Not to rub salt in the wound, but the GPS signals are hitting the car’s GPS antenna unless you’ve disconnected that wire, pulled the fuse to the receiver, or only drive inside hardened RF shielded bunkers. When I was futzing with a little GPS breadboard module the time is what I looked for first, because if you’ve got that time signal from GPS then you know the thing is working. (PEDANTIC EDIT: The signals will hit the antenna if you’re outside unless you’ve shielded them somehow, even if you disconnect the wire.)

You could use GPS signals to synchronize clocks across the entire planet to within a microsecond while your car could be used to prop a stick up to make a sundial.

I’m going to wager there’s something else going on there. If you have a working GPS receiver, a working display (you said you did), a working “clock” that counts seconds and can give something time-like to the display to show (seems like you do), then a switch might be flipped in software and you have a data point about why GNU does what they do.

Debian.

This is the future so Virtual Machines and containers are where most of the stuff will end up anyway. If you need a specific distro it’s minutes away with a VM or container.

If you think there’s a chance you might want some Redhat cert for a job at some point it might be the time to jump to Rocky, and I’ve never used Proxmox so I can’t comment except to say that if I come into two fairly large computers for self hosting, the first one will get Rocky so I can get much more familiar with it, and the second will get Proxmox.

It’s all systemd anyway.

used as a tool by the actual engineers of the coup

Kayfabe.

A person who’s bad at chess plays the game thinking that the opponent will step into traps that have been laid out for them. They don’t think about the opponent being smarter, more experienced, having a will of their own, or looking out for themselves. That person would be great in a wrasslin’ match, because now it’s time for the opponent to run into a clothesline or whatever.

Back in the real world actions have reactions: “no nation has friends only interests.” Make NATO uncertain that the US will show up if needed, and threaten to pull support for weapons? That looks great in the wrasslin’ match. Big strong man yelling at a TV camera impresses people who tuned into watch wanting to be impressed. In the real world it will take generations for the US to build back the trust it had if it can. Anyone wanting to make moves on a global scale will do so before that situation reaches a steady state.

The only thing that could make it worse in the real world for the US is if it started an unnecessary war for no reason and expended a huge amount of hard to replace munitions in a very short time while simultaneously giving an adversary a lot of looks at what modern US equipment looks like. It plays great inside the wrasslin’ match, though.

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundations_of_Geopolitics

I kind of think of that as the happy path, and I’m curious if there’ve been any signs of the LLM being shifty with what it says it knows.

A zero day, at least in the olden days, was a weapon that nobody knew existed; however, once it’s used and has had time to be analyzed it would get patched, so there was a window where you used it for something worthwhile if you were up to something nefarious, or responsibly reported it otherwise.

So, it either discovered it on the fly and used it instantly meaning it has great skill at analyzing software and no strategic planning that places an opportunity cost on a hack now versus a future one, or the OpenAI guys had one sitting ready to go that they trained the model with, or (to me least likely) it had it sitting somewhere in its weights and was waiting on a chance to use it.

The last one is the one that worries me most. It doesn’t look like the world was really ready for how fast new bugs can be discovered by the LLMs, and I really don’t think the world is ready for an LLM that performs worse now because of a strategic reason later.

the models identified and exploited a zero-day vulnerability (which we’ve now responsibly disclosed to the vendor)

Was OpenAI sitting on the zero day, or did the model figure it out during its escapades? Can the model sit on a zero day on its own now?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Nashville_school_shooting

gas system

Technical arguments aren’t going to work, I don’t think. It’s similar to how an old style machine gun with no select fire and an open bolt is easy to make; the trigger just gets out of the way and the guns stops Not Firing. Then the world gets select fire which adds complexity, gets better mechanisms which add performance at the cost of complexity, so on and so forth.

I know I’m speaking to the choir here, but it’s like with Glock and their latest gen models. They tried to address the wish.com switches that were readily available, and they changed the slide somehow so the old switches wouldn’t work. New switches were out within days. Ignoring how additional complexity typically comes at a (small if they’re doing it right) reliability cost, there isn’t a level of complexity you can add to a standalone firearm that’ll make it unusable using technology alone.

So, we use legal means and wind up with a damned patchwork of laws. Some stuff is legal in some states and illegal in others, some states are “stand your ground” and others are “duty to retreat,” and it’s all subject to interpretation. They’ve already changed the forms so that the sex field is specifically the one assigned at birth, and red flag laws can be turned against whoever isn’t in power in a locality. Safe storage laws can’t be enforced without home inspection and are a tax on the poor, depending on interpretation. If pennies matter to someone they won’t be able to afford a safe with X amount of weight and possible structural improvements to support the weight if you’re on a crawl space. Apartments won’t be possible at all.

To the uninitiated the 3D printing stuff looks like magic when it’s really not as hard as it seems. Likewise firearms aren’t as complicated as some people seem to think. How legislation targeting either of the groups of people continually gets written and pushed people people who clearly don’t know anything about it is a failure of the ballot box and can be fixed there.

The other thing that seems to get lost on folks pushing gun bans are that a lot of the developments for making them lighter and easier to use have opened doors for people who’d have a harder time using a heavier firearm with large recoil.

I’ve seen a few news stories through the years where I thought the stock movement was out of whack with the underlying security, and options are a way to “bet” on that being right. It’s cheap and easy to just watch. Almost every time I was wrong and only found out a few times why. That probably just means I’m bad at it.

