If it’s part of a fingerprinting lib, then they just fucked it up. Because the fingerprinting can be done in one ~16ms window of time when the script runs and then you can break down the audio objects and pretend nothing happened.

Honestly, this doesn’t sound like spyware. More like absurd optimization. Here’s why: Audio devices often go to sleep (to save battery) and can take a second or two to wake up. That’s enough time that the end user will miss the first second or two of audio.

By keeping the audio outputting something (even if it’s just silence), they can guarantee that their little (often hilariously terrible) product videos will play the way they expect (which is loud and startling, of course!).

This is just one of those stupid tricks that’s bad for energy use but good for ignorant users who might complain that the first second of every AliExpress video is silent 🤷

The reason why I believe this to be the case is because there’s really nothing unique or interesting to be learned from an audio output loop that’s literally sending zeros through itself. If you wanted to use that to fingerprint a user, you wouldn’t need to keep it active. You could pass a single zero (silence) through and be done.

Shit: Is this why people ask me random IT questions and suddenly vent about their lives in chat?

Perhaps I’m a bit weird, but things like this bother me in ways that nobody else seems to think about:

• The $180,000 is for the entire state. That’s nothing. I don’t know how many schools Kansas has, but let’s say it’s 100. That’s $1800 per school. Come on.
• Why can’t the school just ask some locals to build them some phone lockers? Just put out a school bulletin asking for some volunteers. I’m certain that in the entire state of Kansas they have plenty of companies and locals who would be willing to make the simplest of tiny, metal lockers.

They talk about these complicated technical solutions when all that’s necessary is a very thin, very small traditional locker. Make the kids bring their own lock! That’s what we did with lockers when I was in high school in the 90s.

Those old school steel lockers were certified for fire resistance, BTW. Not because they went through some special certification process, but because they were steel and painted with school-certified paint (which every school district already has plenty of).

It’s beyond “an arms race.” AI has become a commodity that’s everywhere and it’s being used and developed by zillions of completely different groups all over the world with wildly varying use cases and completely different goals.

At this point, trying to ban it would be like trying to ban dandelions from growing.

You are the problem!

You know what you are, actually? You’re like someone with an abusive spouse. “Yes, they beat me bloody from time to time—at the gas pump—but they make me feel good from time to time too. I love them.”

Yes. This is how real estate markets work (or don’t).

In other news, people who bought gas guzzlers when gas was cheap are now taking devastating pump receipts.

No. LLMs and AI image models are fundamentally, a different technology. They use completely different mathematical models, data models, and target different platform spaces.

As a simple example, to train an LLM you need to feed it lots of text and not much else. To train an image model, you need to feed it billions of tagged images. That is, images that have every stupid little thing in the image “tagged” with a bounding box and text describing what’s inside said bounding box.

Also, these terms might not mean anything to you, but LLMs use transformer decoders (autoregressive causal retention) while image models use diffusion networks. The way they work is different at a fundamental level. Text is 1-dimensional and an LLM acts as a word prediction machine whereas image models start with chaos (random garbage pixels) and refine it over and over again in n steps until the chaos starts looking like the prompt.

The way prompting works is also different.

Someone cut above the rest‽

Grimy already pointed out that this article is non-scientific nonsense but there’s something else it’s missing: The efficiency of AI over time.

Qwen-3.8-27B is due out next week and it’s supposed to be on par with Claude (Sonnet, latest). That runs on a regular PC GPU.

Big AI isn’t the only game in town. They’re just what makes the non-tech news.

The open weights stuff gets drastic improvements every three months or so and there’s breakthroughs in efficiency every six months (ish). We’re only at the baby steps of AI tech and the advancement is behaving like a chaotic Moore’s Law that leapfrogs itself regularly, then stagnates for a bit, then there’s another big shift.

If this keeps up, the efficiency of AI will become something that makes using huge data centers for anything but training a waste.

You are correct! Absolutely 100% accurate!

That is not how LLMs learn anatomy!

What does that have to do with AI image generation models though?

AI image generation is such a weird thing. When you self-host it (run it on your own GPU), you get vastly superior capabilities but at the same time you get all the awful results too.

Example: When you use ChatGPT or Gemini or similar “Big AI” service to generate an image, you get one image. However, in the background, those services were actually generating a whole bunch of images and at the end, using AI to pick the best one.

When you DIY, you tell it to generate say, 50 images, hoping you get lucky (haha) and that’s when you see the weird shit. Sure, 10 out of those 50 will be OK-ish—something to work with (using additional tools to say, fix those wonky hands), but in “the bad 40”, there will be a random naked person.

Like… Why‽ I mean, I actually know why (AI image models only work well if they’re trained on nude people! Why? Because that’s how they learn proper human anatomy/ratios! Just like a doctor, actually), but it’s mildly disturbing when I’m trying to visualize a scene in a novel where a girl is holding a doll and it mixes up the doll and the girl and somehow the girl ends up naked (looking like a doll). Ugh! W T F! I didn’t ask for that!

Can’t delete shit like that fast enough!

Note that “Big AI” has that problem on occasion too! It’s basically impossible to fix with 100% accuracy, which is why AI companies are fighting laws like this tooth and nail.

