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I was in federal prison with Sebastien Raoult, one of the ShinyHunters guys. We were in the same unit and talked regularly.

I was about mid-way through my bid when another inmate told me "new guy in B3 is a another hacker." I got really excited—I'd have someone to talk shop with, at the very least.

My takeaway from him was that they're a bunch of contemporary "script kiddies" with a lot of time on their hands.

This tracks.


And then they handed out free beer in the Paulaner Garten

In my vast personal experience, https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1030 is the most absurdly vague law in existence.

My dad spun up my Pentium Deschutes (400MHz!) machine the other day. Same hard drive from when I was 10 years old. “clouds.psd” was on the desktop.

I still remember retiring that computer. The first thing I did when I got my Pentium IV chip a year later was download Macromedia Dreamweaver. Did me well.



Claims Dang is using AI, and that other people are using AI even though most of the flagged post predate popular AI products. Really destroys the whole EM-Dash === AI thing.


> EM-Dash === AI thing

which never should have been a thing, because it was obviously wrong

yes AIs is more likely to use em-dash, but that is just one, by itself very insufficient, indicator.

it's like hip size. In average over the populations they are wider for woman. But the effect is too small to classify the gender of a hip bone by it's size. (Like for a specific age range and ethnicity, the difference in median is like 1" or so, while there is a >10" difference between 5%-percentile and 95%-percentile. Varying by gender in difference and exact distribution.) Well I guess em-dash are more an indication for AI then hip size for gender... lol


That's emphatically not what it claims.


https://www.gally.net/miscellaneous/hn-em-dash-user-leaderbo...

So if EM-Dash is good proof of AI usage, and people who we can see didn't use AI / or predate AI being popular, are flagged, then that undercuts it by a lot.


>Top 50 users by number of posts containing em dashes (—) before November 30, 2022, when ChatGPT was released


There are plenty of other dedicated server providers that do.


Which comparable US dedicated server providers do you prefer?


I tend to mostly use dedicated servers from Hetzner for my own projects and for my client's projects. Whenever they explicitly want US servers, I tend to go with Vultr's dedicated servers which been serving us well for many years.


OVH has dedicated in USA and Canada


I've read several reports from customers saying that their customer service is really bad. Difficult to know with online reviews of course. Does anyone have positive stories to share? I am looking at Australian hosts specifically and Hetzner doesn't have any data centers here.


We use them heavily for test boxes and running experiments. Standard off-the-shelf machines are provisioned almost instantly, and never had any problems.

More custom stuff (eg 100Gb/s NICs) takes a bit longer, but they've always been super responsive and quick to sort out any issues!

The price / performance you get from something like their AX162 is just crazy, although unfortunately with the whole RAM / NVMe shortage the setup fee has gone up quite a lot.


Using them for production for years, never dissapointed.

What you should be aware of is their new exploration of s3 storage. I mean, the s3 works and everything but it's still too eaely - the servers are kind of slow and sometimes fail to upload/download. They are still tuning out the storage architecture. The api key management is kind of too primitive (although much more headache free than configuring aws), and the online file browser is lacking

But for vps servers - they are battletested veterans


> I keep reading folks saying OpenClaw has completely changed their life while posting a picture of 58 mac minis on their desk.

I was having a conversation with someone about OpenClaw, and they proposed this idea of OpenClaw being used for inventory tracking at the retail-level. I let them continue. They said it'd be the best option for tracking when purchases are made and what SKUs are sold at what time of day. They weren't talking about prompting, they were talking about it as a data store.

I didn't bother mentioning how long this problem had been solved.

It's not you being a curmudgeon.


> I didn't bother mentioning how long this problem had been solved.

The ironic thing here is that the person could go to ChatGPT (or whatever), describe the problem they're looking to solve, and ask it to find them the various ways it has been solved reliably (with links to the sources to confirm the information). And even provide some details on when each solution works best and why.

Because THAT is a great use for AI.


They could do that, but then they'd have to then do the actual legwork after, whether that means finding the proposed solution or whatever (after maybe glancing at a few of those pesky links), installing and configuring it. What OpenClaw represents is the ability to, in natural language, state what you want and then take off with the assurance your will will be done. Just as you'd expect when tasking a human assistant.


>Take off with the assurance your will will be done

* Whatever the ai things is your will, will be done in a way the ai things is correct...


I've long thought it would be funny to do a startup where we would make accounting software that was solely a chat interface, with the only data store being a GL account list stored in context. There is probably a VC firm dumb enough to fund it.


You shared this with me via email and I had a great laugh.

I'm very disappointed to not have made the list—going to federal prison for 18 months didn't help my score.


Sometimes I daydream about people screaming at their LLM as if it was a TV they were playing video games on.


Why daydream? ChatGPT has a voice assistant mode.


I've been on the receiving end of federal enforcement (DOJ, high-profile "cybercrime"). When they want you, they don't need a confidence score. There is no quota—they take time to build a case. The existence of these tools tells you this isn't targeted enforcement, it's industrial-scale population processing dressed up in an algorithm.

I live in Minnesota. This is my backyard.


https://josh.mn

mostly about the federal prison system (for which i am an alumnus) and ruby. some essays about autism, too.


Glad to see there are still websites with oddly specific themes. I might read it sometime


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