We still have two holidays and associated vacations and vacation brain to go. And then the January hangover.
Every company that has ignored my following advice has experienced a day for day slip in first quarter scheduling. And that advice is: not much work gets done between Dec 15 and Jan 15. You can rely on a week worth, more than that is optimistic. People are taking it easy and they need to verify things with someone who is on vacation so they are blocked. And when that person gets back, it’s two days until their vacation so it’s a crap shoot.
NB: there’s work happening on Jan 10, for certain, but it’s not getting finished until the 15th. People are often still cleaning up after bad decisions they made during the holidays and the subsequent hangover.
tell that to salt typhoon who collected copious amounts of data on all of us.
https still uses unencrypted client hello's (ECH) across the vast majority of the internet, showing which domain the client is visiting in plaintext for multi-site servers to do SNI. DNS is still plaintext on most consumer routers/models provided by ISPs, stingray technology exists in the wild and is widely used to mimic cell towers. E2EE is not popular in consumer applications, even Telegram isn't E2EE and the main ones that claim they are like X's new Chat they have the keys on; Matrix having E2EE still shows meta data in plain text, room names in plain text.
While iMessages, RCS, Signal are mostly mainstream, most people are unaware of the need for E2EE. RCS is its own set of issues.
Pegasus, Cellbright, I can go on and on with the spyware companies that can just send a text message and infect devices with 0click exploits.
We can have E2EE but if they can just see the screen or hook in to the messaging app's memory doesn't mean much.
Pick up your cell phone, is it connected to Wifi? Can it see other Wifis? Apps track those nearby SSIDs and report to major databases to have accurate geo-location data down to the spot we stand.
Don't get me started on Ad-Tech.
The EU wants to install backdoors on everybody's devices and get rid of encryption entirely.
Zero Trust Technologies are a fun thing to read in to, especially the need for them.
> tell that to salt typhoon who collected copious amounts of data on all of us.
That is not a US government program.
You also brought up ECH, DoH, DoT, Android's fake cell tower detection, and Android's NEARBY_WIFI_DEVICES permission that also demonstrate a strong industry-wide push to limit mass surveillance, contributing to my argument that GGP's assertion that nothing has changed is incorrect.
> The EU wants to install backdoors on everybody's devices and get rid of encryption entirely.
No, it doesn't. Just because someone proposes something doesn't mean the EU wants it, especially when the EU completely removes that proposal from the table.
You're right, it isn't. It's a foreign one (allagedly) and they used the tools telecoms and agencies use to monitor data, sms, call logs with IMEI/IMS mapping. Those, do belong to government agencies.
> You also brought up ECH, DoH, DoT, Android's fake cell tower detection, and Android's NEARBY_WIFI_DEVICES permission that also demonstrate a strong industry-wide push to limit mass surveillance, contributing to my argument that GGP's assertion that nothing has changed is incorrect.
This sounds more like you want to be correct; data brokers and mass surveillance are at an all time high, with platform providers requiring biometrics, ID uploads, data being sold, re-sold, re-sprinkled.
Android devices that can not utilize the latest Android OS (16+) to my knowledge can not access these features, by default DoH, DoT are not enabled by default. Whether the device itself can show if a fake cell tower is being used is only one step. The telecom and infrastructure companies that provide 5g have more tech layered on top of it that is indeed vulnerable, salt typhoon sat dormant in major telecom and internet backbone devices for over a year before being discovered.
We don't know whos cyber campaigns or who's involved in surveillance. I'll often get customers sharing the same stories where they call their ISPs and the ISP operator will list all the websites the customer viewed in casual conversation over the phone; which is scary.
> No, it doesn't. Just because someone proposes something doesn't mean the EU wants it, especially when the EU completely removes that proposal from the table.
Yes, it does. Many countries are in favor of it in the EU and even if it fails, they keep proposing it until it'll pass.
