tal

Ah, thanks! Well, that’s one lone ray of light.

I’m still grouchy about a sandwich place that I liked that recently changed ownership putting in kiosks that apparently do facial recognition, as once I walked up, they suggested items that I’d purchased last time. That started me looking, and I’ve been noticing that a lot of the ordering kiosks that places have been installing around where I am have cameras (though none have been actively making suggestions). I can only imagine that that gets hooked into the tracking and advertising system at some point too, though.

Between increasing use of facial recognition and ALPRs, it’s going to be increasingly difficult to avoid targeted ads. I don’t have a fix for that. I mean, it’s illegal to block use of ALPRs. A lot of places also have anti-masking laws, though I suspect that in practice, they aren’t enforced much, and someone could theoretically put something on their face. I don’t especially want to run around wearing stuff on my face, though.

kagis

It sounds like that was a joke from some years back.

https://www.thesixthaxis.com/2018/06/11/skyrim-special-edition-announced-for-samsung-smart-refrigerators/

Skyrim: Special Edition Announced For Samsung Smart Refrigerators And Alexa

If that headline has confused you then let’s be very clear, this is a joke by Bethesda…

They do have a screen and Internet connectivity, but I don’t think that ATMs are actually a great route (unless they force people to stop and wait to get their money, which I don’t think will fly and will cut into capacity). There isn’t much eyeball time on them. The reason a car or a refrigerator works is because you’re likely to be around it a lot.

I will say that the rise of gas pumps at gas stations that play back advertisements is pretty obnoxious, though.

To enhance our service and offer additional content to our users, advertisements will be displayed on the Cover Screen for the Weather, Color, and Daily Board themes.

I really hope that Steam games don’t head down this path over time. Internet-connected refrigerators I’m willing to avoid, but that’s not the only vector for this sort of thing.

EDIT: And as has been pointed out on here before, some Internet-connected cars are starting to have updates to show ads on their UIs pushed out. Any time you’ve already spent the money and are kind of locked in and the manufacturer has Internet connectivity to the device and can update the thing subsequent to purchase, you’re kind of in a bad position regarding leverage.

I’d be pretty comfortable saying that buying enough battery storage to power-shift a year of power is more expensive.

What I want to do is find out what the maximum size battery I would need in order to store all of summer’s electricity for use in winter.

I mean, I think that it’s probably not a good idea for this guy to try to go fully off-grid if he has access to the grid, but for the sake of discussion, if one were honestly wanting to try it and one is in the UK, I’d think that one is probably rather better off adding a wind turbine, since some of the time that the sun isn’t shining, the wind is blowing.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/322789/quarterly-wind-speed-average-in-the-united-kingdom-uk/

Wind speed averages in the United Kingdom are generally highest in the first and fourth quarters of each calendar year – the winter months.

The UK is one of the worst places in the world in terms of solar potential:

https://globalsolaratlas.info/

But it’s one of the best in terms of wind potential:

https://globalwindatlas.info/

After all, enterprise clients soon realized that the output of most AI systems was too unreliable and too frequently incorrect to be counted on for jobs that demand accuracy. But creative work was another story.

I think that the current crop of systems is often good enough for a header illustration in a journal or something, but there are also a lot of things that it just can’t reasonably do well. Maintaining character cohesion across multiple images, for example, and different perspectives — try doing a graphic novel with diffusion models trained on 2D images, and it just doesn’t work. The whole system would need to have a 3D model of the world, be able to do computer vision to get from 2D images to 3D, and have a knowledge of 3D stuff rather than 2D stuff. That’s something that humans, with a much deeper understanding of the world, find far easier.

Diffusion models have their own strong points where they’re a lot better than humans, like easily mimicking a artist’s style. I expect that as people bang away on things, it’ll become increasingly-visible what the low-hanging fruit is, and what is far harder.

Slate Star Codex has an article from back when, “I Can Tolerate Anything But the Outgroup”.

It’s talking about a variety of things, but one point at the core of it, a point that I think is pretty interesting, is that people tend to have social groups that are extraordinarily politically-clustered and highly non-representative of their countries as a whole…and often don’t realize it.

There are certain theories of dark matter where it barely interacts with the regular world at all, such that we could have a dark matter planet exactly co-incident with Earth and never know. Maybe dark matter people are walking all around us and through us, maybe my house is in the Times Square of a great dark matter city, maybe a few meters away from me a dark matter blogger is writing on his dark matter computer about how weird it would be if there was a light matter person he couldn’t see right next to him.

