AmbitiousProcess

@AmbitiousProcess@piefed.social

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨You can’t replace the battery in Lego’s Smart Bricks — and many of its sensors aren’t available yet⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Turns out there’s not actually much functionality in these at all. An RFID reader and an RGB LED, whoop-de-shit.

  Where did you get that idea? They have an RFID reader and LED, yes, but they also have a speaker, microphone, accelerometer, light and color sensor, near-field magnetic position detection, and then have to fit the battery alongside all of that, all in a 2x4 brick.

  Here’s an example of what cutting-edge brick tech could look like.

  That brick has a fixed option for what it displays without needing to be entirely reflashed, requires a 4x8 powered baseplate to operate, and compared to the smart brick, doesn’t have RFID, LEDs, sound, color, or light sensing capabilities, no accelerometer, and no ability to detect other bricks near it, along with having no internal battery.

  The smart brick can play different (fully interchangeable without firmware reflashing) sounds based on nearby minifigures and interactable buttons and levers, can display lights and sounds based on rotation and movement, can change how it interacts based on nearby smart bricks, and can also be charged wirelessly and operate standalone. And of course, it’ll be able to respond to sounds later on too.

  The brick from hackaday has a display. That’s it. It’s cool, yes, but it’s nowhere close to the smart brick.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨You can’t replace the battery in Lego’s Smart Bricks — and many of its sensors aren’t available yet⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Before people get all up in arms about the non-replaceable battery… Do you know how small a LEGO brick is? For them to pack all this functionality in there, they have to be EXTREMELY careful with how they use every millimeter of space, and they have to make sure a kid won’t just… pop open the bottom of the brick and eat the battery or something.

  The article itself even states:

  As you can see in JerryRigEverything’s destructive teardown, it’s difficult to even get at the battery without going through thin, hair-like antennas.

  Break even one of them and the entire brick is nonfunctional.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Amazon discovered a 'high volume' of CSAM in its AI training data but isn't saying where it came from⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Yep. They are allowed to use your photos to “improve the service,” which AI training would totally qualify under in terms of legality. No notice to you required if they rip your entire album of family photos so an AI model can get 0.00000000001% better at generating pictures of fake family photos.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Microsoft is moving antivirus providers out of the Windows kernel. Hopefully anti-cheat will be next⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  It seems like the point is that Microsoft would be developing some sort of alternative to the kernel with similar functionality for antivirus providers, that doesn't need to have kernel level access. Anticheat uses a lot of the same techniques as kernel level antivirus to detect malware, thus it would probably have to adapt to this new system.

  I think the article is more commenting on how Microsoft is directly partnering with antivirus companies for this new system right now, while they're not directly partnering with anticheat companies, even though they'd probably have to migrate to this new system regardless.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Microsoft is moving antivirus providers out of the Windows kernel. Hopefully anti-cheat will be next⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  To be fair, it certainly still makes cheating harder. If it didn't exist, you'd just see even more people cheating, but it's a pretty overkill way of system monitoring for such a relatively small benefit by comparison.

  Massive privacy risk, only slightly better performance than other non-kernel monitoring.