatically.

Once again, humans were taking robot jobs. Robots won’t stand for this sort of thing!

CIFS supports leases. That is, hosts will try to ask for exclusive access to a file, so that they can assume that it hasn’t changed.

IIRC sshfs just doesn’t care much about cache coherency across hosts and just kind of assumes that things haven’t changed underfoot, uses a timer to expire the cache.

considers

Honestly, with inotify, it’d probably be possible to make a newer sshfs that does support leases.

I suspect that the Unixy thing to do is to use NFSv4 which also does cache coherency correctly.

It is easy to deploy sshfs, though, so I do appreciate why people use it; I do so myself.

kagis to see if anyone has benchmarks

https://blog.ja-ke.tech/2019/08/27/nas-performance-sshfs-nfs-smb.html

Here are some 2019 benchmarks that show NFSv4 to generally be the most-performant.

The really obnoxious thing about NFSv4, IMHO, is that ssh is pretty trivial to set up, and sshfs just requires a working ssh connection and sshfs software installed, whereas if you want secure NFSv4, you need to set up Kerberos. Setting up Kerberos is a pain. It’s great for large organizations, but for “I have three computers that I want to make talk together”, it’s just overkill.

I don’t know how hd-idle stores its data, but sysstat and some other utilities will log I/O on a per-device data and there are utilities that can graph it.

My biggest concerns would be privacy regarding data scrapers .

The protocol already exposes votes, so they already have that. It’s just not currently visible in the Lemmy web UI. You can, as other people on here have pointed out, already go to any kbin/mbin instance federated with a lemmy instance and view upvotes on a post or comment on that lemmy instance. Not downvotes, but kbin/mbin don’t propagate downvotes.