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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 19th, 2023

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  • By default, Symfonium will stream music from Navidrome to your phone, but there are settings you can change in Symfonium to make it sync to your phone instead if you have data quotas or an unreliable connection. There’s probably a way to make it sync a subset and restrict playback to that subset when on a metered connection, but in my case I have more than enough storage to fit everything on the phone.




  • Is Bitcoin really a good idea? bitcoin.com says you shouldn’t worry because it would cost “hundreds of millions to over a billion dollars” to run a 51% attack on the Bitcoin network for an hour. The US government spends this kind of money on wars, and likely has the means to reduce that cost by forcing offline or compromising a large portion of the trustworthy Bitcoin network. This alone wouldn’t allow money to be seized, but it could be used to destroy the crypto market, making that money effectively worthless. You wouldn’t normally need to worry about an attack of this scale, but the it’s not beneath this government and there are a few AI companies that could use a government bailout in exchange for temporarily converting all their GPUs to Bitcoin miners.

    Does World War III involve different countries attacking and defending crypto currencies?



  • What is RentAHuman’s cut? This is a very expensive service to operate. If an LLM posts a request for somebody to go pick up a package, what happens if the package never existed? What happens if the human just says that it never existed and takes the money or even the money and the package? Somebody in the middle needs to be arbitrating between AI agents that are notorious for making things up or getting details wrong and humans that just want to make quick money. Nobody is going to send requests if the humans are randomly stealing and nobody is going to fulfill requests if sometimes the request is unsatisfiable and you don’t get paid.




  • Many senior level “software engineers” are just tenured programmers and they’re managed by business people who don’t know software engineering either. One of the major benefits of using off the shelf software libraries is that they generally work as expected and have been through much more testing than something you just wrote, and often these libraries even receive free or cheap maintenance updates. You don’t want your developers wasting time reimplementing things and then wasting more time maintaining those reimplementations.

    Getting the AI to write it is like mitigating the initial reimplementation cost by going to Fiver.



  • It is impossible. CPV is only going to allow the attacker to know that the device is probably not located next to the VPN server. It can only prove a positive, not a negative.

    The second method you’re describing is only possible for people who control internet infrastructure and are able to infer correlations data going into your VPN server with data going out of your VPN server, which is both easier and more difficult than you’re suggesting. The attacker does not need to most of the internet routers because they only care about the data going into and out of the VPN server (it’s onion routing where the attacker needs to control many routers), but the attacker does need to have a powerful enough device to be inferring (hopefully) encrypted network flows on the public network to the packet sizes of encrypted VPN traffic for all of the traffic that is passing through that VPN server at the same time.


  • The latency to your VPN server is a constant added to the latency between your VPN server and whatever servers you are connected to. As long as the user’s VPN service doesn’t use different VPN servers for different destinations, it is impossible to determine the location of the user behind the VPN based on latency, and in general it is impossible to determine how far a user is from their VPN server because of varying latency introduced by the user’s own network or by bad infrastructure at the local ISP level. You can only know how far they aren’t based on the speed of light across the surface of the earth.

    But, without a VPN, this is a real attack that was proven by a high school student using some quirks of Discord CDNs. Even without using Discord’s CDNs, if somebody wanted to locate web visitors using this technique, they could just rent CDN resources like nearly every big company is doing. Of course, if you have the opportunity to pull this off, you normally have the user’s IP address and don’t care about inferring the location by latency. The reason why it was notable with Discord was because the attacker was not able to obtain the victim’s IP address.


  • It’s not just anti-LGBTQ+. This is going to be bad for everyone. We’re just years away from banks and insurance companies factoring in your social credit score based on your activity on sites where you had to verify you’re not a legally considered a child.

    You verify your age on Discord. Discord doxxes you through negligent handling of user data. Your account is found to be a member of a server that might suggest you are less responsible. Your rates are increased. Even if you know this is the reason, you cannot sue Discord because you were coerced into waiving your rights. The shareholders are happy because the line goes up. Is it already happening? I doubt any companies are rushing to tell us that they’re doing it, but the data is available to them.