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Cake day: June 21st, 2023

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  • When I was young I remember that banks often had large drive-thrus with pneumatic tube systems at each car stall.

    There would only be one teller but they could serve quite a few lanes.

    If you wanted a cash withdrawal, you might put your ID and your withdrawal slip in the tube, and a few minutes later it would come back with cash in it.

    It was pretty rad. But ATMs seem like a better bet overall.


  • The most effective method of protesting would be to find a way to get the masses to turn against the lawmakers in such a way that they convince the lawmakers to solve the problem that the protest is focused against.

    But most of these protests just piss off the masses. They run their day with traffic, they destroy heritage sites that people care about, and while they do get in the news and get some publicity, people’s memory is quite negative. And there are zero focus on anybody who could actually change the situation.






  • One of the best things ever about LLMs is how you can give them absolute bullshit textual garbage and they can parse it with a huge level of accuracy.

    Some random chunks of html tables, output a csv and convert those values from imperial to metric.

    Fragments of a python script and ask it to finish the function and create a readme to explain the purpose of the function. And while it’s at it recreate the missing functions.

    Copy paste of a multilingual website with tons of formatting and spelling errors. Ask it to fix it. Boom done.

    Of course, the problem here is that developers can no longer clean their inputs as well and are encouraged to send that crappy input straight along to the LLM for processing.

    There’s definitely going to be a whole new wave of injection style attacks where people figure out how to reverse engineer AI company magic.





  • I ran a single line BBS system in the Seattle area in my early teens which was early '90s. At the peak we were averaging about 20 calls a day and I kept the whole thing running for a few years. I had a four drive CD-ROM tower system loaded up with shareware CD archives and a connection to fidonet, so you could exchange email with anyone else who had a fidonet address around the world. It was freaking cool and the skills I learned building that prepared me to jump into IT during the .com boom which was a pretty lucky career break for a teen in Seattle.

    That era was the tail end of the golden days of BBS systems because Prodigy and CompuServe followed quickly and what they had was professional content creators and some of the first integrations for buying airline tickets, stocks, reading the news, and functional email that reached a wider audience. At that time, you have to remember there was no other way to access those services in real time. Your only other source for this would have been TV or newspapers, or picking up the phone and calling a travel agent.

    A lot of these services’ business model was selling hours of access. So you might pay 30 bucks a month for 50 hours, and if you stayed online longer you’d pay more. Those numbers were fine because after you finished whatever you wanted to do, there was nothing left to look at so it was easy to log back off. Very few people were leaving anything resembling an instant messenger logged in all the time.

    Those services were constantly updating so every time you logged in you’d see new games, photo libraries, user-generated content in their forums. But in the end they were essentially overgrown BBS’s with funding.

    All of them, including AOL, tried to stay relevant by adding the internet as soon as it became a little more mainstream to talk about. But within a fairly short period of time, maybe about a year, the content available on the wider internet from major sources outpaced whatever Prodigy, CompuServe and AOL could produce on their own, so most people logged in just to bypass and get to the internet.

    The next generation of getting online after that was subscribing directly to a local ISP for a dial-up account.

    As I think back to this, we knew the future was coming fast, but nobody seemed to really understand what that would entail. Absolutely nobody was envisioning services to come like cloud storage, social media, non-stop connectivity from your pocket etc. That was basically sci-fi movie stuff. Connectivity was simply too slow, and we didn’t even have high-res pics or videos stored on our computers at the time. Photos were still taken on film, and video was stored on magnetic tape. It was still very analog and very few people could afford the hardware to digitize it. Early scanners were crappy, only black and white, and expensive.

    The most incredible services to launch at the beginning were the chat systems and forums, and online shopping. Clicking on a picture of a cool thing, Entering a credit card number, and it showing up at your door a few days later was pretty cool, and I can distinctively remember the first Christmas where I did all of my shopping online and then bragged about not having to go to the mall. A pretty glorious experience for somebody who never really liked the mall.

    Mail order systems existed but you had to call to place your order on the phone (during business hours), or physically mail your order slip with a handwritten credit card number or a check.

    I think one of the most fascinating components of this that struck people was how fast you could communicate with people on the other side of the earth. A lot of people would exclaim “I just talked to a guy in Australia!” as the most eye-opening first experience. That’s a real tell on how isolated we used to be.

    In the early '90s, there was a very real sense that most people around you had not ever been online before. So if you started talking about your experiences most people would look at you like you’re an alien, or at least some kind of super nerd. There was a period of time where it was decidedly uncool.

    My best friend to this day is a guy I met in middle school and we quickly discovered that we both knew about BBS systems. By the time I graduated there were maybe only four or five guys in our BBS group of friends at our high school of 600 people.

    Anyways, sorry for the essay. Having been born into the analog era and grown up as it became digital was a wild experience that those before and those after might not totally relate to.







  • Well thought-out and articulated opinion, thanks for sharing.

    If even the most skilled hyper-realistic painters were out there painting depictions of CSAM, we’d probably still label it as free speech because we “know” it to be fiction.

    When a computer rolls the dice against a model and imagines a novel composition of children’s images combined with what it knows about adult material, it does seem more difficult to label it as entirely fictional. That may be partly because the source material may have actually been real, even if the final composition is imagined. I don’t intend to suggest models trained on CSAM either, I’m thinking of models trained to know what both mature and immature body shapes look like, as well as adult content, and letting the algorithm figure out the rest.

    Nevertheless, as you brought up, nobody is harmed in this scenario, even though many people in our culture and society find this behavior and content to be repulsive.

    To a high degree, I think we can still label an individual who consumes this type of AI content to be a pedophile, and although being a pedophile is not in and of itself an illegal adjective to posses, it comes with societal consequences. Additionally, pedophilia is a DSM-5 psychiatric disorder, which could be a pathway to some sort of consequences for those who partake.