Also, the detection algorithms/AI don’t work very well! They know this. I know this. We all know this. That’s why these public Big AI models are regularly generating nudity despite having system prompts that are supposed to stop it.

So what can we do? Many people would say, “just ban AI image generators” or “make it so they can only generate cartoon/non-realistic images”. That’s called “banning a core technology” and it never works if said tech doesn’t have some sort of rare supply chain ingredient (e.g. uranium).

I don’t know. On the one hand, Big AI and smaller AI companies are definitely offering a depraved service. On the other hand, it’s all fake!

All these “nudify” tools and apps are generating 100% totally made up bullshit. Why do we need to ban fake, digital things?

Think about it from a tech standpoint: Let’s say we ban using AI to “generate nudes of people without their permission.” All that users of these services will do is generate generic nudes and then use a different model to place the person’s face on the body. There’s nothing at all you can do to stop that because the user could just crop the image so that only the face and neck are showing and then just paste the result back into the original image.

This is a people problem. That is: People are using tools in ways we don’t want them used.

You can’t solve people problems with technology. It’s one of those “laws” as old as tech.

IMHO, the best we can probably do is to hold people accountable when they behave inappropriately, but the anonymous nature of the Internet makes that extremely hard to do. So… 🤷

Removed by mod

Massive overkill!

That’s a great Home Theater PC. Hook it up to your TV and install KDE Plasma (distro of your choice 👍) then just crank up the global desktop zoom to like 225% and get:

• A real wireless mouse that has a long range (e.g. $10 TEKNET cheapo deal with 10% off coupon today, LOL! https://a.co/d/02qG1oHO )
• A wireless keyboard/trackpad combo that’s made for that kind of thing (they’re all terrible keyboards—it’s only purpose is to get you through the boot menu/rescue process if something horrible goes wrong). Use SSH for doing any real work on the thing.

Now install Docker and all the containers/servers you want!

I have a ~14yo HTPC with a mostly modern GPU (8GB) that only has 8GB of RAM and four cores on some old AMD CPU. It’s running four separate servers for my self-host purposes and it doesn’t break a sweat.

I did the math and these are the approximate real numbers:

• US: ~30 million
• World: ~105 million

That’s active Linux desktops. That is, they’re being used to browse the Internet regularly enough to make it into StatCounter.

Yeah like… What the hell did we build our embassy out of that a great big explosion outside merely cracked some glass in the doors‽

There’s not even pock marks on the frame!

Within the browser, it’ll work to “protect” your traffic (including DNS) from prying eyes locally. As in, someone on the same network as you or your ISP or whatever networks your traffic passes through to its destination.

Instead, it sends it all to Microsoft Central Data Collection™! By passing all your traffic through Microsoft’s central servers, you can rest easy, knowing precisely who is inspecting everything you do (including the US government and the other countries in the Five Eyes network).

Let’s be honest: It’s yet another unfair transfer of power from local criminals to international ones, increasing the wealth of billionaire pedophiles. Give the locals a chance to rise up, would ya?

Yes! Because cyber bullying can only happen on platforms that are designed specifically for adults. By banning children from social networks, we will have completely eliminated the problem and totally not at all created much worse problems like potentially leaking the identities of millions of people and destroying the entire concept of privacy.

(Nods head vigorously)

https://theforestscout.com/40129/in-our-opinion/how-a-childrens-game-turned-into-an-outlet-for-bullying/

When my kids were young, but old enough that they may inadvertently stumble upon porn, I told them the truth. The truth that so few explain to their children. The truth that many adults don’t understand and many more completely forget.

Porn is fake.

It’s not real. The sounds? Acting. The breasts? Those are fake too. The perfect skin? Makeup (or airbrush).

Even “amateur” porn is fake! As soon as someone agrees to be filmed having sex it ceases to be real.

Also, let me get this straight: Your greatest fear from children being exposed to porn is they might begin to accept mysogyny‽ As in, you think porn is the most likely place kids will be exposed to it and somehow just nod their heads‽ “Oh wow, that’s totally sexist! But they’re having sex so it must be OK. I’ll try to be like that!” (Child nods head).

Or perhaps you think kids will be viewing so much porn—specifically, the mysogynistic kind—that it will somehow carve mysogyny into their minds?

This is so much like the beliefs of conservatives that try to ban books that mention LGBTQ people. Stop and think for a moment: How much porn did you view as a kid? How did that impact your life?

I seriously doubt it changed much. Unless, of course, you were reading Playboy for the articles.

Just think: Without legislation like this, kids will be able to see people having sex! Thus, ending their lives. Not so different from staring into the eyes of Medusa!

The amount of children exposed to sex that have died—or suffered worse consequences like early onset conservatism—may have been zero so far but the dangers are clear! We must skip right over parental involvement in child rearing and go straight to the source of the problem: Computers.

Computers have been giving everyone access to too much information for too long! We must restrict it! The first step is to get an implementation that actually works to censor information—to save the children (wink wink)—then later, we will have the tools necessary to censor whatever we want!

When glorious dictator decides that information about trans-genic mice must be erased from the Internet, we shall have the power to do so!