alex7734 · HackerTrans

vorige maanddiscuss

After a point, does it matter? Even assuming that models can keep getting smarter indefinitely, it's not like you need to use the smartest model to get the job done.

Moore's law is dead now, so at some threshold purchasing the GPUs to run the biggest and newest model hurts you more than whatever rent you could've extracted from it.

When we get there, why would you want to run a closed model that you can't control, with restrictions you can't remove, that a company can take from you or silently nerf without telling you?

alex7734

8 maanden geledendiscuss

> Helpfully eSports players tend to have video captures of their gameplay, and most of these "undetectable" cheats are real obvious if you actually watch the footage. That catches most of the serious stuff at the upper level. It's why video verification has been a thing in the speedrunning scene for such a long time.

There's a subreddit called /r/vacsucks which is full of pro players blatantly cheating and getting away with it while the rest of the idiots think they're just good players.

Or, depending on your point of view, full of idiots flagging any player better than they are as cheating.

Aimbots can be "humanized" enough that any such determination becomes subjective.

alex7734

9 maanden geledendiscuss

No forced updates, no downgrade prohibition, no bootloader locking, kernel GPL compliance (with drivers that can be loaded in it, even if they are closed source), no remote attestation.

The bare minimum so that I can use the device I bought as I wish, even if the manufacturer later decides to "alter the deal".

alex7734

2 jaar geledendiscuss

Google loves doing this.

If you dare turn off Play Protect for example, you will be asked to turn it on every time you install or update anything. Never mind that you said no the last thousand times it asked.

alex7734

2 jaar geledendiscuss

> I am happy my iPhone doesn't allow Meta to say "to use WhatsApp, you must install the MetaStore®, give it root and install it from there". I would not be happy with those restrictions on my desktop.

You fix that by making root access inconvenient enough that companies can't rely on the average random user having it enabled.

For example force you to wipe the device to unlock it as another person said in another comment. Or make it so that if you don't unlock it within 7 days of the device purchase and first boot, you cannot unlock it anymore.

alex7734

2 jaar geledendiscuss

This, or even sell "dev units" with the bootloader unlocked so that you explicitly have to accept the risk before purchasing the device.

The problem though is that rooting by itself is not that useful when a lot of apps use remote attestation to deny you service if you're rooted.

We don't just need root access, we need undetectable root access.

alex7734

2 jaar geledendiscuss

A few years ago everyone that had ever used a computer knew what a file and a folder was and could move a document to an USB drive.

Thanks to the efforts of Google to "simplify" smartphones the average young person now couldn't find and double-click a downloaded file if their life depended on it.

In the US, a manual car is considered an anti-theft device. In Europe, basically everyone that isn't obscenely rich has driven a manual car at some point.

People learn what they're expected to learn.

alex7734

2 jaar geledendiscuss

Currently, no. But once (undetectable) OS modification is no longer possible, making the undecrypted media unreadable is just a few API restrictions away.

In Android phones for example you cannot screenshot banking apps. And if you root (modify the OS of) your phone, banking apps refuse to work.

alex7734

2 jaar geledendiscuss

The whole point of TPM is that the OS is not under the user control anymore.

If you modify it thanks to remote attestation you can no longer prove that it is unmodified using the TPM.

alex7734

2 jaar geledendiscuss

Encrypted monitors can be countered by a high quality video camera mounted on a tripod behind your chair or on a wall or ceiling

Expensive, yes, but at that point you're already spending real money on a second computer with a GPU to do computer vision on the game video stream, so...

alex7734

2 jaar geledendiscuss

Not having an automatic transmission means there are less ways in which a manufacturer can screw up your car's performance in the name of emissions.

This is obviously less relevant in America where you can still buy fast cars without being murdered by taxes.

alex7734

2 jaar geledendiscuss

- AI answers are much easier and faster to produce thus it's going to produce a lot more wrong answers by sheer volume.

- AI answers are grammatically correct and verbose so it looks like the poster put effort into it which deceives people into thinking the answers is more trustworthy than it is.

Barring trolls, humans (for the most part) only answer if they think they're right, and the more effort put into the answer the more likely they don't get it wrong.

alex7734

2 jaar geledendiscuss

I don't know what you did wrong, but don't worry, I can be very creative

alex7734

2 jaar geledendiscuss

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SiL2AjOtjZI

alex7734

2 jaar geledendiscuss

But why spend so much time to make it worse?

    on_click() {
        if (last_one()) alert('You must keep at least one item selected.');
        else actually_toggle_it_off();
    }

Simple. Does not need fancy code. User immediately knows what he has to do, with no thinking required.

alex7734

2 jaar geledendiscuss

For projects where I can't trust that the people involved can deal with submodule bullshit correctly I just use these git aliases:

    box = !cd ${GIT_PREFIX:-.} && git config --get remote.origin.url > .gitboxinfo && git rev-parse --abbrev-ref HEAD >> .gitboxinfo && git rev-parse HEAD >> .gitboxinfo && mv .git .gitbox && git add -f .gitboxinfo && true
    unbox = !cd ${GIT_PREFIX:-.} && mv .gitbox .git && true

Then I add the .gitbox folder to gitignore. Whenever I need to interact with the "submodule" repo I unbox, otherwise I leave it boxed and as far as everyone else in the project is concerned, the dependency was just copied n pasted in the project.

If you ever need to regenerate the gitbox folder from scratch you can take a peek at the gitboxinfo file and git clone and reset the dependency repo in a temp folder, then move the git folder next to the gitboxinfo file.

Plus unlike submodules with this you can have local changes to the submodule files without having to fork the submodule itself.

alex7734

2 jaar geledendiscuss

Google Search also nags you for location access in the browser, at least in desktop.

alex7734

2 jaar geledendiscuss

I used uBlock's element picker to remove the modal and then added a custom rule to re-enable the scrollbar.

Why this behavior is legal is beyond me. They do the same thing with Play Protect which I don't want to enable no matter how many times they ask.

alex7734

2 jaar geledendiscuss

There are ways to solve this without killing off the ability to root phones if this was really about users' safety.

You could for example make it so that phones could only be unlocked within a few days of the purchase (first boot) date, and put a scary warning on it. That'd put a stop to 99% of people being tricked into unlocking it.

You could also put a scary warning on boot that allowed anyone to tell it was rooted to stop people selling them while rooted.

The point of blocking rooted phones isn't "security", it's to maintain control of the user experience.

alex7734

3 jaar geledendiscuss

> You could say the same about memory protection and isolation, and yet, here we are.

While it also serves as a security mechanism the most important benefit of memory protection is that it protects against processes *accidentally* corrupting other processes due to mistakes, invalid pointers, etc.

If you want to intentionally mess with other processes memory most OS give you the means to do it in a controlled way, with ptrace in Linux or WriteProcessMemory in Windows, because sometimes it is a useful thing to do.

The problem with Wayland is that they veto useful features they aren't interested in (that admittedly if misused could be a security problem or at least a nuisance) and they don't give any alternative way of doing them, choosing instead to punt the problem downstream to the compositors, who will each do them (or not) in a different way making the whole thing a mess.

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