GamingChairModel

@GamingChairModel@lemmy.world
1 Post – 252 Comments
Joined 12 months ago

Yeah, sounds like a phone call recording app that is allowed to operate on the App Store under the condition that the recording is loudly announced.

9 more...

Some electric BMWs do the same on the literal automobile, too. It's an EV that sounds like a high performance ICE both inside and outside the car.

2 more...

Or is a by product of its former format, the live laughs with a crowd while filming?

This is the reason. Television comedy derives from stage shows where the audience sits in one direction from the stage.

A lot of early television comedy programming was often from variety shows, where the live studio audience is an important feedback mechanism for the actual performers. A standup comic needs a laughing audience to respond to (and often, so do other stage performers, including sketch comedy).

So television comedy comes from that tradition, and a live audience was always included for certain types of programs. Even today, we expect variety shows to have audiences. For example, John Oliver's show without an audience felt kinda weird while that was going on in 2020. And even some pre-filmed sketch comedy shows, like Chappelle's Show, would record audiences watching the pre-recorded sketches as part of the audio track for the broadcast itself, while Chappelle himself was filmed essentially MCing for that audience and those sketches.

So sitcoms came up on sets with live performances before studio audiences, just like sketch comedies and variety shows or daytime talk shows. That multi camera sitcom format became its own aesthetic, with three-walled sets that were always filmed from one direction, with a live audience laughing and reacting. Even when they started using closed sets for safety and control (see the Fran Drescher stuff linked elsewhere in this thread), they preserved the look and feel of those types of shows.

Single camera sitcoms are much more popular now, after the 2000's showed that they could be hilarious, but they are significantly more expensive and complicated to shoot, as blocking and choreography and set design require a lot more conscious choices when the cameras can be anywhere in the room, pointed in any direction. So multi camera still exists.

On the other extreme, 24/7 operations have redundancy.

A friend of mine explained that being an Emergency Medicine physician is a great job for work life balance, despite the fact that he often has to work ridiculous shifts, because he never has to take any work home with him. An Emergency Room is a 24/7 operation, so whenever he's at home, some other doctor is responsible for whatever happens. So he gets to relax and never think about work when he's not at work and not on call.

This is wrong, because you're talking about disability insurance in a comment thread about disability discrimination.

Disability is very broadly defined for the purpose of disability discrimination laws, which is the context of this comment chain.

Disability is defined specific to a person's work skills for the purpose of long term disability insurance (like the US's federally administered Social Security disability insurance). Depending on the program/insurance type, it might require that you can't hold down any meaningful job, caused by a medical condition that lasts longer than a year.

For things like short term disability, the disability is defined specific to that person's preexisting job. Someone who gets an Achilles surgery that prevents them from operating the pedals of a motor vehicle for a few weeks would be "disabled" for the purpose of short term disability insurance if they're a truck driver, and might not even be disabled if their day job is something like being a telemarketer who sits at a desk for their job.

1 more...

Yeah, I'm not a fan of AI but I'm generally of the view that anything posted on the internet, visible without a login, is fair game for indexing a search engine, snapshotting a backup (like the internet archive's Wayback Machine), or running user extensions on (including ad blockers). Is training an AI model all that different?

9 more...

Safari support means there's benefit to web server support. Server support means there's benefit to browser support in other browsers. Apple can kick start the network effects necessary to get this standard adopted.

Webp and heic are fine for web, but JPEG XL is special in that it actually has use for print-based and other ultra high resolution workflows, while also having the best path forward for migration from JPEG.

The problem is that we're not getting rid of the other stuff

We are, though. Coal use in the United States has cut in half in the last 15 years, and it's still on a steep downward slope. Even as natural gas (which emits roughly half the CO2 per unit energy as coal) increased over the same time period, our total emissions from energy consumption has dropped from about 6 billion tons to 4.8 billion tons.

The progress we're making might be slower than many of us would like, but we're also at a tipping point where we're making many fossil fuels simply uneconomical. And that's the key: to make polluting costly enough that big businesses won't want to.

Coal companies are literally going bankrupt as coal plants get decommissioned. When it comes to actual political power, the fossil fuel industry you want to watch out for is oil and gas, not coal.

Mine all the coal you want. If you don't have anyone willing to buy from you, at a price that covers the cost of extraction, you will fail.

So even though the coal companies' bankruptcies are getting them out of their cleanup and decommissioning obligations, the root cause of that is that coal just isn't competitive as an energy source.

until these get produced for real in mass quantities, they are vaporware

The world is already seeing exponential growth in annual completion of grid scale battery storage. Here's some recent data in the US, as products and projects mature from theoretical to small scale prototypes to full scale pilot projects to full production.

