When I was in high school I brought in a copy of The Hacker's Dictionary to show a friend. A teacher saw it.
A few weeks later there was a hacking incident! The shared spreadsheet of every pupil's grades that every teacher had full access to was modified, boosting the grades of some students (including me) and lowering the grades of others (including people I didn't get on with). I was immediately sent home during the investigation. Nothing came of it in the end.
Years later my friend revealed the advanced technique of finding his music teacher's password (bassoon) on a post-it note under their keyboard.
I started studying IT back in ‘99 and got a strict warning from the school my first year, because I had used the schools network to access the internet from my own laptop. I had “gained access” by plugging an ethernet cable into a random socket in the wall, and was doing some homework, when radom employee walked by. Since there wasn’t any rules (yet), that allowed nor disallowed it, I got of with only a warning ... from a school, that teaches IT :|
We had a single wireless AP (really, a WRT54G) chilling in the high school library in my last couple years. I may or may not have factory defaulted it a few times to hop on an open linksys SSID...
... they only seemed to put a sign on it to say 'stop defaulting it' yet did zero oversight, so I'd just keep on walking over to the printer next to it, reset it, and keep on trucking.
Getting a CR48 from the Google Chromebook pilot program was my next trick to defeat their WRT shenanigans - that 200mb of free 3G every month actually went a long way back then in the halls, and a McJob paid for the rest of the wireless freedom ;)
When I was in middle school I used to download keygens and cracks for programs from the school computer and take them with me home on a floppy disk because I didn’t have internet at home.
One of the websites I downloaded keygens and cracks from was called TheBugs.WS. Another pupil saw that I was downloading keygens and stuff and tried to rat me out to one of the teachers saying like “hey look at his screen, he can’t use the computer for that”.
The teacher had a brief glance at my monitor and read the title of the page TheBugs.WS and just said “nothing wrong about learning about insects” and then just walked away lololol. To this day I still don’t know if the teacher genuinely though the page was about insects just from the title, or if she just didn’t care as long as the briefest of glances at my screen didn’t show anything that seemed really out of place.
Either which way, my situation was kind of the exact opposite of yours. And the inconspicuous name of the site was enough that I didn’t get in trouble even though I could have if a teacher looked closely.
i earned myself a notice in the local newspaper in 8th grade for hacking the public library. what i did: on the PC terminal right click, show source, edit the HTML to leave a "i was here" note, click save :)
I remember trying to argue with the IT folks at school because hackaday.com was blocked for "hacking"... damn, guess all those fun electronics projects people were doing is Super Evil And Only For Criminals.
True story: my house (in Australia) was raided by the police in 2022. 8 months later when they said I could collect all the gear they seized the officer in charge told me that the following are things they consider to be suspicious:
1. Use of MEGA (it's apparently used to share CSAM)
2. Use of virtual machines
3. "Having Tor on my computer" (I had to put that in quotes because whilst it doesn't make sense, that's what they said).
They're fucking clueless, don't underestimate how little they understand. An explanation of how something is harmless likely sounds to them like an admission of guilt.
It was an eye opening experience. I (and many members of my extended family) have very much less respect for the competence of law enforcement as a direct result of this experience.
Everyone should encrypt their hard drive. At all times. Even if your country has password disclosure it forces them to get a warrant from a judge for your password and the worst case is the same as the best case from not encrypting it.
MEGA is indeed used to share CSAM and pirate stuff. That is its primary use actually but it's one of those institutions that maintains plausible deniability. Remember it was started after MegaUpload was shut down for being obviously designed to reward copyright infringement - the new one isn't obviously designed for that
I only ever used MEGA a handful of times, and it was only for Android ROM downloads. The police commentary about MEGA was notable to me precisely because of how infrequently I'd used it despite their mention of it. They kinda tipped their hand with that. If they hadn't mentioned it, I wouldn't have known it was a red flag at all.
There's also a large chasm separating copyright infringing material and CSAM, and putting them together as "the primary use" as you did is, in my opinion, questionable agenda pushing.
I agree with your first paragraph, but your second one leaves me wondering about your motivations for commenting in the first place; MEGA and Kim Dotcom embarrassed US law enforcement for a long, long time.
I happen to think that KDC is a piece of shit. But it seems that would make him perfect tech-bro material, except that his copyright infringement wasn't seen as 'US preferential' at the time.
CSAM and pirated material are both illegal file sharing, exactly the same from a technical perspective like how file sharing software works. Of course Mega would like you to pay to use it for backups, but I don't think anyone actually does. Their E2EE is there for a reason - they don't want any information about what you're hosting.
Which is exactly the same as legal file sharing from a technical perspective.
Which is exactly the same as leading corporate secrets or international espionage or hosting a copy of The Satanic Verses, from a technical perspective.
It's also no different from hosting a blog or any other website from a technical perspective.
The title might be XYZ Hackathon but the word Hackathon isn't really meaningful outside of that scene, so if asked what it is, you'd say a computer programming conference or something like that. When I tell people about Revision, I don't say "demoparty", I say "computer art festival", because that's not subculture jargon.
If I was an end user of a working product (AI or not), I wouldn't care.
At work generating and fixing loads of slop is less rewarding work than doing old coding, troubleshooting, article writing, whatever. The internet is full of fake blogs full of fake information. Youtube is full of fake videos and people reading LLM scripts. It feels impossible to share or appreciate small projects because it's so much harder to tell if any effort or thought went into something at all now. My parents can't tell what's real on social media. I'm less sure in my career path because I might spend my time learning skills that become useless in 5 years. I have conversations on the internet or Jira where people respond with LLM output (half the time saying "Claude says..." half the time not.) Kids are cheating their way through school. I'm probably getting dumber by using it.
