@Voroxpete@sh.itjust.works

comments

• We were doing DNS challenges for an isolated system and our provider didn’t support that.

  on Issue #64 that was blocking DNS-PERSIST-01 has been resolved in c/selfhosted@lemmy.world · 23h ago

• Yeah, same, this is news to me but very interesting. Would have solved an issue we had at work that ended up requiring us to move our whole DNS over.

  on Issue #64 that was blocking DNS-PERSIST-01 has been resolved in c/selfhosted@lemmy.world · 1d ago

• So low you’d have to dig.

  on Trump says the US is officially renaming AI to ‘super intelligence’ in c/technology@lemmy.world · 1d ago

• Yeah, I guess to Trump it must seem super intelligent.

  on Trump says the US is officially renaming AI to ‘super intelligence’ in c/technology@lemmy.world · 1d ago

• They don’t. Companies think as far as the next quarter, that’s it. Negative externalities do not exist for these people.

  It’s an entire system built on perverse incentives, and those perverse incentives are all about keeping the stock price going up. Companies operate for the benefit of shareholders. Not for profit or growth or stability; those are just means to an end. The end is line go up.

  The mega wealthy are literally building bunkers to ride out the collapse of civilization. That’s their long term play; emerge as kings of the ashes.

  on even their own economic rules tell them why it will fail 🙄 in c/onehundredninetysix@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 2d ago

• Huh, as of 2023 apparently. Thank you for the correction.

  on US coal ‘biggest contributor by far’ to rise in global emissions in c/technology@lemmy.world · 15 Sep 2026

• It’s also the biggest country in the world by population, by far. That’s not really indicative of anything. China is also decarbonizing at an absolutely incredible rate, whereas the US are basically doing everything they can to increase their emissions.

  on US coal ‘biggest contributor by far’ to rise in global emissions in c/technology@lemmy.world · 15 Sep 2026

• They’re out of money and this is their cover story.

  on OpenAI boss and Elon Musk back calls to put brakes on ‘reckless’ AI development in c/technology@lemmy.world · 14 Sep 2026

• From a business point of view, sure. But that was never my point.

  on Why was Concord DoA upon launch? in c/games@lemmy.world · 13 Sep 2026

• I didn’t say free to play would have saved it. It was destined for failure either way. I said that it failed as hard as it did because they decided to charge for it.

  on Why was Concord DoA upon launch? in c/games@lemmy.world · 13 Sep 2026

• My point is not that free to play would have saved it. I was pretty clear about that. But the scale of Concord’s failure is absolutely staggering even when compared to other high profile failures. Highguard peaked at 97,000 concurrent players on Steam. Concord’s peak? 697. That is literally more than two orders of magnitude less.

  So yes, even though Highguard ultimately failed, there’s an argument to be made that with some continued investment it might have found a core player base and built that into some kind of ongoing source of revenue. Would it have made back its development costs? Probably not, but there’s a chance. But Concord’s failure is in a whole different league. It didn’t just fail, it smashed into a brick wall at 200mph. And that was only possible because of the sheer arrogance of slapping a price tag on it.

  on Why was Concord DoA upon launch? in c/games@lemmy.world · 13 Sep 2026

• Out of all these points, the key one is that it was $40 in a genre where the median price for entry is $0. That really deserves to be front and centre above everything else.

  Everything you’ve said is completely accurate, and describes why Concorde failed, but the key to why it failed as hard as it did is the decision to slap a price tag on it.

  To get away with being a $40 game in a free-to-play genre, they would have to have something so compellingly unique that it could not only stand out in the crowd, but stand head and shoulders above it.

  Concorde was still destined to fail even without that decision, because, as you said, there was nothing unique about it. Forgettable, boring characters battling for unclear stakes in generic arenas with generic powers. No differentiation at all. But released as a free to play game it might at least have gone maybe a year before it collapsed.

