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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 20th, 2023

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  • Walmart appeared to acknowledge the error in a statement released to the media.

    “We want our associates to feel safe and supported in their workplace, and we won’t tolerate bullying or threats of violence against our associates or customers,” Walmart spokesperson Joe Pennington said in a statement. “We’ve reviewed the situation and will be addressing it internally. We’ve also made multiple attempts to invite Ms. Davis to return to work, with back pay.”

    For once in my life I’d like to see one of companies respond in the same way that got them in the situation in the first place. Like if Walmart just responded, “lol fuck you idc” it would actually make me less angry than this bullshit.




  • Your response really highlights that you do not get what I’m saying. I’m not arguing it should be banned. I’m saying that acknowledging that the barrier of entry was lowered is at least somewhat of an important factor to consider. Doing it the way flipper did is irresponsible at best, and more realistically ethically corrupt. It’s been done though and you can’t put the cat back in the bag.

    Now governments are trying to ban them, but when 100s of new clones come out I can almost guarantee governments are going to start doing increasingly silly shit to stop it. Do you think that giving every joker a key to any kia/Hyundai is going to lead to governments cracking down on security on the manufacturing side? Or do you think it’ll just give them a bigger excuse to make invasive laws? I’m pretty sure I know where it’ll lead and I seriously doubt it will be leveling laws against the poor old car manufacturers that donate to campaign funds…


  • I’m onboard with that but putting it at the level of operating a tv remote really casts a wider net. You essentially have to be barely literate to use the thing, where before you had to at least be able to read and execute some walkthroughs. Also you had to kind of be in the security/tech scene to even understand that it was an option, where the flipper has, for a lack of a better word, popularized the attack.

    There’s a reason that when you go on sites like exploit db well over half of the exploits require some fiddling to make work. Metasploit is similar as well because it requires you to actually be able to use a cli on some level. While that isn’t a huge bar of entry, it’s still keeps the riff raff out for the most part. The flipper pretty much said fuck it, and let not only the skiddies in, but any dipshit with $80 buy a car stealing autopwn.




  • I don’t disagree with your point, but the flipper zero for sure lowers the bar of entry. Before the flipper came out the, “You must be this tall to ride” required some pretty good knowledge of microcontrollers, hardware peripherals, and software engineering. The people that had that sort of knowledge tended to actually have paying jobs, which is like the biggest factor in not being a street criminal.

    The flipper made the barrier of entry at about the level of being able to operate a TV remote which any dipshit can do. However, the fact that the flipper exists at all means that the cat is out of the bag. As you said, someone else is just going to come along and release a similar product. You can’t just ban the flipper and expect it to have any impact. My concern is they will decided to make certain code illegal, which gets really stupid.


  • Right but they didn’t include a screenshot. To my hazy recollection it still shows you what the setting is even if it’s org managed. Their description isn’t exactly clear to me either:

    I found a setting in Microsoft Edge that imports data from Google Chrome on each launch. “Always have access to your recent browsing data each time you browse on Microsoft Edge,” reads Microsoft’s description of the feature in Edge. This setting was disabled, and I had never been asked to turn it on.

    The last line isn’t clear to me if it was disabled when they checked, or if they think is was disabled before they checked and when they checked they discovered it was enabled.

    To your incredibly valid point, it very well could be a bug in the buggiest software known to man, but the fact that it isn’t reproducible means I really doubt that, “MiCrOsOfT wAnTs My ChRoMe TaBs.”


  • Does the user have a gpo that enables the setting? That’s what it sounds like to me considering:

    I haven’t been able to replicate the behavior on other PCs, but a number of X users replied to my post about this saying they have experienced the same thing in the past.

    I’m also not clear if they are saying when they checked the setting was disabled, or if they’re saying it was enabled and they don’t recall setting it.

    Of the 100s (possibly 1000s) of complaints I have about Windows, and Microsoft in general, some dude whose not sure how Edge imported settings is pretty far down on my list. Especially when the claim doesn’t come with a before after screenshot, or the ability to reproduce it.


  • I don’t have those problems with my bluetooth devices nearly as much anymore. The exception being in my car where it’s absolute crap. I blame that mostly on car companies because they are notoriously slow at adopting new technology and/or updating their existing tech.

