Hexadecimal base (cracking knuckles).

A few points:

• “I have nothing to hide,” means you’ve accepted the premise that the burden of innocence is on you. That you are guilty until proven innocent. There are a couple millenia of jurisprudence, saying ‘innocent until proven guilty’ should be the default. The US 5th, 6th, and 14th amendments get close, but they don’t just come out and say it.

• “If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him.” This has been attributed to a few people from Cardinal Richelieu to Voltaire. But the crux is, anyone can make someone appear guilty. Doesn’t matter if you’re innocent. The burden of proof has to be on the accuser, otherwise it’s down to chaos, and tyrrany of the powerful and the mob.

• Personal privacy by default is one of those fundamental rights that gives us control of a lot of things around us. From freely walking down the street, to our shopping habits, license-plate-readers, location-tracking, who we associate with, and our healthcare.

• Imagine if the rules were changed so any time anyone wanted to use our data, including transactions, web and mobile interactions, credit-card, banking, voting, healthcare, whatever… they had to get explicit, single-use permission. How much weight would be lifted from everyone’s shoulder. It means you, the individual are in charge.

• There’s academic data on the psychological effects of surveillance. It has actual effect on one’s behavior and mental health: https://academic.oup.com/nc/article/2024/1/niae039/7920510

• At this point, there are too many privacy leaks. The only reasonable solution is to flip it all on its head. EVERYTHING is private, unless there is a legitimate reason to pierce that veil, and the burden is on those wanting the data.

It’ll have financial impacts on many business models. Yes, and? Do better.

AI software can’t technically kill you unless:

1. It convinces someone who can kill you, to you know, kill you.
2. It gets access to the physical world, which can definitely kill you.

Oh, wait.

1. U.S. military is using AI to help plan Iran air attacks: https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/us-military-using-ai-help-plan-iran-air-attacks-sources-say-lawmakers-rcna262150
2. Anthropic Previewing the Model Hardware Standard: https://www.anthropic.com/news/model-hardware-standard-research-preview

See, nothing to worry about.

Anything Monty Python. Also, Gravity’s Rainbow.

Another conspiracy hidden by Big Urine.

On laptop, go until browser crashes in a loop.

One time, had to reboot three times so I could close some of the windows before they locked up.

Long time ago, I had an indoor ginger cat. Rescue kitten. My girlfriend at the time kept teasing it, rubbing his belly, rough-housing with it. I kept telling her to go easy, but she thought it was fun.

Pretty soon, the cat learned about indiscriminate biting and scratching. All my family and friends hated being around him. I had to lock him up in another room when people showed up.

The girlfriend got a job out of town and moved out and I had to move to a place that didn’t allow animals. Fortunately, I found a friend with a farm who wanted to take him. Last I heard, he was having the time of his life riding on top of sheep and horses.

Humans encounter a wide range of tasks as they grow up from infant to toddler and beyond. We don’t have separate ‘training’ vs. ‘inference’ stages (or at least, it’s a very short window). We also generalize from tasks (as the glass jar demo shows). We also appear to have different types of storage for short vs medium vs long-range memory.

We can combine a bunch of individual tasks into complex, coordinated, goal-seeking tasks and keep them around for later use. Like riding a bike, or learning how to drive, or juggle. We can recall those years later, even if we haven’t done them for a long time.

Plus, we somehow have a meta-layer of ‘common-sense’ or ‘ethics’ that tells us when NOT to do something, or when we SHOULDN’T. Like ride a bike onto pedestrians, or juggle kitchen knives. Hopefully, the research will go into those areas as well.

It was a ‘cult revival’ a few years ago. The only movie I ever walked out of. My buddy stayed and says he enjoyed it:

Kull the Conqueror: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kull_the_Conqueror

This guy fingerprints.

(hopefully in a good way)

The WebAudio test is not the only measurement in these scripts. Inspection of the bundles found code that queries or measures:

• canvas rendering and toDataURL()
• WebGL renderer information, extensions, and shader precision
• audio oscillator and analyser output
• screen and viewport dimensions
• device pixel ratio
• hardware concurrency and device memory
• installed browser plugins
• supported audio and video formats
• WebRTC behaviour
• browser performance timing
• mouse, touch, focus, and scroll events
• device motion and orientation
• properties commonly associated with browser automation

There is also code for serialising and encrypting results, making requests to Alibaba telemetry services, and sending data with fetch() or sendBeacon().

Not sure you need all this to play audio.

A small thing keeps getting mentioned, but not explained. These things maintain a ‘whitelist’ of license plates they’ll ‘ignore.’

Why? Who is on that list? And who gets to decide what licenses are placed on the list? Are these logged and audited?

No big. Guess I’ll have to wait another year before upgrading my laptop. Sorry for the loss of business.

If I had to do it again, I’d start with the end goal and work backwards. It was a long time ago, I was single with no extra expenses, had a decent job, and thought it might be fun to learn. If I had wanted to become a professional pilot, the calculation would have been very different.

Getting the cert mainly involved putting in the hours. Having a good instructor helps a lot. Also, not making any stupid mistakes. I almost stalled the plane hard on my first solo touch and go. The hardest part was getting used to the ATC lingo and not stuttering too much. I got an aircraft band radio with a headphone and joined all the weirdos who liked to sit at the end of airport runways.

Getting a private pilot certificate. Was fun, but after going to every airport within range, not sure it was worth it.

Sigh. I really need to put /s around things.

It’s a Monty Python quote.

In that case, society’s to blame.

You rolled a bowling ball down a hill. It struck a few cars on the way and went through a house and killed their pet. Guess who would be held responsible? You or the bowling ball manufacturer?

What if the bowling ball was really shiny and worth $100B? Should it make a difference?