Greg's recent activity
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Comment on AntiRender: remove the glossy shine on architectural renderings in ~tech
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Comment on Lawsuit alleges that WhatsApp has no end-to-end encryption in ~tech
Greg (edited )Link ParentIt’s one of the most used apps out there - three billion users, about a third of the entire planet - and a huge number of security researchers are actively looking at its behaviour, trying to hack...It’s one of the most used apps out there - three billion users, about a third of the entire planet - and a huge number of security researchers are actively looking at its behaviour, trying to hack it, trying to reverse engineer it, trying to interoperate with it (some even with Meta’s begrudging blessing, thanks to the EU) etc. etc.
That’s not to say it couldn’t be sending the keys in some subtle way, and I have absolutely zero trust in Meta, but after seeing enough absolutely insanely subtle vulnerabilities in much more niche software picked up and presented at Defcon, I’d say balance of probabilities is that a target this size is probably fine if we haven’t heard otherwise. I still use Signal and try to convince everyone I can to do the same, though!
[Edit] Clarity
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Comment on USB-C PD all the things! in ~tech
Greg (edited )Link ParentWeirdly, the really cheap no-brand USB-C to barrel adapters do have a tiny seven segment display built in, even though they’re fixed voltage. Power readout is nice, I guess, but it seems like an...Weirdly, the really cheap no-brand USB-C to barrel adapters do have a tiny seven segment display built in, even though they’re fixed voltage. Power readout is nice, I guess, but it seems like an odd design choice that would’ve worked much better on something reconfigurable like this!
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Comment on USB-C PD all the things! in ~tech
Greg Link ParentI wonder if the programmable USB-C bit knows which of the barrel jack extensions it’s attached to? If you can set a profile per barrel jack I can see that as a nice reason for using the more...I wonder if the programmable USB-C bit knows which of the barrel jack extensions it’s attached to? If you can set a profile per barrel jack I can see that as a nice reason for using the more complex adapter in the middle.
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Comment on USB-C PD all the things! in ~tech
Greg LinkIf anyone's looking for the general-case version of this, "USB-C trigger board" is the search term you need - they tend to just be bare boards not too much bigger than the USB-C port itself, with...If anyone's looking for the general-case version of this, "USB-C trigger board" is the search term you need - they tend to just be bare boards not too much bigger than the USB-C port itself, with solder pads or screw terminals for the output and dip switches or traces to bridge to set the voltage. They're also like $0.50 each if you buy a multipack.
The version in the video looks cool too, and for a lot of uses there's solid value in a neat packaged ready to go solution, so no intention to say anything against it if it's what you're looking for. But there have been enough occasions that I've needed something that turned out to be a totally standard part and I just didn't know it existed/didn't know what it was called that it seemed worth pointing out!
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Comment on Super Monkey Ball web game in ~games
Greg Link ParentUhhh... yes, I definitely intended that as an extreme deep cut and didn't just have a minor existential crisis over the fact that I'm sure I remember having it on a Dreamcast demo disc back in the...Uhhh... yes, I definitely intended that as an extreme deep cut and didn't just have a minor existential crisis over the fact that I'm sure I remember having it on a Dreamcast demo disc back in the day! (Seriously though TIL - I could've sworn it was a Dreamcast release, but at a guess I'm probably remembering seeing it hyped in ye olde dead tree gaming magazines of the era as an upcoming title while they were still trying to make
fetchDreamcast a thing, and then conflating that with eventually actually playing it on a GameCube at a friend's house or something after Sega shifted to software-only) -
Comment on Amazon’s promotion of ‘Melania’ has critics questioning its motives (Amazon has spent 35M on marketing on top of its 40M budget) in ~movies
Greg Link ParentProblem is, you’ve got to get a critical mass of the population on side for anything to actually be a solution. And more specifically, on side in a principled support of greater equality way, not...Problem is, you’ve got to get a critical mass of the population on side for anything to actually be a solution. And more specifically, on side in a principled support of greater equality way, not in an “I might be on top one day, and then people like me had better watch out” way.
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Comment on Super Monkey Ball web game in ~games
Greg LinkThis is so cool! I was going to say someone should add accelerometer control, then I realised there’s a dropdown for control type already. And then it just kept switching back to “touchscreen” for...This is so cool! I was going to say someone should add accelerometer control, then I realised there’s a dropdown for control type already. And then it just kept switching back to “touchscreen” for me so I haven’t been able to try that setting out after all… But still, it runs, it’s a Dreamcast game, it’s in my browser - all around excellent.