A few more things to remember. If you look at the first link at the bottom of my post, there are ways to structure buying/selling the calls/puts so that you can have a strategy that pays off if the stock goes up, down, or stays the same. How to set those up and the math involved is beyond me. The other thing is that for every trade with options someone makes there’s an entity on the other side of it. You might be buying a part of the leg of someone else’s more complex trade where a big investment house is trying to manage their risk and keep it below a certain level.

https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/19/business/robinhood-suicide-alex-kearns/

Stay smart and safe, invest money you can afford to lose in products you understand.

Shorting a stock is a bad plan. You typically need collateral (cash, or a line of credit, or something) in case the short goes bad. Shorting a stock can have a theoretically infinite loss since if you buy a share of a company and it goes bankrupt, your maximum loss is the value of the share. Short selling means you’ve sold a share you don’t own with a pinky swear that you’ll buy one back to replace it. A stock likely won’t, but could, go infinitely high. In that case you’d have infinite losses.

The other way is options trading. You can do this with your normal broker, possibly. You’ll need to make statements about your income level, savings, risk tolerance, and check a box saying you’ve read some mandated documentation. The process can seem like click-through stuff for a normal website, but it’s absolving the brokerage of fault if your decisions go bad.

Options work a little like an insurance contract. If you are worried that you’re too heavily tilted towards a certain company (but still believe in the investment), you can buy “puts” that help mitigate the risk if the underlying security. A “call” is a contract that lets you hedge the other way. They let you get exposure to a security without having to purchase the shares. An options contract is a contract that gives you the right, but not the obligation to buy (call) or sell (put) some number (typically 100) of an underlying security by a certain date. Selling options naked is a topic better left for someone else to explain all the risks involved (and I covered a strategy that has infinite risk).

A call pays off if the stock shoots up before the contract expires, and a put pays off if the stock tanks. To do what you’re saying you’d have to buy puts (I’m not an investment advisor, I’m not your investment advisor, this is not investment advice). If it sounds like gambling that’s because it is. Everybody already had the idea to bet against SPCX. There are platforms out there that let you look and see without having to risk money, and that’s probably the best course of action.

• https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/SPCX/options/?date=1789689600&straddle=true

I picked the date September 18, 2026 at random. If you had a September 18 130P, then it went up 21.19% Friday, kudos. The “last price” field is PER SHARE, and the contract was probably for 100 shares, so that’s $2030, meaning you had four figures on the line there. If none of that makes sense, if the activity in the volume field doesn’t make sense, then it’s better to sit it out. In that realm you’re swapping your money for that contract, and someone else is swapping that contract for your (now their) money. If the contract expires out of the money, you lose.

Some resources:

• https://optionalpha.com/options-strategies
• https://archive.org/details/optionsasstrateg0000mcmi
• https://moneybliss.org/recover-from-financial-disaster/

That being said, I will grant that there’s no evidence of this.

The question about whether the feds are on lemmy is falsifiable. There just needs to be enough people in congress willing to make that a primary issue to overrule whatever security laws/apparatus are in place and publish the info. There’s even recent precedent of one guy doing just that. Waiting until there’s complete evidence won’t move the ball forward at all. Even having a bad discussion has a random chance of moving the ball forward (subject to time constraints).

Not Suspicious on the Internet:

• Being Wrong
• Poor spelling or Grammar
• Asking questions, even if they’re dumb

Suspicious on the Internet:

• Calls to extreme violence in a discussion where everyone was generally chill
• Calls to not discuss a topic until there’s evidence to discuss
• • Drawing parallels between documented historical events and current events don’t count
• Suggesting a course of action that’s either prohibitively expensive or time consuming as the only path forward

When reached for comment the family said, “how could this happen to us? We’re not even trans?”

Have the day you voted for, know that you won’t be the last people in rural areas that this happens to, and that when the AI bubble pops you still won’t get the land back. It’s gone forever.

They typically condemn the land before using eminent domain.

The adult entertainers are the VC investors. They’re pretty world-wise, but can’t be well versed on everything. So when someone sells them on something that sounds pretty good, they bite. The CEOs are the bros laughing about how great everything is, except in real life they don’t have consequences. All the CEOs get paid like it might be their last job so if they never work again they’re still fine.

It’s still impressive to see what the LLMs cook up when asked about programming problems. I’m coming back to programming from some time away from it, and it’ll give you the answer to the question you asked. If you ask it for an old way of doing something, it’ll tell you that. Then it slips and shows you a new way of doing something (I’m specifically talking about std::cout versus std::format and std::print), and the doors are wide open all of a sudden.

Then it gives you a technique for something and you spend hours debugging code only for the LLM to say that the solution it provided won’t work.

Prompt engineering is going to be a real thing whether we like it or not.

I know :-)

Here’s hoping for more red today.

The market is full of things like raspberry PIs (too expensive to start up right now), arduinos, ESP32, and so on. Python only gets easier to learn. Are these things truly not in use anywhere, or are the successes not being reported on?

I guess I read here about a case where a company was blowing through LLM tokens because people were using them to convert PDFs, so maybe it’s just not sticking.

Replying to myself to put up a link to the jenga tower scene of The Big Short in case nobody has seen it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xbiDrzTd8fE

It’s there in the S&P 500 between MSFT and PLTR on the left kind of in the middle (size of the box is the market cap of the company). It’s in practically every 401(k) in the US. BBB is somewhere in the middle of the jenga tower.

Ah, sorry.

D-Bus has a similar mechanism to the one that got this hacker arrested. I guess I was expanding upon the previous conversation about how much stuff is considered inside the inner security circle for d-bus.

You shouldn’t forget about selective enforcement.