I think this is the distinction of uses I canost get behind. If you find an attack using any tool, whether that be a CVE, a script kiddy, or an LLM, then you can go on to understand how the vulnerability works and patch it. This leaves the understanding part to the programmer, but not the arduous task of trying to find problems. If you use vibecoding to do the actual fixing you never have the understanding of how the code works and therefore what the changes will actually do.

LLMs can be useful in a lot of ways, but they should never replace thinking and understanding. Just like you do need to memorise some things but not others, there are cognitive tasks you don’t have to do all the time but others you really have to in order to actually be a good programmer. If you outsource thinking you stop doing it and get weaker at it. If you outsource meaningless tasks or use systems to reduce the need for them that is actually useful for freeing up your mind for tasks which cannot be automated.

So in my view using these tools to find bugs in code can be useful. Knowing that if a bug is found it may not be disclosed to you by the tool because the provider of the tool wants to keep some bugs hidden is something people should consider, I mean that is exactly what the NSA has been going for decades with zero day exploits in various operating systems and platforms, why would they not do so now?

Currently reading Buried Mage, book 4 of the Fledgeling God series by Michael Taggart. It is a slightly cracky a heavily gay modern setting fantasy progression series. The magic is explored in interesting enough ways to be fun, the characters are a little one dimensional sometimes, but the whole thing is a lot of fun. It doesn’t take itself too seriously and is just there for a good time, so it never feels to desperate or reaching.

I would give it a solid 80% rating, but I am very picky, I am currently listening to the series for the 3rd time so it is good enough to get repeated listenings.

Just remember, the brick won’t be hurt by hitting a fascist, still good for building, so ¿Por qué no los dos?

This is the central problem with digital ownership. It isn’t real. You don’t own anything.

If you have a file which contains the book and has no Digital Restrictions Management on it then you own the book in the same way as if you have the physical book.

If you borrow a book from the library you could make a copy by scanning all the pages and then give the original back. Alternatively you could refuse to return it and pay the replacement cost. In either case you actually had the book with full access.

If you “borrow” the book in apps like this you are not getting the whole thing unencumbered, you are getting something more similar to a webcam view of a page turning robot. Yes you can read the text, but you can’t make any changes, mark a spot, read it offline, take a photocopy, and so on. Many of these apps block screenshots, and many also block copy and paste.

It is crazy to me that in order to have reasonable access to a book you have no legal option in many cases. I recently bought Azalea Ellis’ books and they are all in a plain eBook format or in a plain audio book format. No DRM, no limits. That means I can use the audio book as I want, which in my case means adding it to my AudioBookShelf server. I can cache it to my phone one book at a time or even the whole series in one go. I can play it at whatever speed I like, 2x is my normal, and nobody can stop me. I can listen to it as many times as I like.

If nobody will sell me the book without DRM I don’t consider it buying. They are leasing the book, renting access to it, but I never fool myself into thinking I own it. I don’t actually own anything on a PS5, nor on Steam. While Steam has not turned evil yet it is always a possibility, so I treat those licences as access rentals and assume they are temporary.

From a moral perspective if you van have it taken away you don’t own it, and if you buying isn’t owning then piracy isn’t theft. Any claims that someone stole from a publisher when the publisher was claiming they were selling the game are bunk. If they actually sold the game, as GOG does, then it would be theft. But if they only sell a licence for access then it isn’t selling the game, and it is therefore not theft.

I try to set aside time to do maintenance once or twice a week. I do a backup of my system using the standard backup tool then do the full upgrade of everything, starting with all the HACS and Addons, then the core OS stuff, then reboot. Then I test a few things and make sure it looks OK. I haven’t had any issues yet but I know it is a matter of time. I have a second computer I will be testing restoring onto shortly, so I will make that part of my process. No point having a backup if you haven’t tested it.

Indeed, future research needed, but definitely interesting.

