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flashman commented on New antibiotic that kills drug-resistant bacteria found in technician's garden   nature.com/articles/d4158... · Posted by u/ascorbic
kylehotchkiss · 5 months ago
Developing countries should absolutely get the standard set of antibiotics.

Formulas for "antibiotics of last resort" (I would consider a newly designed one in this category) should not be sent to Pharma companies of these countries, rather, the antibiotics should be pre-dosed and mailed over from a country who can maintain the integrity of the formula in a limited fashion to keep their effectiveness high so they can continue to serve patients years into the future.

It sucks, but we've watched antibiotics be abused so badly that babies are born into hospitals where they catch resistant infections nearly right after childbirth. I blame the antibiotics-for-every-cough medical practices common in some countries (I've seen this happen myself!)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ofbtepraOX4

flashman · 5 months ago
Jesus
flashman commented on Self-Driving Teslas Are Fatally Rear-Ending Motorcyclists More Than Any Other   fuelarc.com/news-and-feat... · Posted by u/NotInOurNames
pfannkuchen · 5 months ago
You do want them to be better than humans, but vision quality is not really a major source of human accidents. Accidents are typically caused by driving technique, inattention, or a failure to accurately model the behavior of other drivers.

Put another way - would giving humans superhuman vision significantly reduce the accident rate?

The issue here is that the vision based system failed to even match human capabilities, which is a different issue from whether it can be better than humans by using some different vision tech.

flashman · 5 months ago
seems like vision quality might be a major source of robot accidents
flashman commented on An image of an archeologist adventurer who wears a hat and uses a bullwhip   theaiunderwriter.substack... · Posted by u/participant3
nearbuy · 5 months ago
> Current generation of AI models can't think of anything truly new.

How could you possibly know this?

Is this falsifiable? Is there anything we could ask it to draw where you wouldn't just claim it must be copying some image in its training data?

flashman · 5 months ago
Let's reverse that. "Current generation AI models can think of things that are truly new."

How could you possibly know that? Could you prove that an image wasn't copying from images in its training data?

flashman commented on An image of an archeologist adventurer who wears a hat and uses a bullwhip   theaiunderwriter.substack... · Posted by u/participant3
ionwake · 5 months ago
Not sure if anyone is interested in this story, but I remember at the height of the PokemonGo craze I noticed there were no shirts for the different factions in the game, cant rememebr what they were called but something like Teamread or something. I setup an online shop to just to sell a red shirt with the word on it. The next day my whole shop was taken offline for potential copyright infringement.

What I found surprising is I didnt even have one sale. Somehow someone had notified Nintendo AND my shop had been taken down, to sell merch that didn't even exist for the market and if I remember correctly - also it didnt even have any imagery on it or anything trademarkable - even if it was clearly meant for pokmeonGo fans.

Im not bitter I just found it interesting how quick and ruthless they were. Like bros I didn't even get a chance to make a sale. ( yes and also I dont think I infringed anything).

flashman · 5 months ago
Redbubble was sued by the Pokemon Company two months prior to the launch of Pokemon Go, so you picked the exact wrong company and moment to try this with

https://www.smh.com.au/business/consumer-affairs/pokemon-hel...

flashman commented on SheepShaver is an open source PowerPC Apple Macintosh emulator   emaculation.com/doku.php/... · Posted by u/janandonly
flashman · 5 months ago
macintosh.js is an alternative that runs as an Electron app https://github.com/felixrieseberg/macintosh.js
flashman commented on JFK Assassination Records – 2025 Documents Release   archives.gov/research/jfk... · Posted by u/FillardMillmore
flashman · 5 months ago
A bunch of these documents have been released in previous years so we'll need a filter on filenames to determine what's actually new, e.g.

2023 release: https://www.archives.gov/files/research/jfk/releases/2023/20...

