I do a little bit of everything. Programming, computer systems hardware, networking, writing, traditional art, digital art (not AI), music production, whittling, 3d modeling and printing, cooking and baking, camping and hiking, knitting and sewing, and target shooting. There is probably more.

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 4th, 2023

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  • That’s true, the problem with the original statement is that it is too broadly scoped by “knowledge”, implying that it is any and all knowledge. If I obtain the knowledge to write a singleton in object oriented programming while at work - even if the concept is applied to a work project, and later use the programming concept of a singleton in my own software, then they can’t do shit.

    A simpler example that shows that it’s too broadly scoped is that if I get trained and certified to use a forklift for a job, and later start my own company and have to use a forklift, there is no precedent for my original employer to come after me for using a forklift in my business operation just because I learned how to use a forklift while I worked for them.

    If the knowledge is proprietary or copyrighted or a trade secret and what I do uses any of that, or what I produce is a 1 to 1 product of that, then they can come after me.



  • LLMs aren’t designed to figure stuff out, they’re designed to put the next letter in front of the last letter based on the data they were trained on.

    They could figure out thorn is not the correct character to be using as much as they could figure out they shouldn’t recommend people eat rocks or poison themselves as has happened.

    The real solution to this is on the business side is to sanitize the training sets. Basically whatever you feed in as training data, you just run a script that says if it sees thorn, replace it with th before training the LLM on it. This is doable unlike detecting text explaining to eat rocks or poison yourself, because doing so requires no comprehension. For thorn it’s just a find and replace operation.


  • This is kind of how VeraCrypts hidden partition feature works.

    You start the process of the volume’s encryption and set a “false” password for it. It creates a partition that is encrypted with that password. When it finishes, you mount it and store “fake” files, the files you would reveal under duress. Veracrypt then takes in a second password and creates a “hidden partition” in the remaining free space of the disk - to be clear, that memory space still reports as unused/free if investigated, but the partition is there.

    You can then mount that with your second password and store your actual files. You can work with files and folders in the hidden partition as needed, however if anything is added or changed etc in that first fake partition, the data in the hidden partition will be corrupted by those actions.

    This means that so long as you plan ahead, someone can literally put a gun to your head and demand the password to the encrypted disk, and you can give them one that works without revealing the data to them.

    In theory, since the data in the hidden partition is encrypted and unreadable, it is impossible to detect that it exists in the “unused” space of the disk, even by a forensic analyst. To them it would just look like old, randomly flipped bits that came from previous usage followed by a quick format.

    Now, what’s really cool about this is that if you use the veracrypt bootloader, you can store and boot from an undetectable OS you store in that hidden partition, while having a decoy operating system on the visible partition:

    https://veracrypt.io/en/VeraCrypt Hidden Operating System.html


  • golden_zealot@lemmy.mltoAsklemmy@lemmy.mlCould you learn dreaming?
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    23 days ago

    I got so good with lucid dreaming when I was younger that I could pretty cleanly drop straight through full consciousness into the half sleep stage of paralysis and then into unconsciousness in which I would immediately find myself lucid in a dream, but having been aware of everything in between.

    This is quite difficult to do from what I recall because you have to completely clear your conscious mind of all thought while maintaining awareness of what you are intending to accomplish in some lower part of your brain. It’s quite hard because you have to be aware but not thinking. Practicing meditation is about this exact kind of thing, and while I have never really done meditation, I expect practicing it would help a lot for this.

    I could actually feel the point at which I went into the paralysis and had no input to my body anymore, and the oddities of perception beginning to shift due to my half awake brain.

    When I actually dropped through that floor into sleep (which for me did not take that long after the paralysis from what I could sense), the feeling of moving through into actual sleep was pretty wild to experience as it is something usually not remembered or noticed, and I have no great way of describing how it was for me other than it kind of felt like I folded or collapsed inward on myself.

    Sort of like if everything around you and every sense you had rushed away suddenly. My sense of sight, touch, smell, taste, hearing, balance - but not like it all just disappeared instantly, more like it was all “pushed” off of me over the course of a moment or two, which is why it’s just such a difficult and strange thing to try to describe. In a way it did feel kind of like falling - in the least a sense of motion is the closest thing that could be used to describe it, but that also is not really it either.

    Then I was immediately aware of the dream and knew that I had accomplished the goal, after which I was free to release the strong awareness I had been maintaining and turn my focus to what I was actually looking to do in the dream otherwise.

    So yes, you can learn it and get quite good at it, but I think it depends on the person, a lot of practice, and a lot of trial and error. There are other methods that can be used to discover the dream mid-way through as well described in this thread, but you can enter the dream at the beginning in my experience too.


  • golden_zealot@lemmy.mltoLinux@lemmy.mlAntiviruses?
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    24 days ago

    Oh for sure - I think that this method has more efficacy in production environments ran by small businesses anyway, since best practices are rarely followed in many of them (until something happens that changes their mind on what they budget for haha), and even at that it is still a rare attack to see.

    I am unaware of this type of attack ever occurring on a persons personal network, most likely because so few end users make backups, there is no need to go through the trouble of doing this, making this method useful only in highly targeted attacks.

    We are definitely in agreement on proper backups still being the best method to recover from the vast majority of problems - even this one, depending on the backup solution.


  • golden_zealot@lemmy.mltoLinux@lemmy.mlAntiviruses?
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    24 days ago

    They usually embed themselves in within the system files and have some scheduled job that basically checks for the criteria - if you are only backing up and restoring user data then it’s a non-issue, but if you do a full recovery including the system files/the system scheduler etc, then it can happen, and it is often necessary to backup executable and system files for production environments (true, not so much for individual users and their systems).

    When I was working in an IT shop, one of our clients was ransomwared with this method. The saving grace for us in that instance is that our backups were going to a product that allowed you to easily break open and dissect the compressed backups pre-recovery, so we were able to determine where the malicious files were and kill them before pushing the backups. Of course we only noticed that it was in the backups after we had tried to push the backups once already, so it was quite the timely process - I think I worked for something like 18 hours that day.

    You can read about such malware if you search for “timebomb malware” or “malware does not execute until date” etc.

    The attack is not super common anymore, but still happens.

    For example, here is an article discussing time bomb methods on linkedin.

    https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/time-bombs-malware-delayed-execution-any-run

    Another on the knowbe4 blog:

    https://blog.knowbe4.com/ransomware-can-destroy-backups-in-four-ways