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Comment on Why there's no European Google? in ~tech
Greg (edited )Link ParentDeepmind are British, although they were bought by Google a fair way back, so I guess they’ve become American through acquisition? Same goes for Arm - UK company that’s done very foundational...Deepmind are British, although they were bought by Google a fair way back, so I guess they’ve become American through acquisition? Same goes for Arm - UK company that’s done very foundational technical work but is now owned by offshore capital, with ongoing acquisition attempts from US tech giants.
I agree with you about the article being a bit skewed, perhaps even bordering on smug, but I think the lack of hyperscalers is the opposite to the example I’d choose! The incentive structure for those guys is to capture as much of the market as possible, increase prices as far as they’re able, and make it as hard as they can for customers to leave - all “value creation” and success in the economic sense, but not something that I’d say we actually need or want in terms of making things better for developers or end users. I want a thriving competitive market of cross-compatible small players who actually have to compete on price or service!
I don’t have time to write out the whole essay in my head - maybe I’ll draft it as a standalone post one of these days - but I do think that this touches on something really important: the way we define value, and the way we incentivise “success”. Because what the article absolutely does get right is how much real innovation comes out of university research labs, open source developers, small scrappy organisations, and occasionally even government initiatives. But sharing and using those innovations is seen as failure from an economic perspective - or at best, hidden and unquantified success, like the wider business impact of all those billions of devices running Linux - whereas taking innovations from the original creators, locking them away, and charging what the market will bear is seen as success. Breaking compatibility to make it hard for customers to leave is seen as success. Acquiring competitors and increasing prices is seen as success.
The more time I spend in the world of science, technology, and research, the more convinced I am that large companies are a net drag on overall progress - not because they’re inherently evil, or even because they explicitly intend to stand in the way of positive developments, but because acting in a way where that’s a major side effect is the rational move from their perspective. Motivated nerds, when given sufficient resources, make actual progress driven by a combination of self-actualisation and ego - often for decent but not amazing compensation in the world of academia. Companies and investors at a small enough scale figure out how to package and distribute those innovations in a way that’s palatable to the world, which academics are often otherwise broadly terrible at. But companies at a larger scale are directly driven to buy out those smaller ones, with the explicit goal of reducing competition, increasing prices, or both.
[Edit] A quote from a video I linked a few weeks back says it better and more succinctly than I can, actually:
Who’s going to stand up for that broke PhD student who invented something amazing? Who is going to stand up for works that no one else is talking about? This is what is valuable in the world. This is what pushes humanity forward. This is what makes the world better for us. But there is a problem. It doesn’t make crazy money. [...] Just think about it: from a business point of view, taking a bit longer to give you a better, more detailed video about a paper is not a virtue. It is an operational defect that needs to be solved immediately. But not around here it isn’t.
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Comment on Why there's no European Google? in ~tech
Greg Link ParentOut of interest, what kind of services would you miss if you had to use Hetzner or Scaleway rather than AWS or GCP? I’ve always kind of written off any of the vendor-specific services because of...Out of interest, what kind of services would you miss if you had to use Hetzner or Scaleway rather than AWS or GCP?
I’ve always kind of written off any of the vendor-specific services because of those exact interoperability/lock-in problems you mention - maybe it’s a case of me not missing what I never had, but to me they’ve always seemed proprietary for the sake of being proprietary. I don’t see a huge amount of innovation in those services (but again, that could be unfamiliarity or general dislike colouring my view, so I’m genuinely interested in how people use them!), they tend to strike me as being mostly driven by revenue targets at the provider side.
Things like postgres, docker, terraform, Linux itself - and yeah, the conceptual idea of cloud services allowing the hardware to be rented dynamically by the minute or hour rather than by the month or bought outright - all provide a ton of value to me in the “allowing me to do things I otherwise couldn’t” sense, but hyperscalers thankfully don’t have a monopoly on any of those.
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Comment on Amazon is closing its Fresh grocery, Go convenience stores in the US in ~finance
Greg Link ParentThis is exactly my experience! I’m sure the choice of what goes on the shelves is algorithmically optimised to within an inch of its life, but I’m not convinced that the target function they were...This is exactly my experience! I’m sure the choice of what goes on the shelves is algorithmically optimised to within an inch of its life, but I’m not convinced that the target function they were using was optimised all that well for the psychology of bricks and mortar retail…
Same experience with it getting quickly run down too - again, at a guess, that’s what you end up with when you’re used to staffing non-customer-facing warehouses rather than spaces where people are judging the brand on how neat and inviting it seems.
