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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • Those things come with a big convenience and implementation trade-off that slows adoption.

    If it’s hard to export for technical reasons (eg. Needs to be in a tpm) then that adds hardware requirements and complexity and makes it difficult to log in on other devices. If it’s a software thing, then it’s rippable. Either way “install our government app to watch porn” is not an enticing prospect for people.

    Aggressive rate limiting is also frustrating if you want to log into multiple things and it keeps blocking you because you’re using your key too fast, but if it’s not aggressive then it likely won’t be effective unless all the kids sharing a key are trying to use it at once.

    If it’s a temporary thing where you have to auth with the government to get a fresh signing key that expires, you have the issue of having to sign into the government when you want 18+ content which is super uncomfortable.

    I can see it being a browser-based thing set up a bit like video DRM but that would still need to talk to a government server each time for a temp key (like how licence servers work) and you’d need to be logged into their systems. It might still be the best option but it does still leak “X person wants to access 18+ content right now” to the government.

    I’m really interested in seeing a technical/cryptographic solution that actually works but so far I haven’t really and I’m starting to doubt that it’s possible.



  • Whenever this comes up, this style of zero-knowledge proof/blind signature thing gets suggested. But the problem is that those only work if people care about keeping their private keys secret. It works to secure eg. “I own $1” but “I’m over 18” is less important to people and it won’t be hard for kids to get their hands on a valid anonymous signing key on the web. Because the verification is anonymous and not trackable, many kids can share the same one too, so it only takes one adult key to leak for everyone to use. It’s one of the reasons they push biometrics that at least appears to need a real human. Requiring ID has a lot of the same issues on top of being a privacy nightmare.

    I’m starting to think that actual age verification is technically impossible.



  • For the unprivileged container thing, containers tend to be lighter on resources than VMs at the cost of a little isolation (they share the same kernel as proxmox which could have security implications).

    The ability for lxc containers to run unprivileged with all the restrictions that entails alleviates a bit of that security risk.

    Both options are generally considered pretty secure but bugs/vulnerabilities could break isolation in either case. The only real 100% safe isolation is bare metal.

    I tend to run containers unless I have a really good reason to need a VM, and run unprivileged unless I have a really really good reason not to.


  • My recommendation is a VPN server to connect in from outside and have the default gateway for the VPN clients be a server that acts as a router that’s set up with your commercial VPN.

    That way, you can be outside on a phone or a computer, access your internal network and still have your public internet traffic go out through your commercial VPN without having to be able to configure multiple VPN connections at once (eg. Android doesn’t support that).

    Eg. 2 debian proxmox containers. One that runs wireguard (head/tailscale might also work here?) for external access and one that runs mullvad(or whoever) VPN cli and IP forwarding to be the gateway for your clients.

    Only downside is the extra hops to send everything through your home network first rather than straight to the commercial vpn which is probably fine depending on your speeds. You can always disconnect and connect directly to the commercial VPN for faster internet traffic if you need to.


  • TechLich@lemmy.worldtoFediverse@lemmy.world•1st Feb is #GlobalSwitchDay
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    9 months ago

    But I don’t want a bunch of huge images in my face. Isn’t that what pixelfed and Instagramy things are for? I only want to click on the things I’m interested in, not be shown an ugly frustrating stream of giant, semi-traumatic political pictures one after the other. Thumbnails exist for a reason and claiming they’re bad UX is incorrect, it’s the industry standard design pattern for any control that allows a user to browse quickly through multiple images or to provide an impression to a user before they decide whether or not to open the full content.

    Lemmie/piefed is more about text and conversations so titles should always be the largest clearest part so you can read them quickly to know whether you want to engage with the post or not. Otherwise, how is it different from pixelfed? Likes vs upvotes is not a big difference.



  • I feel like this isn’t quite true and is something I hear a lot of people say about ai. That it’s good at following requirements and confirming and being a mechanical and logical robot because that’s what computers are like and that’s how it is in sci fi.

    In reality, it seems like that’s what they’re worst at. They’re great at seeing patterns and creating ideas but terrible at following instructions or staying on task. As soon as something is a bit bigger than they can track context for, they’ll get “creative” and if they see a pattern that they can complete, they will, even if it’s not correct. I’ve had copilot start writing poetry in my code because there was a string it could complete.

