Notices by Paco Hope (paco@infosec.exchange)

@cadusilva Can you maybe reply to your own message with some receipts? I want to believe you, but I don’t want to believe so badly that I’m gonna embark on 5 research trips.

Wow. Richard Dawkins off the deep end.
‘So my own position is: “If these machines are not conscious, what more could it possibly take to convince you that they are?”’

First he goes on and on about the Turing test like it is some kind of law handed down. Like, the fact that sequences of output tokens so closely resemble speech they might pass Turing’s test. He views a moving of the goalpost (Turing’s test apparently isn’t enough to distinguish consciousness) as unreasonable. Like Turing got it right and it’s wrong to say otherwise.

And then he has these risible conversations: ‘I then asked her whether, when she read my novel, she read the first word before the last word. No, she read the whole book simultaneously.’ Let’s not ignore the ‘she’. The thing has a name. ‘Claude.’ It implies a gender. But Richard Dawkins genders it and genders it female. I don’t think that’s a random thing.

We know how computers work. It absolutely does read the book byte-by-byte, in a sequential series of input tokens. It does not matter that the thing output some words that said otherwise. It is wrong. Why doesn’t it matter that the output is plainly incorrect? Where does the disconnection between the reality and the words come into the picture?

This is just drivel.

https://archive.is/6RdK9

In his latest “Pivot to AI” OpenAI faces cash crunch in 2026 as bills come due, @davidgerard (accurately) says: “#OpenAI works by setting as much money as it can on fire, as fast as possible.”

But I want to know: if we had $200B in, say, $100 notes, and we literally set them on fire:

• would it dispose of the money faster? How long would it take?
• would the impact on the environment be worse or less bad?

I gotta think there is someone on the #fediverse with the wherewithal to figure this out. Surely if we boost this, it will nerdsnipe the right person and we will learn the answer.

@thief_of_fire of course they did. It’s just that nobody gave THOSE folks billions of dollars swearing that it was the wave of the future that it would save us all. We just posted it on the internet for laughs.

I’m helping my elderly mother (93) adapt to a new computer. It’s an iMac. She’s had Mac’s for the last 25 years.

Mostly this is fine. But man, Apple has completely lost their way with accessibility. Some things, obviously are world-leading. I don’t want to ignore that.

But the fucking mouse gestures. In Apple Mail you cannot turn off left-right swipe gestures. My mother, with her arthritic hands, cannot reliably do just vertical. It tends to be diagonal. Swiping on a mouse is great. But we need LESS gesture.

In Apple mail the little set of buttons that allows you to see the existence of attachments and download them only appears if you move the mouse. If you leave the mouse alone a few seconds, it disappears. So trying to tell her where to look for something? It disappears before I can get her to focus on it.

"It's called vibe plumbing. I'm not even a plumber. Soon, all swimming pools will be done this way! Get onboard or get left behind."

(a real life version of the 'vibe construction' comic from https://mandatoryrollercoaster.com/). Photo taken from plumbers fails)

I just saw the most amazingly corporate expression of "we did what the bosses wanted us to do, even though the research didn't support that." The actual phrase was:

The research employed a methodology that prioritized stakeholder voice over researcher interpretation.

I wonder if a data scientist slipped that in to make it clear to other folks how this happened. You don't have to write stuff like this if the boss wants to do what the research says is a good idea. You only have to write this if the research says one thing and the boss says another.

@skinnylatte You will master British English when you can use “piss” in all its many forms.

“Taking a piss” means the same to US and UK speakers. “Taking the piss” is something else entirely. And that’s the sense involved in a “piss take.”

But if someone in the US is “pissed” they are angry. In the UK, they’re drunk. A party with a lot of alcohol is a “piss up,” from which we get the fantastic insult “he’s so dumb he couldn’t organise a piss-up in a brewery”

Two countries separated by a common language. 😜

@blogdiva I’m old enough to have played a version of Tetris that had a “boss key” that paused your game and switched to a screen that looked like Lotus 123. 😀

Holy shit this is detailed. Can you believe the hubris to silently collect all this information on users?

#privacy

https://browsergate.eu/how-it-works/

When I look at #artemis I don’t think about a billionaire or a company. I think about my country. And for a fleeting moment I don’t feel shame. This is what it feels like when we, as a society, accomplish something. We don’t focus on some singular person. We feel this whole country pride.

How many bolds could a kobold ko
If a kobold could kobolds

RE: https://flipboard.com/@itvnews/itv-news-im7uoakfz/-/a-lnhr2nKcRvK8vH3ESRGAFw%3Aa%3A3980387611-%2F0

I only just realised how weird this phrase is, using the word chair as a verb. “He plans to chair the cabinet.” “Oh yeah? I plan to loveseat the refrigerator.”

@billyjoebowers Not just stealing it. Literally detonating it. Diverting from social good to bombs that explode. Quite literally burning money instead of helping people.

#uspol #trump

In making a lame joke, I thought up the IP 192.0.2.5. I seem to recall that this subnet (but I thought it was this specific IP) was the default in early Sun Unix systems. Like all the Sun3’s or whatever. And since so many people were using it as their real IP, that’s the reason they had to make this range private.

The way I remember the story is that they created this “documentation” range as an official range as an excuse to block that subnet.

Having searched on the internet a bit, I can’t find any old Internet lore that has anything to do with this. Is any part of what I remember accurate? Was it just the IETF papering over a problem created by Sun’s defaults? Was it something else?

@pluralistic
No company has announced “thanks to AI, we have the same number of employees, but we have launched zillions of new services and are growing our product lines because of all the time our people get to spend innovating.”

I don’t know why that is.

The reason AI phishing emails are effective is because they’re realistic? Why are they realistic? Because all these companies are writing legit emails with the same AI bullshit. If you as Claude to write the normal customer service emails, and then the bad guy asks Claude to write the same thing, it will be really similar.

Scientists have detected another possible Monday arriving as early as next week. If true, this will be the 9th Monday this year. They warn that there are a little over 3 days left to prepare.

Mondays can be bad. Hug those you love and help them through it. Spend these remaining days wisely.

Sitting on a plane at 6:00pm. It’s snowing hard outside IAD. Plane is due to take off at 6:20 and all looks normal. I just got a text telling me the flight is leaving 2 hours late and departing at 8:00pm. Little tag line at the bottom of the text says “powered by GenAI”

It’s ridiculous because the weather can’t possibly be BETTER 2 hours from now. If we don’t take off soon, we aren’t taking off today.

It’s offering to let me rebook. I am sitting on the plane with my seatbelt fastened. I cannot actually rebook.

3 minutes later, I get a message saying we are leaving 8 minutes late at 6:28. The “powered by GenAI” is conspicuously absent from that update.

@RickiTarr in about 2014 I did a pen test on a Belgian bank’s ATMs. They were running Windows XP Service Pack 2. I was like “you know there was a third one, right?” SP3 was 2008. Of course, I had a long pile of other findings too. When I came back in 2015, all they had accomplished in a year was upgrading to SP3. Not one other thing.

I generally don’t use that bank’s ATMs if I’m in Belgium.