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Mikina

@ Mikina @programming.dev

Posts
16
Comments
1020
Joined
3 yr. ago

  • My girlfriend is an actual model, just fyi

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  • Aren't neural networks AI by definition, if we take the academic definition into account?

    I know that thermostat is an AI, because it reacts to a stimuli (current temperature) and makes an action (starts heating) basted on it's state. Which is the formal AI definition.

    Wait. That actually means transformers are not AI by definition. Hmm, I need to look into it some more.

    EDIT: I was confusing things, that's the definition of AI Agent. I'll go research the AI definition some more :D

  • Finally a month that's relevant to me

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  • You're right, I used a wrong word there. It wasn't science, more like public perception maybe? I'd consider lack of research as a part of science, though.

    I'm not sure what better word would fit there instead. I wouldn't say it's the fault of marketing, I'm giving them the benefit of the doubt that they thought it's actually healthier to use this kind of filter.

    The comparison that sparks to my mind are vapes. There's AFAIK lack of research that can tell us anything about long term issues, but a lot of people consider it as healthier. But in this case, common sense is also not correct - because it kind of makes sense that it probably isn't, and it's just marketing.

    But in the case of an asbestos filter, I can see why people (and common sense at the time) would asume that it helps.

    So, I guess common sense is the word that I should've used, because that's what was wrong at the time.

  • Finally a month that's relevant to me

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  • While I get where are you comming from, and I'm also not fan of smoking, isn't asbestos extremely worse?

    I remember my friend had a roof over his summer house that was using asbestos, and it was extreme problem. Like, you can't even take it down without investing heavily into protection, or hiring a company that specializes in it's diasposal, because it's just that much toxic to handle.

  • Finally a month that's relevant to me

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  • My favorite asbestos trivia, which I learned only recently, is that at the start of public realozing that smoking causes cancer, one company came up with the solution of "cigaretes with asbestos filters".

    It's kind of morbidly funny reminder how catastrophically wrong can current science be.

  • Look how much I'd need to purchase a fraction of their game time!

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  • True, but the point was mostly that in this case, it's extremely apparent that there were 0 QA checks before they released it or they simply don't care. As someone who worked in QA, I can imagine them missing a lot of bugs that are happening on Remix or the main game, because they could require some obscure combination of finished past quests and an account state that can be hard/impossible to properly test for all cases, while also having millions of players, so some may encounter it.

    But in the case of a major class campaign quest being impossible with 100% repro rate, because it needs items that are not even in the Remix, that's inexcusable. It's also easy to fix, and should be marked as critical because it's a progress blocker. The only conclusion is that they either didn't know about it, or just don't care becuase they know that the community will just suck it up. It shows extreme disrespect for the players. Hell, when Remix released, you couldn't even finish the first quest and if you tried re-logging, it didn't let you login. It was extremely broken to the point of being unplayable for the first two days.

    I've had similar experiences even in retail. Just getting through the main campaign of last patch required re-logging to unstuck a quest 4 times (which I specifically counted), not to mention the desyncs.

    I could understand something like this if it was a developer that doesn't have the resources, but Blizzard has and had in the past, but they decided to reduce quality just so they can increase their (already astronomical) profits.

  • An Unnecessary (But Cool) Processor

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  • This is cool!

    If anyone here wants to learn how to actually make your own CPU from scratch, I highly recommend playing Turing Complete. It's a puzzle game that's basically a step-by-step tutorial where you start with basic AND gates and slowly build up from aritmetic, memory, ALU and up to a working processor, that's build entierly by you. The previous levels feed parts into later levels, so you're using your desing of memory or adders up until you have a whole processor.

    After you're done with a processor, the game continues where you are actually deisgning and writing your own assembly and solve minor programming challenges that all run on your CPU design.

    I found it by accident and it taugh me a lot about how CPUs work, while also being suprisingly fun enough that I binged the ~8 hours of gameplay in one sitting.

  • Look how much I'd need to purchase a fraction of their game time!

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  • If I could choose not to start WoW again, I would avoid it like a plague.

    I wouldn't call it adiction per-se, but my problem with WoW is that even though I hate what Blizzard is doing, the extreme loss of quality both in game (recent example - they released a patch where one of the main feature are class campaigns, and 8/12 questlines didn't work and had major 100% repro blockers, like requiring items that do not exist) and in Customer Support, and how it's more and more obvious that they just want to milk the playerbase of their money without any kind of effort, I still keep playing. It's not love-hate relationship, I actively dislike Blizzard.

    But, it's one of the only games my partner is playing and that we can play together, and I also have a lot of friends in the guild I've been playing for the past two years with. I mostly just log in for a dungeon or two with her, or a regular raid night with my guild, which I enjoy.

