nymnympseudonym
@nymnympseudonym@piefed.social
"If man chooses oblivion, he can go right on leaving his fate to his political leaders. If he chooses Utopia, he must initiate an enormous education program - immediately, if not sooner."
-R B Fuiler
- Comment on How The U.S. Will Track EVERY Vehicle from Space: SAR GMTI/AMTI 1 day ago:
Between integrated toll scanners like EZPass, and ALPRs, and phone location data readable by GAFAM and their thousands of ad affiliates… reading it from space seems like expensive overkill.
Perfect for the Pentagon.
- Comment on Meta Is Warned That Facial Recognition Glasses Will Arm Sexual Predators 1 week ago:
Meta will arm them… but they won’t have legs
- Comment on Senators Ask Tulsi Gabbard To Tell Americans That VPN Use Might Subject Them To Domestic Surveillance 2 weeks ago:
Dude you could at least read the thread. You are full of half heard misinformation
- Comment on Senators Ask Tulsi Gabbard To Tell Americans That VPN Use Might Subject Them To Domestic Surveillance 2 weeks ago:
You didn’t read.
The government doesn’t know you are using Tor
- Comment on Senators Ask Tulsi Gabbard To Tell Americans That VPN Use Might Subject Them To Domestic Surveillance 2 weeks ago:
Snowflake is a pluggable transport into the bridge system. But thank you for splaining
- Comment on Senators Ask Tulsi Gabbard To Tell Americans That VPN Use Might Subject Them To Domestic Surveillance 2 weeks ago:
You should read the Snowflake docs
There are over 100,000 people providing access from their personal IP address. Even the US government would have a very hard time keeping track.
- Comment on Senators Ask Tulsi Gabbard To Tell Americans That VPN Use Might Subject Them To Domestic Surveillance 2 weeks ago:
You’re right about clearnet websites often blocking Tor exit nodes. Not a problem for .onion sites obviously.
But you should read the details of how bridges work. Despite your claim, no the packet traffic does not reveal that you are using Tor. Even if your ISP/government is watching the wire.
- Comment on Senators Ask Tulsi Gabbard To Tell Americans That VPN Use Might Subject Them To Domestic Surveillance 2 weeks ago:
Self hosted VPNs are good for
lots of reasons incl. home network availability, no need to trust the VPN provider, nice central place you can run adblock/pihole, …
- Comment on Senators Ask Tulsi Gabbard To Tell Americans That VPN Use Might Subject Them To Domestic Surveillance 2 weeks ago:
As a Tor node operator, I have been yelling this message into the ether for years now:
Down sides:
- you really should not stream or torrent over Tor. Both because it sucks others’ bandwidth, and because it can deanonymize you. So no it is not good for YouTube or Netflix.
Plus sides:
- is free as in beer for you
- no payment trail to follow (though you can and should support Tor whether you use it or not because Internet Freedom)
- no corporate entity to trust (why the hell do people still trust corporations?)
- websites you connect to have no idea what your IP address is/where you are
- if you use Tor Bridges like Snowflake, your own government doesn’t know you are using Tor
- people running Tor nodes can either see your IP address, or the address of the site you connect to, but not both
- … unlike your VPN, which knows both exactly who you are, and can inspect and watch the route of every packet you send and receive
- Comment on CNN: Republicans release AI deepfake of James Talarico as phony videos proliferate in midterm races 5 weeks ago:
Why would these work only on the post-truth, anti-science, pro-religion party?
Oh… right
- Comment on I went back to Linux and it was a mistake 2 months ago:
I stopped using Windows because I needed an OS that I could just use and not have to futz with.
Fedora has done that perfectly for over a decade now.
- Comment on Majority of CEOs report zero payoff from AI 2 months ago:
Is your app as efficient as what an experienced developer would create?
One of the earliest uses we had for LLMs was literally just asking it to optimize several large codebases. Lots of pointless changes suggested; several huge performance wins we had overlooked.
And all done – implemented, tested, and human-reviewed – in about a person-week, compared to at least half a dozen person-months to go through all that by hand.
I mean, sometimes the LLMs generate slow algos. But less often than human coders.
If you released the source code, would it have security vulnerabilities?
You’re not gonna believe this, but another of the first things we did was ask the LLMs to review the codebase for security issues (and review any new PRs)
OFC the code also gets reviewed for security vulns like it always has, by old-school automation (eg valgrind, fortify, yadda), human review, and red-teaming exercises. I don’t think I’ve seen enough data yet to say whether it’s got more/worse security issues than human-generated code (which, need I remind you, is often highly insecure)
These are just a couple of the more hidden issues that fly under the radar when shipping LLM-generated code. Ummm… those would be issues if you didn’t use good orchestration, didn’t have good tools and docs for the LLMs to use, didn’t have follow good software engineering practices to begin with…
- Comment on Majority of CEOs report zero payoff from AI 2 months ago:
already quite useful
Quite possibly solving the majority of human diseases is rather more than “quite useful”
2024 Nobel Prize lecture 2024 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qX1aYUckvnY
2025 lecture: Deep Protein Space. If this doesn’t blow your fucking mind… you haven’t heard of DNA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_enkgH6Vrxk
- Comment on Majority of CEOs report zero payoff from AI 2 months ago:
There’s no such thing as “agents”
Up until ~6 months ago I would have agreed with you, and elaborated that “Agents are just LLMs in a loop with a text file scratchpad”
That’s… still true in a way, but honestly so many people have put so much cleverness into managing that process, that I have to say, yes, Cline or Codex with GPT or Claude Code behind them are absolutely “agentic”.
