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thesmokingman

@ thesmokingman @programming.dev

Posts
1
Comments
375
Joined
3 yr. ago

  • Schools are using drones to stop mass shootings

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  • I might find this mildly interesting if the technology had been deployed during an active shooting and prevented it. As it stands, this is just a shitty advertisement for a shitty product that doesn’t address real issues and hasn’t been tested. Used to be you could pay some shadow marketers on Reddit for this kind of organic astroturfing. Kinda surprising it made its way here for free.

  • TIL Jeffrey Epstein may have held powerful influence over the nation's largest sex offender database via his ties to Leon Black

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  • This is exactly like the whole Lifetouch story. It beggars belief.

    Rackspace is, and has been, ISO 27001 certified. Part of that means they can’t directly access customer data. You didn’t link any documents covering the contract that “requires” Rackspace hosting; my base assumption is they’re normal contracts that define hosting for regulatory purposes. None of the documents you’ve linked show Apollo had access to Rackspace infrastructure much less encrypted customer data on Rackspace doesn’t have keys for. The pedo employee had CSAM which does not provide Apollo access to Rackspace infrastructure much less encrypted customer data Rackspace doesn’t have keys for.

    Just like with Lifetouch, if you can show that somehow the equity owners Apollo had direct access to the infrastructure of their investments and somehow managed to either hide or justify it during multiple security audits spanning a decade and somehow got access to customer encryption keys, it’s a possibility. I’m not even using Occam’s razor here; there’s genuinely nothing to even consider hanging a hat on here.

    On the other hand, if Leon Black had direct access to the company running the database, all bets are off. Law enforcement shit gets to sidestep audit shit in dumb ways. But if that were the case, we wouldn’t need Rackspace as the incredibly tenuous connection because he would have had direct access.

  • I'm struggling to think of any online services for which I'd be willing to verify my identity or age

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  • Absolutely valid. In the context of identity verification, I trust ID.me more than random companies that do not have government contracts because government contracts come with security and compliance regulations that require regular audit and make the chances of breach less likely. In either case, it’s a private company and, as any security nut would have told you, when it gets sold all bets are off like 23andme. Even more importantly, in the US, any kind of ID verification is a terrible idea, government or private, because we have no data regulation or privacy constraints. I call out the US here because we have no GDPR equivalent (CCPA wouldn’t hold up to federal data). Even if ID verification were conducted by the government, it can still be used for gnarly shit like we saw with ICE and DOGE.

    On a sliding scale of evil, ID.me is the evil I know will currently fight to continue remaining the only evil which is the only solace I have in the US.

  • I'm struggling to think of any online services for which I'd be willing to verify my identity or age

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  • The theme of this post is “what things online would I be okay giving my government ID to.” The author did not mention government services in the article, so I brought those up and differentiated which government services I think are reasonable for ID verification. In the US, social security is basically a retirement fund and a huge target for scammers. I’m willing to verify there or for my taxes (although those should just be done for me; different argument). A data portal eg census data is not something I am willing to verify my ID for because it should be public. US trademarks, for example, now require ID verification for an account. An account gives expands some access on the website and allows the ability to file. If I file a trademark, I am fine with verifying my identity. If I make an account, I don’t need to verify my identity until I file.

    I didn’t mention picture sharing websites because I agree with the author’s stance.

  • I'm struggling to think of any online services for which I'd be willing to verify my identity or age

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  • In the US it is becoming common for federal services to require ID.me verification. I’ve never really had a problem with social security requiring ID verification. I do have a problem with data portals requiring it.

  • NBC Interview abruptly ends after New Yorker blames private equity and landlords for the city's issues

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  • You and I are in agreement; the user I responded to seemed to be implying otherwise.

    Edit: I think it’s a bit strong to say it’s “a literal white supremacist talking point.” Your average boomer is going to mistakenly associate it with Voltaire. I think folks that are some level below terminally online have seen one of the many pieces pointing out its origin. Away from the author, it could stand on its own merits which is why “kids with cancer” is a funny response to it. In the US, at least, I haven’t seen a lot of discussion from the white supremacists who run the government on this quote which further makes me question if it’s a literal talking point. Perhaps you are aware of groups that are actively pushing it? If not, it’s a bit more reasonable to say what the first response in this thread said. Be careful.

  • Push to eliminate sales tax on food and groceries in Missouri runs into heavy resistance

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  • Yeah fuck the bill’s sponsor and her desire to reduce costs for a family of four by $50 every month

    State Sen. Mary Elizabeth Coleman, an Arnold Republican, said the bill is an attempt to increase affordability for Missourians as prices rise.