This is sort of how I feel about conservatives.

I don’t mean the sort of light-matter conservatives who go around complaining about Big Government and occasionally voting for Romney. I see those guys all the time. What I mean is – well, take creationists. According to Gallup polls, about 46% of Americans are creationists. Not just in the sense of believing God helped guide evolution. I mean they think evolution is a vile atheist lie and God created humans exactly as they exist right now. That’s half the country.

And I don’t have a single one of those people in my social circle. It’s not because I’m deliberately avoiding them; I’m pretty live-and-let-live politically, I wouldn’t ostracize someone just for some weird beliefs. And yet, even though I probably know about a hundred fifty people, I am pretty confident that not one of them is creationist. Odds of this happening by chance? 1/2^150 = 1/10^45 = approximately the chance of picking a particular atom if you are randomly selecting among all the atoms on Earth.

About forty percent of Americans want to ban gay marriage. I think if I really stretch it, maybe ten of my top hundred fifty friends might fall into this group. This is less astronomically unlikely; the odds are a mere one to one hundred quintillion against.

People like to talk about social bubbles, but that doesn’t even begin to cover one hundred quintillion. The only metaphor that seems really appropriate is the bizarre dark matter world.

I live in a Republican congressional district in a state with a Republican governor. The conservatives are definitely out there. They drive on the same roads as I do, live in the same neighborhoods. But they might as well be made of dark matter. I never meet them.

To be fair, I spend a lot of my time inside on my computer. I’m browsing sites like Reddit.

Recently, there was a thread on Reddit asking – Redditors Against Gay Marriage, What Is Your Best Supporting Argument? A Reddit user who didn’t understand how anybody could be against gay marriage honestly wanted to know how other people who were against it justified their position. He figured he might as well ask one of the largest sites on the Internet, with an estimated user base in the tens of millions.

It soon became clear that nobody there was actually against gay marriage.

There were a bunch of posts saying “I of course support gay marriage but here are some reasons some other people might be against it,” a bunch of others saying “my argument against gay marriage is the government shouldn’t be involved in the marriage business at all”, and several more saying “why would you even ask this question, there’s no possible good argument and you’re wasting your time”. About halfway through the thread someone started saying homosexuality was unnatural and I thought they were going to be the first one to actually answer the question, but at the end they added “But it’s not my place to decide what is or isn’t natural, I’m still pro-gay marriage.”

In a thread with 10,401 comments, a thread specifically asking for people against gay marriage, I was eventually able to find two people who came out and opposed it, way near the bottom. Their posts started with “I know I’m going to be downvoted to hell for this…”

But I’m not only on Reddit. I also hang out on LW.

On last year’s survey, I found that of American LWers who identify with one of the two major political parties, 80% are Democrat and 20% Republican, which actually sounds pretty balanced compared to some of these other examples.

But it doesn’t last. Pretty much all of those “Republicans” are libertarians who consider the GOP the lesser of two evils. When allowed to choose “libertarian” as an alternative, only 4% of visitors continued to identify as conservative. But that’s still…some. Right?

When I broke the numbers down further, 3 percentage points of those are neoreactionaries, a bizarre sect that wants to be ruled by a king. Only one percent of LWers were normal everyday God-‘n-guns-but-not-George-III conservatives of the type that seem to make up about half of the United States.

It gets worse. My formative years were spent at a university which, if it was similar to other elite universities, had a faculty and a student body that skewed about 90-10 liberal to conservative – and we can bet that, like LW, even those few token conservatives are Mitt Romney types rather than God-n’-guns types. I get my news from vox.com, an Official Liberal Approved Site. Even when I go out to eat, it turns out my favorite restaurant, California Pizza Kitchen, is the most liberal restaurant in the United States.

I inhabit the same geographical area as scores and scores of conservatives. But without meaning to, I have created an outrageously strong bubble, a 10^45 bubble. Conservatives are all around me, yet I am about as likely to have a serious encounter with one as I am a Tibetan lama.

(Less likely, actually. One time a Tibetan lama came to my college and gave a really nice presentation, but if a conservative tried that, people would protest and it would be canceled.)

