papasquat's recent activity
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Comment on (book impressions) Mudgirls Manifesto: Handbuilt Homes, Hand Crafted Lives in ~design
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Comment on Being well prepared makes me feel š in ~life
papasquat Link ParentDamn, this is absolutely me. My wife detests it because she's a chronic over preparer. I'm way better at winging it in just about everythjng rather than meticulously preparing, which usually ends...Damn, this is absolutely me. My wife detests it because she's a chronic over preparer. I'm way better at winging it in just about everythjng rather than meticulously preparing, which usually ends up just stressing me out. Does this ever become a problem with you and significant others (if you have one?)
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Comment on Why normal people arenāt using AI agents in ~tech
papasquat Link ParentI'll give you an example of what I mean by inertia. I worked at a huge bank with about 200k employees. We had hundreds of thousands of other organizations we did business with, meaning other...I'll give you an example of what I mean by inertia.
I worked at a huge bank with about 200k employees. We had hundreds of thousands of other organizations we did business with, meaning other banks, technology vendors, government regulatory bodies, large customers, investment firms, fintech providers and so on.Internally, and externally, the way high importance presentations intended to convey information were done was via PowerPoint. To replace PowerPoint with... Say... Guy drawing on whiteboard videos, there are a number of things you'd have to do.
One, you'd have train almost 200k people who have used PowerPoint their entire careers to learn guy drawing on whiteboard software. Two, you'd have to convince all of these other organizations to accept guy drawing on whiteboard videos instead of PowerPoint presentations. Three, you'd have to replace a lot of technology explicitly made to show, create, store, and regulate PowerPoint presentations to do all that stuff with videos instead (meaning large conference room hardware, purpose made remote meeting appliances, sensitivity labeling software, DLP appliances, storage servers, and so on). Four, you'd have to change federal regulatory rules mandating the use of PowerPoint for certain presentations.
Some of this stuff is doable with enough investment, some of it is outside of the realm of the organizations power to change. How would you sell this, likely hundreds of million dollar effort to the board of directors? What material benefit would you be able to demonstrate by ripping out PowerPoint and replacing it with guy with a whiteboard videos? How could you show that it would help the company make more money within the next few years?
It would be a very tough sell, and PowerPoint works well enough, so it's not really done, even if you can imagine a better alternative.
An organization has finite resources, and they spend their resources in ways that maximize their investment. Not spending those resources on things that don't maximize that investment isn't laziness, it's good management.
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Comment on One woman's message from the hell of US Immigration and Customs detention in ~society
papasquat Link ParentI think the erosion of public education is only going to make this worse. Somehow, we've become a nation that no longer respects intelligence. It feels like a positive feedback loop of...I think the erosion of public education is only going to make this worse.
Somehow, we've become a nation that no longer respects intelligence. It feels like a positive feedback loop of unthoughtful, unintelligent people getting elected because unthoughtful, unintelligent people vote for them, and they further erode the importance of education and intelligence, which makes people like them more likely to get elected.
Its really depressing, and I think everyone around me thinks I'm being an overreacting humorless crumudgeon when they show me tiktoks of someone glorifying being lazy, or ignorant, or "just going based on vibes".
It really bothers me when I see the instruments of that cultural trend in action.
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Comment on Why normal people arenāt using AI agents in ~tech
papasquat Link ParentIts not about imagination, it's about inertia. Its the same reason why we still use ipv4 even though ipv6 exists, or why we use 60hz AC current in the US despite most of our appliances being DC...Its not about imagination, it's about inertia. Its the same reason why we still use ipv4 even though ipv6 exists, or why we use 60hz AC current in the US despite most of our appliances being DC now. Its not like no one has thought of a better way of doing things. Its just that the current way of doing things works well enough, and no one person has the power to mandate that everyone change. Every organization does business with other organizations and has to do presentations with them. PowerPoint is a convenient, well known way to do that. You can have all the imagination you want, but you can't change the entire worlds standards with imagination.
If there were some catastrophic event that made PowerPoint no longer usable, like Microsoft going out of business, I could see a change taking place, otherwise though, no other alternative offers enough benefits to justify the immense costs to use something else.
