Credit card imprinters.

In western Canada the electronic ones used to be called sliders (from when the magnetic strip was still widely used, before chip & pin), and these were called strikers (from how the card was pressed or physically struck onto the paper).

The irony being that,

1. Men are the overwhelming victims of non-reciprocal physically violent domestic violence; being about 71% of the victims.
2. Even in terms of random assaults by strangers, over 80% of the victims are men.
3. And finally, even if we look at the big kahuna of cross-gender rape, it turns out that women rape men as frequently as men rape women. It’s just that not only have most men been brainwashed into thinking that men cannot be raped, but that even the FBI did not consider it as rape until 2015 (so no national stats exist before this time), and even now many police precincts have software that hard-codes the victim as female and the perp as male, further corrupting justice.

“Capitalism innovates”

No-one.

Absolutely no-one.

If I get widowed tomorrow, imma gonna stay single for the rest of my days.

Not only am I edging into that age where I am becoming increasingly cranky and unwilling to change for someone else (I have changed enough for my wife of 30 years), but I have also been keeping a light finger on what’s happening out there between the sexes, and holy shite that’s become one hell of a mess that I want absolutely nothing to do with.

I mean, the door isn’t going to be barred and locked. But it is going to be firmly closed and with a cinder block in the way. If someone wants through, they are going to have to demonstrate real effort in their pursuit of me.

But then again, I would be shocked AF if any woman thought pursuit of any kind wasn’t beneath them. So I guess my peace and quiet would be quite safe. Thank the lord.

I absolutely approve.

I would do it, too, if I could get over the squick of even dealing with them in the first place.

If you cut onions with a knife, sure. I use a Japanese mandolin called Benriner that is so sharp that I can get through several yellow onions before I start having issues.

As I pointed out in another root comment, the average - depending on the model being tested - tends to sit between 60% and 80%. But this is with no restriction on source materials… the LLMs are essentially pulling from world+dog in that case

So this opens up an interesting option for users, in that hallucinations/inaccuracies can be controlled for and potentially reduced by as much as ⅔ simply by restricting the model to those documents/resources that the user is absolutely certain contains the correct answer.

I mean, 25% is still stupidly high. In any prior era, even 2.5% would have been an unacceptably high error rate for a business to stomach. But source-restriction seems to be a somewhat promising guardrail to use for the average user doing personal work.

How much do large language models actually hallucinate when answering questions grounded in provided documents?

Okay, this is looking promising, at least in terms of the most important qualifications being plainly stated in the opening line.

Because the amount of hallucinations/inaccuracies “in the wild” - depending on the model being tested - runs about 60-80%. But then again, this would be average use on generalized data sets, not questions focusing on specific documentation. So of course the “in the wild” questions will see a higher rate.

This also helps users, as it shows that hallucinations/inaccuracies can be reduced by as much as ⅔ by simply limiting LLMs to specific documentation that the user is certain contains the desired information, rather than letting them trawl world+dog.

Very interesting!

ANYTHING cloud-connected - your doorbell, your security system, even all f**king post-2006 vehicles, regardless of manufacturer - are suspect.

And are highly likely to be actually spying on you.

I’ve been working with computers since 1982, on the Internet since 1988, on the Web since 1992, and in the IT industry since 1997. The proportion of average people who don’t realize how much of their stuff is exposing them, and by how much, is frankly astounding. It’s almost 100% of normies who are woefully ignorant. Even IT people who have no clue is in the majority.

And the security on this stuff that tracks you tends to be - except in rare circumstances - absolute dogshite. Sometimes it comes without any security at all, such as all devices sold having admin creds baked in, or all remote-access credentials being identical and non-user-editable.

This is why almost all of my stuff is hardlined, I have no IoT devices at all, and the wifi for my family’s devices is physically separate from everything else.

Don’t get me wrong, as IT for almost three decades I love all the new shinies. But I’m not blind, and I’m not stupid.

It was never about the 2nd amendment. It was all about restricting gun ownership for “the ideologically wrong people”.

Just look at how they came down on the Black Panthers in the 60s, and how “stand your ground” laws work in wildly disproportionate ways to serve only only white cis people.

It’s a racist and bigoted strategy that has absolutely nothing to do with “rights”, except for the selective restriction of them.

Why would you trust companies like BitWarden or 1Password?

Because they are end-to-end encrypted, as evidenced by their account-recovery mechanisms: they cannot offer one.

Why? Because the encryption on your data files is based - in small part - on your master password. So if you cannot get back in with your master password, they can’t get in without it, either.

The only exception is corporate accounts, which are linked back to a master account made by your employer, which has rights to access anything in your specific account and who can expose company-wide accounts to you based on groups and rules.

Plus, BitWarden also has the capability to entirely self-host, keeping their public servers and domains entirely out of the loop. It’s just between you and the server you configure yourself.

But they put a backdoor into their programs.

LastPass had a mere security breach, and they suffered a 50+% market share drop between 2001 and 2024. An active backdoor would drive any company to 0% market share damn quick, which in business terms is called a fatal level of risk – a business killer for anyone in the security industry.

Bitwarden, in particular, has openly committed itself to fighting any attempt to legislate a back door into their product, and - like other companies like Signal - would rather exit an entire market than build a back door into their product.

And I do actually keep them separately and on paper. Laught about it if you want to, but it’s easy and most reliable. I’ve had pc’s die on me, so I’m happy to have it that way.

Wow.

I’m not laughing… I feel sorry for you.

I put the mention of Excel and paper options in as a dare from colleagues. They didn’t think you would out yourself as such a security anti-intellectual.