And author should compare winter moths

There's also significant developments being made in geothermal, which is actually dispatchable. Plus we actually still produce more grid-connected wind than solar right now, it's just that solar is so damn cheap it makes sense to install capacity well beyond matching peak demand.

Some combination of overcapacity, demand-shifting, and storage will go a long way in reducing the amount of dispatchable fossil fuel capacity that is necessary.

Nah, that's just anticipating customer rage. When I worked in restaurants I learned very early on that it's better to put things in a smaller container, and put the overflow into a separate container, rather than try to give them a little extra in the next size container that doesn't get filled up.

It's the meme with the kid failing to understand that the amount doesn't change just because the container changes. Only with angry adults who want their money back.

Our heads are just loaded with sensory capabilities that are more than just the two eyes. Our proprioception, balance, and mental mapping allows us to move our heads around and take in visual data from almost any direction at a glance, and then internally model that three dimensional space as the universe around us. Meanwhile, our ears can process direction finding for sounds and synthesize that information with our visual processing.

Meanwhile, the tactile feedback of the steering wheel, vibration of the actual car (felt by the body and heard by the ears), give us plenty of sensory information for understanding our speed, acceleration, and the mechanical condition of the car. The squeal of tires, the screech of brakes, and the indicators on our dash are all part of the information we use to understand how we're driving.

Much of it is trained through experience. But the fact is, I can tell when I have a flat tire or when I'm hydroplaning even if I can't see the tires. I can feel inclines or declines that affect my speed or lateral movement even when there aren't easy visual indicators, like at night.

1 more...

I disagree with your premise. The 111th Congress got a lot done. Here's a list of major legislation.

  • Lily Ledbetter Act made it easier to recover for employment discrimination, and explicitly overruled a Supreme Court case making it harder to recover back pay.
  • The ARRA was a huge relief bill for the financial crisis, one of the largest bills of all time.
  • The Credit CARD Act changed a bunch of consumer protection for credit card borrowers.
  • Dodd Frank was groundbreaking, the biggest financial reform bill since probably the Great Depression, and created the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau, probably one of the most important pro-consumer agencies in the federal government today.
  • School lunch reforms (why the right now hates Michelle Obama)
  • Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP or SCHIP): healthcare coverage, independent of Obamacare, for all children under 18.
  • Obamacare itself, which also includes comprehensive student loan reform too.

That's a big accomplishment list for 2 years, plus some smaller accomplishments like some tobacco reform, some other reforms relating to different agencies and programs.

Plus that doesn't include the administrative regulations and decisions the administrative agencies passed (things like Net Neutrality), even though those generally only last as long as the next president would want to keep them (see, again, Net Neutrality).

8 more...

The agency’s manager sent me a background memo about the woman I’d be playing, a purported 21-year-old university student blessed with physical proportions that are in vogue these days.

In vogue these days? That just reminds me of how every generation thinks they invented sex. Or the Simpsons quote where Mr. Burns describes a past encounter: "We expressed our love physically, as was the style at the time."

8 more...

I'm glad that The Atlantic is covering this issue. Nothing groundbreaking here for anyone who follows these issues, but the Atlantic's audience overlaps a lot with actual policymakers and their staffs. The tech companies don't want to be regulated by the government, so coverage by these types of publications may be a good starting point for reform (whether voluntary or regulated).

Even before that, Apple owes its very existence to an acquisition. Acquiring Next allowed them to abandon their dying OS and start anew with OS X, and brought back in founder Steve Jobs (who Apple had previously fired). With Steve Jobs at the helm, they made the computers cool again to buy some time before the iPod completely turned the company around.

4 more...

Put another way, this means that a malicious coffee shop or hotel can eavesdrop on all VPN traffic on their network. That's a really big fucking deal.

4 more...

Generates a realistic-looking scene that didn’t actually occur

Doesn't this describe, like, every mainstream live action film or television show?

3 more...

My kids have a book called "solitary animals," explicitly framed as introverts in nature, and from what I remember of it, it mentions pumas, octopuses, sloths, and eagles.

3 more...

When costs are level per kilowatt over lifetime Nuclear is cheaper thanks to economies of scale

Citation needed.

Vogtle added 2000 megawatts of capacity for $35 billion over the past 15 years. That's an up-front capital cost of $17,500 per watt. Even spread over a 75 year expected lifespan, we're talking about $233 per watt per year, of capital costs alone.

Maintenance and operation (and oh, by the way, nuclear is one of the most labor intensive forms of energy generation, so you'll have to look at 75 years of wage increases too) and interest and decommissioning will add to that.

So factoring everything in, estimates are that it will work out to be about $170/MWh, or $0.17 per kwh for generation (before accounting for transmission and reinvestment and profit for the for-profit operators). That's just not cost competitive with anything else on the market.

Economies of scale is basically the opposite of the problem that 21st century nuclear has encountered, which is why the current push is to smaller reactors, not bigger.

