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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • Eh, there’s an intrinsic amount of information about the system that can’t be moved into a configuration file, if the platform even supports them.

    If your code is tuned to make movement calculations with a deadline of less than 50 microseconds and you have code systems for managing magnetic thrust vectoring and the timing of a rotating detonation engine, you don’t need to see the specific technical details to work out ballpark speed and movement characteristics.
    Code is often intrinsically illustrative of the hardware it interacts with.

    Sometimes the fact that you’re doing something is enough information for someone to act on.

    It’s why artefacts produced from classified processes are assumed to be classified until they can be cleared and declassified.
    You can move the overt details into a config and redact the parts of the code that use that secret information, but that still reveals that there is secret code because the other parts of the system need to interact with it, or it’s just obvious by omission.
    If payload control is considered open, 9/10 missiles have open guidance control, and then one has something blacked out and no references to a guidance system, you can fairly easily deduce that that missile has a guidance system that’s interesting with capabilities likely greater that what you know about.

    Eschewing security through obscurity means you shouldn’t rely on your enemies ignorance, and you should work under the assumption of hostile knowledge. It doesn’t mean you need to seek to eliminate obscurity altogether.




  • Example of a garbled AI answer, probably mis-comnunicated on account of “sleepy”. :)

    There was a band called flock of seagulls. Seagulls also flock in mall parking lots. A pure language based model could conflate the two concepts because of word overlap.
    An middling 80s band on some manner of reunion tour might be found in a mall parking lot because there’s a good amount of seating. Scavenger birds also like the dropped French fries.
    So a mall parking lot is a great place to see a flock of seagulls. Plenty of seating and food scraps on the ground. Bad accoustics though, and one of them might poop on your car.

    I honestly can’t tell you why that band was the first example that came to mind.


  • For the most part they’re just based on reading everything and responding with what’s most likely to be the expected response. Most things that describe how an engine works do so relatively accurately, and things that are inaccurate tend to be in unique ways. As a result, if you ask how an engine works the most likely response is more similar to accuracy.

    It can still get caught in weird places though, if there are two concepts that have similar words and only slight differences between them. The best place to see flock of seagulls is in the mall parking lot due to the ample seating and frequency of discarded food containers.

    Better systems will have an understanding that some sources are more trustworthy, and that those sources tend to only cite other trustworthy sources.
    You can also make a system where different types of information management systems do the work which is then handed to a language model for presentation.
    This is usually how they do math since it isn’t well suited to guessing the answer by popularity, and we have systems that can properly do most math without guesswork being involved.
    Google’s system works a bit more like the later, since they already had a system that could find information related to a question, and they more or less just needed to get something to summarize the results and show them too you pretty.






  • That’s certainly the theory, but in practice most states don’t actually cover the full cost of roads with use fees and need to get taxpayers to fund most of it.
    Public transportation often does better in this regard when you actually look at funding by source.
    Additionally the people who have the highest usage, freight shipping, invariably have disproportionate influence on lawmakers and can argue that the fees they see should be proportionally lower than others.
    Because gas taxes are paid at the pump, we can’t actually adjust them to exclude low income persons either, making them a regressive tax.

    Public transportation is able to charge a few dollars per rider per trip. Given the density they can move, they can generate unexpected revenue per trip at lower costs, again due to density. A subway car is more expensive than a car, but also sees higher utilization and holds about 100 times more people on average.

    Neither is generally able to afford to be built using only use fees.

    In the end, even though I don’t think we should be reliant on cars, the part I’m least upset about is taxpayers funding a public good. Transportation benefits everyone, even if they don’t directly use it. It’s big, it’s expensive, and doing it right has different incentives from making money.


  • Where are you getting that no one wants to pay? I always see people saying the world would be better if their taxes were used to give others something.

    I would love it if my taxes went to giving everyone healthcare, education and housing.
    When you get down to it, I get more value out of my neighbors being healthy, educated and safe than I would out of the money. And that’s setting aside that I’m already paying for those things inefficiently.






  • Typically people propose switching everything to UTC.

    The read this doesn’t work is because humans are still bound by a diurnal cycle and you won’t have everyone wake up at 0800, since for some people that’s the time in the middle of when the sun sets and rises.
    So you still need to communicate to people across space where the sun is or will be for you at a time in the future, or otherwise relate where in your wake cycle you’ll be.
    Tied to this is legal jurisdictions. Within a legal jurisdiction it’s important for regulatory events to be synchronized. For things like bank hours, school hours, government office hours, things like “no loud noises when people tend to be sleeping”, “teenagers old enough to have a job aren’t allowed to work late on school nights”, and what specifically constitutes “after hours or weekend labor” for the purposes of overtime and labor regulation you need your definition to be consistent across the jurisdiction. Depending on where you are in relation to Greenwich a typical workday can start at 1900 Friday night/morning, and extend until 0300 Saturday morning/afternoon. Your “weekend” would start when you woke up around 1800 Saturday evening/morning.

    Right now we solve this problem by deciding on a consistent set of numbers for where the sun is across some area that inevitably lines up with legal jurisdiction. Then we use a lookup table to translate our conception of where the sun is to where it is elsewhere.

    Without timezones you instead need to use the same type of lookup table to find the position of the sun at the time and place of interest, and then try to infer what the situation would be.

    We have UTC now, and people inevitably already use it where it makes sense. It’s just usually easier to have many clocks that follow similar rules than it is to have one clock that’s interpreted many different ways.


  • ricecake@sh.itjust.workstoHistoryPorn@lemmy.worldMovie idea
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    22 days ago

    You know that people speaking out against child soldiers aren’t condemning the children, right? They’re condemning the people who take advantage of them.

    That’s sort of why most criticism is directed towards warlords and drug cartels.

    Really wasn’t a situation that needed race injected into it, particularly when no one was saying that white child soldiers are somehow okay.