That is my read of it too. The next question would be quantifying the effect in terms of duration and durability. If you have this depression of cortisol response from a one time set of exercise, how long does it take for that reduced response to fade? If you have one psychological stressor does that now reset your system and return you to the pre-exercise state?

I would also want to know about the levels for someone going from sedentary to low, mid, and high levels of activity. If you take someone from any of the 4 categories, sedentary, low, mid, and high activity, and then change their activity to one of the other levels what is the impact? For example if you change from a physical job to a less physical job do you have increased cortisol response to psychological stressors? What about parents as their kids move from requiring lifting and carrying to walking on their own? Could this be part of the terrible twos? What about people who have an injury and then become depressed?

Very interesting research, I will definitely be following it in future.

I would recommend learning about skepticism, but not the kind you will find in the USA to be honest, the USA skepticism community has some bad actors mixed in and it is hard to get the good without the bad.

Skeptics with a K is a podcast from the Merseyside Skeptics Society and they do great work. If you start there and listen through a little they will recommend other podcasts and websites and you can go from there.

The reason I suggest them as a starting point is their attitude. They are compassionate people who see the harms of woo and religion but really so embody kindness and connection over anger and hate. They also embrace the kind of skepticism where you maintain a focus on the tools but don’t get locked into extreme positions, exactly what you are talking about. They practice not running to the extremes, but not by saying things like “both sides are the same”. They have convictions, but they are slow to build and carefully constructed. If you copied their mental processes you would be in a fairly good starting position.

To be clear, people do this all the time with medications for suicidal ideation and depression. Those drugs are less effective at preventing suicide than gender affirming care in trans people. If we want to talk about the harms of a medical intervention we always need to keep the harms of the alternative in mind.

I take Warfarin and could therefore have a major bleed where I just don’t stop bleeding. I take it because if I didn’t I would have clotting which would lead to really bad outcomes like a stroke. The stroke is more likely without warfarin than the bleed is with the warfarin, so that is an overall lower risk.

In the same way, if you look at trans kids who are hitting puberty they have two paths, gender affirming care or not. The not path has lots of extra harms, including but not limited to suicide, self harm, depression, anxiety, and so on. The gender affirming care side has bone density issues during the period of puberty blockers, difficulties with accessing medical care, and much much lower rates of the harms available in the not path. The balance is clear, the experts agree, only a vanishingly small minority of politically and financially motivated people push the other way. The parallels to the climate change “debate” are clear. This is not reasonable and rational disagreement, this is ideological and not science based.

I will keep taking my warfarin and I hope the kids impacted by this keep taking their puberty blockers as long as that is beneficial for them.

Nah, it is all transparent for me. I don’t decide to run something with the dedicated graphics, it just runs as needed it seems. Maybe I have it misconfigured and it is using the dedicated graphics all the time, I’m not sure, but it works fairly well given the hardware it has.

I did the same with the Athom bulbs, they were easy to get connected to Home Assistant and the firmware is easy to manage.

Unfortunately they are not so easy for managing PWM sensitivity. They have a fairly high level of flicker and for some people, such as my partner, it can be quite bad on the eyes.

Apparently you can modify the PWM frequency to something much higher and fix the problem, but I have not been able to figure it out yet.

Yeah, they seem to be fairly good at bringing together lots of different sources of information and putting it together. They don’t seem to deal with differences between how things were done and how they are done now, so it can give you bad advice sometimes, but at the same time it can be useful for getting started and figuring out what to try.

A failed starter motor on the feeling engine? You try to start up a feeling and nothing happens. No joy, no excitement, and not even real sadness, just a numb feeling of nothingness.

True, but when my $1400 Mazda 2 Neo hatchback is sailing past a broken down $140000 off road beast I do admit to a little chuckle. I’ve taken my mini beast down some clearly stupid paths and it has yet to let me down. I’ve also never crashed into a roo or gotten myself stuck in a way I couldn’t fix because it is only 1300kg tare weight so I can literally push the car out of a ditch if needed and I couldn’t possibly do that with one of the urban tanks.