  But the sheer arrogance of taking this boring, also-ran, generic hero shooter clone and deciding that it was so special that it deserved a $40 price tag… That’s what turned Concorde into the greatest failure in the history of video games.

  on Why was Concord DoA upon launch? in c/games@lemmy.world · 13 Sep 2026

• Literally the easiest pump and dump ever. Company failing and you want to dump your shares at a good price? Announce you’re doing AI! How? Who cares?! It’s AI!

  on GoPro joins AI bonanza with pivot into data centers as shares skyrocket 40% in c/technology@lemmy.world · 9 Sep 2026

• They should invest in some NFTs while they’re at it. I hear those are only going up.

  on GoPro joins AI bonanza with pivot into data centers as shares skyrocket 40% in c/technology@lemmy.world · 9 Sep 2026

• That’s actually worse. You do get how that’s actually worse, right?

  on Impersonation rule in c/onehundredninetysix@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 4 Sep 2026

• Completely correct.

  on Any good file sync server with web interface other than Nextcloud? in c/selfhosted@lemmy.world · 2 Sep 2026

• Been using Seafile for years, it’s fantastic.

  on Any good file sync server with web interface other than Nextcloud? in c/selfhosted@lemmy.world · 1 Sep 2026

• Oh hell yes! Awesome update.

  on [CBH] BentoPDF can now edit existing PDF text along with two new engines. in c/selfhosted@lemmy.world · 30 Aug 2026

• See, now you’ve flipped from making a legal judgement to making a moral one. I’m not defending the people who work on Grok. You’re allowed to think whatever you like of anyone who willingly takes a job for a Nazi. But there’s a difference between moral liability and legal liability. Even if I have precious little respect for those people, laws matter, because whatever legal standard you apply to someone else, you have to be willing to apply to yourself.

  on Elon Musk’s xAI used child porn to train Grok models, lawsuit says in c/technology@lemmy.world · 29 Aug 2026

• My understanding of hashing is a math function that reduces information.

  Close, but not quite. A hash is better understood as a “fingerprint” for a given piece of data. Any given input will produce the same length of output, so it doesn’t really “reduce” information - a hash of “Hello world” would actually be significantly longer - but rather it identifies a matching piece of data.

  This has a number of uses. For example,if you have a password system on a website, you don’t store a user’s actual password. That would be terrible for security. Instead you store the hash (yes, salted, for that one pedant who was about to interject). Then when the user enters their password to log in, you hash the entered password and compare it to the stored hash. If they match, you know they’re the same string. You can also create a hash of a file and provide that along with the file itself. If the receiver also hashes the file, they can then compare their hash to yours; if they don’t match, the file is corrupt or has been tampered with. You’ll often see this referred to as a checksum.

  Technically, the reproducible data from a hash should be zero, so they don’t so much contain information as verify it. But as we’ve seen from that research, there are ways around that (not the only ones, to be sure). But the idea in theory is that you produce a hash through a one-directional algorithm; very easy to compute A from B, but very, very hard to compute B from A.

  It should be noted that this is very different from stenography, which is a variety of systems for storing data, not fingerprinting it. Hashing is also distinct from encryption as a means of securing data, because encryption is intended to be reversible, hashing is not.

  on Elon Musk’s xAI used child porn to train Grok models, lawsuit says in c/technology@lemmy.world · 29 Aug 2026

• Yeah, it’s absolutely valid to question the degree to which this is an outcome that we should even want. If someone hides a CSAM image in the Linux kernel should Linux become illegal?

  I think there is a valid distinction to be drawn in this case, because removing individual components of an LLM isn’t really something we know how to do. So there’s a fair argument that a model which is built using illegal content should be illegal, and if that means they have to completely retrain from scratch, so be it.

  But yes, I’d want to be very careful about the lines around a law or ruling like that and exactly what it’s extent is. Child sex crimes and child safety are topics that tend to short-circuit all reasonable objections, and are frequently exploited as a means of getting bad laws onto the books. Bill C-22 up here in Canada is a great recent example.

  on Elon Musk’s xAI used child porn to train Grok models, lawsuit says in c/technology@lemmy.world · 29 Aug 2026

• If you came into work today to find your building full of feds packing up evidence, because it turned out that, entirely unbeknownst to you, five members of the C-suite had been running a child sex ring, would you consider yourself “complicit”?

  on Elon Musk’s xAI used child porn to train Grok models, lawsuit says in c/technology@lemmy.world · 29 Aug 2026

• But these deeds are not being done by one person. And at some point whether you are an active participant or not you are continuing to work there so you have some level of complicity.

  Yeah, but I never disagreed with you on that point, did I?

  on Elon Musk’s xAI used child porn to train Grok models, lawsuit says in c/technology@lemmy.world · 29 Aug 2026

• You can’t reproduce an approximation from any type of hash, so that argument is dead in the water.

  https://www.pseudodna.eu/. Scroll down to “Hash reversal” where they demonstrate the technique.

