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MajorHavoc

@MajorHavoc@programming.dev

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MajorHavoc ,

Annoying stuff, but I've suspected for awhile.

My personal blog is life changing, but y'all will never find it, at this rate. /Sarcasm

More seriously, a decade ago my personal blog was the number one article on the Internet for like 3 deeply esoteric technical topics. Neat.

At some point, that stopped happening. I didn't give it serious thought, because those articles were never meant for anything but my personal reference, anyway.

But it made me wonder what was going on with the algorithms.

On one hand, I figure people can just go to stack overflow. Except, I don't participate in SO, because they're a bunch of tossers. But then, I figure someone else can just copy my write-up into Stack Overflow. Except, no one does, anymore, probably because they can't find my blog either.

Again, my blog is mostly useless shit. So maybe the algorithm was just doing it's job. But I've wondered for awhile if the Internet wasn't just plain better a decade ago when search actually worked.

Whose blogs was I missing out on? Now I find stuff like that through Mastodon, but it still isn't targeted topical search, yet.

I need to get in on that web ring action going on.

MajorHavoc ,

I like to think I kept on top of that, yeah.

MajorHavoc ,

None of the most obvious searches I tried came up with my blog, but I did find some better resources (to me, than my blog, which admittedly I don't care to find since there's nothing new there for me...) on blogs that it did find. It looks like it's doing the kind of search I used to rely on. Pretty cool!

MajorHavoc ,

It's not that sinister. Sure, the left handedness requirement feels a little arbitrary, but it's worth it to be part of Debian clu- shit. I almost broke the first rule of Debian club.

MajorHavoc ,

Yeah. I'm not buying for a minute that anything was "discovered", other than that they didn't pay their protection bill. Meta/Facebook seems to have tolerated worse and more obvious abuses for decades.

MajorHavoc ,

Yeah. I spent years saying "Linux is a bit better than Windows now, but I can't give you a compelling reason to switch, if you're comfortable and happy."

Nice of Microsoft to take care of that last part.

MajorHavoc ,
Title
> Edge? No thx, if I want it I will install it myself.

Hey now, back when I used Windows, I found Edge to be perfectly suited to it's job... of downloading Firefox.

I wish I could praise Edge as one of my top five favorite ways to install Firefox, but ...

  • flatpak
  • apt
  • Ansible
  • git clone; make install
  • curl | sudo

Edge doesn't crack the top 5 anymore, after all.

MajorHavoc ,

Someone compare these stats with lead paint exposure stats. I'm so curious if we can finally get positive correlation.

More honestly, it's easier to accept that people we love are brain damaged, than just plain gullible.

MajorHavoc ,

"I've cut out these goatees made of felt for us all to wear until we can grow real ones."

MajorHavoc ,

That's tragic. That was an excellent site.

MajorHavoc ,

Subscribed!

MajorHavoc ,

There are dozens of us!

MajorHavoc ,

Uh...I know we're all just having fun here, but I need to be part of a webring again. If anyone is more than joking, I kinda need to know about it. Thanks.

MajorHavoc ,

Heh. Now I can look forward to a new browser plugin that automatically jumps to the first page of Google results that contains any entry that isn't a Viagra ad. Huge time saver!

MajorHavoc ,

Seriously? Cool. I'm going to go do some research then.
And maybe entirely change the purpose of my blog, just to fit into one...

MajorHavoc ,

In the cat/human relationship, the jury is still out on which species domesticated the other...

MajorHavoc ,

The number of people saying "oh he's friendly" as their dog scares someone afraid of dogs because they're jumping up on them is stupid.

This makes me angry, when it happens. I happen to be huge, and adore dogs, so I hide it well.

Folks with dogs that jump up on people, need to keep those dogs away from other people. Others didn't sign up to have an out of control animal jumping all over them. Doesn't matter if the animal is friendly or not.

MajorHavoc ,

We're dangerously close to revealing the real reason I keep trying new operating systems...

PayPal Is Planning an Ad Business Using Data on Its Millions of Shoppers (www.wsj.com)

Wall Street Journal (paywalled) The digital payments company plans to build an ad sales business around the reams of data it generates from tracking the purchases as well as the broader spending behaviors of millions of consumers who use its services, which include the more socially-enabled Venmo app....

MajorHavoc , (edited )

Just put the card in directly on random websites.

I'm not joking - if you follow your existing "should I even be using this site anyway?" signs, it's going to typically be fine (in 2024!) to use your debit card there.

(Edit: To be clear, things have changed. Time travelers from the past should absolutely not follow this advice back in 2002!)

And when something does go wrong, you'll get better support from your credit union than PayPal would. (You don't still use a bank like a sucker, right...?!)

The worst case, usually, is they reverse the fraud and issue a new card to prevent further fraud.

So I guess it's a few things:

  • Get a credit union, rather than a bank.
  • Choose one or two of debit (edit: or credit) cards for all online use. Life is simpler when fraud does occur, if I have another card that still works for gas and groceries.
  • Use the debit card directly, online, with any trusted site. There's no need for PayPal to exist anymore.