For me, the “holy shit, I live in a bubble” moment was the first time I started looking up polls on ghosts. Like, if you asked me what percentage of Americans believed in ghosts, I’d have probably guessed…I don’t know, somewhere south of one percent, maybe? I mean, just extrapolating from my social circle and my own experiences. Sure, if we were talking medieval times, people maybe believed in ghosts and witches and stuff, but in 2025? Nah. We know, more-or-less, how the universe works now, and the supernatural is just something fun to joke around about, right?

But that’s not what polling finds at all. Depending upon how you ask the question in your poll, you’ll get different levels, but it’s a lot, north of a third of society.

https://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/4400922-americans-ghosts-aliens-devil-survey/

Nearly half of U.S. adults, 48%, believe in psychic or spiritual healing. Slightly fewer, 39%, express a belief in ghosts, while between 24% and 29% say they believe in six other supernatural phenomena, including telepathy, communication with the dead, clairvoyance, astrology, reincarnation and witches.

Note that if you like DNS-over-HTTP, on Linux, systemd-resolved has support for it and can be set up to do it for systemwide resolution, rather than just having one’s Web browser do it for Web browsing.

kagis

Some people setting it up:

https://askubuntu.com/questions/1092498/dns-over-tls-with-systemd-resolved

looks at MEGA hat in image

I distinctly remember, back with early Trump, when the MAGA thing was being done, joking about how people could do it in Europe and call it MEGA. I did not expect it to actually happen.

Well…

From an evolutionary standpoint, we’re basically the same collection of mostly-hairless primates that, 20,000 years ago, hadn’t yet figured out agriculture and were roaming the land in small groups of maybe 100 or so at most, living off it as best we could.

From that standpoint, I think that we’ve done pretty well with a brain that evolved to deal with a rather different environment and is having to navigate a terribly-confusing, rather different situation.

I mean, you see any other critters that have been outperforming us on improving their understanding of the world?

At least some of this is due to the fact that we have really appallingly-bad authentication methods in a lot of places.

• The guy was called via phone. Phones display Caller ID information. This cannot be trusted; there are ways to spoof it, like via VoIP systems. I suspect that the typical person out there — understandably — does not expect this to be the case.

• The fallback, at least for people who you personally know, has been to see whether you recognize someone’s voice. But we’ve got substantially-improving voice cloning these days, and now that’s getting used. And now we’ve got video cloning to worry about too.

• The guy got a spoofed email. Email was not designed to be trusted. I’m not sure how many people random people out there are aware of that. He probably was — he was complaining that Google didn’t avoid spoofing of internal email addresses, which might be a good idea, but certainly is not something that I would simply expect and rest everything else on. You can use X.509-based authentication (but that’s not normally deployed outside organizations) or PGP (which is not used much). I don’t believe that any of the institutions that communicate with me do so.

• Using something like Google’s SSO stuff to authenticate to everything might be one way to help avoid having people use the same password all over, but has its own problems, as this illustrates.

• Ditto for browser-based keychains. Kind of a target when someone does break into a computer.

• Credentials stored on personal computers — GPG keys, SSH keys, email account passwords used by email clients, etc — are also kind of obvious targets.

• Phone numbers are often used as a fallback way to validate someone’s identity. But there are attacks against that.

• Email accounts are often used as an “ultimate back door” to everything, for password resets. But often, these aren’t all that well-secured.

The fact that there isn’t a single “do this and everything is fine” simple best practice that can be handed out to Average Joe today is kind of disappointing.

There isn’t even any kind of broad agreement on how to do 2FA. Service 1 maybe uses email. Service 2 only uses SMSes. Service 3 can use SMSes or voice. Service 4 requires their Android app to be run on a phone. Service 5 uses RFC 6238 time-based one-time-passwords. Service 6 — e.g. Steam — has their own roll-their-own one-time-password system. Service 7 supports YubiKeys.

We should be better than this.

should have been a red flag for someone who literally works in an authentication role.

Maybe. But the point he was making is that the typical person out there is probably at least as vulnerable to falling prey to a scam like that, and that that’s an issue, and that sounds plausible to me. I mean, we can’t have everyone in society (a) be a security expert or (b) get scammed.

The first comment in response is probably the most important bit:

In addition: trust no inbound communications. If something is in fact urgent, it can be confirmed by reaching out, rather than accepting an inbound call, to a number publicly listed and well known as representative of the company.

