I worked in telecom for a couple of years up until recently. There’s actually a growing body of self-regulation going on within the SMS industry. Most notably, any business sending text messages has to apply for a “license” to do so, with some pretty strict consent requirements. Violating those requirements comes with heavy penalties, mostly enforced by downstream carriers. If you’re curious, 10DLC/A2P are the terms to Google for.

That’s unfortunate. Devices like that are basically impossible to use on certain enterprise networks (e.g. college campuses). There really needs to be an override

I’m no expert, so take what I’m about to say with a grain of salt.

Fundamentally, a LLM is just a fancy autocomplete; there’s no source of knowledge it’s tapping into, it’s just guessing words (though it is quite good at it). Correspondingly, even if it did have a pool of knowledge, even that can’t be perfect, because the truth is never quite so black and white in many areas.

In other words, hard.

Does anyone have the recipe on hand? I’m curious what it actually recommended but I couldn’t find it with a cursory Google search

Ditto. I mostly use it when Google (search, not Bard) fails me. I find it’s really good at answering questions of the ilk: “I swear there’s a function for this in the library I’m using, what’s it called again?”, or telling me that it doesn’t actually exist.

Tangential, but my last employer (US based) outsourced L1 IT to a call center in India, and it was maddening. They didn’t know very much beyond the script, and often you just had to say the right words to get your issue escalated, but it would always take a day or so to get called back. It drove me nuts as an engineer, but I’m sure it works fine for people who are less familiar with computers.

I’ve found that the chat agents are much less able to “be a human” and help you out, it feels like talking to a chatbot sometimes. It’s a lot easier to get someone to empathize with your problem over the phone, IME

FWIW, /etc/passwd itself contains no passwords (the name exists for historical reasons) but it definitely is a globally accessible file that can give you clues about the target system. Given this, it’s more likely the user is attempting to find out if arbitrary disk reads are possible by using a well known path on many servers.

Mastodon actually lets you follow hashtags, which is a nice compromise, but it definitely isn’t curated so you gotta pick which hashtags you follow kinda carefully.

I think it scratches a similar itch as most techbros: “if I can solve this hard problem, all problems are easy!” It’s a mentality I see constantly, especially on the orange site.

Yeah, just discovered that, woof.

Thanks for the recommendation of Liftoff! I really didn’t like Jerboa but liftoff seems like a nice app.

I hope co-host lasts. Their attitude has been wonderful and I want to see more like it.

LanguageTool is super cool because you can run it locally! I love it because of that, alone.

The idea of a security tool using the same name as one of the most serious security vulnerabilities of the last decade is very funny, lol.

At least with SO, they have historically put up dumps of all user data on archive.org (that stopped recently but it’s allegedly coming back). If something were to happen, at least the information would still be decently accessible, just not indexed as well.

Ditto, actually. The 3D printing communities I’ve seen here are just so much smaller.

Wow, TIL; I had always thought of it as an open source project, but I guess it wasn’t always!

In May 2002, Roosendaal started the non-profit Blender Foundation, with the first goal to find a way to continue developing and promoting Blender as a community-based open-source project. On July 18, 2002, Roosendaal started the “Free Blender” campaign, a crowdfunding precursor.[19][20] The campaign aimed at open-sourcing Blender for a one-time payment of €100,000 (US$100,670 at the time), with the money being collected from the community.[21] On September 7, 2002, it was announced that they had collected enough funds and would release the Blender source code. Today, Blender is free and open-source software, largely developed by its community as well as 26 full-time employees and 12 freelancers employed by the Blender Institute.[22]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blender_(software)