There's a place for extending nuclear power plant lifespans as long as they'll go. There's less of a place for building new nuclear.

Apple's got one, so does Google, and Microsoft.

They've got beacon location data, yes, but Apple is the only one that gives up that information without first conforming that the query is coming from someone who sees that BSSID. As OP notes:

In this respect, Apple's Wi-Fi database also differs fundamentally from other Wi-Fi databases, such as the one operated by Google.

If you click through to the paper, it describes 2 approaches for using BSSIDs to identify location:

  1. Client submits a query listing each BSSID and its signal strength, and the server calculates position and returns where it believes the query is coming from.
  2. Client submits a query listing each BSSID it's interested in, and the server responds with the location of each BSSID so that the client can calculate its own position.

See the problem there? Approach 2 gives more raw information away, by outsourcing the positioning calculation to untrusted clients.

And the paper outlines how Apple goes even further than that:

Apple’s Wi-Fi geolocation API [4] works in the latter manner, but with an added twist: In addition to the geolocations of the BSSIDs the client submits, Apple’s API opportunistically returns the geolocations of up to several hundred more BSSIDs nearby the one requested. These unrequested BSSID geolocations are presumably then cached by the client, which no longer needs to request the locations of the nearby BSSIDs it may soon encounter, e.g., as the user walks down a city street.

It goes on later:

Apple’s WPS API is free and places few restrictions on its use. It requires neither an API key, authentication, nor an Apple device; our measurement software is written in Go and runs on Linux. Moreover, Apple appears to make no attempt to filter physically impossible queries. The BSSIDs submitted to the WPS need not be physically proximate to each other nor to the device submitting the query; Apple’s WPS will respond with geolocations for BSSIDs on two different continents in the same request to a querier on a third.

That's the discussion here. Apple keeps a large database, like many other big tech/mapping firms, but does nothing to keep that database hard for strangers to scrape in bulk.

In contrast, Google uses the first approach and keeps the information a bit more restricted by performing the location calculation at the server:

Han et al. reverse-engineered Google’s WPS’s method of operation [17]. Google’s WPS functions differently than Skyhook’s and Apple’s insofar as Google’s service attempts to geolocate the device submitting the query, providing it with only the device’s computed position given a list of BSSIDs from the client.

So it's possible to run this type of service with this type of database, without sharing BSSID locations with anyone else who asks.

2 more...

There's two parts to being successful at a job: successfully accomplishing the work that fits into your role, and successfully messaging to your bosses that you're doing a good job.

So when executives lay people off, it tends to catch people who are bad at that second task (the messaging/perception side), which may or may not include people who are good at the first task (actually doing good shit for the company).

That's why mass layoffs are damaging, and should be avoided if possible.

In space nobody can hear you burn satellites

Toyota was the carmaker best positioned for the COVID chip shortage because they recognized it as a bottleneck. They were pumping out cars a few months longer than the others (even if they eventually hit the same wall everyone else did).

Chavez Rodriguez outlined that abortion will be on the ballot in Florida, where the state Supreme Court issued a ruling that puts a six-week ban into effect May 1. Democrats see abortion as a winning issue for them in 2024 after experiencing better-than-expected results in the midterm elections months after Roe v. Wade was overturned.

That's basically a key point here. Abortion is banned in Florida, but a state constitutional amendment protecting the right to abortion is on the ballot the same day as the presidential election.

That does change the electoral dynamic.

There was a very, very brief moment from about 2005 to 2011 or so where there was money to be made directly by artists on iTunes or the other music stores where the tracks were like 99 cents each.

But people stopped buying as soon as Spotify became popular, and now any artist that wants to release on Spotify without a label still doesn't make much money.

No, most computer sales are way down this year compared to last year.

IDC shows Apple's sales are down 23% year over year this most recent quarter (Q3 2023), worse than the overall market of down 7.6%.

But in Q2 2023, the last quarter before that, Apple was the only manufacturer to show an increase, up 10.3% when the overall market was down 13.4%.

In Q1 2023, Apple's shipments dropped 40.5%, while the market as a whole dropped 29%.

Q4 2022, Apple was down 2.1% while the industry as a whole was down 28.1%

If I were at a computer I'd be able to pull these things up more comprehensively, but you get the point. Apple is in a weird position because they released a big change right in the middle of the pandemic when demand for computers was already through the roof, but they're still in the same basic boat as everyone else, with the booms of 2021 to 2022 giving less demand for upgrades so soon afterward.

I don't think that site would be problematic. After all, we're just talking about custom interfaces to analyze public data.

A big part of the solution is that users should have an awareness that their activity is public. Every once in a while someone gets burned not knowing that anyone can view what a specific Twitter user or Instagram user liked (like politicians liking risque thirst trap photos).