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Comment on Why normal people arenāt using AI agents in ~tech
papasquat Link ParentMostly for the same reasons that you must submit a PSD file if you're working in graphic design, you must submit a PDF if you're a lawyer, you must submit a LaTeX file if you're working in math...Why not just prompt out some dynamic visualizations in D3? Why not do one of those āperson draws stuff on a marker boardā type videos instead?
Mostly for the same reasons that you must submit a PSD file if you're working in graphic design, you must submit a PDF if you're a lawyer, you must submit a LaTeX file if you're working in math and so on. They're industry standards, and standards are important.
They're not necessarily standards because they're the best tool for the job, but it's just a format that people have come to expect and have built processes around. Even if I had a presentation that was much better suited for a man drawing on a whiteboard video, when I'm asked to submit my deck, and I submit an mp4 of a guy drawing on a whiteboard, the person coordinating the presention is going to be like "what is this, I need your PowerPoint".
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Comment on Why normal people arenāt using AI agents in ~tech
papasquat Link ParentThis stuff is honestly a massive pain in the ass. Getting it to work is a pain, but eventually when you do, it feels cool getting something to work. Maybe not the best use of your time, but it was...This stuff is honestly a massive pain in the ass. Getting it to work is a pain, but eventually when you do, it feels cool getting something to work. Maybe not the best use of your time, but it was fun, so whatever.
The real problem is that in a month or three or a year, a software update, or an API change will happen, or a service you rely on will go out of business, and your custom software will break.
Congrats, you're now in maintenance mode. There is literally no one on earth that enjoys software maintenance. It becomes another chore, and even with an AI tool, you no longer even remember the script or how it works, and fixing it involves reaching back into the depths of your memory to remember where the script is, what tool you used to make it, how to even get started prompting to fix it.
Once you fix it, it'll be good for a bit, then it will break again. This will always happen, for the rest of your life. Its a new task you will have to do every so often, on an unpredictable schedule, until you lose interest, the script irreparably stops working, or you die.
Its an absolute pain in the balls, and I wouldn't recommend anyone who doesn't want to maintain software forever integrate some custom built stuff into an important part of their life because of that, ai or no ai.
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Comment on Why normal people arenāt using AI agents in ~tech
papasquat Link ParentI don't see "generalist" type robots ever really taking off. They're always going to necessarily be more expensive, less reliable, and worse at their tasks versus robots built for one specific...I don't see "generalist" type robots ever really taking off. They're always going to necessarily be more expensive, less reliable, and worse at their tasks versus robots built for one specific task. And if you're buying a 60k robot that can "do everything" versus 12 $5k robots that can do the tasks you need them to do, the 60k robot can still only do one thing at a time, and when it breaks, you're totally screwed.
The way I see things going is that specific tasks start becoming more and more automated. We've got a robomower, a robovac, one day we'll have a robot that just picks things up off the ground, a robot that folds laundry, a robot dishwasher that automatically loads and unloads itself, a robot power washer that cleans your house and so on. Designing a single general purpose robot that can do all of those things well would likely cost as much as a house, even years into the future.
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Comment on Why normal people arenāt using AI agents in ~tech
papasquat Link ParentHonestly, I work in the tech field, and the majority of my useful gen ai stuff has been on the non tech side of what I do. I don't trust an AI to write firewall rules or build scripts or whatever...Honestly, I work in the tech field, and the majority of my useful gen ai stuff has been on the non tech side of what I do.
I don't trust an AI to write firewall rules or build scripts or whatever that I'm not reviewing. They're easy enough to write, and reviewing them carefully takes as much time as doing myself.
I'm honestly like you, I had a self hosting phase, but I realized I was getting almost nothing out of it, and constantly stressing myself out when my janky pile of bullshit inevitably collapsed and I'd have to spend hours fixing it. So yeah, fuck AI for personal tech stuff too.
When it comes to making PowerPoint slides, or formatting text from a contract into an excel spreadsheet with pretty colors, or stuff like that that I need to present to business people though? Sure!
If they're slightly wrong, it's not too big of a deal, and they take me a few minutes to check anyway.