  Do you understand what I mean by stenographically embedded?

  I took it to be an imperfect attempt to describe more broadly the way that data is mathematically encoded into LLMs.

  Technically, stenography would require that the original be retrievable, since stenographic embedding is the process of concealing one thing inside another. Stenos, from the Greek “covered”. Personally, I’d argue that to conceal, you have to be able to reveal. If I throw a photograph into a fire I haven’t hidden the image in the fire. Modern stenographic image embedding techniques use methods of encoding data into another dataset without visibly altering the second set, with the intent being that that data can later be retrieved by someone who knows that it’s there (eg, least significant bit, where you change only the “1” bit of each pixel. This imperceptibly shifts the colour values of the image to a human viewer, but allows you to read out that stored data at a later time).

  Now, since your argument rests on the exact opposite, that the data is not retrievable, I simply accepted the term as a “close enough” approximation for what I believe we’re both talking about - the extremely complex multidimensional data arrangement that forms the core of an LLM - and carried on from there because I find that sometimes it’s better to just roll with a person’s choice of language rather than quibble over it.

  But since you clearly feel that your meaning was either improperly expressed, or improperly understood, you’re welcome to elaborate.

  on Elon Musk’s xAI used child porn to train Grok models, lawsuit says in c/technology@lemmy.world · 29 Aug 2026

• That’s what courts exist to decide.

  on Elon Musk’s xAI used child porn to train Grok models, lawsuit says in c/technology@lemmy.world · 29 Aug 2026

• Yeah, the stakes are just too high for SpaceX to let this get to trial. Any amount of illegality becomes worth it when you consider the alternative.

  The only other possibility I can see is that they pull a Bungie; “perform an internal investigation”, find an intern to blame for everything, and throw a huge settlement at Jane Doe. But even that would require an absolutely insane cover up to pull off.

  on Elon Musk’s xAI used child porn to train Grok models, lawsuit says in c/technology@lemmy.world · 29 Aug 2026

• But you didn’t say “The people at the top”, you said “Everyone.” I think you need to take a moment to figure out what you’re actually arguing for here.

  Again, I would happily see anyone who had knowledge of this arrested. They either supported it, or knew of it and said nothing. And yeah, we can throw in anyone who maintained wilful ignorance too. If that includes Elon himself, so much the better. We already know the dude is a fucking pedophile, maybe this is how they’ll finally nail him.

  But if you’re arguing for arresting the cafeteria lunch guy over this, that is an insane position to hold.

  So which is it?

  on Elon Musk’s xAI used child porn to train Grok models, lawsuit says in c/technology@lemmy.world · 29 Aug 2026

• Well, like I said, that comes down to whether, legally, that stenographic embedding* would constitute “reproduction” or not. That’s what the German case hinges on. Obviously not relevant to US law, but a) a similar case could be made in the US, and b) X operates in the EU.

  To play devil’s advocate, SpaceX would most certainly argue that what they’re doing is equivalent to storing a hash, like how Microsoft’s PhotoDNA system works. PhotoDNA can detect CSAM without storing CSAM because it only stores the image hashes, not the images themselves. So there’s pretty clear legal precedent for them to point to.

  (NB: There has been work done by security researchers on reverse engineering images from hashes, so even that isn’t absolute.)

  It’s a legally complex area where we’re likely to see case law evolving rapidly.

  (ETA:) *Note that this is not actually the correct term for how the data is being stored. See discussion below. I just didn’t want to derail things by getting into it here.

  on Elon Musk’s xAI used child porn to train Grok models, lawsuit says in c/technology@lemmy.world · 29 Aug 2026

• I’m aware. But if you read my explanation a little more carefully, you’ll see that the argument being made is that this de facto constitutes a form of lossy compression.

  The easy comparison is that a JPEG does not store an “original” image, but it contains information that can be used to almost perfectly recreate that image, with the help of a little math.

  If the same argument can be said to hold true of LLMs - and yes, that is very much a load-bearing “if” - then they would constitute a form of lossy compression.

  on Elon Musk’s xAI used child porn to train Grok models, lawsuit says in c/technology@lemmy.world · 29 Aug 2026

• If x or any other company downloaded CSAM everyone in the company should be arrested.

