GreyBeard

I absolutely disagree. That’s a fantastic reference for a union logo to make.

Sounds like I stand corrected.

Doesn’t the US already have full sanctions with Russia? So literally no trade is happening with them, so a tarrif would be pointless? Maybe I missed trump removing the sanctions at some point in his onslaught of nonsense.

Disasters do happen. Hurricanes are a big problem that often take out everything you mentioned except for starlink. And starlink has several problems, being owned by a Nazi is certainly one of them.

Oh, I’m not defending these dumb-asses doing illegal things to avoid systems setup to safeguard American and its people. They absolutely could have synced things to compromised devices. Just that Signal, themselves, couldn’t do that.

So I and some others here have probably sounded a bit antagonistic to you, but good on you for asking and trying to understand. Public Key Cryptography feels like magic to me too, it’s just magic that I’ve accepted exists without understanding the base math of it all. Without it, however, most of the security of the Internet doesn’t work.

Even most symmetrical encryption (Like AES, which is how you are picturing encryption working) layers on asymmetrical encryption as a negotiation layer to share a key that both parties have but that nobody eves dropping can read. Then once the key is exchanged, they use that because symmetrical encryption is way easier for computers. But for short messages like Signal sends, it wouldn’t surprise me if they stay asymmetrical for the entire communication.

Signal does hold the public keys for every user. But having the public key doesn’t let you decrypt anything. You need the private key to decrypt data encrypted with the public key. So in a chat example, if you and I exchange public keys, I can encrypt the message using your public key, but only you can decrypt it, using your private key.

Signal does run the key exchange, which means they could hand a user the wrong public key, a public key which they have the private key for, instead of the other person’s. That is a threat model for this type of communications, however, signal users can see the key thumbprints of their fellow chat participants and verify them manually. And once a chat has begun, any changes to that key alerts all parties in the chat so they know a change has happened. The new key wont have access to any previous or pending messages, only new ones after the change took place.

In the case of signal, it is provable that it cannot. They do not hold the keys to decrypt. The closest risk is the server injecting a new public key into the conversation, which the Signal app will warn about.

The server can’t decrypt it if it doesn’t have the keys to do so. It can be proven that private keys never leave the local device. It can also be proven that the proper public keys are being provided, and that the local device alerts on public key changes with a partner are announced.

Of course, nobody as part of the linked article did any of that verification, but still, a server doesn’t need to be trusted to be functional.

Nobody in this thread suggested not getting the vaccine. Entire problem is that we are dropping below herd immunity thresholds and that means worse outcomes for the vaccinated and unvaccinatable alike.

Roku started as a streaming media box. You paid them money, they gave you a box that could play Netflix and Youtube. It was a simple transaction. Unfortunately, at some point they decided to start selling/giving their OS to TV manufacturers. This was actually nice at the start. You got a smart TV who’s “Smarts” were designed by competent people. A revolution at the time. But the drive to drop prices lower and lower meant that there was no margin on the TV, which means Roku had to investigate other ways of making their revenue, AKA Ads and selling data.

Of course, the stand alone box probably would have went that way anyways, but at least with selling a dedicated box, there is a clear financial benefit without the need to get invasive.

Same on Android.

That’s a real stretch. 3B is basically stating the size of the model, not the name of the model.

I’m a fan of ARM. https://github.com/automatic-ripping-machine/automatic-ripping-machine

I run it in a podman container, passing my BluRay drive though. It rips automatically, and attempts to even lookup the metadata for the disk to file it properly. It’s not perfect, but it does work quite well. The only issue I have with it is it does a poor job on TV shows, but I’ve found nothing better, so it is good enough for me.

On the internet, nobody knows your a baby face.

But you can make an average of 1 baby a month in 9 months with 9 woman. It’s all about proper planning and budgeting over longer periods.

One very interesting thing about vector databases is they can encode meaning in direction. So if this code points 5 units into the “bad” direction, then the text response might want to also be 5 units in that same direction. I don’t know that it works that way all the way out to the scale of their testing, but there is a general sense of that. 3Blue1Brown has a great series on Neural Networks.

This particular topic is covered in https://www.3blue1brown.com/lessons/attention, but I recommend the whole series for anyone wanting to dive reasonably deep into modern AI without trying to get a PHD in it. https://www.3blue1brown.com/topics/neural-networks

Really, the guy currently in charge of trying to dismantle the US government you don’t particularly care about? Assuming you aren’t from the US, so perhaps US internal politics don’t bother you, but he is also pushing for the far right in Germany, which means he wont stop at destroying America for his own profit. The richest man in the world is currently dismantling one of the largest countries in the world should probably concern everybody in the world, at least a little.

My Palm Pre people. I loved that phone. It was under powered, buggy, and felt like the future.

As others have mentioned, the book knows what it is, and doesn’t over reach its ability to make the silly entertaining. It’s a popcorn action movie of a book. As boatswain mentioned, the book is simi-satire, something that Ready Player One didn’t seem to understand when it ripped it off.