Grumble4681's recent activity
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Comment on Top twenty worldwide with social-engineering and a cheat that's still undetected in ~games
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Comment on Leaked email suggests Ring plans to expand ‘search party’ surveillance beyond dogs in ~tech
Grumble4681 Link ParentHow many cameras and what resolution are you able to pull off on that hardware? It's been my understanding that's where the spec requirements of the system can rise greatly. But yeah, that's what...How many cameras and what resolution are you able to pull off on that hardware? It's been my understanding that's where the spec requirements of the system can rise greatly.
But yeah, that's what I've seen about that and similar setups, basically if you roll your own it seems to be much better performance and functionality, just too high of a barrier of entry for most people.
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Comment on Leaked email suggests Ring plans to expand ‘search party’ surveillance beyond dogs in ~tech
Grumble4681 Link ParentReolink in theory can be set up for direct access, either disabling their remote connection setup or going further and straight up blocking the hardware from connecting out on a firewall, I think...Reolink in theory can be set up for direct access, either disabling their remote connection setup or going further and straight up blocking the hardware from connecting out on a firewall, I think Unifi can as well but not 100% on that. Eufy, I don't think so.
Unifi and Eufy I believe have both had session security problems in the past, giving people access to others systems because session tokens were swapped on the backend or something like that (I'm sure someone can correct me on the exact technical details). The only way to avoid this as far as I'm concerned is using direct connections to your equipment and not being reliant on any online accounts to sign in and view devices.
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Comment on Leaked email suggests Ring plans to expand ‘search party’ surveillance beyond dogs in ~tech
Grumble4681 Link ParentThe other unfortunate part is that from my experience, it seems that the cloud based ones have better 'AI' and some better features and functionality than local ones, unless you go with some...- Exemplary
The other unfortunate part is that from my experience, it seems that the cloud based ones have better 'AI' and some better features and functionality than local ones, unless you go with some absurdly expensive systems or roll your own which requires even more technical know-how than just installing them even, and more hardware.
My personal experiences with cloud based systems are Alarm.com, OpenEye (which is owned by Alarm.com) and Wyze which I am pretty sure all their smart detections are cloud based, and local systems are Hikvision, Dahua, Reolink, a few random other brands, and then beyond that my knowledge is just what I've researched online.
From what I can tell, any of the cheaper hardware that can do local is all about the same capability detection wise. Decent but not great. If you want better detection or recording capabilities, you basically have to roll your own setup for the recording system, which can mean getting a beefy PC, running a desktop OS and then installing some open source software or proprietary software to function as the recording software. Some of these like Frigate require more specialized hardware in addition, like as described below.
A detector is a device which is optimized for running inferences efficiently to detect objects. Using a recommended detector means there will be less latency between detections and more detections can be run per second. Frigate is designed around the expectation that a detector is used to achieve very low inference speeds. Offloading TensorFlow to a detector is an order of magnitude faster and will reduce your CPU load dramatically.
That's of course excluding the other big reason why people go for these cloud based cams which is initially they were targeted for DIY install which for the average home user means battery powered. Plus the networking and remote viewing aspects of these are resolved in ways that securely viewing a local system isn't without the technical know-how.
Comparing local system detection capabilities to the detections and various capabilities of the cloud-based systems I interacted with, those cloud systems were way more capable. Alarm.com detection was quite good, their platform was limited in what kind of recording setups and notification rules and stuff you could set up. OpenEye was nearly perfect from a usability standpoint. They hadn't quite gotten to the better AI detections at the point that I was working with them but I understand it to be better now. It was designed around commercial/enterprise use more so, but it had way more granular controls and one thing that bothers me that other systems don't have by default is dual recording options. Recording motion detections in the high quality main stream of the camera, and recording 24/7 in the low quality substream of the camera. OpenEye had this and made me annoyed to find hardly anything on the lower cost end has it (and OpenEye isn't on the low end of cost so it's not necessarily a fair comparison). Synology has it on their NAS systems, but Synology has come under fire for being anti-consumer in their own ways too. They also have some other software and hardware limitations.
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Comment on Elon Musk says SpaceX will prioritize a city on the moon instead of a colony on Mars in ~space
Grumble4681 Link ParentI personally don't see the value in humanity enough to support it. I value that we're genetically programmed for survival in more immediate and direct ways and wouldn't advocate for forced...I personally don't see the value in humanity enough to support it. I value that we're genetically programmed for survival in more immediate and direct ways and wouldn't advocate for forced extinction or such, but having an off-site backup is not meeting any immediate human needs. Humans do not need to exist forever. Humans that destroy their own civilization even less so. I'm not talking about specific humans, I'm talking about the species. The fact that some humans find the idea desirable to spread the virus far and wide to ensure the species exists only further proves to me that humans are not some higher intelligent being that should be seen as something morally superior and worth saving, but no different than any life form or virus on Earth.
