I had never heard of them but apparently it’s an “open source” AI platform. Basically AWS but aimed specifically at running LLMs.

Well first you need to invent AGI which is probably at least a decade away still, but once you do that then you negotiate with that AGI to carve out a little corner of the Internet and lock all of us inside it.

Claiming your AI product sucks and doesn’t do what it’s asked to do (aka hallucinates) is a bold move, lets see how it works for them Cotton.

If you’re influencing the outcome via some private mechanism that’s a crime and is in fact illegal (a little thing known as insider trading or cheating depending on how you go about it). So per your definition either you can’t influence the outcome in which case it’s gambling, or you can in which case it’s illegal and you’re committing a crime.

All that said I think the definition of gambling being truly random isn’t quite right. Gambling has always been about statistical outcomes because if it was truly random nobody would ever make any money off of it so nobody would waste their time. Remember the house always wins because they control the odds. These sites are just bookies in techbro clothing using marketing and legal loopholes to run illegal gambling sites.

I hate how they’re supporting the fiction that this isn’t gambling by calling it a “prediction site”. It’s gambling, always has been.

MS has mastered the one thing businesses love which is being perfectly mediocre. If you present a business two pieces of software one that does one thing really well but nothing else, and one that does three things terribly, they’ll pick the one that does three things terribly every time. That’s the MS design, it smears a thin coating of suck across as broad a surface as possible and then advertises that it does everything.

You should be able to remove any or all the certs as well, although I could see an argument for requiring you to enter the BIOS to do that.

The way it should work is that during the OS install the OS can ask to have a cert added to the keystore at which point UEFI pops up a screen that says something like:

An application has requested to add a new certificate to secure boot which will allow new software to run at boot up. This usually happens when installing or updating an OS. If you would like to allow this press and hold <5 randomly selected letters> on the keyboard for 5 seconds. If you don’t want to allow this press and hold escape for 3 seconds.

This would at least be a vendor agnostic way of enrolling certificates instead of the MS certificate just always being pre-installed. It should also of course be publicly documented exactly how the process works so everyone can use it.

No, OS X aggressively resists customization or convenience. There’s the Apple way to do pretty much everything and the painful way which is anything but the Apple way. Windows is anti-consumer because they want to harvest your data and cram ads down your throat. OS X just doesn’t care what you want or what you would prefer and will actively punish you if you attempt to deviate from the way it thinks you should be doing things. If something doesn’t work the way you want tough, OS X makes you adapt to it rather than trying to adapt to you.

The correct industry term is white label products.

Since Reagan it has been one of the Republican pillars that businesses should have no regulations, taxes, or standards of any kind. They will of course break from that position when they see an opportunity to screw over a minority or attack a business they don’t like for some reason, but otherwise yes ask your average Republican if some business regulation (or regulatory agency) should be repealed and they almost always say yes.

The biggest surprise at the moment is actually that many of the voters are turning against the data centers, although I suspect the majority of them would still oppose any kind of regulatory attempt to block them.

That’s because it is. Every time this comes up it turns out they prompted it to act out a scenario. LLMs don’t do anything on their own, all they do is respond to the prompts they’re given.

I’m just of the opinion that I’m in no way obliged to disclose to you what I spend my money on, just because I work somewhere you spend money on.

…

So you believe that customers of a company should have a say how the staff uses their wages?

Can you see how these two statements are not the same thing? The former is not something anyone had said until you did so while the latter is what the entire rest of this conversation has been about until you tried to pivot to the former.

Indirectly yes a customer absolutely has a say in what an employee spends money on if they are aware of it because it’s the customer’s money that’s indirectly paying for the thing. An employee is a part of a business and when an employee engages in some activity even on their own time if people are aware they work for that company, then that reflects on the company and vice versa. That’s one of the reasons companies have very strict rules about representing yourself as an employee or agent of the company.

Furthermore the higher an employee’s position in a company the stronger their actions reflect on the company. For someone like a co-founder, practically the highest position in a company, those actions reflect very strongly on the company. The only actions that reflect stronger are ones done directly by the company itself.

This is why HR departments exist, they protect the business from the actions of its employees (or at least attempt to).

No. I’m just of the opinion that I’m in no way obliged to disclose to you what I spend my money on, just because I work somewhere you spend money on.

That’s not what you said though. I don’t think anyone is arguing that employees of a company are obligated to disclose their spending habits, that would just be ludicrous. However, if that information was available or if the company itself made donations/purchases it’s perfectly reasonable as a customer to decide not to support that kind of behavior by continuing to do business with that company.

Just as one example Chick-fil-A is rather famously anti-lgbtq and regularly donates part of their profits to anti-lgbtq organizations. As a consumer it’s entirely reasonable and moral to refuse to do business with them in order to reduce the money being funnelled to morally repugnant organizations.

Calling him Thomas Edison is giving him far too much credit. Edison may have been a self aggrandizing asshole, but he also did have a few accomplishments to his name. Musk is a glorified venture capitalist, only instead of just taking a chunk of the profits he buys the whole company so he can steal credit for the company’s achievements. Elon Musk has never created a single thing in his life. He has in fact been a net negative as every company he has ever been involved with would have been better off without Musk’s “help”.

You and everyone else that’s using Firefox. It’s one of the dumbest “features” that’s ever been added to Firefox and that’s quite an accomplishment considering the long history of adding stupid features nobody asked for.

and why old all platforms need consistent server-side validation across APIs, account services, and databases

FTFY.

Regular search engines have feedback mechanisms that limit how effective that is. The click through and bounce rate are used to adjust rankings and as more and more people look at the fake info and then ignore it it will naturally fall out of the top results and get buried. LLMs though don’t have that feedback, once something is ingested and baked into the model it’s there forever. The fake info doesn’t need to look believable enough to fool a human, just self consistent enough to fool an LLM with its tiny context window.

I’ve seen it proposed that cops should have to start carrying essentially malpractice insurance that they pay for out of their own pocket and that would cover payouts in the event that they get sued. This would have the added advantage that all those “bad apples” that somehow always seem to end up transferred to new precincts instead of fired and banned for life wouldn’t be able to get anyone to insure them effectively banning them.

Spam was never done with “burner phones” in the first place, it’s mostly done via VoIP through shady telecoms companies that can’t be bothered to validate their customers. Due to the age of the phone system it’s incredibly easy to spoof phone numbers because it’s essentially a trust system. Phone exchange A talks to exchange B and says phone number 123 is calling number 456. How does exchange B know that it’s actually 123 calling? They don’t at all, they just trust that exchange A is telling the truth. It’s really hard to get into the system, but once you’re there you essentially have unlimited power with virtually no safeguards in place.

Basically from a security perspective the phone system looks a lot like the 1980s internet, there is technically some security in place, but significantly less than there actually should be.