    If I stopped playing, I'd give up a lot of friends and also an activity with my partner that we're mostly used to. She doesn't really play other games. So far, it's still worth it, but I'm really conflicted every time I have to give Blizzard more money, since I'm basically held hostage.

    I highly recommend looking for a free server, i.e Turtle WoW (assuming it won't get shut down, they are getting sued IIRC), because those people are actually making an effort to make a game they love better. Blizzard is just exploiting people like me, and their nostalgia, without any regard for the game. It's a shame Morhaim lost the battle against capitalism and was driven out, and it's extremely aparent on the quality of the game and direction Blizzard is going.

    Just to be clear - the game in itself is pretty all right and fun to play, what I have issue with is the way how extremely obvious is that Blizzard does not give a fuck, produces low-quality slop without any semblance of QA, and just plain exploits the playerbase. It could've been so much better with the resources they have, but they chose not to, and just cut corners more and more. And I highly despise that. Patches are broken, there's reskinned content that's heavily time-gated, and it just screams "low effort".

    Do yourself a favor and don't think about giving Blizzard money.

  • Are people here using DeltaChat? Seems like an easier to use alternative to Matrix and more decentralized than Signal

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  • The major advantage of Matrix (not sure if DeltaChat can do the same) is the support for a lot of bridges, and how easily can you host it.

    Matrix has a really good and robust ansible project, with which you can set up your own sever in like an hour, assuming you have a place where to host it (I use Hetzner for like 7$ a month) and a domain. Adding bridges and configuring the ansible only needed like changing 5 config lines at most, and it's very well documented. It's also super easy to maintain, I "just update" every few weeks and it's so robustly written, that it lets me know what changed and what config I need to update. I never had an issue with it in the past two or three years I've been using it.

    And then the bridges - I did not need to convince others to switch, becuase I run Discord, WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal and Messenger bridges on my Matrix server, which does bridge all of the apps into my Matrix server. Sure, they still get your conversations data, but at least you don't have to have their spyware installed on your phone/PC and have it all consolidated into one Matrix app. I can also slowly convince people to switch to the more secure messengers like Signal, but don't have to drop contact if they decide not to.

  • Deleted

    Male Drivers Sue Uber and Lyft Over Women-Only Ride-Hailing

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  • That doesn't make any sense. Can male strippers sue that there's not as big demand for them as there is for female strippers? I don't think so. (This is just a metaphor, I have no idea how big the male stripper business is, but that's not the point, I'm sure you could come up with a similar example where gender is an advantage, becasue there's simply smaller demand for the other gender).

  • Using Vim is Amazing

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  • I second this. I only started slowly switching to nvim few months ago, and I already can feel slightly annoyed when I have to take off my hands of the keyboard to reach for a mouse, or when I'm editting a text in i.e a browser, want to make an edit few words back, and I have to spam keys like a madman instead of just jumping where I need to be.

    It's addicting and extremely comfortable, having a good keyboard navigation controls.

    I really need to look into tiled window managers and a browser.

  • Using Vim is Amazing

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  • I do also like all the alt and ctrl combinations with arrow keys to move lines, blocks and jump over words.

    That's what I love the most about VIM, that it has dozen little tricks like these. Need to jump over a word? Jump to next occurance of letter L? Jump five words? Jump to second parameter of a function definition? Jump to matching bracket? There's a motion for all of that, and more. Including "go to definition" or "go to references", if you set up your vim correctly.

    I don’t even know where to start to make vim or neovim do all that.

    What I did was simply install IdeaVIM into my Rider, so I can start learning the motions while also keep the features of the IDE I'm used to, but also more importantly installed LazyVim, which is a pre-made config for nvim that can do most of that by default, or has a simple addon menu (LazyExtras) that automatically download and install plugins relevant for a language you are working on. I.e I need to work in Zig, I just open LazyExtras menu, find zig-lang, and it install LSP, debugger, linter, etc that's specific for that language.

  • Square Enix says it wants generative AI to be doing 70% of its QA and debugging by the end of 2027

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  • They already have a really cool solution for that, which they talked about in their GDC talk.. I don't think there's any need to slap a glorified chatbot into this, it already seems to work well and have just the right amount of human input to be reliable, while also leaving the "testcase replay gruntwork" to a script instead of a human.

  • Square Enix says it wants generative AI to be doing 70% of its QA and debugging by the end of 2027

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  • Square Enix actually has a pretty sick automated QA already. There's a cool talk about how they did that for FFVII remake in GDC vault, and I highly recommend watching it, if you're at all interested in QA.