If you want a real mind bender consider intersex people. They are also a minority, smaller than trans as a group, but also have a lot of discrimination and ambiguity from the binary view of sex and gender. Some intersex people have indeterminate genitals, others have mixed features, and some rare few have something close to both sets of organs. They may have a gender which aligns with one or the other general gender presentations, they also may not. It is really a full range of possible outcomes.

They also have some major historical, and current, bigotry around how they are seen and interacted with. Many people with indeterminate genitals are operated on by surgeons based in the surgeons best guess for the sex of the child, not based even on genetic details like karyotype, XX or XY. Sometimes the parents are told that their child had a small abnormality and it needed medical correction, but this is just to make the child fit typical sex norms, not for medical necessity. The surgeries can be very harmful to the child and may lead to difficulties later in life, especially around puberty, where they end up having been “corrected” to a sex which does not align with their gender identity.

Past all the horror, what is the sexual preference of someone who dates an intersex person? This is where externally applied and rigid categories fail. If a cis man is interested in an intersex person who has male genitalia but presents and identifies as female is this straight attraction? The woman here is clearly a woman in all ways bar genitals, so a casual or even in depth check without going under clothes will not identify any difference from female. The woman identifies as a woman, the man sees her as a woman, and she behaves as a woman in all ways bar sex and toileting. Straight doesn’t really have to exclude this relationship, but also it may be a bad rigid category, it may be better to say the man is on the straight end and likes fem people. It also may be best to not look for a single word or term and just describe things, saying this guy likes fem people but isn’t repulsed by typically male genitals.

I think the language here is hard because we are trying to fit messy reality into boxes. Fascism relies on this simple categorisation of people to form boxes for control and regulation of people. We don’t actually have to do this. We can just describe the world we find and use labels loosely to act as a shorthand, not a prescription. Someone could be described based on their behaviours but not have that result in a demand for consistency. As you say, no need to yuck someone else’s yum, but I think also no need to define their yum into a tiny box because it is convenient, let them yum without labels and allow yourself the same.

No worries, have a good one!

Every time I see this I feel so sad. IRC was definitely not perfect, the security was crap and the user experience was awkward, but it was possible to have a fully open source self hosted stack. Discord is not a viable alternative in my mind.

Element/Matrix is a bit dodgy to me, with a lot of questionable stuff around original funding and development not to mention the amount of clearly illegal and immoral stuff on it, but at least you can run your own server in theory. I don’t know what the solution is, but it needs to have a lot of people on it to work so it needs to be easy and quick to get set up on, and ideally without the kind of verification stuff discord has.

Boom!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F0vjbdWdnaI

Exactly what you wanted for Google Nest devices, a simple drop in replacement PCB. Very cool!

My view on this is that in all news there is editorial. If you choose not to report on the latest goings on in Ghana you are changing what information will get to your readers. Reporting is inherently done with a perspective, even if it is only in the sense of choosing what to report on.

The key issue for climate change is that things are changing due to human activity. There are lots of ancillary issues, for example how exactly things are changing or who is responsible for causing the situation. These are all valid parts of the overall story of climate change and each one adds to the knowledge of your readers. Adding another story of a bushfire does provide more context to your readers, but at some point diminishing returns starts to rear its ugly head.

If you only focus on the harms and never talk about solutions you are in fact biasing the information given to your readers. Recognising that you have not been providing a full context for your readers and then changing your reporting practises to fix that seems like good journalism to me.

We should absolutely be talking about the harms of climate change. This information is vital to actually making changes in who we vote for and what policies we support. But if we have no information about solutions we can’t make informed decisions about whether a new technology is viable or vapourware, or whether a financial mechanism is useful or extractive. We need good information covering the causes and solutions so we can make good choices.

Yeah, the Google tie in has made Matter a non-option for me too. I have ZigBee and WiFi devices, but nothing Matter for this very reason.