> In completely unrelated news, upcoming versions of Signal will be periodically fetching files to place in app storage. These files are never used for anything inside Signal and never interact with Signal software or data, but they look nice, and aesthetics are important in software. Files will only be returned for accounts that have been active installs for some time already, and only probabilistically in low percentages based on phone number sharding. We have a few different versions of files that we think are aesthetically pleasing, and will iterate through those slowly over time. There is no other significance to these files.
Do not stop here! Keep going the trilogy there is great and all of it within the foundation universe, incredible stuff. I wish I had more people to discuss it with
I had a copy of Hyperion but didn't read it for years because the scary knife robot on the cover seemed intimidating. I finally read it, and all the sequels, and they were great books, and hell YEAH that was an intimidating knife robot! Sometimes you CAN tell a book by its cover.
I find this interesting, there was a briar app that was spoken about a few months ago that was only for android citing that iOS had issues [0] with apps running in background, wonder if/how this was solved here.
Also, I have not seen unlicense before -- guess I'm one of todays lucky 10,000
I'm a big fan of this change, however, I think to a black mirror episode [0] where essentially little robot dogs could interface with everything they came into contact with because every connection was the same, it may be trivial to have multiple connections for a weapon like this but the take away I had from this is that 'variety' may be better than a single standardized solution. Partly because it is more expensive to plan for multiple types of inputs and making the cost of war go up will make it more difficult which I think inherently is the idea behind some of the larger cybersecurity companies, a hack can only work once then everyone has defenses for it after that single successful attack, this makes it more expensive to successfully stage attacks. Huge digression from this convo... but I think back to this constantly.
Many defensive are a trade off between the convenience of non attackers, and the trouble created for attackers.
Given the sheer number of devices we interact with in a single day, USB-C as a standard is worth the trade off for an increase in our threat surface area.
1000 Attackers can carry around N extra charging wires anyway.
10^7 users having to keep say, 3 extra charging wires on average? That’s a huge increase in costs and resources.
1) Surely the world conquering robo-army could get some adapters.
2) To the extend to which this makes anything more difficult, it is just that it makes everything a tiny bit less convenient. This includes the world-conquering robo-army, but also everything else we do. It is a general argument against capacity, which can’t be right, right?
iOS doesn't allow apps to stay active in the background to listen for messages like Android can. And since Briar very much does not rely on the vendor push services that is a showstopper.
Indeed, this is very much a limitation for all apps on iOS that don't want to rely on centralised services, such as a push notification server other than Apple's.
I’m not sure where you’re pulling “backdoored” from, but if Apple markets their devices as private then it seems reasonable that end users expect a private device.
I really enjoyed continuum and felt that the last season was a bit abrupt leaving a lot unexplored.
I still imagine a halo device from that show that i think would do well to be made, I imagine a garmin/iwatch that also completes lifestyle and healthcare needs on steroids that also replaces smart phones
Yeah 100% agree on the last season. Maybe you know already; I heard it was canceled somewhat abruptly and they only got 6 episodes to wrap up the plot. With the conspiracy being that the ani-corporate message was getting too radical haha.
I think the apple watch is somewhat halo like! Especially if they manage to add blood pressure and continuous glucose monitoring. Though hopefully with less panopticon/police state vibes.
I plan to use MonicaHQ , I failed to self host behind a reverse proxy and the effort was no longer prioritized but I would be interested if anyone else is using it.
You might be able to run it behind / between a simple Tailscale app installation instead on your devices to connect them privately. I'm a recent user and it's been a little sublime.
to control for that I had this general idea to have a grounded hidden truth to anchor the llm, things like having the scenario written and ground all player outcomes to the hidden secnario. that worked well in terms of pushback, but gpt are far too optimistic - i.e. it was impossible to lose a game, or to even die or have permanent wounds. gpt also allowed any kind of problem solving if narrated well enough - common sample, you can just keep drinking healing potion regardless of whatever situation you are in and just reset the game.
next step was to keep track of item consumption outside of the gpt, so I built a database and a few shot instructions system. gpt still doesn't push back on a player trying to cheat, but there's nothing much I can do there. also, I needed to lead gpt into negative outcomes, so I outsurced skill rolls. that eventually led to a massive engine to run the game, with llm just describing outcomes, where the pipeline is natural input > llm convert to structured json describing the action > engine ask for an action for every npc in the zone > llm map structure to game rules > engine executes the rules and update game world state > llm pick output and describe the result to the player - and the world is in a hierarchical structure, so only few npc get executed but the world state is tracked as the player explore and return to past locations
now, this is not it. this is a smaller engine that just take the skill roll and a simpler version of the item tracking, and instead of being the game controller, is referenced from a gpt for most of the game. as I said this approach is a fair bit weaker, but can provide a good enough result, if you are compliant with the narrative (i.e. willing and honest participant to the game) and will absolutely break apart if you challenge it too much