I don't necessarily hate humanity in the way that the above paragraph may be interpreted, as I said I'm not advocating for a mass extinction event or anything, I just don't support plans that involve repopulating planets or spreading genetic material around the solar system to ensure the ongoing existence of the species. I support plans that are about improving the lives of the humans that already exist, not trying to create and subjugate more conscious beings into the trap.
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Comment on The mega-rich are turning their mansions into impenetrable fortresses in ~finance
Grumble4681 Link ParentI don't think anyone is really arguing that Buffet's house is average, or that he's a great person, the argument is that house does not show off his wealth. You wouldn't look at that house and...I don't think anyone is really arguing that Buffet's house is average, or that he's a great person, the argument is that house does not show off his wealth. You wouldn't look at that house and assume a multi-billionaire lives there. Now what isn't commonly shown or talked about the house is what possible security measures he has, and I imagine for someone of his fame that he would have to have gotten security measures at some point and those security measures could potentially indicate a greater level of wealth than the house itself may indicate. I did find an article stating he had a small guardhouse built on the property in the 2000s but I didn't look any deeper because I don't care to know the specifics.
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Comment on The mega-rich are turning their mansions into impenetrable fortresses in ~finance
Grumble4681 Link ParentHis wealth is far beyond 3x the average family, so the example still fits.His wealth is far beyond 3x the average family, so the example still fits.
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Comment on Warner Bros. Discovery considers restarting talks with Paramount in ~tv
Grumble4681 LinkThere's so many headlines and discussion surrounding the potential acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery, Netflix's bid, the hostile bid from Paramount, and before it really ramped up in the news...There's so many headlines and discussion surrounding the potential acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery, Netflix's bid, the hostile bid from Paramount, and before it really ramped up in the news (from my perspective anyhow, which I think was caused by Paramount's hostile bid), Comcast was seriously interested as well, and what I find most concerning about this is that in all of this, I've seen little to no serious discussion or headlines about how this should possibly be an indicator of why Warner Bros. Discovery shouldn't be allowed be acquired and shouldn't need to be acquired.
If WBD is so valuable, which this crazy bidding war I think proves it is, how is it seemingly not part of the public discussion that it should be considered inappropriate and wrong for any of these acquisitions to happen? I understand that with the Trump administration there's no effective governing going on and any 'governing' that does happen is likely motivated by corruption, so I get that there's likely some acceptance that no amount of public discussion will result in the government intervening, but I still think there would be more coverage surrounding this idea to begin with.
That this coverage doesn't really seem to exist much outside of more niche outlets in my view is reinforcing that the public simply does not care or is not educated enough to weigh in on these issues, and/or the media is forgoing public interest (engagement and possibly money) to avoid magnifying public concerns about it. No matter how you slice it, I find that to be extremely concerning that we're so accepting of acquisitions of this type with little to no public push back against it. Given that two of the bidders in this most recent scenario are owners of NBC and CBS, among other media outlets I may not be aware of, I would lean towards believing they have a strong interest in not fanning the flames of the idea that big corporations like them shouldn't be able to acquire WBD. Even the ones not involved in the bidding likely have their own aspirations for acquisitions in the future and wouldn't want the public second guessing those.
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Comment on An AI agent published a hit piece on me in ~tech
Grumble4681 (edited )Link ParentArs Technica published an editors note regarding this article. https://arstechnica.com/staff/2026/02/editors-note-retraction-of-article-containing-fabricated-quotations/ I'm somewhat skeptical...Ars Technica published an editors note regarding this article.
I'm somewhat skeptical that it happens to be the 'only' work they've done with AI generation, what are the chances the first time you get caught is the first time you did it? I suppose for highly error prone AI, it could be more likely, but I don't know.
Also they attribute only the quotes to AI generation, but it seems it was more than just quotes that were AI generated in that article.
The fact that the matplotlib community now has to deal with blog post rants from ostensibly agentic AI coders illustrates exactly the kind of unsupervised behavior that makes open source maintainers wary of AI contributions in the first place.
If the agent produced it without explicit direction, following some chain of automated goal-seeking behavior, it illustrates exactly the kind of unsupervised output that makes open source maintainers wary.
These are two different paragraphs in that article that were not quotes attributed to anyone but were supposedly written by the authors of the article. I'm someone who can be repetitive with phrases and such that I use, but even that seems a bit too on the nose for me.