I’m not sure if it’s what was used here, but a lot of areas have some kind of generic “nuisance” law, which basically serves as a general purpose “someone is doing something obnoxious that affects us and we want to provide law enforcement with a way to make them stop” tool.

kagis

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuisance

Under the common law, persons in possession of real property (land owners, lease holders etc.) are entitled to the quiet enjoyment of their lands. However this doesn’t include visitors or those who aren’t considered to have an interest in the land. If a neighbour interferes with that quiet enjoyment, either by creating smells, sounds, pollution or any other hazard that extends past the boundaries of the property, the affected party may make a claim in nuisance.

Legally, the term nuisance is traditionally used in three ways:

• to describe an activity or condition that is harmful or annoying to others (e.g., indecent conduct, a rubbish heap or a smoking chimney)
• to describe the harm caused by the before-mentioned activity or condition (e.g., loud noises or objectionable odors)
• to describe a legal liability that arises from the combination of the two.[2] However, the “interference” was not the result of a neighbor stealing land or trespassing on the land. Instead, it arose from activities taking place on another person’s land that affected the enjoyment of that land.[3]

The law of nuisance was created to stop such bothersome activities or conduct when they unreasonably interfered either with the rights of other private landowners (i.e., private nuisance) or with the rights of the general public (i.e., public nuisance)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuisance_in_English_law#Public_nuisance

EDIT: Okay, found a news article that mentions what they’re being investigated for:

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/four-arrested-uk-projecting-photos-trump-epstein-windsor-castle-rcna231804

Thames Valley Police said in a statement Tuesday night that they arrested four adults “on suspicion of malicious communications following a public stunt in Windsor.” The police added they will conduct an investigation into the incident, and that all four people arrested remain in custody.

Probably this law, though it doesn’t sound to me, on the face of it, like it’d qualify:

Malicious Communications Act 1988

It addresses communications “in electronic form”, but I don’t think that in the everyday sense of the word, a projection would count.

EDIT2: I also wouldn’t be terribly surprised if they don’t wind up with this actually going anywhere, and just wanted some sort of legal rationale to make them stop it for the moment.

I recall reading that one application of sentiment analysis in voice recognition — like, determining what a speaker’s mood is — is that if someone gets upset on a call talking to a computer, the system will route them to a human.

Altman said in a statement accompanying the announcement, adding that the company is “building an age-prediction system to estimate age based on how people use ChatGPT.”

I suppose our theoretical teenager could get an account on, say, Grok and ask it to rephrase all of his prompts as if they were written by a 30-year-old and then send the output of that to ChatGPT. Let the models fight it out based on their profiles of what constitutes an adult.

I’m sure that you could use MetaPost to procedurally generate a frame, then merge them into an animation.

A newer, similar language is Asymptote, and it looks like it has animation support.

I’d guess that the argument on natural gas is one of the following:

It’s replacing coal and coal emits more carbon

The problem is that coal-based power is rapidly declining, at least in the West, and it’s not a huge chunk of the generation mix anymore.

https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/interactive-publications/energy-2025

In 2023, the energy mix in the EU, meaning the range of energy sources available, mainly consisted of 5 different sources:

• crude oil and petroleum products (37.7%)
• natural gas (20.4%)
• renewable energy (19.5%)
• solid fuels (10.6%)
• nuclear (11.8%).

Oil is a pretty expensive way to generate power. I doubt that wood pellet power plants are very common. So if you want to reduce fossil-fuel-based generation past that, you probably do have to look at reducing natural gas.

We can use it in conjunction with intermittent renewables at lower levels to avoid expensive energy storage

Solar and wind aren’t always available when someone wants to use them; they’re intermittent. You have to fill in those gaps somehow. But energy storage is expensive and for pumped hydrostorage, the most-currently-economical form, somewhat geographically-limited. So the idea is that one uses natural gas instead of storing energy from a less-carbon-intensive source to fill in those gaps…but at least you’re using less natural gas than one would if one weren’t using renewable resources and just using natural gas all the time.

Also, one more tidbit:

Austria had sued the European Commission, the bloc’s executive, over the inclusion of gas and nuclear in the EU’s classification system for environmentally sustainable economic activities.

My guess is that Austria’s probably unhappy because Austria uses a ton of hydropower, is very mountainous and has favorable geography for hydropower, so they’d prefer to have hydropower favored.

kagis

https://lowcarbonpower.org/region/Austria

This has hydropower in Austria being 56.2% of Austria’s electricity generation.