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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • Yup. The risk of someone breaking into your house and stealing your post-it note is vastly different from someone guessing your password, and the risk changes again when it’s a post-it note on your work computer monitor.

    One of the best things you can do with your critical passwords is put them on a piece of paper with no other identifying information and then put that piece of paper in your wallet. Adults in modern society are usually quite good at keeping track of and securing little sheets of paper.

    I’m paranoid, so I put mine on an encrypted NFC card that I printed to look like an expired gift card to a store that went out of business. It’s got what I need to bootstrap the recovery process if I loose all my MFA tokens (I keep another copy in a small waterproof box with things like my car title. It’s labeled “important documents: do not lose” and kept unlocked so any would be thief feels inclined to open it and see it’s worthless to them rather than taking the box to figure that out somewhere else. The home copy is important because there’s vaguely plausible scenarios where I lose both my phone and wallet at the same time. )

    Stealing my laptop and getting my stuff is a significantly larger risk than me leaving my computer on and unattended without locking the screen.

    Passkeys are a good trend because they’re just about the only security enhancement in recent memory that increases security and usability at the same time.


  • It’s a shockingly common source of data leaks. There are some versions with more subtlety, like actually redacting the text but a copy of it remains in the file for version tracking, as a separate layer, or things like that.

    PDF is derived from printer control tools, and has a lot of features built in that add flexibility for office document purposes, but can be surprising for people not expecting it.
    If you’re working as a team to redact documents you might deliberately use something reversible so that the person checking your work can 1) see what you redacted 2) unredact if they think you shouldn’t have.
    Sometimes people also just don’t know there’s actual reaction tools built in.

    The part that I’m more surprised by is that whatever process they have for releasing documents didn’t involve passing it through a system of some sort that automatically fixed that sort of thing.



  • It’s really not. The people who invented the term “artificial intelligence” both meant something different than you’re thinking the term means and also thought human level intelligence was far simpler to model than it turned out to be.

    You’re thinking of intelligence as compared to a human, and they were thinking of intelligence as compared to a wood chipper. The computers of the time executed much more mechanical tasks, like moving text into place on a printer layout.
    They aimed to intelligence, where intelligence was understood as tasks that were more than just rote computation but responded to the environment they executed in. Text layout by knowing how to do line breaks and change font sizes. Parsing word context to know if something is a typo.
    These tasks require something more than rote mechanical action. They’re far from human intelligence, and entirely lacking in the introspective or adaptive qualities that we associate with humans, but they’re still responsive.

    Using AI only to refer to human intelligence is the missuse of the term by writers and television producers.

    The people who coined the terms would have found it quaint to say something isn’t intelligence because it consists of math and fancy scripting. Their efforts were predicated on the assumption that human intelligence was nothing more than math, and programming in general is an extremely abstract form of math.



  • Right now browser usage patterns are shifting because people are trying new things. Most of those new things are AI integration. If those new things prove popular or have staying power remains to be seen.
    Firefox , in my estimation, is looking to leverage their existing reputation for privacy focus while also adding new technologies that people seem at least interested in trying.
    A larger user base means that people will pay more for ads, which if they maintain their user control and privacy standards users are less likely to disable on the default landing screen.

    It’s why they keep getting flac for working on privacy preserving advertising technology: they want you to use Firefox because they don’t stop you from disabling the bullshit, and they hope to do the bullshit in a way that makes you not mind leaving it on.

    All the AI stuff was mentioned in the same context as discussion about how they need to seek money in ways that aren’t simply being paid by Google.





  • Reading a bit more, during the sentencing phase in that state people making victim impact statements can choose their format for expression, and it’s entirely allowed to make statements about what other people would say. So the judge didn’t actually have grounds to deny it.
    No jury during that phase, so it’s just the judge listening to free form requests in both directions.

    It’s gross, but the rules very much allow the sister to make a statement about what she believes her brother would have wanted to say, in whatever format she wanted.