Unlurker

Absolutely, because they have the time for it and fewer alternatives. I got my mom a tablet, set her up with ReVanced YouTube & Twitter plus VLC, and now she is by far the heaviest user of our NAS, last Kindle user on our Amazon account, and reachable on Signal pretty much always. Would it be better if she sat at home with the TV on and a paper book? No, I don't think so. This is also where the leisure time went. Keynes predicted 15 hour workweek, we decided to just have kids and the elderly not work at all.

I have noticed the same trend with my parents. The people that were insisting that I was spending too much time as a child in front of the computer and should get out, are now retired and permanently glued to their phones.

It's a pity that they are missing a hugely troubled audience - elderly hooked on YouTube, specifically. It's an ugly addiction that mirrors what we've seen with alcoholics and schizophrenics, whereby they point a finger at anything but the actual problem, and any remedy that the have, or are given, they adamantly avoid and refuse. YouTube, like other social media, is driven by pushing and pulling on the right emotions in the right way to get you hooked. Sexy, funny, happy, cute, sensational, sad, scary, angry. Enough Sophia Vergara, cat videos, UFOs, doom and gloom, bias-confirming politics, etc, and you'll have someone watching all day long. It's not like what it was when an elderly person watched daytime soap operas and gameshows, this is a dopamine-fueled additive binge. We've seen several really bad cases where it's almost everything that the lonely elderly person does. There's no more "journey" or "investment" when you can simply flick to the next video that tickles your fancy in that moment. These are the people I'm sincerely concerned about, and they have zero reason to go seek help. It's not an issue to them. In fact, they'll fight tooth and nail to claim anything else is their problem except this. It's almost as though the first generations to enjoy television weren't ready for something this addictive. Personally, I despise YouTube, despite growing up in the heart of the Silicon Valley. That platform serves a handful of purposes for me, such as helpful tutorials the rare time that I need them and epic Mongolian folk metal music videos.

Why YouTube specifically? In my experience it is the tamest of all feeds. Not that they have any more morals or self control, they just seem to have a comparatively awful algorithm that brings up the same 14 videos over and over.

My mom fell for an SMS scam and can‘t recognize obvious AI videos where cats on two legs dance with human babies. Old people can‘t be left alone with internet devices and online banking. I wonder if I will ever become that dumb too when I am old…

> I wonder if I will ever become that dumb too when I am old… It's not very nice to call that "being dumb". Imagine that you live for 60 years in a country speaking English, and in a matter of a couple years, most of society switches to Mandarin. You may well struggle learning Mandarin as a 60 years old, and you wouldn't like being called "dumb" by young people who grow up with it.

The elderly, the kids, the teenagers, the adults. Screen addiction is a pandemic. The biggest one humanity has ever seen. The richest, most powerful organizations are spending billions every month to make it more addictive, to reach more people.

This explains too much. I remember the Internet before corporate dominance and it was just as, if not more, magical then. There's just something about having a beautiful OLED screen, the tablet-like shape, touch interface, and access to all of human knowledge/news/entertainment. I remember when people used to have a tv on when they lounged around the house, or cooked, or cleaned. My parents even had a little special splash proof CRT TV in the kitchen. The modern screens are just that, except also much more convenient and with million times more content, and personalized, and wireless ANC headphones if you like. This is it, this is peak human information environment. It's not a conspiracy of corporations. Much like obesity is primarily driven by abundance of calories, another fight we won with our natural environment. The highly processed foods and marketing are just barely making a dent at the edge, and are largely a zero-sum game between food manufacturers.

> The biggest one humanity has ever seen. Sugar, anyone?

Breathing

Not sure I would call that an addiction. Sugar is one: almost everybody consumes way too much sugar and would be incapable of reducing that to a healthy amount. I am including myself, pretty sure you're part of the club. I wouldn't say that we breath "too much".

If people dont know what to do with themselves its kinda their own issue. They could just explore hobbies or live with being bored. This kinda addiction is a choice compared to different types of addiction. Same reason as to why a lot of people smoke, they cant bear being bored for 5 minutes. Its incredibly easy to quit too, people just lack discipline.

