it’s actually designed to slow down typing speed

This is a myth

The Germans didn’t exclusively kill Jews during the Holocaust.

I’m more excited about those Frore MEMS airjet chips.

That’s actually in at least one consumer product right now.

Why would any of this be about you personally?

Uh, hello? Do you want to think about why I wrote that? Do you need me to explain to you the idea that other users of the extension are mostly self interested but it is in their best interest to cooperate and share information if the extension is bad? That the greater the number of people with access to the source code the less likely it is that some subset of them could cooperate against some other subset? And therefore the more people looking at the source code there are, the less you have to trust any single person? You know, the same reason you won’t follow a single person into a dark alleyway but are comfortable standing in a crowded street? Because the first subset being “everyone”’ and the second one being “only you” is an extreme case that is basically impossible to happen, just like the Ohio conspiracy? Do you understand what a negative example is or are you gonna comment back “wow I can’t believe you think Ohio doesn’t exist and everyone in the world is out to get you, you must be a paranoid schizophrenic”?

I honestly can’t take you seriously when this is your view of security

This is the view of the majority of people that work in netsec. There’s a general sentiment that we should be reviewing code more, relying less on single-developer projects, and getting reproducible builds for everything, but nobody serious thinks that access to source code is a bad thing and usually it’s regarded as a positive.

So in that sense uBlock is kinda bad because Gorhill does the vast majority of the work, but it would be even worse if it was closed source on top of that.

"we caught em once so the system works”.

As opposed to your system where you throw your hands up and say “you’re screwed either way, nothing you do matters, just admit it and give up!”, which has famously done so much good in the world.

I trust a random internet stranger that in theory is doing their work in public

There’s no ‘in theory’ about it.

I’ve actually had an extension I was using be revealed as spyware (it was hoverzoom, I immediately switched to an alternative afterward).

I don’t read every line of every piece of software I use because that would be impossible, but I do actually look at some of it and modify it to suit my needs. It was because there are many thousands of people like me that do this that the problem in hoverzoom was caught. It’s been ten years, so I don’t have the best memory of the event, but I think it only took a few days to catch it as well, despite the fact that the offending code was left out of the GitHub repo and was only in the compiled extension.

The state of open source isn’t perfect (not everything has reproducible builds yet) but in general I ‘trust’ that every other programmer in existence isn’t in on a conspiracy to screw me over specifically.

That’s what Google was trying to do, yeah, but IMO they weren’t doing a very good job of it (really old Google search was good if you knew how to structure your queries, but then they tried to make it so you could ask plain English questions instead of having to think about what keywords you were using and that ruined it IMO). And you also weren’t able to run it against your own documents.

LLMs on the other hand are so good at statistical correlation that they’re able to pass the Turing test. They know what words mean in context (in as much they “know” anything) instead of just matching keywords and a short list of synonyms. So there’s reason to believe that if you were able to see which parts of the source text the LLM considered to be the most similar to a query that could be pretty good.

There is also the possibility of running one locally to search your own notes and documents. But like I said I’m not sure I want to max out my GPU to do a document search.

How do you know Ohio is real? Have you been there yourself? Have you seen it with your own two eyes? Or do you just trust all the people who claim to live there?

You see, believing in the existence of Ohio is exactly the same as believing that my dad works for Nintendo and I got to play their next game early. It was awesome btw.

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Being able to summarize and answer questions about a specific corpus of text was a use case I was excited for even knowing that LLMs can’t really answer general questions or logically reason.

But if Google search summaries are any indication they can’t even do that. And I’m not just talking about the screenshots people post, this is my own experience with it.

Maybe if you could run the LLM in an entirely different way such that you could enter a question and then it tells you which part of the source text statistically correlates the most with the words you typed; instead of trying to generate new text. That way in a worse case scenario it just points you to a part of the source text that’s irrelevant instead of giving you answers that are subtly wrong or misleading.

Even then I’m not sure the huge computational requirements make it worth it over ctrl-f or a slightly more sophisticated search algorithm.

Probably the weirdest kind of lightbulb I’ve heard of is the electron stimulated luminescence bulb.

They were basically little CRT screens that produced white light instead of a picture. They had about the same efficiency and lifespan as CFL bulbs (which were around at the same time) but better color rendering capability (higher CRI). They also didn’t use mercury in their construction.

They never caught on probably because of how bulky they were, with cost probably being a factor as well (though if they were as manufactured at the scales CFLs were the cost may have come down). Today LEDs are better than both of course.

