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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 3rd, 2023

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  • I forgot the Sidewalk is a thing. While that tech does kind of do what OP was saying, Sidewalk is limited to only Amazon Sidewalk compatible devices, like the echo line and ring. Just at a quick glance, there are no smart TVs that can connect to that network.

    That said, it is an opt out service, which it awful. No smart TVs will connect, but I’d recommend disabling for anyone that uses Amazon devices.


  • Yea, this paragraph feels like fear mongering. I’m not saying OP didn’t see that somewhere, but from a tech standpoint, the TV still has to authenticate with any device it’s trying to piggy back off the wifi for. Perhaps if there were any open network in range it could theoretically happen, but I’m guessing that it’s not.

    I do remember reading that some smart TV was able to use the speakers as a mic to record in room audio and pass that out if connected. It may have been a theoretical thing but it might have been a zero day I read about. It’s been some years now.


  • There are the obvious options that can’t work due to the general mode anti cheat software, but over the past 1.5 years, I’ve only had a couple of steam games where I had to tweak something because it didn’t work out the gate. Every major title I’ve played worked first try.

    I tried Linux a couple times over the bast 20+ years and it was still too raw for me. Now, it just works for me. I’m by no means a Linux guru but I am a computer smart guy. I setup a laptop with Mint for my brother who knows the bare minimum about computers, and he’s had no issues using it. The progress made over the past decade has been wildly positive.




  • Code readability is important, but in this case I find it less readable. In every language I’ve studied, it’s always taught to imply the previous condition, and often times I hear or read that explicitly stated. When someone writes code that does things differently than the expectation, it can make it more confusing to read. It took me longer to interpret what was happening because what is written breaks from the norm.

    Past readability, this code is now more difficult to maintain. If you want to change one of the age ranges, the code has to be updated in two places rather than one. The changes aren’t difficult, but it would be easy to miss since this isn’t how elif should be written.

    Lastly, this block of code is now half as efficient. It takes twice as many compares to evaluate the condition. This isn’t a complicated block of code, so it’s negligible, but if this same practice were used in something like a game engine where that block loops continuously, the small inefficiencies can compound.


  • Apart from the bias, that’s just bad code. Since else if executes in order and only continues if the previous block is false, the double compare on ages is unnecessary. If age <= 18 is false, then the next line can just be, elif age <= 30. No need to check if it’s also higher than 18.

    This is first semester of coding and any junior dev worth a damn would write this better.

    But also, it’s racist, which is more important, but I can’t pass up an opportunity to highlight how shitty AI is.







  • I had the same phone, and the only reason I replaced it was because the USB C port was finicky. It must have been damaged at some point and when plugged in, the cable had to be just right. Wireless charging works great, but I wanted the stability of being able to plug in and know it would discharge over night when I didn’t have a wireless charger. Otherwise, I had no issues with the battery, and I got the phone when it was pretty new to the market. I swapped it out just a few months back, and it’s going to be my test phone for grapheneOS and may end up being a communal remote.




  • My only real counter to this is who created the dataset and did the people that were creating the app have any power to affect that? To me, to say something is racist implies intent, where this situation could be that, but it could also be a case where it’s just not racially diverse, which doesn’t necessarily imply racism.

    There’s a plethora of reasons that the dataset may be mostly fair skinned. To prattle off a couple that come to mind (all of this may be known, idk, these are ignorant possibilities on my side) perhaps more fair skinned people are susceptible so there’s more data, like you mentioned that dark skinned individuals may have less options to get medical help, or maybe the dataset came from a region with not many dark skinned patients. Again, all ignorant speculation on my part, but I would say that none of those options inherently make the model racist, just not a good model. Maybe racist actions led to a bad dataset, but if that’s out of the devs control, then I wouldn’t personally put that negative on the model.

    Also, my interpretation of what racist means may differ, so there’s that too. Or it could have all been done intentionally in which case, yea racist 100%

    Edit: I actually read the article. It sounds like they used public datasets that did have mostly Caucasian people. They also acknowledged that fair skinned people are significantly more likely to get melanoma, which does give some credence to the unbalanced dataset. It’s still not ideal, but I would also say that maybe nobody should put all of their eggs in an AI screening tool, especially for something like cancer.



  • There is a clarification from Google in he article that I don’t believe was there when I first posted. It still by default allows Gemini to have access to things I don’t want it to access, which is anything. It can be blocked through the Gemini apps activity, but I don’t think that was clear in the OG text.

    None the less, they claim that it will be completely offline and that no information will be used to train their models. I believe that’s probably true in the short term, but I don’t trust them as far as I can throw them, and I’ve got fucked up shoulders. I’ve little doubt that they will change policy in 6 months to a year so that some data is sent anonymously.

    I just want it so if I say don’t allow this thing at all, ever, that stays true and they don’t make me later opt out of that thing.