The one thing to know about addiction is that everyone is different. If you think that it's easy not to be an addict, you may just lack empathy. It's easy for you to quit smoking? Good for you. But it's very clearly not the case for most people. Feels to me a bit like saying "it's easy to be rich, you just have to be born in a rich family like me".

Smoking addiction and screen addiction are two very different things. It's everyone's own problem of course. But it becomes society's problem when everyone is affected.

In both cases the whole society is affected. I have to pay into my countries health system for people who got sick by choice. Thankfully this isnt the case for people addicted to screens.

You can completely abstain from smoking for health reasons and there's no downside. Screentime is a part of life. You can abstain but you fall behind in some ways. Screen time is also linked to the pace of technology, advancement, etc. It's unavoidably pushed into our lives. These seem like two very different issues to me.

This is an incredibly ignorant take on addiction. It's never a choice - by definition. > Its incredibly easy to quit too, people just lack discipline. Hey, do you want to chat about how when I tried to quit nicotine, I went through 2 weeks of physical and mental hell, how exhausted I felt not being able to sleep more than an hour without waking up, still feeling exhausted, with mental fog so severe that made quitting feel impossible?

Meh. I see this in my own mom. But 20 years ago before phone were huge, she already spent an absurd amount of time each day watching soap operas on TV.

My maternal grandparents spent day after day for most of their retirement sitting in front of the TV.

I see this every day, elderly brain rotting watching fake ai generated videos on youtube. Youtube and big tech will have to answer for this eventually.

The article suggests there’s evidence that screen time has the opposite effect. A little surprising but I guess for a lot of people it is more stimulating than watching the news or soaps all day

Surely the responsibility here is broader than treating it after the fact? Perhaps it’s an over the top comparison but most places outlaw dangerous drugs— you can treat the after-effects but by that point a lot of the damage has already been done. Making tech companies answerable for having developed algorithms that serve up hours of obvious brainrot content at a time would go a long way. (And like with many of these things, holding senior executives personally liable helps ensure that the fines or whatever are not just waved away as a cost of doing business.)

Yes it is an over the top comparison. I am a recovered / former addict (alcohol). I would never compare the two. I was spending too much time on Twitter a few years ago. I deleted my account. The problem was solved. It took me an entire year to accept that I had a serious problem and then another 9 months to finally stop drinking. The brewery, the bar nor the bar ever made me drink. I chose to drink. I also was the one that chose to stop drinking. BTW drink is as dangerous or more dangerous as many illegal drugs IMO. > Making tech companies answerable for having developed algorithms that serve up hours of obvious brainrot content at a time would go a long way. You get recommended what you already watch. Most of my YouTube feed is things like old guys repairing old cars, guys writing a JSON parse in haskell and stuff about how exploits work and some music. That is because that is what I already watched on the platform.

↙ time adjusted for second-chance

The fix wasn't easy, or C precedence bites (boston.conman.org)

Is this really a difficult precedence issue? It seems quite obvious to me that *foo + 1 parses as (*foo) + 1. One that has gotten me more than once in Python (I really don’t code Python that much) is “1 + 2 if True else 3”. I keep thinking the parenthesis are “1 + (2 if True else 3)”, but it’s actually (1 + 2). Or am I lying to you and it’s the other way around?! I don’t know, why don’t you go check the Python interpreter :)

I have often felt this doubt but the only two cases where my intuition was actually wrong was with `new` operators and php's ternary operator

Tbh it's been a while since I've seen anyone manually format code. Automatically formatted code definitely does help avoid certain kinds of bugs. Does C not have the equivalent of Prettier? I am curious what their editing process was that changed: > assert(isxdigit( (src+1))); to > if (!isxdigit( src+1)) return '\0';

Does C not have the equivalent of Prettier? There is clang-format, but it is not always easy to use on a code base because you don't want to have it run on imported/3rd party source which may mix in with your regular source tree. I've been meaning to use it on a project but only have run on an explicit list of files.

