“do it again, I wasn’t looking”

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: September 25th, 2023

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  • Right, I thought that might be what you were referring to. This is where we get into weeds technically:

    Those regulations apply to active jamming, which is the use of an electronic device(s) to emit signals that interfere with lawfully approved channels. It is important to note that this holds no practical bearing upon structures as they by definition cannot engage in active jamming, only in passive blocking or coincidental interference.

    What’s being experienced with Walmart’s lack of 5G is likely due to the fact that 5G does not penetrate walls very well. Combine this with the fact that you have hundreds of devices in the same enclosed space trying to talk to the same tower some miles away on the lower bandwidth 5G channel that can penetrate walls, and you can see how 5G access is effectively being “denied” simply by the nature of the business. Walmart could implement an on-premises 5G relay to solve the issue, but why would they want to take on that tech debt? All they are required to do by law is make sure E911 is not impeded by the building or operations of the business. They don’t owe you access to other radio waves when on their premises.

    If this regulation were to somehow be applied to passive blocking like what I’ve described, then Faraday cages would be illegal-- which aren’t, again as long as E911 is not impeded. This would also make high security bamk vaults illegal due to the thick wall construction.







  • If I were to fully elaborate, I’d be typing for hours, so I’ll sum up:

    • pip - default behavior is to install to system-wide site packages. In a venv, it will try to upgrade/uninstall system packages without notice/consent unless you specify --require-virtualenv. Multiple things can fuck up your ENV to make the python binaries point to system-wide, while your terminal will still show you as in a venv. Also why TF would package metadata files need to be executable? Bad practice, -1/10
    • nix - they acknowledged years ago that they should probably have some kind of package signing and perhaps an SBOM or similar mechanism, but then did nothing to implement it and just said “oh well, guess we’re vulnerable to supply chain attacks, best not to think about it”
    • brew - installing packages parallel to your system packages manager, without containers. My chief complaint here is that brew is a secondary package manager that people might treat as a “set and forget” for some packages, rarely updating them. So what happens when a standard library used by a brew package is vuln? A naive Linux user might update their system packages but totally forget to update brew. And when updating brew, you can easily hit max_open_file_descriptors because kitchen sink

    From there, it’s all extremely nit-picky and paranoid-fueled-- basically, none of the package managers I mentioned are conducive, in my eyes at least, to a secure and intuitive compute environment.

    Unfortunately, there’s not much I can do about it except bang pots and pans and throw maintainers under buses when the issue that has been present for years rears it’s ugly head. Because they are the only ones who can change this, and pressure is the only thing that might motivate them to.





  • yeah I was about to point out that corpos certainly did not just invent the word “bedrot” for their own benefit. This has been a thing for a while. Nurses often have to walk patients who are admitted for several days to prevent “bed rot” symptoms.

    If you were staying in bed all day, every day, yeah you’re gonna get some severe health issues pretty damn quick. But if you’re getting up and moving around regularly, you shouldn’t worry… but in that case, it would make more sense to idk buy a desk, sit at a table, or on the couch. A laptop in bed is not practical and certainly not comfortable with the heat it generates. Quite frankly I don’t understand why anyone would ever choose to use a laptop in bed if they have other options available.



  • Not to be confused with the fallacy that these essentials are exclusively the product of exchanging money-- while you can pay for better health and better safety, there are also things you can do with little to no money to improve those for yourself, though the freedom to do so unfortunately is not default and financial security does empower an individual to better use what resources are available to them-- maybe not everyone can trivially access hiking trails, or be in the health for it, and even then they should have a good pair of shoes, a water bottle, and reliable mode of transportation to/fro the trails, which again not everyone has unfortunately.

    Imo, the idealistic answer is to work to ensure everyone an essential baseline level that can reliably empower them to live as healthy and opportune of lives as is reasonably possible, while of course having in place infrastructure and accomodations to those less fortunate in health and/or opportunity. I’d like to think this is more than a utopian idea, and closer to a reality than one might originally think, or perhaps I was somewhat unique or grossly digressed from the status quo in pessimistically believing that we might be far from this being a reality. Perhaps my pessimism was also influenced by my financial stress at the time, among the other throes of life.




  • This is not the direct result of a knowledge cutoff date, but could be the result of mis-prompting or fine-tuning to enforce cut off dates to discourage hallucinations about future events.

    But, Gemini/Bard has access to a massive index built from Google’s web crawling-- if it shows up in a Google search, Gemini/Bard can see it. So unless the model weights do not contain any features that correlate Gaza to being a geographic location, there should be no technical reason that it is unable to retrieve this information.

    My speculation is that Google has set up “misinformation guardrails” that instruct the model not to present retrieved information that is deemed “dubious”-- it may decide for instance that information from an AP article are more reputable than sparse, potentially conflicting references to numbers given by the Gaza Health Ministry, since it is ran by the Palestinian Authority. I haven’t read too far into Gemini’s docs to know what all Google said they’ve done for misinformation guardrailing, but I expect they don’t tell us much besides that they obviously see a need to do it since misinformation is a thing, LLMs are gullible and prone to hallucinations and their model has access to literally all the information, disinformation, and misinformation on the surface web and then some.

    TL;DR someone on the Ethics team is being lazy as usual and taking the simplest route to misinformation guardrailing because “move fast”. This guardrailing is necessary, but fucks up quite easily (ex. the accidentally racist image generator incident)


  • edit: currently lol’ing at the fact that some of you people out there are so pathetic that you disagree with equality. That’s fine, enjoy your sexist lives you ingrates.

    All I’ve got to say is that I might begin to take female domestic abuse victims with a grain of salt if I’ve any suspicion they would treat male victims similarly. Because to many victims, it is obvious that it can happen to anyone and be perpetrated by anyone, regardless of gender of either. But if they say men can’t be abused, that just tells me that they have never experienced abuse and removes any credibility from anything they could possibly say about the subject.


  • Seeing lots of wrong answers here, though I can’t guarantee I’ll be any more accurate. But I have a feeling this has to do with how ente.io’s email egress is set up.

    They have three email origins provided (all from Zoho): Zoho, ZCsend, and TransMail. I would expect that Zoho is for support and business email, ZCsend is for marketing, and TransMail handles transactional emails such as billing and password resets. That said, I only see a domain key for Zoho attached to their ente.io domain. This means when Gmail’s SMTP servers might not be able to successfully authenticate the email’s origin if it’s sent through ZCsend or TransMail, leading them to take the default action of marking spam for an unauthenticated marketing-/phishing-esque email.

    TL;DR Google most likely isn’t doing this intentionally, but rather ente.io’s email service might not be configured the best and Gmail is unable to distinguish it from what it considers spam as a result.


  • I created a GitLab account long before they implemented this, but never used it. Went to post an issue related to self-hosted GitLab on their issue tracker, and it told me my account was banned. I wrote an email to support and they essentially said “an automated system identified your account as a bot and banned you during an account clean up some years ago to cut back on malicious users”. I informed them that this was not at all reasonable, as I’ve never even posted anything on any GitLab account, and that I would be advising my organization to never pay for any GitLab product or service unless legal writes up the contract terms, because I have no faith in them as a vendor.

    Seriously, fuck GitLab. And if anyone from that org wants to discuss this with me, they can pipe their email to /dev/null