I can point them to a problem report and our company documentation and… an ever-increasing percentage of the time, I wind up with a problem description, a patch that fixes it, unit, coverage, and stress tests, and (if relevant) updated docs.
- Comment on Majority of CEOs report zero payoff from AI 2 months ago:
This reminds me so much of the late-80s when everyone was installing PCs in their offices and everyone was asking if this is actually better than a typewriter and Rolex, because people spend all day “futzing” on the computer.
5 years later we had networking, emerging interoperability standards, office productivity suites. 10 years later there was basically no company left that didn’t have PCs and much better productivity.
I see the same thing playing out here. A year ago we had Copilot and it sucked, I didn’t see the utility. But now coding agents with skills can easily read and understand specs, create testsuites, etc. These are right now revolutionizing my team’s work.
You see this pattern over & over with AI capability on a given task: It’s pathetic at 5%, then it merely sucks at 40%, then it takes a lot of futzing to fix up at 70%, then suddenly it’s at 95% and does as well as most professionals.
Downvote me to hell, this is my honest assessment.
- Comment on Don't fall into the anti-AI hype 3 months ago:
“The Internet in healthcare and science has been a boon, but other than that fuck it”
“Computing in healthcare and science has been a boon, but other than that fuck it”
“Electricity in healthcare and science has been a boon, but other than that fuck it”
- Comment on Brave overhauls adblock engine, cutting its memory consumption by 75% 3 months ago:
… but leaving its scamminess levels unchanged
- Comment on Brave browser starts testing agentic AI mode for automated tasks 4 months ago:
Especially when it’s the shady near-scam quasi-religious cult known as Brave
https://hackread.com/brave-browser-tor-leaked-onion-queries-isps/
https://twashingtonledger.com/brave-browser-privacy-scandal-goes-right-to-the-heart-of-brave/
https://www.lifewire.com/brave-browser-falls-short-of-its-promises-of-privacy-5206799
https://eathealthy365.com/brave-browser-s-controversies-downsides-explained/ - Comment on Judge hints Vizio TV buyers may have rights to source code licensed under GPL— Tentative ruling signals a potential win for SFC’s copyleft enforcement push 4 months ago:
Plot twist: Vizio monitors become the new WRTG
- Comment on Looks Like We Can Finally Kiss the Metaverse Goodbye 4 months ago:
How can I say goodbye to a place neither I nor anybody I know has ever been
- Comment on Mozilla's Latest Quagmire 4 months ago:
This is what you want
It’s literally the latest FF but with the telemetry and AI ripped out, and proper adblocks etc
- Comment on Nearly 90% of Windows Games now run on Linux, latest data shows 5 months ago:
Still not Bloons Tower Defense 😢
- Comment on U.S. agencies back banning TP-Link WiFi routers, citing national security risk and ties to China. They have between 30 and 50% market share in the US. 5 months ago:
Dead serious
I can’t decide
Maybe if everything has an LLM and talks to its owner and adjusts itself based on the owner’s level of interest & understanding… that will be better?
- Comment on U.S. agencies back banning TP-Link WiFi routers, citing national security risk and ties to China. They have between 30 and 50% market share in the US. 5 months ago:
WRT + TP-link = more secure than most corporate networks
- Comment on Give your mouse the finger with this wild cursor control ring — Prolo Ring hits Kickstarter, hoping to transform your finger into the ultimate macro and gesture device 5 months ago:
Ooooh that’s information
Downvoting myself now LOL
- Comment on Give your mouse the finger with this wild cursor control ring — Prolo Ring hits Kickstarter, hoping to transform your finger into the ultimate macro and gesture device 5 months ago:
Yet people put lithium batteries on their lap right next to their genetalia and on top of a blanket that covers up the laptop’s hot air exhaust
I have reasons to pass by this invention but exploding off my finger is not the primary concern
- Comment on ‘Death to Spotify’: the DIY movement to get artists and fans to quit the music app 6 months ago:
If it were just a tip jar feature that would be one thing but it’s kind of a lot of things.
It does what it says on the tin and I love having a shared library online for streaming with apps that support local cache download. - Comment on ‘Death to Spotify’: the DIY movement to get artists and fans to quit the music app 6 months ago:
Also it funds Google which is … not ideal
- Comment on ‘Death to Spotify’: the DIY movement to get artists and fans to quit the music app 6 months ago:
I set up a Funkwhale but tbh it is feature-poor
Which would you suggest as a selfhost alternative ?
- Comment on Anonym and Snap partner to unlock increased performance for advertisers | The Mozilla Blog 6 months ago:
Just another reminder why I use Librewolf