It’s worth adding that, if you are arrested, that phone is a treasure-trove of potential liability that will absolutely get used against you. Also, you’re probably not getting it back, so you’re better off without it. Carry cash, a map if you must, and coordinate rally points and fallback locations with your friends ahead of time.

A proper camera is a good tip, but make sure the camera memory and storage card are wiped ahead of time.

just living your life without a phone is getting harder

This is a bigger problem than most realize. Consider the barrier-to-entry for phones, internet access, and charging. Then add cashless payment on top of that. Combined, it creates a new red-line between economic classes, and a rather ugly one at that. At some point, this mode of commerce is going to get selected not for the convenience it provides, but for whom it excludes.

I’ll also add that getting access to a smartphone with total anonymity is impressively hard to do.

True, but what about the “two legs good, four legs bad” variety?

Other than “because of BLM”, cooperation with local law enforcement would be a good reason for ICE to focus efforts there.

I mean, that happens with CloudWatch all the time. It’s the most plausible part about this.

I haven’t always been a fan of Go. It launched with some iffy design decisions that have since been patched, either by the project maintainers or the community. It’s a much better experience now, which suggests that maybe there’s some long-range vision at work that I wasn’t privy to.

That said, Pike clearly has a lot of good ideas and I’m glad Google funded him to bring those to light.

I’ll also say that after finally wrapping my head around Python and JavaScript async/await, I actually much prefer the Goroutine and channel model for concurrency. I got to those languages after surviving C++, and believe me when I say that it’s a bad time when your software develops a bad case of warts. Better to not contract them in the first place.

You’re welcome.

I’m not sure if this is c/bmoviebonanza material, but it’s up there. Anyway, that’s a solid community if you enjoy shlocky “how did this happen?!” movies.

Also, just dig through the Cannon Group movie list for more “throw crazy shit at the wall” gems like this. Some are hits, most are misses, and a few are really incredible misses.

Best I can do is Lou Ferrigno as Hercules. Just watch the whole trailer. The monster designs and other set pieces are pretty far out there for the time.

With a helmet like that, may as well cast GWAR and call it a day.

I use a system prompt that forces it to ask a question if there are options or if it has to make assumptions

I’m kind of amazed that even works. I’ll have to try that. Then again, I’ve asked ChatGPT to “respond to all prompts like a Magic 8-ball” and it knocked it out of the park.

so I start a new chat frequently.

I do this as well, and totally forgot to mention it. Yes, I keep the context small and fresh so that prior conversations (and hallucinations) can’t poison new dialogues.

I also will do the same prompts on two models from different providers at the same time and cross reference the idiots to see if they are lying to me.

Oooh… straight to my toolbox with that one. Cheers.

That’s been my biggest problem with the current state of affairs. It’s now easier to research newer tech through an LLM than it is to play search-result-wack-a-mole, on the off chance that what you need is on a forum that’s not Discord. At least an AI can mostly make sense of vendor docs and extrapolate a bit from there. That said, I don’t like it.

When writing code, I don’t let AI do the heavy lifting. Instead, I use it to push back the fog of war on tech I’m trying to master. At the same time, keep the dialogue to a space where I can verify what it’s giving me.

1. Never ask leading questions. Every token you add to the conversation matters, so phrase your query in a way that forces the AI to connect the dots for you
2. Don’t ask for deep reasoning and inference. It’s not built for this, and it will bullshit/hallucinate if you push it to do so.
3. Ask for live hyperlinks so it’s easier to fact-check.
4. Ask for code samples, algorithms, or snippets to do discrete tasks that you can easily follow.
5. Ask for A/B comparisons between one stack you know by heart, and the other you’re exploring.
6. It will screw this up, eventually. Report hallucinations back to the conversation.

About 20% of the time, it’ll suggest things that are entirely plausible and probably should exist, but don’t. Some platforms and APIs really do have barn-door-sized holes in them and it’s staggering how rapidly AI reports a false positive in these spaces. It’s almost as if the whole ML training stratagem assumes a kind of uniformity across the training set, on all axes, that leads to this flavor of hallucination. In any event, it’s been helpful to know this is where it’s most likely to trip up.

Edit: an example of one such API hole is when I asked ChatGPT for information about doing specific things in Datastar. This is kind of a curveball since there’s not a huge amount online about it. It first hallucinated an attribute namespace prefix of data-star- which is incorrect (it uses data- instead). It also dreamed up a JavaScript-callable API parked on a non-existent Datastar. object. Both of those concepts conform strongly to the broader world of browser-extending APIs, would be incredibly useful, and are things you might expect to be there in the first place.

The genius of launching an attack of this scale from an address space that is already jam-packed full of hackers, should not be understated. Id say that, if not for doing it live on stage, law enforcement now has a giant haystack of needles to sift through.

I have a USB-bootable thumbdrive with Ubuntu 24 on it. Two home systems down, two to go.

My chief concern is that this wave of enshitifiation will eventually make it to Microsoft’s security support. Historically, at least recently, the weekly updates and response to critical vulnerabilities and virus scanning have been pretty good. But now that they’re attacking their own flagship products - Office and Windows itself - I think it’s only a matter of time before they fumble Windows security in a big way.

I’ll also predict that Non-pro Windows will eventually be “free” (as in beer), but will be useless without a live internet connection and cloud services. So now really is the time to switch. IMO, all the money points in that direction.

The answer is: binary, sometimes with electrical switches.

As late as the very early 1980’s, the PDP-11 could be started by entering a small bootstrap program into memory, using the machine’s front panel:

You toggle the switches to make the binary pattern you want at a specific location in RAM, then hit another button to store it. Repeat until the bootstrap is in RAM, and then press start to run the program from that first address. Said start address is always some hardwired starting location.

And that’s a LATE example. Earlier (programmable) systems had other mechanisms for hard-wired or manual input like this. Go back far enough and you have systems that are so fixed-function in nature that it’s just wired to do one specific job.

Real, honest question here: how are they defining “hardship”? That’s a huge range of subjective circumstances there.

To be clear, I’m not going to fire back by saying “well, that’s justifiable”. Rather, I’m curious where said “shitstains” are coming from and how they frame their choices. I only have the broad strokes here, and would love some more nuance to this story, however anecdotal. Cheers.

I blame the system.

There are parts of the country that prop up a rather sinister dichotomy: live here and flirt with the poverty line, or enlist and better your economic prospects (and maybe take a bullet). You can see these outcomes in the faces of the homeless, the working poor, and veterans that are functional members of society. Our society does the rest by having almost no social safety net, lavishing the wealthy with praise, and vilifying poor people, all at the same time. Lastly, recruitment targets 18-22 year olds, which are people whose brains are in the final years of their developmental cycle, and have not yet begun to understand how the rest of the world works. This all operates together to push people towards putting on a uniform.

Solve any of the problems above and the comic will start to look like a thing of the past.

Edit: While we’re on the topic, the IT industry has a tidy white-collar equivalent: You can make more money and get more job security, but you have to be indifferent about how your work is used. Usually, the more ethically grey (or outright evil) the job, the more it pays.

Goddamn. That might actually be worth it.

Well, now I wanna know. How much money is worth life-altering injuries, including a concussion?

Yeah, all I know are the occasional bits and pieces that wash up here on Lemmy. I knew he was bad news, but I didn’t know he was a trumper. Wow.