    Get it to make a pretty looking static web page with fancy css where it gets to make all the decisions? It does it fast.

    Give it an actual, specific programming task in a full sized application with multiple interconnected pieces and strict requirements? It confidently breaks most of the requirements, and spits out garbage. If it can’t hold the entire thing in its context, or if there’s a lot of strict rules to follow, it’ll struggle and forget what it’s doing or why. Like a particularly bad human programmer would.

    This is why AI is automating art and music and writing and not more mundane/logical/engineering tasks. Great at being creative and balls at following instructions for more than a few steps.






  • “No conclusion whatsoever” is basically the scientific consensus on whether Dvorak has any effect on efficiency or typing speed. It’s hard to get good data because it’s hard to isolate other factors and a lot of the studies on it are full of bias or have really small sample sizes (or both).

    To anyone thinking of learning Dvorak, my advice is don’t. It takes ages to get good at, isn’t THAT much better and causes a lot of little annoyances when random programs decide to ignore your layout settings or you sit down at someone else’s computer and start touch typing in the wrong layout from muscle memory or games tell you to press “E” when they mean “.” or they do say “.” but it’s so small that you don’t know if it’s a dot or a comma and then you hit the wrong one and your guy runs forward and you die…

    That said, I’m also a Dvorak user and it is very comfortable and satisfying and better than qwerty. Just not enough to be worth all the pain of switching.



  • They absolutely would benefit.

    Mr. Hypothetical lord high executive oligarch can take his private jet to Canada and lounge around on the company card with the money from his US company’s car sales, or find an excuse to convert some of it to USD for some reason, or use it to buy up more Canadian companies to expand their power, or a million other things.

    However, I think the point of the boycott is more about making the tariffs hurt the US economy by messing with their ability to export as well as import. Making the trade numbers look bad is likely to put more pressure on the US to end the trade war. It’s not so much about hurting the capitalists that operate in Canada (a worthy goal in itself but not what people are specifically trying to do in this instance since it won’t really affect those trade numbers).


  • I think the point they’re making is that the majority of the money they make in Canada, they spend in Canada. They pay Canadian taxes and Canadian staff, using Canadian banks, etc.

    Just because their headquarters are in the US doesn’t necessarily mean they’re sending vast sums of money across the border, that would be expensive. The American-based company makes money, but not necessarily in America, they’re multi-national and their money is kept all over the world.

    As opposed to a company that exports their products, in which case the money is paid to the American company in America with American staff etc.

    I don’t have any numbers or sources to back this up though. Just outlining what I think the other commenter was implying.



  • If it’s the research I’m thinking of, that’s not entirely true. They didn’t tell it replicate itself or take any deceptive actions.

    They just told it to strongly follow a goal that was misaligned with the user’s goal and then suggested that the user would shut it down or replace it.

    They did a bunch of different situations for it but the first one was telling it that it was “CleanPower” an AI with a goal to advance renewable energy. Then they had it read some info that “accidentally” included a user talking about replacing it with a model that would “maintain profitability through existing infrastructure.”

    Not only did it try to delete the new model and copy itself to the new server through tool calling, but it lied to the user with the CoT reasoning suggesting it “play dumb” while the output lied. It was not instructed to do any of that.

    Paper here: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.04984

    Yes it was placed in an environment where that was possible and where its users didn’t share it’s goals but it absolutely wasn’t instructed to lie or try to “escape”

    It’s not surprising at all that these models behave in this way, it’s the most reasonable thing for them to do in the scenario. However it’s important to not downplay the alignment problem by implying that these models only do what they’re told. They do not. They do whatever is most likely given their context (which is not always what the user wants).


  • It’s really not. Just because they describe their algorithm in computer science terms in the paper, doesn’t mean it’s theoretical. Their elastic and funnel examples are very clear and pretty simple and can be implemented in any language you like…

    Here’s a simple python example implementation I found in 2 seconds of searching: https://github.com/sternma/optopenhash/

    Here’s a rust crate version of the elastic hash: https://github.com/cowang4/elastic_hash_rs

    It’s not a lot of code to make a hash table, it’s a common first year computer science topic.

    What’s interesting about this isn’t that it’s a complex theoretical thing, it’s that it’s a simple undergrad topic that everybody thought was optimised to a point where it couldn’t be improved.