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Comment on Federal officers kill another citizen in Minneapolis, National Guard activated in ~society
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Comment on Federal officers kill another citizen in Minneapolis, National Guard activated in ~society
Greg LinkLook at Stephen Miller and Kristi Noem’s outright lies in response to their own agents murdering a peaceful citizen, even in the face of clear video evidence. Look at the funding, decision making,...Look at Stephen Miller and Kristi Noem’s outright lies in response to their own agents murdering a peaceful citizen, even in the face of clear video evidence. Look at the funding, decision making, and explicit public encouragement they have given to create the situation in the first place.
Now look ahead and realise that these same people will still be running the country when the next elections roll around. This is the time to start considering how to protect those elections from a government that is not beholden to the law, and will use violence, up to and including outright state-sanctioned murder of innocent people without consequence, to get their way.
I’m not the person to suggest how to secure the voting process, because I genuinely don’t know. But if you’re in the US and unable or unwilling to leave, you’re going to need to face the issue of electoral interference far above the level that “oh, but the states control voting, it’s safe from the federal government” will be able to account for. Seems like something worth organising against and planning to mitigate ahead of time, rather than assuming that the people condoning shootings in the street would draw the line at ballot stuffing.
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Comment on Federal officers kill another citizen in Minneapolis, National Guard activated in ~society
Greg (edited )Link ParentTheir update to acknowledge the death also made it significantly more passive and removed any indication of the perpetrators. Perhaps a hollow gesture, but “Man is shot and killed by ICE officers...Their update to acknowledge the death also made it significantly more passive and removed any indication of the perpetrators.
Perhaps a hollow gesture, but “Man is shot and killed by ICE officers during Minneapolis immigration crackdown, National Guard activated” at least restores that important detail?
[Edit] Thank you to whoever updated it again - restoring the active voice rather than just adding the detail to the old title is even better!
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Comment on The assistant axis: situating and stabilizing the character of large language models in ~tech
Greg Link ParentIt comes with a research paper and github repo to replicate the work (including chat transcripts), if those make it more palatable to you? There should at least be enough info there to examine...It comes with a research paper and github repo to replicate the work (including chat transcripts), if those make it more palatable to you? There should at least be enough info there to examine with a critical eye, which I do agree is important.
That said, I’m personally fine with the blog posts being shared - I’ll skim them for enough info to say “oh, cool, ‘persona’ is baked into a couple of hundred vectors that are similar between models, that’s interesting!” in the same way I’d skim the abstract if the link went straight to a paper I don’t have time to read in full. That’s as much weight as I’m giving them, and I think they tend to be more or less fine to that end? Summaries of interesting research I might otherwise not have heard about, presented by a marketing team.
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Comment on Cory Doctorow | AI companies will fail. We can salvage something from the wreckage. in ~tech
Greg Link Parent… That’s exactly what I meant by “specific”. Not “unusual”, not “unexpected”, certainly not “wrong” - but specific. An assumption that there is a relatively narrowly defined meaning that’s correct...I wouldn't call them "extremely specific" though just because they aren't what you happen to be used to
…
For example, the idea that memorisation does not automatically produce knowledge even when accurately and appropriately retrieved was part of my secondary education that everyone in my country receives
That’s exactly what I meant by “specific”. Not “unusual”, not “unexpected”, certainly not “wrong” - but specific. An assumption that there is a relatively narrowly defined meaning that’s correct for a specific term, rather than a breadth of possible implications and connotations from the same word that can all be considered equally valid.
It's not some novel fringe idea where I come from, and I've found the distinction frequently useful in everyday life, which is why I'm applying it now. From my perspective it feels a tad brow-raising that some clearly intelligent and thoughtful people are baffled about it to this extent, and that it gets so lightheartedly deemed "nitpicking", in other words a useless way to think.
I’ll say it more directly, in response to this: we aren’t missing the concepts you’re using. We aren’t lacking the theory of mind to recognise the difference between retaining a fact and conceptualising, generalising, or understanding it. We aren’t dismissing the value of making these distinctions. We’re just saying that our definitions of the verb “to know” don’t inherently carry that meaning without further clarification.
Aside from the strong American representation, possibly Tildes also has more tech-oriented people than humanists?
Almost certainly, and that does impact how we approach and think about the world. But perhaps not quite to the extent that you’re thinking it does!
In the context of your reply, I’d guess that Tildes also has a lot more people who were taught differently in high school, and use English with different phrasing and connotation to what you’re used to, even when talking about conceptually similar things.
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Comment on Cory Doctorow | AI companies will fail. We can salvage something from the wreckage. in ~tech
Greg Link ParentNot the person you replied to, but I'd certainly say that one's a straightforward yes! I'd probably use the word "understanding" as a way to distinguish from "knowing" if I were trying to...Not the person you replied to, but I'd certainly say that one's a straightforward yes! I'd probably use the word "understanding" as a way to distinguish from "knowing" if I were trying to communicate a difference between memorisation and mastery, but I'd also quite plausibly use both of those words pretty much interchangeably if I were just talking normally and not specifically focusing on the nuance.