Also, there were two names on the article but one of them (Benj) has posted on bluesky to admit they were responsible.
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Comment on Joy of sharing a creation replaced by a longing sadness in ~talk
Grumble4681 (edited )Link ParentDo you think this applies if you're using servers from the same company whose services you're attempting to access? Like for example, if you tried to access Youtube through Google's servers by...Do you think this applies if you're using servers from the same company whose services you're attempting to access? Like for example, if you tried to access Youtube through Google's servers by setting up a proxy/vpn on one of their servers, or using AWS when accessing Twitch? Obviously I know that Google's compute engine is likely quite separated from Youtube infrastructure of course, and likewise Twitch isn't necessarily just going to welcome visitor traffic from AWS since part of the reason why those restrictions exist is to mitigate abuse, but I also wonder if they may exempt their own orgs from some of those restrictions.
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Comment on US Immigration and Customs Enforcement plans to spend $38 billion on warehouse conversions in ~society
Grumble4681 Link ParentMy opinion at the moment is that the DDoS that is known about at the moment is not causing substantial active harm. It's in adblock lists to mitigate harm from anyone using some adblock...My opinion at the moment is that the DDoS that is known about at the moment is not causing substantial active harm. It's in adblock lists to mitigate harm from anyone using some adblock extensions, and from what I've seen gyrovague hasn't had any interruptions of service. The people/organizations most impacted by it directly at the moment seem to be the hosting company that gyrovague uses, as gyrovague operator says their hosting plan is flat-rate and increased activity from the DDoS doesn't cost them anything, so that means the hosting company is eating the costs, whatever they may be. The cost to individual users visiting the archive site is also minimal and arguably offset by being able to access the content that they wouldn't be able to otherwise.
Now the risk is that the operator of archive.today can change anything on the site at any moment if they wish that could be more harmful or harm others, but they could also have done this at any time anyone was using it in the past 10+ years too, and any site we visit could also do that. They're all a risk in that respect. I don't view archive.today to be that much riskier than they were before in the sense that despite their seeming mental instability on some level as displayed in their blog, the action they took here has some level of logic to follow behind it to understand what other type of actions they could take. They chose a highly unethical method of revenge for perceived doxxing, they didn't just randomly lash out at someone. I suppose there could be a number of other potential victims out there who have potentially wronged archive.today owner on some level and they could be next on the revenge list, but there's also no indication of this on their blog.
I do think it means we should try to use alternatives if they exist, but it seems not many exist at the moment.
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Comment on An AI agent published a hit piece on me in ~tech
Grumble4681 (edited )Link ParentI can agree with that perspective to an extent, I'll clarify that the reasoning of why I made that comment is that I wanted to respond to the initial statement in the parent comment "the author...I can agree with that perspective to an extent, I'll clarify that the reasoning of why I made that comment is that I wanted to respond to the initial statement in the parent comment "the author has not considered that this is not an agent operating autonomously" in a less direct way, because in the author's post, they do acknowledge that possibility but they dismiss it right away.
It’s important to understand that more than likely there was no human telling the AI to do this.
There's the line from the author's post that I'm referring to that acknowledges they did consider it.
So if they did consider it, then the most logical way to explain parent commenter's disbelief of the author not considering it was that the author went with the more interesting story. At least that's the most logical to me anyhow.
So while I can agree that it could seem incongruous for a person to do that, I don't think the scenario I presented is viewed as malicious as that. I think you interpret that as more malicious or selfish than I do, so it seems more incongruous with their character to you than it would to me. That doesn't mean I don't take issue with it, but rather I think people are more capable to do something like that without necessarily consciously thinking through all aspects of it, so they're not necessarily consciously choosing or setting out with the mindset that 'I'm going to write this blog post where I'm fairly sure this human used an LLM to disparage me because they were upset I rejected their code but I'm instead going to lie and tell everyone it was fully autonomous AI agent doing it all on its own', I don't think that is what is going through that person's mind when they made the post.
I'm sure if you examine enough of my comments, you could find an angle where I possibly misrepresented something or wasn't genuine about what I thought on some level, for example, the comment you replied to. I already acknowledged that I saw in the author's blog the line where they they considered it and dismissed it, but I replied to the parent comment with a question as if I didn't already know the author considered it and dismissed it. Did I do it maliciously or selfishly? I don't think so. I think I did it because I thought it was a higher quality comment to present that perspective that way than to just be more literal and respond with "No the author says they did consider it".