Speaking of cost and LEDs, it’s pretty remarkable just how cheap lighting has gotten. Consider this article, where they talk about the cost of producing light with candles vs with incandescent bulbs. But since 2006 we have developed some LED bulbs that approach or exceed 200 lumens per watt. That’s a more than 11x improvement over the 17 lumens per watt figure given in that article. That adds another .9 to the percentage cost drop before we even consider the longer lifetime of the LED bulb.

I think I calculated at some point that Philips Ultra Efficient bulbs cost less than $1 per year per bulb to operate if you add the cost of power + the purchase price of the bulb amortized over its lifetime. At this point lighting up a room is almost free.

I have, I like his channel a lot.

It kinda depends on my much IR light your camera lens absorbs.

A certain percentage of the light produced by the lamp (whether it’s incandescent or an arc lamp) is infrared light. This is the same as the radiant heat you can feel coming off of a fire, for example.

Whereas with the LED light almost all of the photons it’s emitting are going to be in the visible band. High intensity LEDs do produce some amount of waste heat, but this is in the form of heating up the structure they’re connected to. So not only do they waste less energy, the energy they do waste isn’t shooting out the front in the form of IR.

To be clear, visible light also turns into heat when it’s absorbed, but with the LED you’d just be shooting visible light through your lens, whereas with a lamp you’d be shooting the same amount of visible light (same lumen value) plus a bunch of IR. So in the latter case there’s a greater total amount of energy flowing through the lens.

All of this is to say that an LED emitter of the same lumen value almost certainly has less of a potential to heat up your camera lens. I guess if IR just passed right through it (and none of it got absorbed in the glass or in the tube of the lens) then it might not be much of a problem, and you’d just be heating up your projection screen slightly more. But I don’t know enough about camera lenses to say if that’s the case.

My most stereotypical special interest (in that it’s something really random that you might assume there’s not a lot of depth to) is artificial lighting technology.

But I have a lot of stuff I could infodump about: computers, video games, TTRPGs, world building, neurology, etc.

Even if it takes 100+ years for quantum cryptanalysis to become viable I would rather we start switching over to better algorithms now.

I don’t watch TV, not even streaming.

For the desktop maybe Haiku and Plan9 as well. I don’t know if those would be more or less popular than Minix and Solaris though.

They can see what website you go to, and how much data you exchange with it, but not what specific page on that site you’re looking at or what specific data you send (for example my ISP can’t tell that I’m making this specific comment).

Provided the site is using SSL of course.

I’m in Canada and I can never trust my doctor to have any conversation with anyone, at any time longer than five minutes at a time for anything

The best tactic I’ve found if you want to get anything done for yourself or someone close to you is for you to do the legwork and make calls, contacts and literally hound people to do their job.

This is my experience in the US as well. Also nobody knows anything about anything.

Doctor A puts you on a medication, doctor B doesn’t know until you tell them and then he says “he put you on that!? You shouldn’t be on that, I’m taking you off it.”

You go to have a surgery and say “hey guys, did you know that I’m difficult to intubate? Because I could die if you don’t take that into account”, they didn’t know.

“Hey guys, I have reason to believe that the insurance card I was issued in the mail isn’t completely correct, can anyone help me with this?”, 4 different people at the company that issued the card have no idea what’s going on, don’t even know about the policy tied to the card in question and think you must have accidentally called the wrong company (you didn’t).

“Hey guys how much is this going to cost?” it is literally impossible to say.

If you’re curious:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zombo.com

Back in 1999 a lot of websites would consist of a full-page Adobe Flash program (something that no longer works in modern browsers) a bit like how a lot of websites now are basically JavaScript apps. Because the speed of internet connections was so low back then it could take a long time for those flash apps to load all their content, so while you were waiting they might play a little animation or something that served as an “intro”.

Zombo com was a parody of those websites. There was no actual content, it just played a really really long intro that consisted of colorful blinking circles and audio of a guy saying variations of “welcome to zombo com, you can do anything here, anything at all” over and over again.

Nerds don’t just want to teach people to drive. They want to teach them about the engine, the drive train, the underlying transportation infrastructure, and how to change their own oil and tires.

Maybe if more people knew how combustion worked and where the gasoline they burn comes from we wouldn’t have as much global warming denialism.

Similarly, if people knew how their posts were served though Facebook, what server costs are, and what their revenue model was, it wouldn’t come as such a surprise to them that their privacy was being violated.

But I think you’re right though. I’ve given up on trying to convince the general public of literally anything, at least in the US where it’s clear the cult of ignorance has soundly won. How can I tell someone that it’s better to use an electric car if they’re not willing to understand the carbon cycle? How can I tell someone it’s better to be vaccinated if they’re not willing to understand herd immunity? How can I tell someone that federated social media is better if they’re unwilling to understand what federation even is?