2025 release: https://www.archives.gov/files/research/jfk/releases/2025/03...

flashman commented on Apple says it will add 20k jobs, spend $500B, produce AI servers in US   bloomberg.com/news/articl... · Posted by u/helsinkiandrew
abalone · 6 months ago
Some useful context: this is almost certainly being driven by Apple’s Private Cloud Compute architecture and not tariffs, as an investment of this magnitude is not planned overnight.

Why is PCC driving Apple to spend billions to build servers in the states? Because it is insane from a security standpoint (insanely awesome).

PCC is an order of magnitude more secure server platform than has ever been deployed for consumer use at planet scale. Secure and private enough to literally send your data and have it processed server side instead of on device without having to trust the host (Apple).[1] Until now the only way to do that was on device. If you sent your data for cloud processing, outside of something exotic like homomorphic encryption[2], you’d still have to trust that the host did a good job protecting your data, using it responsibly, and wasn’t compromised. Not the case with PCC.

To accomplish this Apple uses its own custom chips with Secure Enclaves that provide a trust foundation for the whole system, ultimately cryptographically guaranteeing that the binaries processing your data have been publicly audited by independent security auditors. This is the so called hardware root of trust.

It is essential then that the hardware deployed in data centers has not been physically tampered with. Without that the whole thing falls apart. So Apple has a whole section in their security white paper detailing an audited process for deploying data center hardware and ensuring supply chain integrity.[3]

You can imagine how that is the weak point in the system made more robust by managing it in the US. Tighter supply chain control.

[1] https://security.apple.com/blog/private-cloud-compute/

[2] Fun fact, Apple also just deployed a homomorphic encryption powered search engine! It’s also insane!

[3] https://security.apple.com/documentation/private-cloud-compu...

flashman · 6 months ago
> It is essential then that the hardware deployed in data centers has not been physically tampered with. Without that the whole thing falls apart.

am i wrong or does this just change the threat from Chinese to US government tampering

and if third-party auditing can detect hardware tampering then why does it matter where the hardware is manufactured

Deleted Comment

flashman commented on Atari 2600+ vs. Atari 7800+ – Which Should You Get?   goto10retro.com/p/atari-2... · Posted by u/rbanffy
flashman · 7 months ago
> Speaking of game loading, it is surprisingly slow. You plug in a cartridge and turn on the 7800+, which takes a moment, and then there is a “Loading game” screen that takes 15 to 20 seconds to actually load the game.

This would have been nearly instantaneous on the original console. You could hit reset and be back at the title screen basically before you'd leaned back from pushing the button.

It is very funny that as computers have become more powerful, we've lost the incentive (and probably the skills, outside of the demoscene) to make things run fast and close to the bone.

Also, I think "disappointing joypad" is faithful to the Atari experience, having used those spongy suckers for many hours in the early 90s.

flashman commented on Infosec 101 for Activists   infosecforactivists.org... · Posted by u/greenie_beans
some_furry · 7 months ago
> Why?

Because if I was running SIGINT at the NSA and collaborating with the FBI to arrest activists, the very first thing I would do is start up a bunch of VPN providers that bill themselves as "private" and then log everything aggressively.

The second thing I would do is have useful idiots (i.e., influencers) spread vague anecdotes about Tor users being "de-anonymized" when VPN users are never "anonymized" to begin with. I would make sure these anecdotes never clarify whether it's "Tor users accessing Hidden Services and getting popped by a Firefox exploit" or "network attack that enables traffic correlation" so everyone fills in the blanks and assumes Tor is dangerous, when it isn't, thereby pushing activists to my VPN services.

After all. There is no real enforcement mechanism if a "private" VPN lies.

https://www.theregister.com/2011/09/26/hidemyass_lulzsec_con...

flashman · 7 months ago
That's funny because if I was running SIGINT at the NSA I would do all of the above, and also compromise Tor

u/flashman

KarmaCake day3980August 13, 2014
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Data analyst. tim@electronsoup.net, twitter.com/flashman
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