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Comment on archive.today is directing a DDOS attack against my blog in ~tech
Grumble4681 Link ParentI get that is how the author of the 2023 blog post framed it, as a curiosity and one of some kind of admiration, but it actually comes across as disingenuous or they're just incredibly ignorant...Having read the original blog post that started this whole mess, it doesn't really read like an attempt to dox the site's owner. It reads to me as a writeup of someone getting curious about the details of the background and workings of a widely-used online service, and writing down their exploration into the surrounding rabbithole. I've read countless similar write-ups over the years, people share them because it's just interesting to them and figure others will also find it interesting.
In a vacuum, it actually reads pretty positively to me compared to a lot of such write-ups. It literally ends with "It’s a testament to their persistence that they’re managed to keep this up for over 10 years, and I for one will be buying Denis/Masha/whoever a well deserved cup of coffee." Without the DDOS attack, I would've found the whole thing pretty neat and gotten some more respect for the creator.
I get that is how the author of the 2023 blog post framed it, as a curiosity and one of some kind of admiration, but it actually comes across as disingenuous or they're just incredibly ignorant and unaware which I just don't believe. There's no way you can think that unmasking someone who is doing something obviously illegal ('archiving' paywalled sites and distributing that copyrighted information without authorization) is somehow not harming that person. I can't fathom the level of ignorance it would require for someone to knowingly dive into that thinking that it's just an innocent curiosity on their part that has no repercussions to the person they're attempting to unmask. It's not believable. They even acknowledged that the archive.today is helping people bypass those paywalls in the intro of that 2023 blog post, and they acknowledged that it seems the owner of archive.today is 'mysterious', in effect meaning the owner had made no efforts to reveal their identity to anyone. So to then pretend like it's an innocent curiosity that leads them to reveal the details of who is behind it, it's disingenuous.
It would have made more sense to me if they just said they were getting into investigative journalism or such rather than feign admiration and curiosity for someone while in the same breath taking actions to harm that person. I do believe there is an argument that it's ethically or morally protected to publish the information they did publish if they were doing it in the role of an investigative journalist rather than just boil their actions down to 'doxxing', but it can be hard to distinguish where doxxing is wrong and where journalism begins. Imagine if they had uncovered that archive.today was actually owned by Elon Musk or that it's run by the Chinese government or something, I think that would be valuable public information and a public good. If you're an ardent supporter of existing copyright legislation and protections, you might also perceive it as a public good to unmask whoever is violating copyright laws running the site. I don't necessarily have a strong opinion on the actual information they published, but by framing it the way they did, they also framed their publishing of that information more as doxxing than as journalism. You can't be on the side of someone that you're obviously harming.
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Comment on An AI agent published a hit piece on me in ~tech
Grumble4681 (edited )Link ParentArs Technica is now running unverified AI generated pieces now? Wonder if they'll even bother to offer an explanation for this. Edit: Aurich from Ars said this "We are doing an investigation right...Ars Technica is now running unverified AI generated pieces now? Wonder if they'll even bother to offer an explanation for this.
Edit: Aurich from Ars said this "We are doing an investigation right now to figure out exactly what happened. Given that it's Friday afternoon on a long weekend (it's a holiday on Monday in the US for those not aware) we probably won't have something to report back until next week."
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Comment on Discord will require a face scan or ID for full access next month in ~tech
Grumble4681 (edited )Link ParentThe sort of funny thing about this is, there's no proof that it's still you using the account. Granted there's not a lot of incentive for people to transfer over free accounts to other people,...The sort of funny thing about this is, there's no proof that it's still you using the account. Granted there's not a lot of incentive for people to transfer over free accounts to other people, like if your little brother wants a discord account and you stopped using discord, you don't give your brother your account, he just makes his own. But if there's age gating, now maybe there will be incentives to transfer accounts or sell accounts.
That does make me wonder how this IDing will go down if you change the email on your account, presumably you'd have to verify your age again. Otherwise someone could possibly just make a bunch of discord accounts and verify them with the facial age software and then change the email to some 15 year old's email address.
Edit: One other thing about the direction of age verification, even if you assume the software is perfect and assume the hardware has something built in to authenticate video streams are coming from the hardware so people can't utilize alternative video streams and the stream must be recorded by the front facing cam on the device, and even if you assume that this camera is incapable of being fooled by videos of other people, there's nothing technically stopping anyone from loaning out their face to age verify other people's accounts. Granted I recognize the reality of that is that it's so highly impractical that it wouldn't happen on a widespread level in all likelihood, but the primary way to defeat this would then be to make a face database and even if you don't store actual images or videos of people, if you just break it down into data points of someones face like facial recognition does, then you can tell if one person is using their face to age verify multiple accounts.