Many years ago, PayPal's innovation was treating people who shop online like actual people. The rest of the world has caught up, while PayPal lost sight of that.

Source: I worked in FinTech. It's amazing how bad your current options are, but it tends to work out, anyway. There's an extremely ethical and detail-oriented army of women named Karen, behind the scenes, looking out for you.

Edit: And as far as I can tell, not one of the extremely ethical and detail oriented women named Karen works for PayPal. Big tech companies rarely successfully keep that kind of no-nonsense-tolerated top talent.

MajorHavoc ,

I've heard this advice as well. It certainly doesn't hurt, if you have credit cards, to prefer them.

I imagine it is a lot nicer to have a fraudulent item on a future bill, than an actual fraudulent deduction from a current active account. And fraud correction is prompt enough, that the bill never comes due on a CC, whereas the money is, indeed, missing immediately on a debit card.

That said, not having any credit cards, I would never open one simply for the fraud protection.

Debit card fraud correction has always been prompt and accurate, for me.

The card companies do not discriminate, currently, between corrections on credit and debit cards. Currently, that's largely thanks to contract language with their debit card customers that prevents them from such discrimination.

I added disclaimers like crazy above, because FinTech is a constantly evolving industry with constantly changing terms of service. And because most people working in FinTech are assholes who want to scam you.

Edit: I've corrected the above advice with yours, thanks! There's certainly no reason to prefer debit over credit for online use, for anyone who has both card types. I just have a bad habit of using the words interchangeably because I only carry debit cards.

MajorHavoc ,

I didn't even have "Phrenology makes a comeback" on my apocalypse bingo card for the 2020s.

MajorHavoc ,

Agreed on all points, but "improve the tech" probably belongs in quotes. If there's no real consequences, they may just accept some empty promises and continue as before.

MajorHavoc ,

Cyberpunk face paint isn't illegal...yet.

MajorHavoc ,

I've got an extremely common-looking face in a major city.

Indeed, it's likely to be a problem, if you stick with committing few or no crimes.

The good news is that, should you choose to commit an above-average number of crimes, then the system will be prone to under-report you.

So that's nice. /sarcasm, I'm not actually advocating for more crimes. Though I am pointing out that maybe the folks installing these things aren't incentivising the behavior they want.

MajorHavoc ,

We're also worried that it does work.

As another person said, it feels like there's a lot more use cases for rampant authoritarian control, then positive benefits to society.

Recognizing sociopaths, sure. We do that already with wanted posters, and with political office advertisements.

But for everyone else who is just trying to live their life, this can be extremely invasive technology.

MajorHavoc ,

You already have an incredibly invasive system tracking you. It's the phone in your pocket.

As a Cybersecurity expert running well configured GrapheneOS, I actually don't.

So I, personally, have a lot more privacy to lose from facial recognition technology. Since my only path to reasonable mitigation is a socially ostracizing face paint pattern. (It would play well with my professional colleagues, who understand the risks, I suppose. But I have a feeling it wouldn't play out so nice at my local grocery store...)

But I do take your point, that for most folks, it's not a huge change.

A key difference is that, while it's a lot of work, I can, and have, opted out of the phone tracking.

MajorHavoc ,

That makes a lot of sense, and I agree that's where this is going.

One issue, and not a particularly new one, is that virtually everyone is overselling how far that straight line improvement actually takes us.

As someone with LLM expertise, my gut assessment is that almost everyone is wildly overselling the usefulness of the next generation of improvement.

The current error and hallucination rate is probably going to get dramatically better. And certain tasks that no AI can do will have breakthroughs that allow a decent AI to emerge.

But those coming improvements aren't going to make current AI suck that much less at the tasks it's currently not well suited to, in the majority of cases.

Source: decades of experience finding clever ways to make previously impossible automation work well enough, and a solid amount of direct LLM experience.

Edit: And that's a fascinating summary, and a great write up of an important and enlightening aspect of all this. Thanks for sharing it!

MajorHavoc , (edited )

especially if you still use things like Facebook and Whatsapp.

Yeah....speaking of my making myself a social outcast by painting my face crazy colors - I figure I am at least 20% of the way there by not using Facebook or Whatsapp.

I'm joking...mostly. But it really can feel isolating not to have either of those apps.

The Google Wallet feature I think has taken care of itself.

My experience matches. I did miss Google Pay for a few months after switching to GrapheneOs, until tap-to-pay reached all my favorite stores. Now I'm just mildly annoyed to carry a card to do something my phone ought to do.

So that just leaves the Google Camera. How's the quality with Graphene?

I was very annoyed with how slow the Google camera app loaded, on my previous phone.

My Pixel with GraoheneOS is the best camera I have had in about a decade, because the stock camera app opens almost instantly. I had a big problem with the camera taking a couple seconds to open, on my previous two or three Android phones. Somehow it got worse with each generation of phone, while I paid more for stronger CPU and worse battery life.

I am vaguely aware that I maybe gave up some clever camera features that some of my phone vendors added, but I don't miss them since I wasn't using them. One had a 3d photo picture that I used exactly once, if I recall.