    “Missourians are paying more and more for necessities,” Coleman said. “Most of us agree fundamentally that essential services should not be funded on the backs of the poor.”

    Coleman said a family of four would save $54 per month with the removal of grocery sales tax.

  • NBC Interview abruptly ends after New Yorker blames private equity and landlords for the city's issues

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  • Why does that preclude it from being in the zeitgeist?

  • TOML

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  • TOML

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  • Phoebe Gates wants her $185 million AI startup to succeed with 'no ties to my privilege or my last name': 'I have a chip on my shoulder' | Fortune

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  • Ohhhhhh yeah this is just 100% LLM garbage. No machine learning. Forgive me; I don’t often talk to people that understand the difference so my default is human vs LLM not LLM vs <insert something AI that isn’t LLM>. Trying to explain machine learning vs LLM summaries to data company business executives wears you down.

    Edit: also my frame of mind was on the more recent Waymo “our AI just goes to a human when it’s hard” news that followed the Amazon “it was always a Mechanical Turk” news which is why I jumped to human.

  • Phoebe Gates wants her $185 million AI startup to succeed with 'no ties to my privilege or my last name': 'I have a chip on my shoulder' | Fortune

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  • I’d be surprised if a human were behind it. This is exactly the kind of thing that can be vibe coded pretty fast and is mostly just reselling fancy Google searches through an LLM. I did a quick skim of the website and it’s just a bunch of items scraped from big brands with lots of similar looking images of other products. There’s too many sites for me to really believe they’ve made integrations with all of them.

    The insane valuation is because of her name not because the tech is good. The only way to make money on this is the customer data. The margin on that is going to be fucking minuscule especially once LLM costs start going up so they can make money. This adds nothing of value on top so it will go away almost immediately.

  • Phoebe Gates wants her $185 million AI startup to succeed with 'no ties to my privilege or my last name': 'I have a chip on my shoulder' | Fortune

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  • The shopping assistant plugs into browsers like Chrome and Safari to compare prices and surface deals across tens of thousands of retail and resale sites in real time. It essentially serves as your own personal deal finder: Say you’re looking at a $200 dress from Anthropologie, Phia can find and compare prices at secondhand sellers to help customers find a better price.

    Gates and Kianni first brainstormed startup ideas in their Stanford dorm room, cycling through concepts before landing on a consumer tool that included Gates’ interest in women’s empowerment (likely modeled after her own mother) and Kianni’s sustainability focus.

    I don’t think a coupon tool that wastes excessive resources is either empowering or sustainable.

  • Wikipedia blacklists Archive.today, starts removing 695,000 archive links

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  • I don’t think the issue is paywalls. I think the issue is the personal actions of the owner. I also really don’t think Russia plays into this. Again, the personal actions of the owner of achive[.]today were the reason it was removed. The site was used by the owner to personally attack someone.

  • The OpenClaw bot that defamed an OSS maintainer is a human crypto bro [video]

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  • @dgerard@awful.systems wrote the piece. Perhaps he’s got some evidence he didn’t publish? I hope he didn’t make some shit up without fact-checking.

  • Morge continvoucly

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  • (Ars) Editor's Note: Retraction of article containing fabricated quotations

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  • We agree on that 100%. No matter what, the owner of the agent did some dumbass shit. I fall in the camp that believes they proactively did dumb shit instead of the camp that believes through their inaction they did dumb shit. The whole situation to me feels like someone got their hand slapped and reacted poorly. I’ve seen this play out on forums for 30 years. Either the egotistical idiot burning resources on this chicanery actively did it or the fucking tools who built this destructive Rube Goldberg machine made it so the same fucking flame wars that add zero value keep happening in their new, perfect society. Everyone involved on the agent side needs to be removed from the internet permanently because they clearly have nothing to add to humanity.

  • (Ars) Editor's Note: Retraction of article containing fabricated quotations

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  • Apologies, I meant something more along the lines of “this agent’s runner saw code got rejected and decided to actively go harass the repo maintainers” instead of the line the repo maintainers have taken where they assume “this bot attacked us autonomously after being rejected.”

  • (Ars) Editor's Note: Retraction of article containing fabricated quotations

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  • I think there’s still reasonable debate over whether or not a human actively triggered the agent to generate the hit piece.

  • LinkedinLunatics @sh.itjust.works
    thesmokingman @programming.dev

    Hiring a technical archivist to be a technical architect really sets everyone up for success