    I’m not an expert with bluetooth or anything, but my understanding was that if the source/destination both supported the codec then there wasn’t any compression from bluetooth. Could be wrong about that, but that does seem to be the case in my very limited testing. Not sure why your car/phone pairing is crap but most likely it’s that your car bluetooth is a bit shitty.

    I think you might be omitting a few important features of bluetooth over wifi. The really big advantage to bluetooth is that it is that it is low power. You wouldn’t be able to run your earbuds for several hours on a tiny battery if it was running wifi compared to bluetooth. The low power feature is great for portable speakers too. It’s also more user friendly then setting/connecting wifi, but I’m not sure if that matters as much anymore.



  • Maybe don’t generalize a group of people without careful thought and appropriate caveats then? Seems pretty easy to me. You even admit that you are writing from personal experience, and don’t have perfect information, so why not include precise language to reflect that? Seems pretty simple and way more inclusive.

    Like I said previously, using precise language simply avoids putting readers that are a part of whatever group on the automatic defensive. Why not just take the extra couple of a seconds to avoid that miscommunication? If you don’t care to do that, then that’s fine, but over generalization is going to automatically alienate some readers that you perhaps didn’t mean to offend.


  • It’s super easy actually! You just qualify your statements. For example:

    • I don’t like how some people…

    • I’ve noticed that a lot of people…

    • There’s quite a few people that…

    • The majority of people seem to…

    This language avoid assumptions about how everyone else feels and leaves the reader an out to say to themselves, “I’m not in that group and they acknowledge that I am an exception.” It avoids the trap of over generalization and doesn’t put the reader on the defensive. Language like “all people” and “allistic people” (meaning all non-autistic people) only work to alienate. Ironically it demonstrates the same behavior they appear to be complaining about…




  • It’s escapism I think. At least that’s part of it. Having a machine that won’t judge you, will serve as a perfect echo chamber, and will immediately tell you AN answer can be very appealing to some. I don’t have any data, or any study to back it up, just my experience from seeing it happen.

    I have a friend who I feel like I kind of lost to chatgpt. I think he’s a bit unhappy with where he is in life. He got the good paying job, the house in the suburbs, wife, and 2.5 kids, but didn’t ever think about what was next. Now he’s just a bit lost I think, and somehow convinced himself that people weren’t as good as chatting with a bot.

    It’s weird now. He spends long nights and weekends talking to a machine. He’s constructed elaborate fictional worlds within his chatgpt history. I’ve grown increasingly concerned about him, and his wife clearly is struggling with it. He’s obviously depressed but instead of seeking help or attempting to figure himself out, he turned to a non-feeling, non-judgmental, emotionless tool for answers.

    It’s a struggle to talk to him now. It’s like talking to a cryptobro at peak btc mania. The only thing that he wants to talk about is LLMs. Trying to bring up that maybe spending all your time talking to a machine is a bit unhealthy invokes his ire and he’ll avoid you for several days. Like a herion addict struggling with addiction, even pointing out the obvious flaws in what he’s doing makes him distance himself more from you.

    I’m not young, not old exactly either, but I’ve known him for 25 years in my adult life. We met in college and have been friends ever since. I know many won’t quite understand but knowing someone that long, and remaining close, talk every few days, friends is quite rare. At this point he is my longest held friendship and I feel like I’m losing him to a robot. I’ve lost other friends to addiction in my life and to say that it’s been similar is under stating it. I don’t know what to do for him. I don’t know if there’s really anything I CAN do for him. How do you help someone that doesn’t even think they have a problem?

    I guess my point is, if you find someone who is just depressed enough, just stuck enough, with a particular proclivity towards computers/the internet then you have a perfect canidate for falling down the LLM rabbit hole. It offers them an out to feeling like they’re being judged. They feel like the insanity it spits out is more sane than how they feel now. They think they’re getting somewhere, or at least escaping their current situation. Escapism is very appealing when everything else seems pointless and sort of gray I think. So that’s at least one type of person that can fall down the chapgpt/LLM rabbit hole. I’m sure there’s others out there too with there own unique motivations and reason’s for latching onto LLMs.