Anyone who says that they can maintain perfect opsec over an extended period of time is seriously mistaken. A sufficiently motivated investigator with enough resources will join the dots eventually. The would-be evader has to be lucky every time whereas the investigator only has to be lucky once.

Certainly in the UK you can get the 2fa app popup in store if you tap to pay with your phone rather than a card. It’s analogous to going for a contactless payment with a card and them asking to insert the card and type the pin (which sometimes happens). It’s pretty rare (as in I have done the vast majority[1] of my payments using contactless on a phone for a couple of years now and I think it’s happened once to me).

[1] Like probably 99%+. I scarcely ever have a card on me and never use cash.

Agree. Use of "cringe" is cringeworthy in itself.

Reading the links posted in a sibling thread it only does it if you have text to speech enabled and they use an anonymizing proxy so openai can't associate sessions with any particular user ie it's not perfectly anonymous and private but I don't see how you could have totally anonymous and private until you have a fully offline on-device TTS model, which the fairphone guy said they tried and didn't feel it was up to scratch.

I don't use e/os but it doesnt' seem like a terrible compromise to me personally.

It is not even imperfectly private. Every word gets heard by a partner of a kakistocratic foriegn regime.

> don't see how you could have totally anonymous and private until you have a fully offline on-device TTS model

Yes, and? PCs that have have had that for decades - despite orders of magnitude less platform capability.

I read that as "make them sound more important and accurate than they actually are".

It obviously depends on where you live. In my country you certainly con choose a new electric company. I mention that because we really should use consumer choice to overcome these types of problems where we can. Ie if you can switch to a bank/electricity provider/whatever that has a less terrible app it’s really good to do so.

I agree on principle. I'm not sure if everywhere in the US is like this, but everywhere I've lived in California basically had a monopolistic electric and gas provider.

For things where we do have a choice, yes I agree.

It would make the game worse for players and spectators.

What would the supposed benefit be?

BTW the “special case for looping endings” I think you’re talking about is to do with drawing by 3-fold repetition or the 50 move rule.

You left out Liz Truss, which is understandable really.

Liz Truss lost because she was barking mad, manifestly wildly out of her depth and her and her think tank buddies tanked the economy. She was rude and patronising to women (but only because she was rude and patronising to everyone).

That’s complete nonsense. The universe doesn’t care what we think.

The earth has always been earth-shaped. We can think it’s flat, spherical, “turnip-shaped”[1] but the universe doesn’t care what we think. The earth doesn’t change shape based on our perception.

[1] Yes some people think this for some reason I can’t fathom

> The earth has always been earth-shaped.

And you never needed more than 640KB of RAM [1] right? Your "statement" is based on your knowledge today. You'd be burned for witchcraft back in the days for saying the earth was not flat.

> but the universe doesn’t care what we think

Assuming you know what the universe is. Your theory is based on your limited today knowledge. Someone sometime in the future could say something completely different (just like you talking about those of the past).

[1] famously from 1981

The particular problem with intelligence is perception can cause agents with intelligence to alter the world around them even if our understanding of the universe is wrong. At the end of the day we are just the universe experiencing itself, not something separate.

My uncle was part of the team in Bank of America implementing new ATM software at the time they moved to somewhat customizing the interface so it had a quick button on the first menu to give you your favourite withdrawal amount quickly, let you choose what notes you wanted etc. He said it was written in java and his favourite bit was writing the method that would be called (after all checks were done to make sure you had the money etc) to issue the cash. It was called “dispenseWithoutQuestion()”.

You could call dispenseWithoutQuestion(someamount) and the device would spit that amount of cash out so it was obviously tremendously pleasing to test.

I hope it returned how much it dispensed so that a dispenser failure would result in a refund.

Why would this be tremendously pleasing to test?

You get money!

Of course you don't get to keep the money, but it is yours for a moment, even if just to count it.

And beyond that, you get to see your code operate a physical machine that you can touch.

How many of us get to do that?

Yeah exactly. The test lab had an ATM which you call the function and it spits out money (that you don’t get to keep, but still).

Wouldn't that be Monopoly money anyway?

Doubt it, the bill reader checks all the bills before dispensing, so it would be bypassed for monopoly money.

Maybe they used $1s or something.

Nah, they get 'test money' to load into the dispensers, and it's something banks will also buy for things like ATM demonstrators.

https://shop.dieboldnixdorf.com/atm-demonstration-currency/p...

(We haven't really had "ATM demonstrations" in a long time specifically, but there was a bit of time in the early adoption era to get a fake card into a customer's hand and let them play with a demonstration machine in your lobby or in an office to get to see how convenient it was to get the play money out. See also the tabletop demonstrator Triton built, the ATM Jr - https://triton.com/about-triton/innovative-history/)