Seriously. Surely making certificates is one of the absolute apexes of the ratio of how much money you can make versus how much actual work you have to do; in what world did they manage to be sufficiently massive cockheads as to screw that ticket up?

I couldn’t really make head or tail of it and I’m still not sure, but Google’s announcement linked to the list of incident reports that they said were being mishandled, and I picked out this one at random, and I have to say it definitely seems like they kind of have a point. Certificates were being signed with SHA-1 for about 2 years, as far as I can tell, and most of Entrust’s responses over several months of people asking them “how are you taking steps to endeavor that things like this aren’t still happening or will not happen again” was basically, thank you for concern but fuck off stop bothering me.

You know what? I actually think the answers are almost all pretty solidly productive stuff. Like taking at face value the question and saying “hey here’s how to help the Democrats win since you asked.”

That was not what I expected. I am – for real – pretty surprised. I think I have well founded reasons for being suspicious of why you would have posted the actual “just asking questions” original post, but the answers (even the discussion from people being real critical of Biden) is fine. Has the Lemmy consensus, even on lemmy.ml, shifted that far away from “let’s not vote for Biden what’s the worst that could happen”?

Haven’t you read their messaging? They are just perfectly innocent Democrat supporters who are super concerned about Biden’s chances in the election. Also they talk about Cornel West sometimes. For some reason they are not concerned about his chances in the election; they just really like what he has to say, and they’re going to vote for him. Flawless.

It’s good to see that the propaganda accounts have learned the Fox News trick of having one person innocently ask a question so a bunch of other people can rush in and provide the answer (which is turning out to be, big shocker, that Biden is bad and we shouldn’t vote for him.) As Fox discovered, it seems a lot more organic that way instead of just having someone stand in front of the camera and say over and over “DON’T VOTE FOR BIDEN.”

I am still waiting for them to learn to make accounts that are supporting Biden but doing a terrible job of it – sort of a Lemmy version of Alan Colmes – like “I’m glad the stock market and GDP are going up so much under Biden, as a rich person I think he’s doing great with the economy and also he’s sticking it to the Palestinians which I obviously support.”

I’ve seen a little sporadic trickle of accounts with very bad semiconservative opinions and then also supporting certain Democrats, but they seem pretty chaotic and probably like authentic homegrown trolls. I think the real fake-Biden-supporting propaganda potential has yet to be unlocked. I do support this new development in innocent questions, though; it seems like it’s got some potential.

GPT-4 generally doesn’t need fine tuning or anything no

100% right; unless you are using it a ton the API pricing is likely to be cheaper

You’re going to think I am joking but I am not. Multiple people have sworn to me that this works for a common failure mode of HDD drives and I’ve literally never heard someone say they tried it and it failed. I’ve never tried it. Buyer beware. Don’t blame me if you fuck up your drive / your computer it’s connected to / anything else even worse by doing this:

1. Stick it in the freezer for a short while.
2. Take it out.
3. Boot it up.
4. If it works, get all the data off it as quick as you can.

GPT4all can do it pretty easily on a desktop with a good GPU. I think it’s unlikely that anything can run locally on your phone (LLMs are notably hogs in terms of even pretty capable desktop PC resources; there’s just not a cheap way to do them). You could use colab or something via your phone, and there is probably a little howto guide somewhere that shows how to do a Mistral setup on colab. It’ll take some technical skill though.

You might just bite the bullet and do $20/mo for the GPT-4 subscription also. It can also do web searches, I think, although in practice it’s pretty clunky the times it’s tried to do things like that for me. I’m not aware of one that does the “search the web for answers and get back to me” thing really all that perfectly or smoothly I’m sad to say.

GPT-4 is apparently the model to beat. I haven’t seen all that much difference in practice between GPT-4 and 4o. I’ve heard various claims about various other models outperforming it (notably including Claude) but I haven’t seen the claims materialize over the long haul as yet.

I have however heard that Mistral can get quite close to GPT-4, run for free locally with the right hardware, if you build up a hand curated set of around 100 query/response pairs from GPT-4 that are what you want it to do, and then fine-tune Mistral against that training set. I haven’t tried it but that’s what I’ve heard.

Jon Stewart for president with someone central to Biden’s cabinet who actually knows about politics and the stuff Biden was doing, as VP, to be able to give him on the job training on the actual politics part to match his sharpness level and his heart

I don’t care if he doesn’t want the job

I think Biden has done great stuff (domestically 🙁) and I would expect good policies from him and obviously a dead plant would be a better president than Trump, but his debate performance is kinda hard to put a good spin on

And therefore it is clear that what the world needs to see is a Jon Stewart vs Donald Trump debate

Fixed

John Stewart

Edit: Sorry I meant his brother, Jon Stewart

So, Gary Brechner wrote an article about this, like 20 years ago: Basically, that the combination of expense to build, and vulnerability to specific asymmetric threats, that huge ocean-floating warships represent, means that in the long term they are doomed as a serious military platform. They should go on the shelf alongside that thing the Nazis did with trying to build small-building-sized tanks, as something that just doesn’t make sense when all factors are considered.

It might seem that the submarinization of the Black Sea fleet proves him out, but as it happens, I coincidentally got to talk recently to an actual military strategy expert on the topic and this was his take:

• Deterrence is a relevant factor. Lots of expensive military kit is pretty vulnerable. The issue is, if you do start taking steps to attack it, what’s going to happen to you in response. That’s at the heart of keeping a lot of big powers’ naval forces safe, more so than them being invulnerable. Real no-holds-barred war is pretty rare in the modern world; most military kit goes around most of the time being used for force projection or little proxy wars, usually not full-scale war against peer enemies.
• It may be that the big ships are becoming more vulnerable as time goes on, yes, but it’s not like that’s new. Once it does go past the level of “we don’t want to do that / provide weapons so our proxy can do that because we’re scared of the response,” and proceeds to a real fuck-'em-up war, losing big battleships and carriers at a shocking rate has been part of war since around World War 2. They’re hard as fuck to defend and navies tend to be super cautious with where they put them as a result, and once it comes to a real war, they start sinking yes. It’s not like land warfare; it only really takes one day where something goes wrong to sink billions and billions of dollars worth of your navy irrevocably. Adding a new way that that can happen doesn’t necessarily change the shape of the war because it was already happening and was already part of the calculus.

I think, as some other people have said, that most of it is bad strategy and tactics by the Russians, of putting their big naval assets within range of the weapons that can fuck them up and for some reason not reacting (until very recently) when as a result they started sinking like pebbles in a pond.

So did I, until I tried to use it a few times.

Power Glove

Fun fact! They think that because of some kind of electromagnetic issue, Kessler syndrome or its precursors could maybe destroy the ozone layer too.

What about that didn’t happen? Enlighten me.

“Let’s just divide up Poland and keep the peace. We can focus our whole energy on the western front, you can save yourselves bloodshed by the tanker load, and in a few short years we can share dominion over a subjugated world.”

“You so right, that sounds like a great plan”

“Hey guess what I just decided”

The whole world would have been different. It was still a pretty close thing with help from the Soviets and with Germany fighting a ludicrous two-front war for literally no military or geopolitical reason at all.