Gross! NewXXXXXX and constructors should always be near the top of the file, next to the struct and interface definitions :)

What is the blue cathedral in this context ?

I think "the powers that be" also works in this context.

Control over global public discourse is the most effective mind control tool in the world. Even moreso when your control is hidden and you maintain plausible deniability. The current ownership won't give this up without a fight.

Didn't know Rupert Murdoch owned Twitter.

Disagree, there are so many people who don't care about the media outrage machine that went from Trump to Musk and now to Kanye. It's all very political.

Isn't there a 'let me keep reading' button on these substack popups?

You can sign up for a free trial and cancel before any payment is required. I know that can be annoying, but as a writer you have to have some way of getting people interested in trying a subscription. Not easy to find a good balance for both readers and writers.

Easily defeated argument. If that website doesn't want members of the public accessing it (and picking and choosing what parts to access), then don't make it publicly accessible.

This is not necessarily a good counter to that argument.

You're assuming they don't want the general public accessing the website, perhaps they do and would also like the revenue that comes with the ad's served on the site, because that is, broadly speaking, how the ad funded model works.

I personally think ads are a terrible model but a paywall is an entirely different business model with different considerations.

They are publicly hosting their content with a protocol that was designed for clients to only follow the links they are interested in.

Rather than gimping the browser stack for everyone, websites should use the tech they already have. Like rendering ads directly into the page contents.

And if you choose for an ad based model, you just have to suck up that some people block ads. It is just that simple, it is part of the model.

That’s like saying that a retailer should factor in stolen goods. That doesn’t make straling ok.

No it isn't like stealing at all. HTTP and REST API was explicitly designed so that clients can request and explore only the links they are interested in.

This includes links to tracker filled javascripts and images hosted on ad servers.

To argue against this, a Word document has no business running arbitrary code with access to system drivers. I think it's more like opening a document in GEdit and realizing that your whole system got hacked.

Macros were another billion dollar mistake: https://www.zdnet.com/article/the-cost-of-ransomware-around-...

> Macros were another billion dollar mistake: [link stating ransomware costs economy $265 billion in 2030, linking to study that says currently it's $20 billion per year globally]

So even if we say that Office Macros were responsible for half of all ransomware infections, I'm not convinced the world economy doesn't benefit more than $20 billion per year from Office Macros. Many businesses basically run on macro-enhanced Excel spreadsheets.

And a Word document is not running arbitrary code at all. Is running the code that was programmed in it. As for if that code gets to run at all, that depends on the configuration of the system. Do run it using a user that has no access to write/delete files and you'll see that the most malicious macro is benign.

>Do run it using a user that has no access to write/delete files and you'll see that the most malicious macro is benign.

It could retrieve work from a server to start long running processes that mine cryptocurrency. And scan every IP/port on your local network and use metasploit to send matching exploits to everything it sees. And then hijack a local process running under a different user with disk write permissions.

I would like to see macros restricted similar to Javascript in the browser. You can still run code and manipulate local data, but you don't get any direct access to the host OS. No disk access, no registry access, no way to create a process, only able to calculate things and change the document itself. And there must be no checkbox to disable these protections.

All of the above means a poorly configured system. A correctly configured Windows system would not allow any of that to happen.

1- For network privileges you can restrict user to strict network location and nothing else.

2 - For scanning it also needs privileges that can be restricted using policies.

3 - Can't send anything if it doesn't have the correct privileges.

Who's stopping you to create your own version of VBA, release it and replace Microsoft Office suite with your own defined version as you said. And in the process of doing this you'll become billionaire too.

Until then, a correctly configured Windows system is immune to all of the above.

I salute the IT team who keeps all of those security policies in place while not interfering with daily operations.

>Who's stopping you to create your own version of VBA, release it and replace Microsoft Office suite with your own defined version as you said.

I'm stopping myself because nobody would use it :)

But stable diffusion isn't an automated system maximizing its own power and drowning the world in paperclips in an out-of-control feedback loop. It's just me generating cool pictures on my GPU.

No?

Training it to produce as 'realistic as possible' pictures could lead to it producing outputs which encourage humans to train it more and more, with more and more data, to eventually produce really good pictures.

Before long, everyone on earth is working in a GPU factory...

I don't think that'll happen with stable diffusion... but I do think that if AI is an existential threat to the world, the point of no return will be something apparently mundane like that...

Hijacking our brains' reward system through visual hypersignals, just an exploit of our existing "visual addictions".

If you release the model then it's easily automated, isn't it?

What is easily automated? Generating JPEGs until I receive an error that there is no more space on my hard drive? This would leave no bad effect on the world.

Think automated spam and the damage it does. The artificial constraints you've imagined aren't even realistic.

Do you also think that Carl Benz should have kept the first combustion vehicle secret from the public, since it could be used to automate damage upon pedestrians?

Ban and criminalize the unethical application, not the tool.

> Do you also think that Carl Benz should have kept the first combustion vehicle secret from the public... ?

No.

> Ban and criminalize the unethical application, not the tool.

No one banned the tool. You've created a strawman argument.

This sounds like such a bad idea, what if one of your employees has a concealed carry permit and chooses to defend themselves?

I think GP meant "tell employees that there's going to be a drill with men carrying fake weapons, act as if you were too terrified to defend yourself".

Er, definitely no fake weapons either, that seems like a massive unneeded risk and stress factor. Tell them that there is a drill and they're supposed to work with the red team to the same extent that someone might if being coerced with guns. They're not actually on the red team since they aren't working as trusted team members, but they are also helping the red team/not working against them. It's more like they're part of the environment and their job is to help run the simulation.

The adversary for the red team is the rest of the company that isn't being occupied, not the office that they did "occupy".

Fear of this is why I prefer a sorted set with ZREMRANGEBYSCORE to remove expired items

Same here, I only caught one episode of HOTD, the one where they are at the feast and the two guys fight over the girl and then she gets kidnapped. The whole episode felt intimate, filled with emotion and natural rhythm, very personal and lifelike. Now I'm a fan.

Contrasting to LOTR where a bunch of miscast 20 year olds give wooden performances in front of sterile CGI to advance a bolted on story. Disappointment of the year.