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WHAT DOES HE KNOW FOR SURE???

"Exercise gives you endorphins. Endorphins make you happy. Happy people just don't shoot their husbands. They just don't."

> try to open the door as close to zero as possible while preventing the beeps

To go easy on the door switches, which operate at high voltage and can wear down if they're being used to break the circuit on every run, it's better to press the Stop/Cancel button instead.

But believe me, it is a hard, hard habit to break.


No laws when you’re running Claws.

> The legal basis? Not consent.

> The reason? US surveillance laws […]

This slop in every blog post? Fucking tiresome.


Same at my org at the time, blacklist was nixed, no matter how many times the question, "What color is ink on a page?" was brought up.

Seems like a bad faith question, unfortunate that it was asked multiple times. Blacklist is derived from a definition where black means "evil, bad, or undesirable". When you say that ink is black, you're using a different definition, which relates to color. I don't know if I see the objection to blackbox, which uses a definition of "unknown". Personally, I think the harm is small but I look to people of color for guidance and prefer the more descriptive deny-list where I can. Cuts down on possible confusion for non-native English speakers too.

Blacklist and Whitelist come from the behaviour of light on coloured surfaces. A black surface absorbs all light, a white reflects it. There is also Graylist.

I don't know of any connotation of black meaning "evil, bad, or undesirable". If anything black means "missing or vanished". Maybe that is different in your culture, but I never heard of it until now. Tons of things in everyday life are black including the most letters, signs and a lot of devices. The only thing that comes to my mind is tooth decay or pestilence, but that is hardly anything connotated with the colour per se.


A quick web search for "define black" and "etymology blacklist" readily finds "from black (adj.), here indicative of disgrace, censure, punishment (a sense attested from 1590s, in black book)" and several similar results. But I didn't immediately see an etymology based on absorbing light.

I'd be curious to see a regional reference that shows an absorb/reflect etymology.


The irony is that the term "Black" was precisely chosen by Black civil rights activists in the 1960s. This wasn't a term given by white people, it was specifically chosen by Blacks, because of its negative connotations. They wanted to embrace its negative connotations and turn it on its head, and that's where terms like "Black is beautiful" came from. They didn't want to be ashamed of it, that's why they embraced it. Black was not a term of shame, it was a term of power.

Now, the left wing activists have turned it on its head again, and now saying that the term "black" is shameful and racist. It's bizarre how ignorant people are who say the term "blacklist" is racist.


I think you've constructed a strawman. Can you point to evidence that people think the word black is shameful and racist?

Or maybe you are confusing the idea that 'using black to mean bad and white to mean good' is a problem?

Those are two different concepts.


> What color is ink on a page?

Middle gray, according to modern UX designers. ;)


You are lucky. It's often light gray on thin fonts.

The colour of the ink is not where "blacklist" comes from though? It's not from supposed skin colour either...

Blocklist makes more sense in most scenarios.


As sibling comment mentions, with OCR and video tooling these days I'd imagine you could whip up something pretty easily that can comb through several minutes of video footage and convert it to text/PDF/etc.

A leaker with a smartphone on a tripod capturing video while they scroll through files etc. could probably deal significant damage without much effort.


Yeah, this is why any high security information facility has physical security controls. Give someone infinite time and physical access and they could copy it off with clay tablets and chisels.

There's not much you can do about it, as sibling comment mentions it's a known gap. There is some work [0] in this space on the investigative side to trace the leak's source, but again the only way it would work is if you can obtain a leaked copy post hoc (leaked to press, discovered through some other means, etc.).

0: https://www.echomark.com/post/goodbye-to-analog-how-to-use-a...


> There's not much you can do about it, as sibling comment mentions it's a known gap. There is some work [0] in this space on the investigative side to trace the leak's source, but again the only way it would work is if you can obtain a leaked copy post hoc (leaked to press, discovered through some other means, etc.).

Those kinds of watermarks seem like they'd fail to a sophisticated actor. For instance, if that echomark-type of watermark becomes widespread. I supposed groups like the New York Times would update their procedures to not publish leaked documents verbatim or develop technology to scramble the watermark (e.g. reposition things subtly (again) and fix kerning issues).

With generative AI, the value of a photograph or document as proof is probably going to go down, so it probably won't be that big of an issue.


> I supposed groups like the New York Times would update their procedures to not publish leaked documents verbatim or develop technology to scramble the watermark

Like knuckleheads, The Intercept provided the Pentagon a copy of a scanned document they received from a whistleblower, which directly led to Reality Winner's identity being discovered.


You could do really sneaky things like alter the space between words or other formatting tricks.

Print it out, scan it back in, and OCR that.

Then have an AI or intern paraphrase it.


I think that's exactly what will happen.

When a competent journalist gets a leaked document, they'll learn to only summarize it, but won't quote it verbatim or duplicate it. That'll circumvent and kind of passive leak-detection system that could reveal their source.

Then the only thing that would reveal the source is if the authority starts telling suspected leakers entirely different things, to see what gets out.


> Then the only thing that would reveal the source is if the authority starts telling suspected leakers entirely different things, to see what gets out.

This is called a canary trap [0], a well-trodden technique in the real world and fiction alike.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canary_trap


Then you fix that loophole by subtlety altering the phrasing or formatting that you send everyone

That's why I said you paraphrase, rather than using the exact phrasing and formatting of the original doc.

Include slightly different details in each version. Then if the paraphrase mentions one of them, you've identified the source.

Yes, I'm aware of that approach.

It's likely tougher than it seems; the big important bits that the news will care about have to match up when checked, and anyone with high-level access to this stuff likely has a significantly sized staff who also has access to it. Paraphrasing reduces the chance of some minute detail tweak being included in the reporting at all.

You also have to actively expect and plan to do it in advance, which takes a lot of labor, time, and chances of people comparing notes and saying "what the fuck, we're being tested". You can't canary trap after the leak.


Vonnegut also managed to design the logo for Claude half a century before it existed [0].

0: https://astrofella.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/...


> Ideas are then further refined when you try to articulate them. This is why we make students write essays. It’s also why we make professors teach undergraduates. Prompting an AI model is not articulating an idea.

I agree, but the very act of writing out your intention/problem/goal/whatever can crystallize your thinking. Obviously if you are relying on the output spat out by the LLM, you're gonna have a bad time. But IMO one of the great things about these tools is that, at their best, they can facilitate helpful "rubber duck" sessions that can indeed get you further on a problem by getting stuff out of your own head.


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