Another is easy alts and throwaways, with tips to avoid correlations:

  • Don't use the same verified email address
  • Don't reuse usernames, including across platforms
  • Try not to use the same instances, such that instance admins can see whether login activity is coming from the same place, unless you absolutely trust that the admins won't analyze your data OR inadvertently leak their records.
  • Be aware of the techniques used to correlate users: analysis of timestamps, linguistic/grammatical quirks, etc.

This is a public place, so people should be aware that this is a public place. That means they can still find this useful space, as with many other public places, but should be aware that the more they do on this platform, the easier it is to correlate with a real life identity.

3 more...

Someone figured out a way that could hijack iMessage through sending a special malicious PDF that took advantage of a flaw in some legacy font rendering code unique to Apple, that even Apple hadn't used in decades.

Then, that PDF launched a JavaScript debugger that is built into iPhones, and took advantage of a flaw in that to jump into putting some code into the parts of user memory, that the system doesn't fully trust.

Then, that code takes advantage of another flaw to bypass the system's protections for not fully trusting that code, to secretly launch a web browser and navigate to a secret webpage that runs a much bigger piece of malware.

That malware can read and modify basically anything on the system, and was used to read all sorts of sensitive data: message history, location information, app data, etc.

Because the whole exploit chain was so advanced and involved so many different previously unknown vulnerabilities, basically the list of possible suspects is very, very short: some kind of nation state with advanced hacking capabilities.

"Biblically accurate models"

I agree.

I especially love that it addresses the biggest pitfall of the typical "fancy new format does things better than the one we're already using" transition, in that it's specifically engineered to make migration easier, by allowing a lossless conversion from the dominant format.

I don't understand how retrieving a phone from a pocket is somehow less convenient than retrieving a wallet from a pocket, and then retrieving the card from the wallet. That's 1 step versus 2 steps.

10 more...

Harry Frankfurt's influential 2005 book (based on his influential 1986 essay), On Bullshit, offered a description of what bullshit is.

When we say a speaker tells the truth, that speaker says something true that they know is true.

When we say a speaker tells a lie, that speaker says something false that they know is false.

But bullshit is when the speaker says something to persuade, not caring whether the underlying statement is true or false. The goal is to persuade the listener of that underlying fact.

The current generation of AI chat bots are basically optimized for bullshit. The underlying algorithms reward the models for sounding convincing, not necessarily for being right.

Look at the Diffie Helman scheme, with the example used in the Wikipedia page.

  • Alice and Bob agree in public, for everyone to see, that they're gonna start with p=23 and g=5.
  • Alice has a secret key 4, and doesn't tell anyone (not even Bob). She plugs her secret into the formula g^secret mod p, or 5^4 mod 23. 5^4 is 625, and dividing 625 into 23 gives a remainder of 4. So she tells Bob in public that she derived the number 4 from her secret.
  • Bob has a secret key of 3, does the same thing, and calculates 5^3 mod 23, which results in the number of 10, tells Alice.

The magic of this scheme is that taking each side's result and applying the same secret gets to the same final result. 10^4 mod 23 turns out to be the exact same number as 4^3 mod 23. So both sides get to the secret shared key 18, without disclosing that their secret numbers were 4 and 3, respectively.

But if you try to drive the secret key from the information publicly exchanged, you'll basically have to try each number until you get to the right one. It's inefficient, and basically impossible to do once you're using very large integers (300+ digits long).

It affects me, the user, because I have to sift through garbage sites, because advertisers pay to keep those garbage sites online. So I think it's a problem worth discussing and addressing.

Is there a legitimate reason for it not being reverse-engineered yet?

The actual protocol isn't a secret. It's that the authentication of the device relies on a hardware key, and that key is fully locked down by Apple (as it also secures the user's biometric logins, keyring, financial information in Apple Wallet, etc.).

Every security mechanism is also a potential denial of service vector.

The idea that these models are just stochastic parrots that only probabilisticly repeat their training data isn't correct

I would argue that it is quite obviously correct, but that the interesting question is whether humans are in the same category (I would argue yes).

I'm having a hard time seeing why one is fine but the other isn't.

I think the law says that neither is fine, in the context here. The law allows celebrity impersonators to engage in parody and commentary, but not to actually use their impersonation skills to endorse products, engage in fraud, and pretend to be that person being impersonated.

5 more...

Summary:

Apple disclosed and patched an actively exploited vulnerability in its proprietary image processing library.

At the same time, Google disclosed and patched an actively exploited vulnerability in its own webp processing in Chrome.

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. Because processing webp files is such a fundamental function of any different pieces of software, there's a concern that this is one vulnerability common to a huge set of commonly used software.

I wonder if this vulnerability is especially serious, given that the programs processing images often have escalated privileges.

2 more...