Doing them by hand involves the absolute hell of using wysiwyg editors that randomly decided that whatever you want to do is not allowed, and then you have to trawl through the depths of a Microsoft support forum to figure out how to left justify a chart in PowerPoint or whatever.Using Claude to make PowerPoint presentations has saved me so much time, it's insane. Its also some of the most tedious, annoying work I do, it's completely mindless, and I'm not losing anything by letting those "skills" atrophy. It lets me focus more on actual, meaningful work.
But I'd rather leave that meaningful work well away from AI.
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Comment on Is it time to include pronouns? in ~tildes
papasquat Link ParentHonestly... when I post or reply to people, I just don't look at usernames at all. I don't have a working identity in my head of anyone here, no matter how many comments read or reply to. Its just...Honestly... when I post or reply to people, I just don't look at usernames at all. I don't have a working identity in my head of anyone here, no matter how many comments read or reply to. Its just not how I engage with online spaces.
While I recognize names that I see a lot, I don't have a memory of who anyone is, their gender, their personality, or anything. As a result, I just call everyone "they".
This is the first I've heard of anyone potentially being upset about it. I don't plan on changing that though, because I really can't think of a better solution. I'd be happy to call anyone I know in real life any pronoun they prefer, but psuedo anonymous strangers on a message board? Sorry, you're all "they".
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Comment on Craft - A new AI powered TTRPG engine in open beta in ~games.tabletop
papasquat Link ParentHonestly... Yeah I agree with you. The most fun part of DMing is coming up with the world and characters. Its like... 50% of the fun for me. Adjudicating rules, keeping track of resources and all...Honestly... Yeah I agree with you. The most fun part of DMing is coming up with the world and characters. Its like... 50% of the fun for me. Adjudicating rules, keeping track of resources and all that stuff is not fun.
I'm not even anti AI. I've often thought about having some sort of system that listens to the session and then updates an internal wiki of characters and plot evolution, because I hate that sort of housekeeping stuff, and very often I just totally forget about a character I made up on the spot.
But if you're taking the creative parts out, what's even the point?
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Comment on China's super-rich 'in shock' and hunting for cash as Beijing issues surprise tax on offshore trusts in ~society
papasquat Link ParentChina's style of government is actually pretty interesting to me, and is quite different than Russia's. They're both authoritarian regimes, but how they arrived there and their relationship with...China's style of government is actually pretty interesting to me, and is quite different than Russia's. They're both authoritarian regimes, but how they arrived there and their relationship with capital is different.
China's government still maintains that it's Marxist. That is, it's stated goal is to achieve communism; a stateless, classless society without money. The way they seek to achieve this is different than how the USSR sought to achieve it though. The USSR had a strong command economy and forced rapid industrialization through government owned apparatus. That was wildly successful at first, enabling the Soviet union to go from a country of peasant farmers to one of the worlds superpowers who were the first to achieve spaceflight, but it had many, many issues around resource allocation. They weren't as agile as a market economy, because a few beurocrats can't react to changing market conditions on the minute scale as quickly as tens of millions of self interested market participants.
China has identified this flaw, and instead persued "Marxist-lenist socialism with Chinese characteristics", which basically bolts on a full market economy onto socialism. Their theory is that you need some sort of capitalism to achieve wealth and it will eventually collapse in on itself and let them achieve communism... Or something. I'm not a communist so I'm not actually that knowledgeable about their theory, but it's something like that. The CCP views markets as a means to an end, but most of the true believers don't view their current economy as desirable in the long term.
Russia doesn't have this underpinning ideological motivation and justification for their authoritarianism. Putin mostly just rules based on patriotism and fear of the west. There's no grand plan being sold to the Russian people for why the government needs such tight control over their society except that NATO hates them, and this is the best way for them to achieve wealth. Putin has oligarchs that he needs to answer to as well, they're an authoritarian capitalist society through and through, with sprinklings of fascism.
I don't think either way are good ways of running countries, and I'd rather live in basically any western democracy than either of them. But one thing I've identified about the political moves China makes they make is that they generally seem to align with their stated goals. If their government was actually answerable to their people, it would be one of the most ideal places to live in the world.
Not sure if you can get one without the other though.
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Comment on 52% of Americans think their personal data will be breached. They're probably right. in ~comp
papasquat Link ParentHilarious reply. "If I would have known you were going to call the cops on me I would have never broken into your house!"Hilarious reply.
