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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: October 25th, 2023

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  • Like the custom endocrine systems of combat sleeves in Richard Morgan’s Altered Carbon edit: I think I was thinking of Iain M Banks’ “Culture” series actually, but both are worth a read! Need to be strong or fast? Just give yourself a little squirt of adrenaline! Time for slow heart rate and low energy use? Slow-release a skoche of acetylcholine.

    You make a good point about subscriptions. The repo when you stop paying would be pretty grim.


  • Hey hey, you’re an honorary American now! Your flag and genocide kit are in the mail (don’t worry, we’re pretty sure we got the right address from that darkweb database).

    But for real there’s not much you can do but keep an eye on it. If Europe has similar credit agencies to the ones in the US, then freeze your credit and keep it frozen until you need to apply for more (new card, car, house, etc).

    Use a password manager so if an account gets compromised they can’t get into anything else.

    And, as advised, watch for unusual activity (but forever, not just a few months, that’s just a false sense of security).

    This should keep you largely safe. My data has been leaked in dozens of breaches, but I do the above, and while I’ve had two instances of card fraud, I don’t see hard enquiries into my credit that I didn’t make even after 6+ years.






  • I think you don’t understand the difference between fundamental rights and regular old rights. A right does not have to be fundamental to be a right.

    And, if copyright law were about encouraging creation, it would not restrict the use of other peoples’ work.

    Would you do me a favour? Read back over this thread until you realise you just argued creation is “encouraged” by a category of law which only restricts the use of other peoples’ work, including modifying it to create derivative works, and has been used as a club against creation to boot. Consider, how does Nintendo kill Smash tourneys? How many YouTube videos have been wrongly DMCA’d?



  • Ehh, I halfway agree, but there is value in keeping historical stuff around. Heritage laws exist in a good number of countries so that all the cultural architecture doesn’t get erased by developers looking to turn a quick buck or rich people who think that 500 year old castle could really use an infinity pool hot tub; there are strict requirements for a building to be heritage-listed but once they are, the owner is required by law to maintain it to historical standards.

    I only halfway disagree because you’re right, forcing people to pay for something has never sat right with me generally. As long as the laws don’t bite people like you and me, e.g. there are relatively high requirements for something to be considered “culturally relevant” enough to preserve, I’d be okay with some kind of heritage system for preserving the internet.




  • Oh boy. If you think this is bad, you should try waiting a few weeks or months after you’re signed up this time, then sign up for a new account using your current details, just with a different email. Spoiler: if you can answer the security questions, you’re home free.

    And remember that between the Equifax leak and more recent hacks, at this point, every sensitive detail for every member of the economy is now in the hands of bad actors. If they want your shit, or into it, they’ll social engineer it.

    Should passwords have maximum character counts? Sure, to prevent overflow attacks (or whatever) by pasting five different analyses of the movie Primer as your password. It should be longer than 20 in any case. But are there other, way worse security issues? Yes.




  • You’re thinking of Machine Learning and neural networks. The first “L” in LLM stands for “Large”; what’s new about these particular neural networks is the scale at which they operate. It’s like saying a modern APU from 2024 is equivalent to a Celeron from the early 90s; technically they’re in the same class, but one is much more complicated and powerful than the other.