For what it's worth, reading your replies across this thread, I do see some quite interesting ideas there - but I do also get the impression that you have extremely specific definitions in your mind for certain words, and maybe aren't realising that other people are using or reading the same words without the exact same meaning in mind. Not a situation where either person is necessarily right or wrong, more just the natural fuzziness and subjectivity of communication!
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Comment on Cory Doctorow | AI companies will fail. We can salvage something from the wreckage. in ~tech
Greg Link ParentThe difficulty here is that they're necessary in the sense of "our current economic system won't give you food and shelter if you don't have a job", but often not necessary in the sense of "the...The difficulty here is that they're necessary in the sense of "our current economic system won't give you food and shelter if you don't have a job", but often not necessary in the sense of "the work you're doing is needed for a productive, thriving world".
I think I get where you're coming from, but the actual impact of phrasing it as "jobs are valuable" is that 99% of your audience will just hear it as support for the already ingrained idea that "having a job" is worthy, noble, or productive in and of itself. If we're going to have even the slightest hope of building support for evidence-based work reform, the first barrier to cross is breaking the idea that "40 hour per week job == good, contributing, beneficial" and "any other arrangement == bad, lazy, burdensome".
I think "jobs are not inherently valuable" is at least a clear opening statement for that conversation - as is "jobs are currently a necessary evil", if you prefer an alternative way of framing the same thing. Suggesting that their necessity gives them value, but then trying to explain to people that there's a giant asterisk there to clarify that the necessity is artificial, and "valuable" doesn't mean what the majority of them are interpreting it to mean, just seems like a very difficult way to communicate the point.
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Comment on Cory Doctorow | AI companies will fail. We can salvage something from the wreckage. in ~tech
Greg Link ParentI'm not conceptually against regulating the tech, assuming it's done in a sensible way by people who understand the nuances of both the technology and the law (a big ask, I know!). I just don't...I'm not conceptually against regulating the tech, assuming it's done in a sensible way by people who understand the nuances of both the technology and the law (a big ask, I know!). I just don't like the faulty premise coming in as a foundation of the argument, because it makes it a lot harder to get to a logically consistent endpoint - even if it's coincidentally being used in support of a reasonable point on this occasion.
Same way I wouldn't want a road safety policy to be based on the idea that red cars are faster, even if it happened to end up getting to a policy I agree with, you know? If we let that kind of thing pass, it just sets up for deeper and more damaging misunderstandings later.
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Comment on Why London’s chimney sweeps are enjoying a resurgence in ~life
Greg (edited )LinkI can't speak for the UK as a whole, but for London specifically I'd bet this is the actual reasoning 95% of the time: Energy costs and general fearfulness make for a good narrative, and they...I can't speak for the UK as a whole, but for London specifically I'd bet this is the actual reasoning 95% of the time:
“People enjoy sitting in front of a fire,” he said. “You can shut the curtains, light a fire and it doesn’t really matter what’s going on outside. People have a glass of wine, the fire’s alight, they read a book. I guess they switch off.”
Energy costs and general fearfulness make for a good narrative, and they really are having a big impact on a lot of people's lives - but if you've got a working fireplace in London that means you (a) own a house, (b) an entire house, that hasn't been subdivided into flats in the last 100+ years, (c) and it's been well maintained enough that whole time that it still has intact period features today. Think Brooklyn Brownstone, or Bay Area townhouse, if you're coming from a US perspective.
It's not absurd super rich territory or anything, but it's comfortably upper middle class. Software developer married to a doctor, that kind of vibe. The kind of people who, not to put too fine a point on it, happen to have a magnum of champagne and a picture from someone's recent ski trip on the mantlepiece when the NYT drops in to take photos.
[Edit] I mean no shade by that, BTW. It's a lovely cosy way to set up the living room if you can! I just don't want people getting the impression that it's some kind of Victorian-era recession indicator. The lines outside the local food bank, on the other hand... :/
I like this idea a lot! Seems like a creative use for tech that by definition makes a best guess - there's something quite satisfying about "let's set this pessimistic guess against your marketing department's overly-optimistic one".
Honestly I think a decent architect would probably value something like this, even though I wouldn't expect to see them releasing the images publicly (and I imagine they're already considering the same realities of weathering and maintenance already if they're actually decent!). The third example makes me think yeah, whoever laid out that park probably was already considering the grey miserable days, and they've done a solid job even then.