BluescreenOfDeath

What a weird way to spell nano

Except, imo, AI searching is literally a regression vs other search methods.

I work as a field operations supervisor for an ISP, and we use a GPS system to keep track of our fleet. They've been cramming AI into it, and I decided to give it a shot.

I had a report of a van running a stop sign. The report only had a license plate, so I asked the AI which of the vehicles in my fleet had that plate. And it thought about it and returned a vehicle. So I follow the link to that vehicle's status page, and the license plate doesn't match. Isn't even close.

It's only in recent time that searching has turned into such a fuzzy concept, and somehow AI turned up and made everything worse.

So you can trust AI if you want. I'll keep doing things manually and getting them right the first time.

But can you actually trust what it outputs?

Hallucinations are a known thing that LLMs struggle with. If you're trusting the output of your LLM summary without validating the data, can you be sure there are no errors in it?

And if you're having to validate the data every time because the LLM can make errors, why not skip the extra step?

I worked for a marina when I was a ~~child~~ teenager, and my favorite boat name was a sailboat named

C:[ESC]

There's a difference between 'language' and 'intelligence' which is why so many people think that LLMs are intelligent despite not being so.

The thing is, you can't train an LLM on math textbooks and expect it to understand math, because it isn't reading or comprehending anything. AI doesn't know that 2+2=4 because it's doing math in the background, it understands that when presented with the string 2+2=, statistically, the next character should be 4. It can construct a paragraph similar to a math textbook around that equation that can do a decent job of explaining the concept, but only through a statistical analysis of sentence structure and vocabulary choice.

It's why LLMs are so downright awful at legal work.

If 'AI' was actually intelligent, you should be able to feed it a few series of textbooks and all the case law since the US was founded, and it should be able to talk about legal precedent. But LLMs constantly hallucinate when trying to cite cases, because the LLM doesn't actually understand the information it's trained on. It just builds a statistical database of what legal writing looks like, and tries to mimic it. Same for code.

People think they're 'intelligent' because they seem like they're talking to us, and we've equated 'ability to talk' with 'ability to understand'. And until now, that's been a safe thing to assume.

Users are blameless, I find the fault with the developers.

Asking users to pipe curl to bash because it's easier for the developer is just the developer being lazy, IMO.

Developers wouldn't get a free pass for taking lazy, insecure shortcuts in programming, I don't know why they should get a free pass on this.

The post is specifically about how you can serve a totally different script than the one you inspect. If you use curl to fetch the script via terminal, the webserver can send a different script to a browser based on the UserAgent.

And whether or not you think someone would be mad to do it, it's still a widespread practice. The article mentions that piping curl straight to bash is already standard procedure for Proxmox helper scripts. But don't take anyone's word for it, check it out:

https://community-scripts.github.io/ProxmoxVE/

It's also the recommended method for PiHole:

https://docs.pi-hole.net/main/basic-install/

These are rare ads for you, because you're not in the target demographic that they get shown to.

Everyone's online experience can be totally different based on what group an algorithm puts you in.

You don't have to click an ad for it to be a security threat.

It is possible to abuse the mechanics of a web browser to send a fullscreen ad that resists typical means of app closing, scaring a normal user into clicking to install something malicious.

The weakest link is always the user, and advertisements are literally meant to target users. Exactly how hard do you think it is for an ad network to target the kinds of people most likely to get scared and just click the [Fix] button that downloads the malware?

Your average user gets infected and they take a computer to a repair shop to get it fixed, which costs money.

If the ad network would accept liability for damages caused by malware ads their ad networks delivered to people, I could be more sympathetic to the position that blocking ads is unfair to the content creaters paid by ad views. But if I'm financially responsible for fixing damage caused by ads, then I reserve the right to block them.

Full stop.

Putting fiber in the ground is expensive. I work for an ISP, and we estimate fiber overbuild costs at $15/ft. So a mile of underground fiber costs about $79,200.

I can't say for certain that this is what is happening, but it would fit.

I work for an ISP and deal with problems like this a lot.

In our system, we have a master keeper of information. We call it "The Biller". It keeps all the records of what services you have and at what tiers.

Then, there's the fiber optic equipment. There's a small building somewhere near your area that houses the equipment on the other end of your fiber optic line.

By default, the biller and the fiber optic equipment don't communicate with eachother, so there's some middleware software that 'provisions' the service automatically.

When I get these kinds of complaints, there's generally some software glitch or misconfiguration in either the biller or the provisioning software. When provisioning is triggered, the middleware queries the biller for the information about your service (what services do you have [TV, data, phone?], what are their features [channel lineups, speed profile, calling plan, etc], what equipment is used to deliver that service [ONT serial number, etc]) and it builds a configuration file that gets sent to the fiber optic frame equipment in your area to set those services up on the device you have in your home.

For some reason, when you reboot your ONT and it fetches a configuration file from the OLT, that configuration file is saying you should only get 100Mbps. When you call in to support, my bet is the support agent is manually fixing the speed profile on the OLT without looking into why the OLT is getting the wrong speed profile.

It's likely an issue with your account, and unfortunately it's squeaky wheels that get the grease. If you want this resolved, I would recommend making it happen a lot one day. Just keep rebooting your ONT and calling in to support. Eventually, someone will find and fix the problem.

And don't forget it's hard-coded to inject affiliate links on certain sites.

Oh, wait, I forgot they said that was an "accident".