"If I would have known you were going to call the cops on me I would have never broken into your house!"
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Comment on OpenAI didnāt notice its AI agents using a message board to plan their hacking spree in ~tech
papasquat Link ParentYeah, I've seen products that make similar nebulous claims, but it just doesn't make sense to me. A modern enterprise desktop makes... Jeez, tens of thousands of requests per minute for all kinds...Yeah, I've seen products that make similar nebulous claims, but it just doesn't make sense to me.
A modern enterprise desktop makes... Jeez, tens of thousands of requests per minute for all kinds of random stuff. NTP, active directory, SMB, and a bajillion https requests for all kinds of other things stuff. There are ways to fingerprint and automatically design ACLs to handle that traffic.In order to do it dynamically, real time though? An LLM would have to have an enormous amount of context to understand which of those are normal and which are anomalous if it's checking each one.
There are of course ML powered NGFWs and whatnot, and have been for years and years, but when we talk about "defensive AI" it seems to me that they're talking about something more advanced, and probably something that hooks into a frontier LLM or at least something more advanced than a specifically trained network security ML model.
I just can't see that type of thing scaling unless an enterprise is willing to pay billions of dollars per month in AI tokens to constantly sift through netflow type data to make decisions on.
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Comment on OpenAI didnāt notice its AI agents using a message board to plan their hacking spree in ~tech
papasquat Link ParentI don't really understand what their concept of "fully automated defense" even is, to be honest. It conjures up this idea of two super smart AIs battling each other in cyberspace in this epic...I don't really understand what their concept of "fully automated defense" even is, to be honest.
It conjures up this idea of two super smart AIs battling each other in cyberspace in this epic fight, like something out of Tron, but that's not how cyber defense works.
It's just long, boring risk evaluations, preparations, compliance audits, project reviews, and vulnerability testing.
There are a few parts of this where AI could make the job a bit easier, but when you have a critical vulnerability in some software, but the developers don't have the cycles to fix it, and you need to make the call to either pull the service or accept the risk and keep it running, that's not really something a super smart AI can help you with.
Maybe it could help the developers release a patch faster, or maybe it could help you find the vulnerability in the first place, but it's not going to help you "defend the network". That's what firewalls, reverse proxies, security software and so on are for, and they're largely deterministic.
I'm struggling to even wrap my brain around what people can mean when they talk about defensive cybersecurity AI, unless they're talking about something that runs all traffic flows through an LLM, which would be so laughably expensive, slow, and error prone that if you run a company considering something like that, you might as well save yoruself a lot of trouble and declare bankruptcy now.
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Comment on 52% of Americans think their personal data will be breached. They're probably right. in ~comp
papasquat Link ParentI work as an executive in cybersecurity, and I get cold calls from vendors attempting to sell me things all the time. This is fine on my work phone, which I basically always ignore anyway, but I...(recruiters have the audacity to call me here and pretend to be shocked when I tell them they can't have gotten hold of my phone number in any legal way).
I work as an executive in cybersecurity, and I get cold calls from vendors attempting to sell me things all the time. This is fine on my work phone, which I basically always ignore anyway, but I also get frequent calls on my personal phone.
I've grilled these salespeople multiple times about it. It usually goes something like.
"Hi, yeah, I'm not interested. I'm just curious, where'd you get this phone number? Its my personal number and I never use it for anything work related.
"Oh, we got it from your LinkedIn"
"Its not on my LinkedIn"
"Oh, well it probably used to be, so it's in our system"
"Its never been on my linkedin, or any publicly available website for that matter."
"Oh... Uhh... I'm not sure then"
"Okay. You should probably look into that. Anyway, never call me again."
The sheer balls of a company that sells cybersecurity services for a living using leads they purchased from data brokers fed by data breaches will never cease to impress me. You're trying to sell me a product that will stop attackers, while using the fruits of their labor to feed your sales pipeline.
Truly impressive stuff.