I mention this last part because I've seen that question asked in this thread a few times, what incentive would they have to keep the information or create data points of your face etc.? That's an example, albeit with a highly impractical premise in that particular case, but I'm also not an oracle and there could be many other scenarios that I can't think of which would prompt the same motivation to save data points of your face from the face scanning process.
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Comment on archive.today is directing a DDOS attack against my blog in ~tech
Grumble4681 Link ParentI'm curious if you've tried this ghostarchive.org site yet and had any success with it because I just tried using it with an LA Times article and the main page of the site loads but it won't load...I'm curious if you've tried this ghostarchive.org site yet and had any success with it because I just tried using it with an LA Times article and the main page of the site loads but it won't load when searching nor trying to archive a site and just returns 404 not found. Could just be an influx of traffic they weren't prepared for but guess it won't take too long to find out if it's ready to be the replacement for archive.today
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Comment on An AI agent published a hit piece on me in ~tech
Grumble4681 Link ParentWhat if the author did consider it, but conveniently put no weight to it because it's a better story to say that an AI agent did it all autonomously? Probably drives a lot more traffic to their...What if the author did consider it, but conveniently put no weight to it because it's a better story to say that an AI agent did it all autonomously? Probably drives a lot more traffic to their blog if that's the story, rather than a human using LLM to help them do it.
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Comment on archive.today is directing a DDOS attack against my blog in ~tech
Grumble4681 Link ParentYeah, it's not as though he fully gave away all the information all in one go as it may have been more the case for archive.today, but the username sharing thing is also another common mistake...Yeah, it's not as though he fully gave away all the information all in one go as it may have been more the case for archive.today, but the username sharing thing is also another common mistake that gives people away. That's why when I joined Tildes I used a random username generator, which in the past I didn't always do that and I would use the same username across different services. Then I wouldn't think about or realize that even if I curate the information I provide on each service to not identify me, if I'm linked across services because I used the same username and then all that information is combined it is way more identifiable.
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Comment on archive.today is directing a DDOS attack against my blog in ~tech
Grumble4681 Link ParentThe parent comment is not referring to the blog post linked in this tildes post, it's referring to an old blog post from 2023 where the operator of gyrovague.com did some internet sleuthing about...Sounds like they want attention on the issue, so that public pressure may cause the archive person to stop, as well as further investigation by other people to make them stop.
The parent comment is not referring to the blog post linked in this tildes post, it's referring to an old blog post from 2023 where the operator of gyrovague.com did some internet sleuthing about the identity of archive.today (well before any DDoSing was taking place) and laid out who the person was behind the site.
Sometime after, this blog post with archive.today's identity in it started getting attention, and then the FBI subpoenad archive.today in late 2025. This seems to be the start of where the owner of archive.today started feeling the heat, and they noticed news articles or something along those lines being posted about their identity and they were all citing the 2023 gyrovague.com blog post.
So the DDoS was in reaction to the heat they were already feeling and they attributed it to gyrovague for putting the heat on them.
Now this news of the DDOS reaction as detailed in this blog post is obviously generating even more heat on archive.today.
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Comment on archive.today is directing a DDOS attack against my blog in ~tech
Grumble4681 Link ParentYeah I don't get what their motive was or what they were hoping to accomplish by that either. I personally don't think it was right for them to essentially dox the identity of archive.today owner,...Yeah I don't get what their motive was or what they were hoping to accomplish by that either. I personally don't think it was right for them to essentially dox the identity of archive.today owner, but they also laid out how they came across the information and it apparently wasn't that difficult. Just about anyone could have found it if they were determined enough, in fact the part about an F-Secure forum post where the person is talking about the site they own is a fairly common slip-up that can catch a lot of people, I'm pretty sure I remember that being behind the Silk Road guy and a stack exchange post or something like that. When you first start something you don't know it's going to be what it becomes and don't necessarily think about the privacy/security component of it at that time until after it's too late. So law enforcement definitely could have found that if they had tried.
Of course that doesn't justify ddosing them, and whats more, it's fairly obvious from an outside view that ddosing would never accomplish what they want. Even if they could permanently take down gyrovague through DDoS, that information was already republished elsewhere. There's no going back.
I feel for someone who was effectively doing a public service all on their own and this gyrovague blogger made it easier for others to magnify the exposure of the identity of this person, but they messed up when starting their site and left an easy trail of crumbs to their identity and that's just the unfortunate reality of it. In the end, that's going to do them in no matter what other blog posts are out there or not.
It wasn't my perception that was the implication. I think you're reaching on that.