I make holiday light shows with an open source program called XLights[0]. I'm sure you've seen the videos[1] of what people[2] can do. Usually the top comment is "man that is cool but I wouldn't want to be their neighbor!" followed by "my neighbors love my light shows".
Creating the sequences is time consuming, and lot of people end up buying them or sharing them, but those are rarely as good as the ones you make for yourself.
Some folks have dabbled with using AI to create the sequences. I think the biggest issues are lack of training data and it's a very visual art, so there needs to be a better feedback between the text representation and the visual manifestation.
So if you're into using AI to make physical world things better, that would be a good place to look!
If you're talking about the school in Iran, that wasn't OpenAI. That was a Palantir system that pre-dates OAI by a few years, and was due to a bad entry in a spreadsheet, that showed the building as military housing. Which it was a few years ago.
180 people lost their lives because of bad data in spreadsheet, but not AI.
Many years ago. Not "a few years ago".
Also you could make the sentence that 180 people lost their lives because of an evil war, of which USA and Israel are the aggressors. And we definitely don't talk enough about that part.
180 children lost their lives because of decisions by people in the US military (and ultimately the US government / the POTUS).
Let's not fall into the trap of adopting narratives created to waive accountability. The spreadsheet didn't launch a missile, the spreadsheet didn't authorize the strike and the spreadsheet didn't select the target.
Not to mention that "outdated spreadsheet" is also a hilariously anachronistic excuse for a war crime if you consider what kind of satellite technology the US has publicly acknowledged to have access to, let alone what kind of technology it is likely to have access to.
The difference between intentional premeditated murder and reckless endangerment resulting in a killing is not guilt and innocence but merely the severity and nature of a crime. Both demonstrate a callous disregard for the sanctity of human life, one just specifically seeks to extinguish it, the other merely accepts death and suffering as an acceptable outcome.
The Dodgers could have so easily turned this into a huge win. After 50 years they could have just awarded him a paper lifetime pass. Scan this and get in for any game! It would have been so easy.
Or if they really wanted him to go digital, just buy him a smart phone and install the app for him!
No, proper easter eggs don't introduce security issues, they're benign almost by definition. I think what made them disappear was the introduction of all the suit-wearing people who decide what the programmers are supposed to program, with no room for autonomous work within that.
Proper code doesn't either, and yet there they are! The point is they added another attack surface, however small, and another code path that should be tested.
When people started to care about 100% test coverage, they started to disappear.
> The point is they added another attack surface, however small, and another code path that should be tested.
I dunno, "attack surface" to me means "facilitate opening/vulnerability somehow" and none of the easter egg code I've seen has done that. You have any concrete examples where a easter egg made possible a security vulnerability that wouldn't be possible otherwise?
But yes, another code path created by easter eggs that wasn't tested I've seen countless of times, but never been an issue, but maybe our easter eggs always been too small in scope for that.
Or they were removed for other reasons than security.
In Star Trek: 25th Anniversary, we had a hidden animation of Captain Kirk's toupee jumping off his head and running out of the room. It was caught before release and they made us take it out since no one wanted to piss off William Shatner.
Another fun related one: If your username is Tyler and you run shutdown, instead of the usual message it will say "Oh, good morning Mr. Tyler, going down?"
Discovered this in college when I was shoulder surfing a coworker who always used the username Tyler. When he typed shutdown I called it out, and he said, "wait, it doesn't do that for you? I always assumed it said that for everyone and just replaced the username!".
(For those of you too young to know, it's a reference to an Aerosmith song)
While I sympathize with the author, and feel the same way, I think Apple/Google have some blame here. They make certain simple things only possible in the apps, because the APIs are not exposed via the web.
Notifications is a big obvious one. Not sure if they've changed it since I last looked into it, but having an app installed was the only way to send a notification to someone for a long time.
Do people allow website notifications? One argument I have heard raised in favour of mobile apps is that people are more likely to give an app notification permission.
That's one of the main reasons to not install an app. Extremely few apps are able to limit their notifications to actually transactional events. As soon as they have the capability they start spamming away.
Chrome has notifications at least in the desktop version and it's the most horrible thing ever as noobs end up with tons of notifications from random scam websites.
I have no idea if that claim is true, but what I did love about visiting Finland was the even the small apartment I rented had a sauna in it! It seems like it's a non-negotiable for even the smallest accommodations.
The cheaper apartments tend to not have private saunas built into the bathroom, but most apartment complexes at least have a shared sauna on the top floor. Residents can book a block of personal time in advance.
> but it was arguably the Christian value system which forged the government and institutions that made these achievements possible.
Many of the founders were specifically anti-Christian. They were deists, and believed in a higher power, but specifically rejected the idea of a divine intervention of God or Jesus.
Christians do not own the idea of being nice to others and trusting others.
Of the 45 delegates to the continental congress, only two (Benjamin Franklin and another) were known to be deists. One's membership records couldn't be found. The other 42 were active members and on the books in their churches.[0]
Jefferson also was a deist, but he wasn't present at the constitutional convention of 1787 (though he earlier authored the Declaration of Independence).
[0] M. E. Bradford. Founding Fathers: Brief Lives of the Framers of the United States Constitution, second edition. University Press of Kansas, 1994.
I stated that the United States is based on Christian values. Not that the United States is a Christian state.
Do you value separation of state and religious authority? Women's rights? Minority rights? Human dignity? Equality before the law? Sanctity of life? Individual moral responsibility? Monogamous marriage? The objective study of history? Fair trial? Witnesses at trial? Tolerance of alternative viewpoints?
Those are all Christian values. For what it's worth, I'm not Christian.
> I stated that the United States is based on Christian values. Not that the United States is a Christian state.
And I said:
> Christians do not own the idea of being nice to others and trusting others.
But let's look at your list:
> Do you value separation of state and religious authority? Women's rights? Minority rights? Human dignity? Equality before the law? Sanctity of life? Individual moral responsibility? Monogamous marriage? The objective study of history? Fair trial? Witnesses at trial? Tolerance of alternative viewpoints?
First of all, these are all Jewish values that Christian's adopted. And secondly, none of these are exclusive to Christianity. In fact they appear in many religions worldwide, as well as secular societies.
These are all just common decency, which is why they appear in most religions, and non-religions.
> These are all just common decency, which is why they appear in most religions, and non-religions.
You and I both wish these decencies were common. Some cultures have some variations on some of these decencies, but they are not common. Assuming that they are common is projecting your culture onto others.
This is why I mentioned the importance of high trust society.
Christian values are always whatever individual Christians say they are.
There's really no such animal in practice. Over time Christian values have included charity for the poor, rapacious capitalism, slavery, the abolition of slavery, anti-science, science, war, peace, and the rest.
> stated that the United States is based on Christian values. Not that the United States is a Christian state
I believe most of the founders expressed disdain at the notion that the United States was built on Christian values. They were privately Christian. But publicly American. They were trying to break the cycle of history that building countries on religious values brings.
Saying we were built on Christian values is arguing for a continuing role for Christian values. Which, in turn, leads to a Christian state. And then we’re back to popes and mullahs in charge, and the SecDef and Speaker of the House giving sermons.
Creating the sequences is time consuming, and lot of people end up buying them or sharing them, but those are rarely as good as the ones you make for yourself.
Some folks have dabbled with using AI to create the sequences. I think the biggest issues are lack of training data and it's a very visual art, so there needs to be a better feedback between the text representation and the visual manifestation.
So if you're into using AI to make physical world things better, that would be a good place to look!
[0] https://xlights.org
[1] https://youtu.be/enhhtPZMwCE?t=119
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z5dfpe_-Lgg
reply