The U.N. just signed a multi-nation treaty with 72 countries, including Russia, China, and Iran to swap data with other intelligence and law enforcement agencies with the data its collected as its joint mission to, on paper look like a good thing but broaden surveillance and share that data among countries.
https://vp.net/l/en-US/blog/72-Nations-Create-Global-Surveil...
The U.S. isn't involved with that, but here in the U.S. states are just now proposing VPN bans and requiring logging for major AI providers.
Most things are walled gardens.
The claims that it's getting better need all of us to put in a lot more work. Security, privacy, data integrity all go hand in hand.
Those SSIDs have among them, tracking that tracks MAC addresses, which can also be scanned out of the air using basic tools like aircrack-ng
A simple 'Share Your Location with this website' popup on a browser is more than enough to geo-locate you and provides enough information to geo-locate others on the same network.
It getting better is just not true. I wish that were the case, but it's going to take a lot of work for all of us.
> they used the tools telecoms and agencies use to monitor data, sms, call logs with IMEI/IMS mapping.
Telecoms use that data for billing. The government, notably, is not allowed to request this data en-masse post-Snowden.
> data brokers and mass surveillance are at an all time high, with platform providers requiring biometrics, ID uploads, data being sold, re-sold, re-sprinkled.
On the contrary, after GDPR, sharing of this data has become severely restricted, limiting this information to first parties.
> Android devices that can not utilize the latest Android OS (16+) to my knowledge can not access these features, by default DoH, DoT are not enabled by default
This permission was added in Android 13, also post-Snowden, representing a change limiting mass surveillance. DoH rolled out as the default to all Firefox and Chrome users in the U.S. in 2020.
> Yes, it does. Many countries are in favor of it in the EU and even if it fails, they keep proposing it until it'll pass.
Speculation. Mass surveillance is more difficult now than it was pre-Snowden, as I asserted. Maybe in 100 years, it will be different, but I made no claims about mass surveillance in the 22nd century.
> Those SSIDs have among them, tracking that tracks MAC addresses, which can also be scanned out of the air using basic tools like aircrack-ng
Android has defaulted MAC address randomization since version 10 and iOS since 14. This is yet another feature that made mass surveillance harder since Snowden.
Ah yeah I came up with the solution to that one. It's 'don't fly drones over our heads' approach. Also the 'upgrade the fragile infrastructure so a light breeze doesn't take out millions of people's power.'
Wow, that makes me want to check it out more thoroughly (if I had the time)
I remember when CS Pro Mod was being made between the transition of CS 1.6, Source, the 1.6 community didn't want to move over to Source, before GO/CS2 came around.
Cool to see what's basically Quake1/doom style but this is a far fetch away from counter-strike. Although if netcode could be imagined and implemented I don't see why making a lower tier Counter-Strike wouldn't be doable. I'd play it if it were the quake style old-graphics version of CS that allowed for skill gaps.
Source had some insane rag doll. CS players weren’t ready for the physics and honestly, Valve spent a hell of a lot of effort to refine the physics for CS:GO to make it feel like CS1. Kudos to the dev teams.
I’d also love a Battle-bits CS version. (Battle-bits was a fun Battlefield low poly spoof).
Yeah, but we can self-host them. At this point in the span of it, it's more about infrastructure and compute power to meet demand and Google won because it has many business models, massive cashflow, TPUs, and the infrastructure to build expanding on their current, which would take new companies ~25 years to map out compute, data centers and have a viable, tangible infrastructure all while trying to figure out profits.
I'm not sure about how the regulation of things would work, but prompt injections and whatever other attacks we haven't seen yet where agents can be hijacked and made to do things sounds pretty scary.
It's a race towards AGI at this point. Not sure if that can be achieved as language != consciousness IMO
Who is "we", and what are the actual capabilities of the self-hosted models? Do they do the things that people want/are willing to pay money for? Can they integrate with my documents in O365/Google Drive or my calendar/email in hosted platforms? Can most users without a CS degree and a decade of Linux experience actually get them installed or interact with them? Are they integratable with the tools they use?