There's plenty of reasons to be "anti-AI". It's not just a tool that's making programming more convenient.
I asked an LLM (Gemini) about a calculated field in my taxes that was wrong but I couldn’t figure out why and every time it tried to tell me something like “It’s a common glitch for tax software to calculate like this.”
When I did figure out what was wrong and asked if that made sense, it told me I was absolutely right though.
I think people are lucky the IRS fired all their employees this day and age so this work isn’t getting checked as much.
You're being deprived of government services and a sustainable economy because the wealthy are allowed to game the system they've rigged for themselves. I wouldn't call that luck.
Gemini is a pretty bad choice for an LLM. Most people using it are doing so because Google bundled it for free with a couple things, not for its quality.
Serious question: to figure out the answer why did you not go to the IRS website for that field? This is how I ultimately answer any tax questions I have.
Once every single thing connected to the internet (iPhone + 10 years?). Tech products, software, video games, etc. were new and exciting ways to solve problems. Now every single thing is a way to monetize, steal your data, or lock you into a platform to do those things later.
To fill the gap left by all the sites being blocked, the company intends to offer access to a library of religious content, including AI-generated Bible videos.
Truly a serious and spiritual company. Maybe you can chat with AI Jesus instead of going to PornHub.
Since last year Amazon doesn’t let you download your books as files from the web anymore. You have to sync purchases to a (presumably supported) Kindle device. I have a jailbroken Kindle and was shocked at the added hoops to read a legally purchased book.
Obviously the solution is to stop supporting Amazon. Some authors unfortunately only sell ebooks there.
Yep. I moved off Kindle onto kobo several years ago. I would still buy books on Amazon if they were only available there, and used dedrm to move them to the kobo. That doesn't seem possible anymore, so I guess I just won't buy anything from Amazon now.
This could just be a skill or wrong use case thing, but do you only use spreadsheets for pure number-crunching? I've played terminal spreadsheets, mostly sc-im, but I often have some longform text field (like 'Notes') that becomes more fiddly to deal with than a GUI.
Visidata is the only terminal program I've found that handles large text fields in tabular data nicely the way you can drill down into a table row, then Ctrl+O to edit a field in your editor, but it's not a spreadsheet.
I have AI automation metrics that are tracked. We have automation that automates the AI usage whether you want it or not so our metrics are 100% for everyone. Presumably this makes the stock go up somehow.
I know this is nothing new, but it's insane that we need policies like "When talking to us you have to use human words, not copy pasted LLM output" and "You must understand the code you're committing."
When I was young, I used to think I'd be open minded to changing times and never be curmudgeonly, but I get into one "conversation" where someone responds with ChatGPT, and I am officially a curmudgeon.
Brazen usage of LLM output is a disrespect to the target audience to begin with. If I'm being expected to employ the mental capital needed to understand the context and content of your writings, I at the very least expect that you did the same when actually authoring it.
It also feels like using one of those cereal encoder wheels, to some degree. If someone sends me 10 paragraphs of output from chatGPT, and they only wrote a sentence to prompt it, then the output is really just a re-encoding of the information in the original prompt.
Quite literally - if they sent me the text of the prompt I could obtain the same output, so the output is just a more verbose way of stating the prompt.
I find it really disrespectful to talk to people through an LLM like that.
Generally speaking, a person can write a long rambling email without much effort. It takes some work to distill it down to keep the meaning without the verbosity.
If anything, AI should be used to take the long rambling email and send off the shorter distilled version.
I hope it becomes as accepted as it is to stick cameras in random people's faces: generally seen as rude, and bad actors who do it anyway are desperate and considered as such.
I am capable of copying and pasting shit into an LLM, do not give me its output and don't insult me by pretending the output is your own work.
The root of the issue is "ChatGPT people" are using artificial intelligence to replace... intelligence. Nobody, not even ChatGPT people, wants to actually read that drivel.
Alternatively, join my meetings on time. You click End Call, then Join. It takes 3 seconds.
You get Outlook reminders 15 minutes in advance. Webex/Teams notifications 5 minutes in advance. I’m sure you can make your watch vibrate or something.
People at my office join every meeting 5 minutes late because no one expects meetings to start on time anymore. So I guess we’re following this advice in all but the nominally scheduled time. Drives me nuts.
I'm absolutely baffled by colleague who somehow manage to be five minutes late to an online meeting while working from home. Because you're right, you get a reminder 10 - 15 minutes in advance, you just need to click the join meeting button, you're already at the computer. We have, for remote meetings, a five minute buffer at the start of every meeting, for people to "settle in" makes no sense, just start the meeting.
In general a lot of people just aren't being serious about meetings, which I guess is also why many hate them. So key indicators of a bad meeting is: runs more than 60 minutes, no meeting plan, documents or talking points provided in advance, more than five people (unless the meeting is more of a briefing).
> So key indicators of a bad meeting is: runs more than 60 minutes, no meeting plan, documents or talking points provided in advance, more than five people (unless the meeting is more of a briefing).
Seems about right, but wouldn't you agree that the majority of those meetings either could have been an email, or could have been handled in 20% of the time, if they had been planed?
Maybe, I think most people just don't give shit about any of this and for them wasting an hour feels "productive", like they've achieved something. After all, nobody can hear your beautiful voice over email.
TBH unless the meeting has a clear agenda and not just a vague title, I only join it when someone mention me. This allows me to be able to actually work and/or take breaks.
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