RevEng (u/RevEng) - Readit News

RevEng commented on Bypassing Google's big anti-adblock update 0x44.xyz/blog/web-request... · Posted by u/deryilz

Beijinger · 2 months ago

I did not even realize my ublock origin was turned off. My HOST FILE script did the same service: https://expatcircle.com/cms/privacy-advanced-ublock-origin-w...

More concerning is that social fixer was turned off: https://socialfixer.com/

MFGA Make Facebook Great again ;-)

RevEng · 2 months ago

Hosts alone won't solve many ads. Plenty of companies include their own annoying content from their own domains. uBlock lets you get far more fine grained, blocking specific paths.

RevEng commented on Bypassing Google's big anti-adblock update 0x44.xyz/blog/web-request... · Posted by u/deryilz

alex1138 · 2 months ago

1) A lot of ads are terribly overdone and even sometimes actively malicious (malware or tracking). It makes no sense to aggressively try to stamp it out like Google is doing

2) Aside from the Page/Brin stealing tech salaries thing (yeah it really did happen) what happened to Google? They've always been a bit incompetent but their behavior (ie Chrome and increasing censorship on Google/Youtube the last few years) has been really bad, I thought they were basically founded off idealism

RevEng · 2 months ago

Idealism does with capitalism. Executives and shareholders don't care about ideals: they want money. All of the questionable things Google has done have been in pursuit of ever larger profits.

RevEng commented on Bypassing Google's big anti-adblock update 0x44.xyz/blog/web-request... · Posted by u/deryilz

bborud · 2 months ago

I remember back in the day, one of the big selling points for Google’s search engine used to be that the advertising didn’t get in the way. Imagine that.

RevEng · 2 months ago

The big reason for me was that it "just worked". Altavista was the biggest player at the time but you had to learn a while query language to get good results. Google's search engine took plain English keywords and have relevant results.

RevEng commented on Microsoft Teams will soon block screen capture during meetings bleepingcomputer.com/news... · Posted by u/josephcsible

NKosmatos · 4 months ago

There isn’t a single user (presenter) that would ask something like this. Only a presenter that has to follow some strict “high security” procedures would enable something like this. A politician, for example, will have an excuse in case something leaks. The fact that with a simple mobile having a camera you can copy whatever is being presented (or with slightly more technical ways) is irrelevant for laws and procedures ;-)

RevEng · 4 months ago

Every meeting I'm in where we talk numbers or strategy starts with someone saying, Please don't record or share this. The documents all say CONFIDENTIAL all over them. That's not true of all our presentations, just ones that we really wouldn't want our competition to see.

Many people still take screenshots of things they think are useful. Things still get shared though emails and occasionally posted on social media.

I have worked with various secure chamber VPN and VNC systems that make it quite difficult to record or screenshot. These are companies where their IP is worth billions of dollars and everyone wants a piece of it. It's difficult enough that it's not worth the effort to try and work around it. The rare time I really need something for debugging, I'll take a photo with my cameraphone, but it rarely comes to that.

Because it's that much harder, I record a lot less of it. Likewise for all the other engineers I work with. Friction won't stop it entirely, but it will make it far less frequent.

RevEng commented on Fandom sells gaming media brand Giant Bomb to long-term staff about.fandom.com/news/fan... · Posted by u/minimaxir

bigstrat2003 · 4 months ago

> to Jeff Gerstmann getting fired AGAIN

Hold up what? I didn't know that. It seems insane to fire the man from the organization he co-founded.

RevEng · 4 months ago

It happens. Our CTO "resigned" about 6 years after we started our VC funded startup. He sold his shares to the rest of the investors. It wasn't his choice to leave.

RevEng commented on "AI-first" is the new Return To Office anildash.com//2025/04/19/... · Posted by u/LorenDB

lsy · 4 months ago

The point is well-made that truly revolutionary technologies don't need top-down mandates to drive adoption, and it's certainly a bad sign for the AI industry that we are in this phase of the hype cycle. But it also seems likely that top-down mandates will create perverse incentives for product development around these technologies, preventing genuinely valuable use cases from emerging as people determine what does and doesn't work.

If everyone, to satisfy their CEO's emotional attachment to AI, is forced to type into a chat box to get dreck out and then massage it into something usable for their work, we'll see that ineffective mode persist longer, and probably miss out on better modes of interaction and more well-targeted use cases.

RevEng · 4 months ago

I'm seeing a lot of that in my own job. Every company has a top-down mandate to use more AI and a budget to back it up, my employer included. But we write software. Now this means we are chasing the AI dragon making LLM-based software in the hopes that we can capitalize on the hype. I would be more charitable in my description if I thought we were going after the high value targets, but our marketing strategy is literally "AI in everything". I'm all for selling what the customer wants to buy, but I don't think that's actually what we are making. Trying to make everything at once means making none of it well.

There's a huge disconnect between what customers think AI will do for them and what we are actually capable of delivering. When customers and colleagues alike complain that something doesn't work well and ask how we are going to fix it I have to keep reminding them "this is an open area of research in the field; nobody has found a solution to this yet." Nobody likes hearing that, but it's the truth.