For the record, not only can you script secure BitWarden exports to your storage enclave of choice, but you can even script exports to KeePass for offline access.

Granted, with an export to KeePass there are things like ToTP and secondary/tertiary URLs that won’t come along for the ride, as it’s not something that KeePass does, but most everything else will.

in the last 25 years, not a single one of my accounts got hacked by my fault. I had 1 Ubisoft account hacked, but that was because their servers got hacked and the password was stolen from there.

X-Doubt.

Ubisoft did not store their passwords in plaintext. Those passwords were all hashed appropriately.

If your password was successfully un-hashed and used, it was because either,

1. You re-used a password from elsewhere that had previously and unknowingly been exploited, or
2. It was simple enough to un-hash by itself, or
3. It was represented in a rainbow table to be trivially un-hashed.

In all three cases, it’s user error on your part.

https://haveibeenpwned.com/

Check it out, it’s wild. Betchya more than just Ubisoft will pop up.

but then it proceeded to delete all of my passwords by default every time I closed it

1. That’s not how password databases like BitWarden and 1Password work.
2. On the razor-thin possibility you are still using the browser’s internal password store, quit being a moron. Those are trivially crackable by browser malware, and there are many thousands of script-kiddie browser attacks that go after this store. You would have better security keeping passwords in an Excel spreadsheet, or on paper.

Honestly, I can’t understand how browsers are still allowed to store passwords in 2026. That functionality should have been torn out of them half a decade ago for the massive security flaw that it is.

The objective is not to win. Winning against America’s imperial might is impossible.

The objective is to make them bleed as much as possible. To make victory as phyrric and as painful for them as possible. And when going up against the most expensive war plane in human history, this means choosing the aircraft that can get as technologically close as possible with as many units as possible on a per-dollar-spent basis.

We can make them bleed much more with 420 fully-functional Gripens than we can with 88 partially-functional F-35s that can be remotely shut down against our will.

We can already figure much of that out from the technological specifications of the F-35. Simply looking at the capabilities can give us strong clues on how to neuter or at least limit the inherent F-35 advantages from a tech standpoint.

The rest of that comes down to how the pilot behaves, and what tactics they have been trained in. And this is where differences in training, corps attitudes, and even pilot personalities can dramatically affect performance.

And while I fully agree with you in regards to pilot training, our problem is that a Canadian fighter pilot is likely to behave (tactic chain, decision trees, emotional responses, etc.) considerably differently than an American fighter pilot. As such, while we need to train our pilots in Gripen jets against F-35 jets in combat-like scenarios, we need to do so against American pilots, not Canadian ones.

And that’s the tough part - how do we get the American administration to willingly play along with activities that are obviously meant to train our pilots to fight theirs, and gain a consistent toehold against pilots in F-35s even if it means losing a few Gripens for every one of their F-35s. It needs to be done with a great deal of subtlety and subterfuge.

Canada needs to put the Gripen factory on an accelerated track, cancel the entire F-35 order, and move ahead with an immediate purchase of min. 50 Gripens using the F-35 funds to cover the gap and train up pilots until Gripens start rolling out of the factory.

Canada’s complete F-35 promise will cost the country $28,000,000,000 ($28B) with billions more needed to bring them up to full operational efficiency, and yet the Gripen costs only $65,000,000 ($65M) per aircraft, allowing us to buy 430 fully-functional Gripen jets instead of 88 partially functional F-35 jets.

Remember: tech superiority does not win battles. Sheer numbers do. WWII demonstrated this overwhelmingly on many different fronts, with many different technologies.

As just one example, the Germans had Tiger tanks that could face off against 6-8 Shermans at a time and win with barely a scratch on their hull, but when 10, 20, or even more came roaring over the hilltop for every Tiger that was fielded, their tech superiority ended being absolutely useless. They got overrun and overwhelmed with sheer numbers.

The F35 can be rendered equally as useless with enough Gripens in the air.

And the Gripens don’t come with a remote kill switch like the F-35 does.

…The fuck?

Is Tim Sweeney legitimately outing himself as a pedophile? Does the Parasite Class really feel so comfortable and immune from consequences that they can openly advocate for pedophilia?

Emotionally? Maybe. I have so many things that I still want to do that death is not even on the radar, and wasn’t even on the radar when I was a socially isolated and depressed teen. So I am not ready, but I would be able to accept it.

Mentally? Yes. As an atheist, I am of the firm belief that everything that has a beginning has an end, and death itself holds no fear for me.

Rather, it is the potentially-painful process of dying that has me nervous. And the concept of wanting to wrap things up and just shut it all down, but being stuck in hospice and no longer having a legal right to do so, is absolutely terrifying for me. Which is why I am now walking my Octogenarian parents through the process of MAiD such that they can still leverage it whenever they want to and for as long as possible; to give them the agency to flip that switch as they see fit. Supporting and maintaining their right of self-determination and agency right to the very end is probably the biggest gift I could ever give them.

Physically? Dear goodness, I hope not. Seeing as my own father is inching rather close to 90, and doing so in good physical condition, gives me hope that I can get another three-plus decades under my belt as well. I just hope I won’t mirror his cognitive decline.

Israel is currently on an absolutely bloodthirsty genocide bender right about now. The fact that it doesn’t give two shits about women’s rights is quite a bit further down the priority list from where it doesn’t give two shits about life in general, and is violently unaliving most everyone not like them in the region

Pretty ironic, actually.

Sooo… he works multiple part-time jobs?

Weird how a forced technique of the ultra-poor is showing up here.

Doesn’t exactly help when most Android phones more than a year old won’t get these patches for many months or even years – if at all.