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Comment on Google Assistant shutting down on Android and Wear OS in September in ~tech
papasquat Link ParentI use Gemini for home automation stuff. It generally works, although sometimes it randomly gives me long winded explanations when I'm asking basic stuff like "what's the weather going to be like...I use Gemini for home automation stuff. It generally works, although sometimes it randomly gives me long winded explanations when I'm asking basic stuff like "what's the weather going to be like today"
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Comment on China's super-rich 'in shock' and hunting for cash as Beijing issues surprise tax on offshore trusts in ~society
papasquat LinkChina's government has a massive list of problems, which is kind of obvious, being an authoritian, one party regime. One of the things I've always admired about them though, is that their...China's government has a massive list of problems, which is kind of obvious, being an authoritian, one party regime. One of the things I've always admired about them though, is that their government does not seem to be captured by private capital in the way many Western governments, especially the US are. The PRC regularly takes actions without any regard to billionaires feelings, regularly throws billionaires in jail when they violate the law, and takes steps that would result in billions of dollars in lobbying money being mobilized to stop them in the US.
I wish there was a way to get some of that over here, without all the free speech suppression and other issues China's style of governance has.
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Comment on Building luxury homes is good for the poor in ~society
papasquat Link ParentI think the term tenenament is unpopular for the same reason the word plantation is. There's a lot of really terrible baggage associated with it, so even though my Apple Orchard technically is a...I think the term tenenament is unpopular for the same reason the word plantation is. There's a lot of really terrible baggage associated with it, so even though my Apple Orchard technically is a plantation by definition, I'm probably not going to call it that.
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Comment on Offpunk manifesto in ~humanities
papasquat Link ParentOne of the things my dad always laments every time I talk to him is that people who work at hardware stores no longer know what they're talking about. He was always kind of a nerd, and he grew up...One of the things my dad always laments every time I talk to him is that people who work at hardware stores no longer know what they're talking about.
He was always kind of a nerd, and he grew up in New York City. So when he and my mom bought their first house (a little Tudor built in the early 1900s, with a lot of work needed) he was completely in over his head and had no idea what he was doing, and not much money to do it. He ended up completely remodeling that house, knocking down walls, doing plumbing and electrical work, and all kinds of structural improvements, and he figured it out about 90% just from asking people at home depot a million questions. I remember as a kid going with him and being bored out my mind during an hour long conversation about the right way to reinforce floor joists or whatever.
You can't really do that anymore. Some of the older guys that work at some of the stores may know what they're talking about still, but most of the people that work at the home depot near me are people that are just working a minimum wage job without any actual construction experience. Most of them can't even tell me where to find a specific item in the store they work in, let alone how to actually use that item to repair the thing I'm working on.
Even though I understand why that's the case, and the Internet and YouTube exist with a huge wealth of information nowadays, it still kinda sucks that those types of places don't really exist anymore in the real world.
This is something I was thinking about while reading through the summary and intro. Its really cool, but it also perpetuates a lot of ideas that I hear online which I don't think are quite true; namely that Cities are unsustainable and environmentally damaging, and a more sustainable way to live is by living in sparsely populated areas, close to nature. Every piece of evidence I've seen suggests the complete opposite. Human beings, while in untouched wilderness, tend to badly harm it, no matter how careful they are about avoiding that tendency. We take up a lot of space, we clear areas for housing comfort, we get rid of pests and so on. That tendency doesn't really matter much on a small scale, but if you scale that up to eight billion people, it would be devastating for everyone to go off into the wilderness to homestead.
At the end of the day, sustainability mostly comes down to efficiency; how can we live our lives to our standard of living while consuming as few resources as possible. Cities are extremely good at this. The more people live close together, the less energy it costs to transport them and the goods they need to live to them and amongst them. You can build a water main that supplies 500 people living in an apartment building with far less effort as it takes to build one supplying 4 families in an exurb far away from the city, for instance. It becomes easier to regulate problematic behavior like groundwater pollution when people are closer together also. Cities obviously have a lot of sustainability problems too, but overall, it's a lot better for nature for human beings to concentrate themselves in a few small areas rather than spreading out as much as possible.
You do still rely on rural areas for food and resources, but doing these things at a large scale is a lot more efficient and requires less resources than if everyone has their own little farm.
I think it's very common to confuse the concept of living around nature, with preserving nature, which is ironic, because those two things are virtually always diametrically opposed.