Statistically close to "everyone" cannot run great models locally. GPUs are expensive and niche, especially with large amounts of VRAM.
>It's a race towards AGI at this point. Not sure if that can be achieved as language != consciousness IMO
However it is arguable that thought is relatable with conscienceness. I’m aware non-linguistic thought exists and is vital to any definition of conscienceness, but LLMs technically dont think in words, they think in tokens, so I could imagine this getting closer.
'think' is one of those words that used to mean something but is now hopelessly vague- in discussions like these it becomes a blunt instrument. IMO LLMs don't 'think' at all - they predict what their model is most likely to say based on previously observed patterns. There is no world model or novelty. They are exceptionally useful idea adjacency lookup tools. They compress and organize data in a way that makes it shockingly easy to access, but they only 'think' in the way the Dewey decimal system thinks.
if we were having this conversation in 2023 I would agree with you, but LLM's have advanced so much that they are essentially efficient lookup tables is an oversimplification so dramatic I know you don't understand what you're talking about.
No one accuses the Dewey decimal system of thinking.
If I am so ignorant maybe you'd like to expand on exactly why I'm wrong. It should be easy since the oversimplification is dramatic enough that it made you this aggressive.
I'm not the other poster but he's probably referring to how your comment seems to only be talking about "pure" LLMs and seems pretty out of date, whereas most tools people are using in 2025 use LLMs as glue to stitch together other powerful systems.
Yeah, it does. It's not the worst in the world but dark mode my eyes relax and I can better enter flow-states. Too much non-dark mode and I get eye floaters.
Probably has something to do with having an all black background on desktop / IRC, terminals, steam since 1996/1997->now
Even MSN Gaming Zone where I started was 'dark moded'
-window was resized/moved, send a websocket snitch to the backend
- keep a consistent web socket open, or fetch a backend-api call for updates on X events
- more calls are made, means user is probably scrolling, inject more things/different things.
I see some js obfuscators out there where I look at the js file and it's all mumbo jumbo.
It is indeed a privacy nightmare, where whatever we do feeds the algorithms to aide in making other people do things.
But it's also used in network security, organizations etc. Staff/employees will use the system a certain way, if something enters it without the behaviors, it's detectable. I assume that's what you mean in anti-fraud.
Sad part is we don't know what the data is ever used for, and it's often bought and sold and the cycle repeats.
In the end all this shit we have to deal with is probably 99% used for deciding which ads to show you, which we are gonna block anyway, and it's all a complete and utter waste of computing power and electricity. This is how big tech "makes the world a better place" apparently.
Steam power is no joke if you actually look at the numbers. At this scale, it lets you move energy around and convert it to electricity in fewer steps, with fewer losses, than any other strategy.
We are still trying to solve the problem that we can't keep the plasma hot long enough to create fusion energy, so working on exotic conversion schemes is one step too far.
Consider also how complex these reactors already are, it makes sense to use the simplest method that we know works well.
Makes sense, but from a layman perspective it seems like introducing additional complexity and lots of inefficient, high-loss transmission steps.
We start with detached electrons moving at high speeds (plasma). We want detached electrons moving at moderate speeds (electrical current). And yet, the intermediate steps involve everything from heat, steam, large-scale mechanical forces and magnetic induction, just to get back to the electrons?
It feels more like the "pull in a 500MB framework instead of writing the function yourself" kind of simplicity.
There are lots of ideas, like using a reverse cyclotron (a particle decelerator) to drive a turbine, or harnessing the photo-electric effect (essentially solar panels, but for x-rays).
Billionaire Drools That “Citizens Will Be on Their Best Behavior” Under Constant AI Surveillance
https://futurism.com/the-byte/billionaire-constant-ai-survei...
Is the kind of mindset behind this guy.
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