    It has nothing to do with AI, it's just plain old automation, but they solve most of the issues you get with making automated tests in non-discrete 3D playspace and they do that in a pretty solid way. It's definitely something I'd love to have implemented in the games I'm working on, as someone who worked in QA and now works in development. Being able to have mostly reliable way how to smoke-test levels for basic gameplay without having to torture QA to run the test-case again is good, and allows QA to focus on something else - but the tools also need oversight, so it's not really a job lost. In summary - I think the talk is cool tech and worth the watch.

    However, I don't think AI will help in this regard, and something as unreliable and random as AI models are not a good fit for this job. You want to have deterministic testcases that you can quanitfy, and if something doesn't match have an actual human to look at why. AI also probably won't be able to find clever corner-cases and bugs that need human ingenuity.

    Fuck AI, I kind of hope this is just a marketing talk and they are actually just improving the (deterministic) tools they already have (which actually are AI by definition, since they also do level exploration on top of recorded inputs), and they are calling it an "AI" to satisfy investors/management without actually slapping a glorified chat-bot into the tech for no reason.

  • Square Enix says it wants generative AI to be doing 70% of its QA and debugging by the end of 2027

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  • Large companies probably do that anyway.

    Take Blizzard for example. They just released a new patch, where class campaign quests for 8/12 classes do not work. Sure, it's a remixed version of older expansion, and with all the phasing stuff I can kind of imagine some of the phasing issues being caused by, I don't know, the player having a weird combination of completed stuff that's hard to properly catch in testing, since there's quite a lot of variables.

    But the fact that one of the class quests requires crafted items to be completed, while crafting isn't available by design in the Remix, there's just no excuse. They either just don't give a fuck about an issue that's literally a progression blocker with 100% repro rate (while also being pretty easy to fix), or no one ever tested it even once. And it's not just some random sidequest, it's literally the main class campaign, one of the main features of the expansion.

    As someone who worked in QA and gamedev, I can't imagine how could something as obvious as this ever get approved for release. That's something you catch immediately. Hell, you don't even have to play through it to realize that this might be a problem.

  • Password to Louvre’s video surveillance system was 'Louvre', according to employee

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  • There are some ways how to get around NAC. If it's older 802.1x, you can use https://github.com/s0lst1c3/silentbridge, but what usually works for us is simply cloning the printer MAC, because older printers can't do authentication and rely on MAC whitelisting.

    Making a MITM device that just clones the MAC when you plug it between the printer and the network isn't that difficult.

    But I agree, NAC is important!

  • Password to Louvre’s video surveillance system was 'Louvre', according to employee

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  • It depends on how well segmented is their network, but all you might need for that is a Raspbery PI with ethernet and GSM.

    I've done some engagements where we sent someone into the company to get in as an air conditioning tech, and when they got in he planted that device between a printer and the network. It was set up to forward all traffic, but also allowed us to connect through GSM and get into the network.

    It takes like a few seconds to plant it.

    Or if it's really bad, then you might be able to reach it from the WiFi.

  • Password to Louvre’s video surveillance system was 'Louvre', according to employee

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  • I've done exactly that, worked as a Red Team Lead, and the success rate is pretty disturbing. That, and vishing - calling people from the company you find on Linkedin from a spoofed number of their IT that they fucked something up and need to download and run this .exe to fix it before The Audit that's currently happening notices it.

    Even if we do internal infrastructure tests where they let you in, switch AVs to "detect mode" instead of "block mode" and the goal is to find as many unpatched systems/vulnerabilities as you can (instead of, well, testing the AV solution), what we usually do is run a password spray for all domain accounts with a combinations (you can try like 3 to not lock the accounts) of "

    <month>

    <year>

    <companyname>

    " we every single time got at least few accounts.

    Fortunately this kind of tests are getting more popular, and passwords such as this should've definitely been caught in some kind of security test. But it is also pretty depressing, when you repeat the same test next year, and 80% of the passwords are still the same, and vulnerabilities are still not patched.

  • Leaker reveals which Pixels are vulnerable to Cellebrite phone hacking

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  • unless they’re running GrapheneOS.

    Nice, this is good to know.

  • Is it wrong that I want one

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  • There's a lot of them "handmade" on etsy...

    Because it's sold on Aliexpress for dirt cheap. So, save money and get it from the source.

  • affine foss alternative to notion

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  • From a very quick glanceit looks similar to https://logseq.com/, which I've been using for some time now and absolutely enjoy.

    The querying stuf and "referenced by" box on pages is awesome, and I like the journalling format.

    Once I solved sync troubles (with a git repo), it was great.