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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 19th, 2023

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  • 100%. I buy physical copies of the books I want to read, because odds are I’ll probably keep them and read them again in future. The ebooks I have are files I have been able to download and store on my system (and backed up), so they can’t be edited or deleted.

    I will always prefer a physical release for a film or TV show over digital-only. Not only do I not have to pay a subscription (and then worry that it’s going to get edited or removed), but I get sound+video quality that exceeds what’s possible on streaming at present. Plus there’s just something nice about having your favourite movies and shows sitting on your shelf to remind you that it’s there and something you enjoy, rather than a purely digital library that isn’t as tangible or immediately visible.

    It’s deeply frustrating, too, when there are shows that you just can’t buy at all. A few times in the past two years there’s been a show on one of our free-to-air TV networks and their online streaming video service that I’ve enjoyed, but they’re only there for a limited time and then gone. Can you buy them on disc or even digital only? No. They are almost as ephemeral as TV from the 1960s when shows were made to be shown once, maybe repeated a few times before rights expired, then gone (sometimes forever, if you didn’t have space in your archives).


  • I don’t think their test system was directly connected to the Internet. OpenAI’s post said this:

    With this access, our models performed a series of privilege escalation and lateral movement actions in our research testing environment until the models reached a node with Internet access.

    The way I read it, the AI agent (using multiple models) escaped the sandbox, traversed the LAN in their R&D environment, gained access to the gateway and from there, the Internet. That’s not as simple as just escaping a container, VM or firewall on the host machine and bingo, you have Internet. I’m mildly impressed by that.

    The concerning aspect of all this is that this is a perfect example of misalignment, which has been warned about. In order to reach its goals, instead of pursing it legitimately, the AI agent sought a shortcut and attacked Huggingface.



  • For certain cats, shelters do more harm than good, unfortunately. One of mine was a stray and we went through the formal process of taking her to the local shelter (pound) to confirm she didn’t have an owner and get her checked out, etc., stating that we clearly wanted to adopt her if she had no owner. She went backward in the shelter (they flagged her as having “behavioural issues” - she initially started to warm to staff, but then became very withdrawn and defensive after they tried to wash her chin and stayed that way, apparently). She steadily recovered when we brought her home (no doubt being in a familiar place helped), although it took years for her to get used to strangers and her to stop responding to a couple of trauma triggers we were able to identify (I don’t know what happened to her in her first few years of life).

    To this day we’re not sure whether they would have tried to adopt her out if we hadn’t been so keen to take her. She has never been hostile towards us and her default is to run and hide if anything disturbs her (so on the rare occasion I get scratched if something startles her whilst she’s on my lap or I’m holding her).

    I wish you all the best with Maylin and hope that, with time, she’ll improve.





  • Ironically I wasn’t able to get EAC working on my Windows 10 installation due to the WinFSP clash, whilst CUERipper errors out on WINE (something to do with how it interacts with the ODD).

    However, CUETools works fine and so I was able to compare the same CD ripped by CUETools/CUERipper on Windows with EAC under WINE. I used an ABBA CD as the test case (100+ matches in CTDB, 10+ in AccurateRip).

    The CUE sheets are functionally identical (barring the differences in extra metadata stored between the two, as CUERipper included the IRSC where EAC has a Composer comment instead) – the gaps and indices are all the same. The raw rip itself is also identical - I ripped the CD to a disc image (with offset correction in both cases) and the md5 checksum of the WAV file from both applications is the same.

    In both tools the rip validated against AccurateRip and CUETools DB as well. I double-checked the EAC rip afterwards using CUETools (again under WINE), as a further test.





  • I use the last supported version of LineageOS on my old Note 3 (Lineage 18.1 / Android 11) as a spare device around the house. Always meant to try building a newer version but never got around to it, and it’s not as though the phone ever ventures outside my LAN anyway (mostly acts as an alarm clock + media player these days).

    Lineage itself is still active.

    Older devices do eventually have support dropped by Lineage, but depending on which version of the G7 you have it looks like it may still be supported (note that discontinued devices are filtered by default, so you have to change the filter setting to see previously supported devices): https://wiki.lineageos.org/devices/