But compared to stock (Pixel) Android, it's literally apparently the same camera app, except I swear it loads much faster. (I'm wrong, it's not the same app.) The privacy implications of the load time difference I perceived freak me out a little, honestly. I hope I'm just wrong about that bit. (Thankfully, yes. I'm wrong.)

I also missed Google Photos for backup, until I bought a Synology Network Attached storage device.

MajorHavoc ,

Thanks for replying

Sure! Incidentally, it looks like you can now install the GrapheneOS camera through Google Play, if you want to give it a test run without going full GrapheneOS.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=app.grapheneos.camera.play&hl=en&gl=US

MajorHavoc ,

I'm willing to subscribe to a per-algorithm daily updated face paint advising Patreon account, if it comes to that.

Face painting actually sounds like the most fun part of the distopia we often feel headed towards.

MajorHavoc , (edited )

Yeah. I mean, it's not going to work, but it would be a hell of a social commentary, and would show solidarity with a lot of folks who already can't hide in a crowd.

Also, there's more than one operating system algorithm and more than one antivirus algorithm, but virus writers are getting by. Algorithm and anti algorithm tech escalation exists today in an uneasy balance.

And, at the point that someone has been flagged and thrown out of the civil system, whether fair or not, they're going to say, "fuck it" and paint their face and open carry the largest weapon they can get their hands on. I'm guessing they'll stop tipping, too.

If this continues to escalate, we really may see face paint and LED hats come out in force, in particularly troubled areas.

I'm hoping for the version of the future where we regulate this facial recognition crap instead.

MajorHavoc ,

No species ever lasts that long.

Sharks enter the thread.

Awkward silence ensues

MajorHavoc ,

They worship an old fax machine they found, too, for some reason.

That tracks. Fax technology probably will outlive us all.

MajorHavoc , (edited )

Ever since I was an avid Lynx text only browser user, I've been asking for a complicated privacy invasive (if the AI is remote) (hey neat, it's local!) browser that interacts with me in a nedlessly conversational way. Thank goodness someone is finally cramming AI into my simple web lookups. (/Sarcasm)

MajorHavoc ,

I try not too get to mad about this kind of mistake. Life is, indeed, two short.

Edit: Specifically, about "Drink Pepsi", when "Royal Cola" exists.

MajorHavoc ,

Thank you! Though, in humility, I think I'm a Crawley, at my best.

MajorHavoc ,

"asked if Neuralink would perform another surgery to fix or replace the implant, but the company declined"

Evidence whether the company saw them as a person, or felt any ethical obligation...

It's an interesting era when an organization can have a single user, and choose to leave that single user with 85% of the promised functionality no longer functional. But is happily pursuing it's second user.

MajorHavoc ,

Yeah. I also can think of lots of reasonable reasons, but if those were the real reasons, the company should still be making commitments and plans with their first user...

The healthy stuff sounds like: "We intend X follow up procedure, but it needs to follow Y precaution."

Hell, even companies that have no intention to help usually take the time to lie and claim that they do.

MajorHavoc ,

if they have learned something, is there something preventing it to be applied to the first patient.

That's part of what makes me see this as a really bad look.

"Install it deeper" isn't rocket science, and it sounds like their first volunteer is willing.

They just want the extra data from leaving their first volunteer where they landed.

Human subject experiments are supposed to carry more long term obligation than this.

MajorHavoc ,

You are statically probably correct. Probably the best kind of correct.

MajorHavoc ,

Sorry. I meant stoically. Or stochastically.

MajorHavoc ,

I believe the left hand is a shell fork-bomb, on the assumption that anything that zany is probably malicious.

And the right hand is a way to tell Make to use up all available system resources:

"-j [jobs]’ ¶
‘--jobs[=jobs]’
Specifies the number of recipes (jobs) to run simultaneously. With no argument, make runs as many recipes simultaneously as possible. If there is more than one ‘-j’ option, the last one is effective. See Parallel Execution, for more information on how recipes are run. Note that this option is ignored on MS-DOS."

Edit: I think the make command is technically only a problem when run for a Makefile that tries to do too many things, and has at least one mistake in dependency controls. So... for every Makefile I ever encountered (or that I ever wrote!)

Yeah. They're the same picture

MajorHavoc , (edited )

Yeah. This is going to suck worse before it gets any better. The good news is that all the useful content (outside of sales gardens) is going to be here in the Fediverse.

The other good news is that the state of Cybersecurity investment is abysmal, and the walled garden content is going to get breached/leaked/pirated a lot, for a long time to come.

MajorHavoc ,

My money is on: replace it with some half-assed AI "enhanced" prototype.

MajorHavoc ,

but they’ll stay and work in a half ass way since it’s better than unemployment and cobra.

Yep. Or they'll stay and do no work at all and count on it taking a long while for anyone to even notice.

it certainly isn't competent management they're working for.

MajorHavoc ,

Yeah. I suspect they let him know he could have honest to goodness consequences for his actions.

MajorHavoc ,

If Word had WordPerfect's Alt+F3, I probably would have never stopped using Word. So I guess it's for the best.

MajorHavoc , (edited )

Except Debian is neither interesting nor innovative.

How dare you!? /s

Yeah. Good point.

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