• 6 Posts
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Joined 6 months ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2024

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  • The lie was WORSE than that.

    A lot of the fintechs invovled actually told people their money was safe, because it was subject to “passthrough FDIC insurance”, because their money was ultimately put in an insured bank, and thus was safe.

    Problem is that’s not how it actually worked, so basically everyone was straight up lied to.

    Basically the whole thing is that the bank keeps track of who owns which account and how much money they have, so if they go bust, you just have the FDIC come in and use that data and write checks, basically.

    Except since they’re disrupting banking, they also decided to just fucking not bother, and so even if there was going to be a payout, nobody has any fucking clue who has how much and in which bank said money was.

    Absolute clusterfuck, and about what you’d expect from silly-con valley types.


  • Both!

    The native automation is perfectly cromulent for what I want, usually, but there’s a couple of cases where the integrations either don’t exist or don’t return meaningful data.

    FOR EXAMPLE, the video playback in the living room thing. Sure, the roku integration says “something is playing” but it’s shockingly wrong and unreliable. What happens is it falls into ‘idle’ status between videos, or if you’re fast forwarding sometimes and thus the automation was not doing exactly what I wanted.

    The Jellyfin API, though, can look at the living room tv user and is spot on as to what is going on with play/pause/stopped statuses, so I have node red yank that data direct from the API and it works great.



  • big fan of mini PC’s

    Same, but just be careful if you venture outside of the “reputable” vendors.

    I bought one recently from Aliexpress, and while it’s perfectly functional, it’s using an ethernet chipset that doesn’t have in-kernel drivers so I have to keep compiling new drivers for it every time the kernel upgrades.

    Not the end of the world, but an annoyance that I could do without, and not something a slightly more expensive version of what I got would have.


  • I’ve gone way too far down the automation path.

    All manner of temperature, humidity, occupancy, motion, and air quality sensors make all sorts of things do appropriate responses.

    For example, I’ve got a mmwave motion/occupancy sensor in the bathroom, and if there’s no motion/occupancy and the humidity is more than 5% higher than the hallway sensor, then turn on the exhaust fan until it’s not.

    Or, if the air particulate count in the kitchen is too high, turn on the exhaust fan until it’s not.

    Or, if the living room is occupied, and the tv is on and playing media, turn the overhead lights off and turn the RGB accent light on very dimly. And if the media is paused or stopped, increase the brightness of the RGB lighting so you can see where you’re walking, and if it stays paused or stopped for more than 10 minutes, turn the main lights back to whatever state they were in before media playback started.

    No dashboards though, since the goal is essentially that you don’t have to think about what is going on, because it should Just Work™ and never be something you have to deal with.

    …though, really, I’d say we’re at like 80% successful with that.

    For manual interactions I’ve got a bunch of NFC tags in various places that will trigger the appropriate automation in the case that you either want to do it by hand or it fails to do the needful, plus the app is configured to allow manual control of any device and to trigger specific automations.






  • Search will never search non-local content.

    Which is the point I’m trying to make: right now, you cannot use search as a discoverability medium, unless you’re on something the scale of mastodon.social.

    Search with a focus on new content discoverability is utterly useless for smaller or single user instances, because a search that only finds things you already know about isn’t exactly a useful search for discoverability.

    If I have to be on the biggest instances, then there’s very little difference between something like Bluesky and Mastodon in terms of usability, and uh, I might as well pick the one that’s more likely to have the most growth and diversity of content.

    We have to give up on the idea of having easy and direct access to the whole of thw fediverse.

    I agree, and it’s why I’ve pretty much migrated back to centralized services with the exception of Lemmy, because Lemmy works very well in terms of finding useful shit to follow in a way that literally no other federated platform does.


  • Privacy regulations are all fine and dandy, but even with the strictest ones in place,

    They’re also subject to interpretation, regulatory capture, as well as just plain being ignored when it’s sufficiently convenient for the regulators to do so.

    “There ought to be a law!” is nice, but it’s not a solution when there’s a good couple of centuries of modern regulatory frameworks having had existed, and a couple centuries of endless examples of where absolutely none of it matters when sufficient money and power is in play.

    Like, for example, the GDPR: it made a lot of shit illegal under penalty of company-breaking penalties.

    So uh, nobody in the EU has had their personal data misused since it was passed? And all the big data brokers that are violating it have been fined out of business?

    And this is, of course, ignoring the itty bitty little fact that you have to be aware of the misuse of the data: if some dude does some shady shit quietly, then well, nobody knows it happened to even bring action?


  • How exactly are “communities offering services” a different thing than “hosted software”?

    I think what they’re saying is that the ideal wouldn’t be to force everyone to host their own, but rather for the people who want to run stuff to offer them to their friends and family.

    Kinda like how your mechanic neighbor sometimes helps you do shit on your car: one person shares a skill they have, and the other person also benefits. And then later your neighbor will ask you to babysit their kids, and shit.

    Basically: a very very goofy way of saying “Hey! Do nice things for your friends and family, because that’s kinda how life used to work.”


  • AI model of that type is safe to deploy anywhere

    Yeah, I think you’ve made a mistake in thinking that this is going to be usable as generative AI.

    I’d bet $5 this is just a fancy machine learning algorithm that takes a submitted image, does machine learning nonsense with it, and returns a ‘there is a high probability this is an illicit image of a child’, and not something you could use to actually generate CSAM with.

    You want something that’s capable of assessing the similarities between a submitted image and a group of known bad images, but that doesn’t mean the dataset is in any way usable for anything other than that one specific task - AI/ML in use cases like this is super broad and has been a thing for decades before the whole ‘AI == generative AI’ thing became what everyone is thinking.

    But, in any case: the PhotoDNA database is in one place and access to it is scaled by the merit of uh, lots of money?

    And of course, any ‘unscrupulous engineer’ that may have any plans for doing anything with this is probably not a complete idiot, even if a pedo: they’re going to have shockingly good access controls and logging and well, if you’re in the US, if the dude takes this database and generates a couple of CSAM images using it, the penalty is, for most people, spending the rest of their life in prison.

    Feds don’t fuck around with creation or distribution charges.



  • This is kinda old information, but my understanding was that there were 3 issues with dasiy-chained UPSes.

    The first is that you’re potentially going to cause a ground loop, which is not healthy for the life of anything plugged into those UPSes.

    The second is that there’s a potential for a voltage droop going through from the first to second UPS, which means the UPSes will flap constantly and screw their batteries up, though I’d be shocked if that was necessarily still true for modern high-quality units.

    And of course, the UPS itself won’t be outputting a proper sinewave when it’s on battery, which means your 2nd UPS in the chain will freak out (though again, maybe modern ones don’t have that limitation).



  • comparative scale of the content involved

    PhotoDNA is based on image hashes, as well as some magic that works on partial hashes: resizing the image, or changing the focus point, or fiddling with the color depth or whatever won’t break a PhotoDNA identification.

    But, of course, that means for PhotoDNA to be useful, the training set is literally ‘every CSAM image in existance’, so it’s not really like you’re training on a lot less data than an AI model would want or need.

    The big safeguard, such as it is, is that you basically only query an API with an image and it tells you if PhotoDNA has it in the database, so there’s no chance of the training data being shared.

    Of course, there’s also no reason you can’t do that with an AI model, either, and I’d be shocked if that’s not exactly how they’ve configured it.