cecilkorik

That’s a fair criticism and an important clarification, I agree.

End-to-end encryption is the final boss of false-sense-of-security.

Like, it’s great and all, but it’s not universal perfect privacy the way a lot of people seem to hold it up as if it were. You have to understand what it’s actually defending against, and who might be blocked by that, and more importantly, who won’t be. Because the list of potential adversaries it is actually useful against are becoming narrower and increasingly out-of-date.

Encryption alone prevents the messages being read in transit between you and Signal, and obviously that’s fundamental basic security at this point. Signal being end-to-end encrypted prevents your messages being spied on by Signal, but ironically they’re probably one of the most trustworthy actors in this whole chain, so the fact that it’s protected from them, while commendable, is not particularly valuable security. They were probably not the ones going to spy on you in the first place. They have prevented themselves from being capable of doing so, and that’s good, but if that’s all you’re worried about and you now think your privacy problems are solved, you’re completely missing the point because instead of Signal themselves, you need to be worried about the guy currently standing over your shoulder with his camera filming.

Treat your phone and your Windows computer like they are permanently compromised with a rootkit taking continuous screenshots of everything you do and feeding that to their big tech overlords, because they might as well be.

For that matter, even Linux PCs still have their black box “intel management engine” or similar processor running constantly and potentially watching everything you do, although I don’t believe they actually do that in any reasonable case, we need to understand they have both the capability and the motivation to be, at least in some cases, compromised by adversaries which may include (but are not limited to) tech companies and governments. You can’t even trust your “dumb monitor” unless you’ve audited every chip inside it, you’ll never know if it could be scanning everything on your screen and feeding it back through HDMI/DP back-channels or even through powerline networking. You also don’t know if the same kind of things could be happening on the other side that you’re sending/receiving from. Sure the network trip is protected, but that’s hardly the only place you’re vulnerable to interception.

That probably all sounds paranoid and extreme and improbable, and it is, but the point is end-to-end encryption does nothing to help you against any of that, so don’t make the mistake of assuming you’re 100% safe because it’s end-to-end encrypted. The “end” is not what you think it is and it’s not paranoid to at least understand that and accept the risk with the understanding.

I realize I am probably preaching to the choir here, and most of you probably understand this as well as I do. But I’m also pretty sure a lot of people truly believe it’s more secure against eavesdropping than it actually is and that needs to change. The surveillance state is adapting and expanding rapidly and I fear they’ve started getting ahead of many of us. Beware, and plan carefully in the months and years ahead.

Absolutely, just like addiction to fast food causes obesity, our addiction to fast information has developed into a profound societal ignorance. Studying issues seriously takes time and effort, and if you think “ain’t nobody got time for that” I’ll tell you right now you’re going to have to start to make time for it. Because if you don’t, you’ll end up knowing nothing, and being wrong about everything, and while that may be acceptable to anyone following all the other lemmings in the same direction (the double irony of “lemming behavior” being historical fake information itself, while posting this on lemmy is not lost on me), I’m also going to suggest to you there will be serious personal consequences from being wrong all the time, and those consequences are going to catch up with you sooner or later.

I dabble in local AI and this always blows my mind. How do people just casually throw 135b parameter models around? Are people like, renting datacenter hardware or GPU time or something, or are people just building personal AI servers with 6 5090s in them, or are they quantizing them down to 0.025 bits or what? what’s the secret? how does this work? am I missing something? like the Q4 of Qwen3.5 122B is between 60-80GB just for the model alone. That’s 3x 5090s minimum, unless I’m doing the math wrong, and then you need to fit the huge context windows these things have in there too. I don’t get it.

Meanwhile I’m over here nearly burning my house down trying to get my poor consumer cards to run glm-4.7-flash.

I hate to break it to you, but we’re never going to be able to trust anything ever again. At least, not the way we used to. In the future, without any doubt, we are going to need to develop a different model of learning, using, and processing information that considers the provenance of where the information came from and how it got there from essentially first principles. We will have to build a web of investigation and trust to determine and mark what information is trustworthy and what is not, especially new information. None of this exists in any meaningful way yet, and the systems we used to have for it, like academic research and journalism for example, would have been catastrophically inadequate to handle this onslaught even at their peak, and they are nowhere near their peak anymore, having been deliberately eroded into a shadow of their former effectiveness so some assholes could get rich and powerful. So hopefully we’ll be able to rely on solid ground like Wikipedia and… books as a starting point, and nobody gets around to burning the Library of Alexandria down in their rage against “woke stuff”, because otherwise we’re going to be rebuilding our information spaces pretty much from scratch in the near future, probably at the same time we’re rebuilding civilized society in general. If this sounds incredibly uncertain, tedious and painful: yes, it will be, especially at first. But we will get better at it, eventually. We will develop new systems for it, we will become fluent in information again and the friction will fade.

