Here are some things that people will suggest that are unacceptable:

Have the dnalounge.com MX record point to some Google thing and let them take over 100% of my company’s email. Fuck no. Also it wouldn’t integrate with our internal systems, store, transactional emails, bounce processing, etc.

Why is that unacceptable? “Fuck no” is not a reason for it being unacceptable, and having to build out integrations when things change is part of the job.

You want business email? Well you host it yourself, pay someone to manage it in house, or pay someone to manage it externally. Using loopholes to get free end-user emails was bound to stop working eventually; just pay for Google workspaces, keep the same familiarity for your employees and now have heightened control over how Google uses your data.

I can’t wait for hardware companies to let go of their designers prematurely in the pursuit of AI everything only for there to be a bug in a major board and no one available to troubleshoot thereby stranding customers with a broken board, no revision on the horizon, and no recourse.

On a “respond to an individual query” level, yeah it’s not that much. But prior to response the data center had to be constructed, the entire web had to be scraped, the models trained, the servers continually ran regardless of load. There’s also way too many “hidden” queries across the web in general from companies trying to summarize every email or product.

All of that adds to the energy costs. This equivocation is meant to make people feel less bad about the energy impact of using AI, when so much of the cost is in building AI.

Furthermore, that’s the median value–the one that falls right in the middle of the quantity of queries. There’s a limit to how much less energy a query to the left of the median can use; there’s a significantly higher runway to the right of the median for excess energy use. This also only accounted for text queries; images and video generation efforts are gonna use a lot more.

There are zero downsides when mentally associating an energy hog with “1 second of use time of the device that is routinely used for minutes at a time.”

https://xkcd.com/1035/

• I ask a website for content.
• The website gives me content and a side of shit.
• I instruct my intelligent butler to discard the shit and only give me the content I requested.
• I get only the content I requested.

If a website wants to run ads that’s fine, I’ll just remove them. If they want to gate their content behind a paywall that’s fine, I’ll just make a determination about whether or not what they offer is worth it.

Removing ads is not “breaking a website” if anything it’s the exact opposite–restoring a cleaner layout, faster loading, less privacy invasion, and a reduced chance of malware.

WiFi uses a subset of the significantly wider microwave band. Ground Penetrating Radar also uses a subset of the microwave band. While there can be some overlap, the frequencies desired for GPR will very broadly based on what you are looking for, what you are looking in, and how deep you are looking for that thing. The wattage supplied can also differ.

WiFi and Microwaves in general are most definitely not the same thing and I will absolutely encourage you to not set up a 1kW 3GHz jamming antenna for your WiFi needs.

Could you use WiFi for search and rescue? Maybe for a narrow set of circumstances, but in almost all situations a dedicated GPR option will be better.

This also won’t identify a victim, only revealing that one exists.

Microwave based ground penetrating radar is actually different from WiFi. Also the technology referenced in the link is a motion based body locator, not an identity recognition device.

This is different technology doing different things than what the original article was talking about.

VPNs will help. The article is only talking about VPN servers based in a location with a geo ban, which, duh. But if you actually use your VPN to be in a different country and not just a different city it’ll work fine.

Why do you need to identify specific cats over merely the presence of movement or cats in general?

If all you need is presence detection then a motion sensor would be vastly more efficient.

If you actually need identity detection, then maybe, but you’ll still have to have a camera or detailed access logs to associate the interference signature with a known entity and at that point you may as well just put an RFID reader under the bowl you throw your keys into or use facial or gait detection.

Probably not.

This kind of thing relies on the fact that the emitter and environments are static, impacting the propagation of the signals in a predictable way and that each person, having a unique physique, consistently interferes with that propagation in the same way. It’s a tool that reports “the interference in this room looks like the same interference observed in these past cases.”

Search and rescue is a very dynamic environment, with no opportunity to establish a local baseline, and with a high likelihood that the physiological signal you are looking for has been altered (such as by broken or severed limbs).

There are some other WiFi sniffing technologies that might be more useful for S&R such as movement detection, but I’m not sure if that will work as well when the broadcaster is outside the environment (as the more rubble between the emitter and the target the weaker your signal from reflections against the rubble).

Don’t think of this as being able to see through walls like with a futuristic camera, think of this as AI assisted anomaly detection in signal processing (which is exactly what the researchers are doing).

I’m generally pro research, but occasionally I come across a body of research and wish I could just shut down what they’re doing and rewind the clock to before that started.

There is no benefit of this for the common person. There is no end user need or product for being able to identify individuals based on their interactions with WiFi signals. The only people that benefit from this are large corporations and governments and that’s from them turning it on you.

Continued research will ease widespread surveillance and mass tracking. That’s not a good thing.

The hazards also override your turn signals so I now have no idea when you are going to attempt lane change.

• History shows everything I’ve ever been to including the “nope that top result in my search engine actually didn’t contain the search string anywhere in its contents and is thus useless to me.” pages
• Bookmarks are for things I routinely go to for years
• Tabs are useful results for the projects I’m working on now.
• Pinned tabs are the pages I visit multiple times a day.

None of those is a substitute for any other.

Thank goodness John Henry has taught us Americans that machines will never beat humans, so we obviously know how this will end. /s

I virtue signaled over a decade ago.

Did you accidentally replace your path rather than append to it? You might need to get a recovery drive, chroot in, and reset the path. Not sure what the actual value should be though.

To me this smells of typical subsidizing of a product to capture market share then lock in that market share. Anything I’m missing?

That’s exactly it.

From their email:

What you get:

2,000 code suggestions a month: Get context-aware suggestions tailored to your VS Code workspace and GitHub projects.

50 Copilot Chat messages a month: Use Copilot Chat in VS Code and on GitHub to ask questions and refactor, debug, document, and explain code.

Choose your AI model: You can select between Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 Sonnet or OpenAI’s GPT 4o.

Render edits across multiple files: Use Copilot Edits to make changes to multiple files you’re working with.

Access the Copilot Extensions ecosystem: Use third-party agents to conduct web searches via Perplexity, access information from Stack Overflow, and more.

So it’s just a rate limited thing meant to get you signed up and then cut you off right when you get used to it. I get access through work and well, it just sucks.

Different operating systems have their own interfaces to allow user level programs (like games) to communicate with hardware. This is a great-over-simplification, but one OS may understand something like “drawTriangle(x, y, z)” while another may expect “drawPolygon([x, y, z])”.

There are software projects to attempt to translate commands meant for one OS for a different OS (such as “Wine” or Valve’s “Proton”) and those work fairly well in cases that: 1) there’s an analogous command, 2) the analogous commands have been accurately mapped, and 3) the analogous commands operate in user space.

That last point is the primary reason why, despite the best efforts of developers, some games still cannot work across OSs. Operating systems are built on top of different levels with the lowest being the “kernel” (of “kernel level anti-cheat” notoriety) and the highest being the user space (where you interact). Both Windows and Linux have these, but the boundaries around them, what they can and cannot do, and how to interact across those boundaries differs between each system.

So when a Windows game installs a driver to monitor everything that your computer does that driver (kernel level anti-cheat) is tailored very specifically to the extremely powerful, low level, and unique Windows kernel. Linux cannot run that natively. If the game pretends that spying on you is an essential component to launch then the game will not launch. If, however, a game is perfectly happy to just stay in user space where it belongs then it will probably work fine with the available translation layers.

Billiam Bakesale