It reminds me a lot of the dotcom bubble. People thought they could get rich just my making a web site that talked about their company. Even many of the biggest most successful early movers failed completely. We can all agree today that the Internet has provided tremendous value and really has changed the world, but not in the way most people thought it would then. Most of the startups being started didn't have a business plan beyond "it's on the web" and that's where I see a lot of the AI development right now. They think making the technology makes it profitable without asking what problems it solves better than our existing solutions. Some of what we are developing shows potential, but a lot of it is a solution in search of a problem.

It's definitely resulting in opportunity costs as we pour money and people into projects that only exist because we can put AI in the name, taking priority over projects that we had already planned and vetted with customers and market research. For a company that prides itself on slow and steady progress and long term stability, we sure are jumping head first into AI solutions and we are doing so at a rate that precludes any kind of design, testing, or quality control. We are selling shaky prototypes and our customers are happily paying for them. Everyone on both sides is so blinded by the hype that they are setting aside everything they've learned over decades of experience and success.

I can't wait for the hype to end so we can start talking about where LLMs and other generative AI are actually useful.

RevEng commented on Chain of Recursive Thoughts: Make AI think harder by making it argue with itself github.com/PhialsBasement... · Posted by u/miles

nonethewiser · 4 months ago

In theory couldnt this just be baked into a single adversarial model?

RevEng · 4 months ago

Not entirely. Since generation is auto regressive, the next token depends on the previous tokens. Whatever analysis and decisions it has spit out will influence what it will do next. This tends to cause it to be self reinforcing.

But it's also chaotic. Small changes in input or token choices can give wildly different outcomes, particularly if the sampling distributions are fairly flat (no one right answer). So restarting the generation with a slightly different input, such as a different random seed (or in OP's case, a different temperature) can give wildly different outcomes.

If you try this, you'll see some examples of it vehemently arguing it is right and others equally arguing it is wrong. This is why LLM as judge is so poor by itself, bit also why multiple generations like used in self-consistency can be quite useful at evaluating variance and therefore uncertainty.

RevEng commented on The coming knowledge-work supply-chain crisis worksonmymachine.substack... · Posted by u/Stwerner

RevEng · 4 months ago

The article rightly points out that people don't enjoy just being reviewers: we like to take an active role in playing, learning, and creating. They point out the need to find a solution to this, but then never follow up on that idea.

This is perhaps the most fundamental problem. In the past, tools took care of the laborious and tedious work so we could focus on creativity. Now we are letting AI do the creative work and asking humans to become managers and code reviewers. Maybe that's great for some people, but it's not what most problem solvers want to be doing. The same people who know how to judge such things are the same people who have years of experience doing this things. Without that experience you can't have good judgement.

Let the AI make it faster and easier for me to create; don't make it replace what I do best and leave me as a manager and code reviewer.

The parallels with grocery checkouts are worth considering. Humans are great at recognizing things, handling unexpected situations, and being friendly and personable. People working checkouts are experts at these things.

Now replace that with self serve checkouts. Random customers are forced to do this all themselves. They are not experts at this. The checkouts are less efficient because they have to accommodate these non-experts. People have to pack their own bags. And they do all of this while punching buttons on a soulless machine instead of getting some social interaction in.

But worse off is the employee who manages these checkouts. Now instead of being social, they are security guards and tech support. They are constantly having to shoot the computer issues and teach disinterested and frustrated beginners how to do something that should be so simple. The employee spends most of their time as a manager and watchdog, looking at a screen that shows the status of all the checkouts, looking for issues, like a prison security guard. This work is inactive and unengaging, requiring constant attention - something humans aren't good at. When little they do interact with others, it is in situations where that are upset.

We didn't automate anything here, we just changed who does what. We made customers into the people doing checkouts and we made more level staff into managers of them, plus being tech support.

This is what companies are trying to do with AI. They want to have fewer employees whose job it is to manage the AIs, directing them to produce. The human is left assigning tasks and checking the results - managers of thankless and soulless machines. The credit for the creation goes to the machines while the employees are seen as low skilled and replaceable.

And we end up back at the start: trying to find high skilled people to perform low skilled work based on experience that they only would have had if they had being doing high skilled work to begin with. When everyone is just managing an AI, no one will know what it is supposed to do.

RevEng commented on Trump temporarily drops tariffs to 10% for most countries cnbc.com/2025/04/09/trump... · Posted by u/bhouston

Kwpolska · 5 months ago

> “This was his strategy all along,” Bessent said at the White House, where officials, including him, had denied for days that the tariffs would be suspended.

And why should we believe them? If it was the strategy, you could have made the tariff announcement into an acrostic or something.

RevEng · 5 months ago

Not 24 hours ago he said the tariffs were non negotiable, now he says this was always the plan. There's no reason to believe a word he says.

RevEng commented on Trump temporarily drops tariffs to 10% for most countries cnbc.com/2025/04/09/trump... · Posted by u/bhouston

foogazi · 5 months ago

If the country gets rich from tariffs why stop them?

RevEng · 5 months ago

Because it's not the country getting rich - it's the government getting rich from its citizens. It's another form of taxation, but one with no plan and crazy fluctuations day to day that affect first and foremost businesses, who will put off investments are start layoffs in order to make themselves more resilient to the chaos, which affects the whole economy. And this long term downturn in the economy doesn't make the country rich, but rather poor.

If what Trump was saying about making the country rich were true, then sure, why would people complain? But it's not true; just a lie told to placate his followers. It's another version of "diamond hands" or "ride the dip" that you hear from people pumping and dumping crypto stocks.