I wish we could get to that stage right away, but unfortunately it will have to wait. We can’t do anything to improve the swimming pool while we are currently drowning in it. This is the reality that rampant and unchecked use of AI technologies by soulless corporations and corrupt governments have wrought. Logic and reason never stood a chance, and we are entering the digital dark ages. The enlightenment is probably coming someday, but don’t hold your breath for it.

Support your local library, that’s the most helpful thing I can think of for individuals to do. Librarians know their shit.

Welcome. It’s smaller, but the people are better. Most of them, anyway. Sometimes some of them are brilliant and amazing, just like on Reddit. Sometimes some of them suck (sometimes including me) but it’s not so overwhelming because there aren’t as many. Small is beautiful, even if it is a little quieter than you’re used to. You’ll get used to it though, and it’s better for your mental health.

It’s awesome that people are reverse-engineering this garbage but honestly who the fuck is using these evil companies software expecting it to not be evil.

Use an open-weights model in open-source software if you have to, fuck these idiots.

0.02% of page loads is honestly way more than I would’ve expected. The fact that they would look at that number and see an excuse to remove a feature like this is honestly a gigantic red flag for the way these browsers are being developed. Granted, it’s not that surprising if you’ve been paying attention to the embrace-extend-extinguish march of web technologies towards a walled garden controlled by tech giants, but this is part of the writing on the wall, folks.

Yes. They are technically reflected sunlight, so they are as bright as the sun, just very small. It makes sense you can see them during sunlight, since they are reflections of sunlight. You will typically only see them on the side of the sky opposite the sun, but the exact angle depends on the location and orientation of the satellite and the surface that is actually doing the reflection.

Generally speaking, they are dots that fade in somewhat gradually, moving at a consistent pace (typically slower than a shooting star, but faster than an airplane at cruising altitude) in a straight line direction for awhile at full brightness, then fading away.

They don’t even respect us enough to bother with trying to make their lies convincing anymore.

Because they incentivize it. Some banks are better at incentivizing it than others. My bank for example, allows the highest daily limit (by a factor of 5x) if you use the app. Online banking has a lower limit, and cards lower still. I don’t appreciate them holding my own money hostage, but the sad reality we live in precludes me from having enough remaining mental bandwidth and effort reserve to commit it to fighting against it in such an empty and unwinnable battle. Money is a scam anyway.

This very much feels like they just needed to come up with a new justification for this process

It feels that way because that’s exactly what happened.

The biggest issue with the Pinto was not the Pinto itself, it was how Ford discussed the potential issues with it internally. It was their very well documented preference for money over protecting human life that caused the controversy.

We know this really happens all the time, at all companies and in all industries, but Ford was punished for saying the quiet part out loud (amongst themselves) and getting caught doing it. We are all supposed to at least put on a show of human lives being more important than money, and Ford failed to put on the show, and for that they were punished.

We still don’t care about human life, but at least we all felt better about it afterwards.

Hey Sam, just so you know, if I do get laid off, I am going to charge at LEAST double when some of these assholes need to hire me back to fix the AI generated disaster they’re struggling to keep running while bleeding money. So thank you in advance, I guess.

I think it was even easier to say in 2021, because more people knew about it and the scam was even more obvious. Now, in 2026, most people’s hindsight doesn’t go back that far, it was quickly forgotten as it should be, and people are like “huh? NFT?”

It’s the old-school term for the “Reddit hug of death”. In other words, huge popular site links to tiny unpopular site, and tiny unpopular site is overwhelmed by extreme levels of traffic it never expected to see and is completely unprepared for, server hosting it melts into a puddle of goo and website becomes inaccessible. (Realistically, server hosting it goes to 100% CPU or memory or both and the website just crashes and doesn’t restart or only functions intermittently and extremely slowly)

Server admin, seeing their server turning to a puddle of molten goo, decides to quickly throw emergency barricades in front of it to try to block enough of the traffic that the server can continue to function, often in vain.

Slashdot.org was the precursor to Reddit for old techies. It still kind of is, but it’s a shadow of what it once was.

It can be bad, but it doesn’t have to be. It’s not bad if you’re just using it as a tool and understand that it’s not your only tool. Heavy equipment operators use their machines like extensions of their body. It doesn’t mean it’s bad or that they forget how to use their arms and legs or that they don’t still exercise their arms and legs sometimes. Use tools when it’s appropriate to and don’t when it isn’t, and always make sure you can use a variety of different tools including the ones you were born with and you’ll be fine.

Maybe they should start making RAM /s

When they make it law to have age verification in your operating system, only outlaws will have operating systems without age verification.

I guess I’m an outlaw then. Enjoy your visit to the wild west, we will always have illegal operating systems aplenty.

I think it’s more like expectations have been deliberately lowered in those fields to meet exactly what AI can deliver. Unpredictable, arbitrary, non-negotiable decisions are the point, and the goal. It’s not about enforcing any laws or achieving any actual outcome other than making innocent people fear for their lives. And it’s doing a fine job at that.