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pliny commented on Spyware maker NSO Group confirms acquisition by US investors   techcrunch.com/2025/10/10... · Posted by u/corvad
isodev · 3 months ago
I always wondered how the software people who work in places like this live with themselves. Is it some sort of “enough money can make me forget and look myself in the mirror” situation?
pliny · 3 months ago
I asked this (in a less accusatory tone) of an NSO employee once and he said something about how the big tech companies also spy on people and do unethical things.
pliny commented on Potential issues in curl found using AI assisted tools   mastodon.social/@bagder/1... · Posted by u/robhlam
Brian_K_White · 3 months ago
No you can't. You can only pay to transfer them to someone else on top of their own.

It's fundamentally different from how a machine or some code makes a task actually go away or at least become smaller.

pliny · 3 months ago
There are already cheap, domestic robots for cleaning dishes, cleaning the floor, cleaning clothes, making coffee, heating and cooling food, turning screws, drilling holes and so on. All those robots represent a greater than 90 percent (and sometimes a greater than 99 percent) savings in time relative to doing the same tasks manually. You still have to move the objects they operate on around within your house but that's mostly the only part of the task you have to do.
pliny commented on U.S. bombs Iranian nuclear sites   bbc.co.uk/news/live/ckg3r... · Posted by u/mattcollins
mjburgess · 6 months ago
Neither you or I, and esp. not the media, have any access to facts on the ground. All photographs or videos you have seen have been placed there for you to see them.

All we can work backwards from are the most reliable facts we have before the war, about capabilities on the ground. We know the rough size of the iranian missile programme, of the country, economic, various military assets and similar.

We can work backwards from this to ask, "what would we be able to see had Israel achieved its claim re iran" -- and we're talking extraordinary levels of destruction in iran, across the country, and so on. We don't have any evidence of operations of that scale even taking place, let alone having been successful.

It is most likely, at the moment, that at least some alleged air force victories by israel are actual missiles they've issued from neighbouring states on the land.

However, either way, all of this is speculation. What can be stated with near certainty is that any picture presented in the media is an extremely careful creation of the propaganda arms of our states, and not a credible military briefing.

Our only access to reliable inferences is purely rational and hypothetical: what are X's aims, what are their claims, what are they claimed strategies, what are their capabilities and so on.. and then what would we see *if*...

pliny · 6 months ago
>All photographs or videos you have seen have been placed there for you to see them

The source of most of the videos from both sides is random social media users.

Even the videos and info from the IDF I would regard as credible, since they released similar videos and info from the Lebanon operation last year that was consistently corroborated by evidence from social media (there was no internet blackout in Lebanon so every IDF strike on an urban area had multiple videos from different perspectives).

pliny commented on Wiz's $32B GTM Playbook   cybersecuritypulse.net/p/... · Posted by u/baxtr
pclmulqdq · 8 months ago
Yep, these guys have a very powerful network with access to a lot more CISO offices than you or I can get into. That network also includes a lot of the people who develop malware and exploits.
pliny · 8 months ago
The network Assaf got from founding and selling a big cybersecurity company and then being a VP-equivalent at Microsoft for 5 years (immediately before found Wiz) is more relevant than what he had from being an IC in the army 15 before that.

Deleted Comment

pliny commented on Hezbollah hand-held radios detonate across Lebanon, sources say   reuters.com/world/middle-... · Posted by u/shmatt
pliny · a year ago
The purpose is to injure enemy combatants
pliny commented on Intel Brags of $152B in Stock Buybacks. Why Does It Need an $8B Subsidy?   commondreams.org/opinion/... · Posted by u/robtherobber
mrkstu · 2 years ago
Is there a heuristic for how much of the value of a share is assigned to asset value vs forward looking earnings? Many of the ‘hot’ stocks like Nvidia seem almost all forward looking.
pliny · 2 years ago
For public companies you don't need a heuristic, as the balance sheet is included in quarterly earnings reports.
pliny commented on Intel Brags of $152B in Stock Buybacks. Why Does It Need an $8B Subsidy?   commondreams.org/opinion/... · Posted by u/robtherobber
otteromkram · 2 years ago
> On the other hand, a buyback should lower the market cap of a stock [...]

Uhh...what?

Buybacks are a return of value. Share prices adjust accordingly to the updated proportion of outstanding stock.

Might want to select a new username, friend.

pliny · 2 years ago
The price of the share stays the same but there are fewer shares, so the market cap would go down.
pliny commented on Claude 3 Opus suspects it is being tested from benchmark question   twitter.com/alexalbert__/... · Posted by u/magnio
pliny · 2 years ago
I saw a comment (not in the linked thread) that notes that the system prompt probably includes something along the lines of "You are a helpful AI assistant...", which does feel like a bit of a giveaway in the sense that there are many documents on the internet that discuss testing AI assistants and therefore a document who's topic is an AI assistant is likely to contain discussion of testing the assistant (and if the document is written from a first person perspective, of the assistant, then it's likely to contain text from the perspective of the assistant discussing it's own testing).
pliny commented on Finance worker pays out $25M after video call call with deepfake CFO   edition.cnn.com/2024/02/0... · Posted by u/bsdz
iamflimflam1 · 2 years ago
I would suggest that every CFO agrees some kind of secret challenge response with their staff and other execs.
pliny · 2 years ago
The secret challenge exists and it is the phone number / email address / VC account of CFO. If CFO wants to order EMPLOYEE to send money, then EMPLOYEE should only do the action after making an outgoing call to CFO.

u/pliny

KarmaCake day1205June 8, 2012
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