  I assume you cannot possibly mean that as written, right?

  I’m absolutely for arresting anyone who was involved with this, or had knowledge that it was happening. But we’re obviously not talking about going after Jane the intern here, right?

  on Elon Musk’s xAI used child porn to train Grok models, lawsuit says in c/technology@lemmy.world · 28 Aug 2026

• Sure. Never argued against that. I was discussing the assertion that the model itself would be illegal as a result. Different thing.

  on Elon Musk’s xAI used child porn to train Grok models, lawsuit says in c/technology@lemmy.world · 28 Aug 2026

• In all seriousness, there are some very interesting legal questions that will be raised if this case makes it that far.

  The problem is that there’s no existing law that would effect this on its own. To my knowledge, no country in the world has a law on the books specifically dealing with AI models trained on CSAM. So the question, under existing laws, would turn on whether the data stored within the model itself would constitute CSAM.

  The problem, in no small part, is that we have serious gaps in our public consensus knowledge about how LLMs actually work.

  There’s a case that, AFAIK, is still being argued in Germany pushing the theory that LLMs actually do, in effect, store a copy of all their training data, just in a compressed form. This certainly seems to hold some water given both the tests they relied on, and the situation with this Jane Doe where the model produced images so alike to real images of her that they tripped hash detections.

  The German case argues that this is analogous to the difference between an MP3 and a WAV, or a JPEG and a PNG. That sharing a lossy copy of a work is no less infringing just because it’s imperfect.

  If the underlying claim - that LLMs function as a form of lossy compression - can be substantiated then there would be a real argument that the model itself would constitute CSAM. Since there would be no realistic method that I’m aware of for removing the offending material from the model - and presumably SpaceX would have to somehow prove that they’ve done so - that would make the entire model contraband. They’d have to retrain on a clean dataset.

  Of course I said “if the case makes it that far” at the top because I don’t think it will. SpaceX will do anything and everything to avoid handing over meaningful discovery in this case, including, I suspect, outright destruction of evidence. If there is anything that actually proves that they used CSAM in the training data then they are so far beyond fucked that there’s simply no downside to further illegality in pursuit of concealing their crimes. They have the world’s wealthiest asshole in a position to throw literal billions at making this go away. I genuinely wouldn’t be surprised if people turn up dead off the back of this if that’s what it takes.

  on Elon Musk’s xAI used child porn to train Grok models, lawsuit says in c/technology@lemmy.world · 28 Aug 2026

• Doesn’t matter to Nvidia. It’s just about having a plan B if all those future orders start to collapse.

  on Nvidia has been in talks to acquire Hugging Face for more than $13 billion in c/technology@lemmy.world · 27 Aug 2026

• Awesome, thank you

  on Do Amber Alerts for Missing Kids Actually Work? | The Walrus in c/technology@lemmy.world · 25 Aug 2026

• Not just because it enables more access for everyone, but because it represents a deepening commitment by these companies to Linux as a gaming platform.

  The more companies see Linux as a viable gaming platform, the more consumers will. It’s a virtuous cycle, and one that will only help to erode Windows grip on the desktop OS space.

  on Cool... I guess. in c/linuxmemes@lemmy.world · 24 Aug 2026

• Could you tell us what that app is?

  And yes, the fact that they blast out amber alerts at the same level as “imminent nuclear attack” is unbelievably stupid. There’s no justification for it whatsoever.

  on Do Amber Alerts for Missing Kids Actually Work? | The Walrus in c/technology@lemmy.world · 21 Aug 2026

• When this is all over the world owes Ed Zitron a massive fucking apology.

  on Top economist warns that the AI math doesn’t make sense: 'Profits are currently being funded by investors rather than earned from customers' in c/technology@lemmy.world · 11 Aug 2026

• They’re not even better optimized. Hallucination rates are up. Inference costs are up. There’s only an AI industry at all because they’re selling a highly subsidized product, but when they try to raise prices even a little the market collapses. Companies that were encouraging employees to up their AI use are now rationing tokens like chocolate in wartime. This isn’t like Uber where they can push out the old providers and then obtain market capture on something everyone needs. AI is not, and cannot be, essential, because you can always just get a human to do it.

  on Top economist warns that the AI math doesn’t make sense: 'Profits are currently being funded by investors rather than earned from customers' in c/technology@lemmy.world · 11 Aug 2026