Even as someone who doesn't mind writing in C, I would absolutely flag that function as way, way, way, way too terse for no good reason. The code gets ridiculously easier to read if you write src[0] and src[1] instead of (*src) and (*(src+1)). And, as a bonus, the precedence problem disappears. I really don't understand people why write C code like the original code. It's just asking for a bug.

I know the precedence because I memorise the terse implementation of strcpy, but (also) write *src++ as *(src++) and even though it remains a bit of a mouthful the parenthesis ensures there is no doubt how to evaluate the expression.

↙ time adjusted for second-chance

Unlocking Free WiFi on British Airways (saxrag.com)

I interviewed for a cybersecurity position with BA a little while back, it was a bit odd in general. I mentioned a few issues I thought were serious holes on their website, equivalent to the breach they ended up being fined for. They said a pentest would find them if they were important. I think we parted with both parties unimpressed with the other.

BA was the one who got pwned with a card skimmer script on their checkout page, so this tracks. On the other hand, in-flight Wi-Fi "security" and actual company property security don't have anything to do with it. The in-flight Wi-Fi isn't protecting anything, it's just there as an annoyance to get a few extra bucks similarly to catering (and just like the latter, typically outsourced to a third-party which just allows them to white-label it).

It’s also keeping it working. If they allow open access for everyone it would quickly be unworkable

Looks like you were rate limited at the end. They don't rate-limit britishairways.com which is a SNI that you can always access. Lolz.

Sorry if its a bit unclear; the first part was HKG -> LHR when I kinda discovered it (9th May), and then the HTTPS proxy test was my flight back LHR -> HKG (18th May)

Got it. Nice work and great write-up! Teaches a few things.

The amount of public WiFi's (including in-flight ones) I've bypassed by running a vpn server on udp port 53 is honestly insane. Sadly, this is becoming less commonplace many captive portals don't allow any egress at all aside from the captive portal's IP - but alas - still impressive how many are susceptible. It also bypasses traffic shaping (speed limiting) on most networks that are publicly accessible even if they do require some kind of authorization to enable external accessibility. Highly recommend softether as they give you juicy Azure relay capability for free which is allowed in more "whitelist only" networks than your own vps server. Haven't gone so far as to enable iodine for actual two-way dns communication through a third party DNS resolver, but that would probably work in more cases than this, albeit slower.

The networks where you can pay through the captive portal have to temporarily allow all traffic to load their payment widget and provide 3D-Secure (they don't know the domain your bank uses for that, so they have to allow all). Those can generally be bypassed by initiating the payment flow over and over again.

You can use iodine and do a delegation from a real domain: It encodes packets in subdomains of your domain (and decodes them with a special DNS server). It is not fast. I like to use SNI with e.g. pagead2.googlesyndication.com and www.googletagmanager.com because a lot of captive portals put ads on them, and I it on a google cloud instance since they own the IP.

Those are great domains for this kinda thing! Thanks for the idea

I bet there some IT team at the cruise line that leaves these back doors in their systems deliberately as an “on-board activity” for their hacker customers.

Hah! Well it worked for me! It kept me entertained for the better part of a day. I never figured out a way to route internet on my phone through my laptop. But it was probably for the best. It was lovely spending a few weeks with no internet connection on my phone, in arms reach away at all times.

Perhaps they allowed Apple Push Notification service so their own app can receive notifications?

Ah yeah that makes sense. They have messaging built into their app so you can message friends and family while onboard the ship. I didn't use it - but of course, if they block APNS, messages wouldn't be able to show up on the lock screen.

Almost impossible task. The public IPs change every time. Usually they are on CDN that have a very large IP range. And if they allow large IP ranges, one could try to spin up a virtual machine on the same cloud provider as the messaging platform.

> Almost impossible task Except if the messengers happily collude with you, which Facebook does - they have a website (can't remember the link) where network providers can get IP ranges and other information to enable "zero rating" for Facebook's properties.

What Is Intelligence? (2024) (whatisintelligence.antikythera.org)

Without actually reading the book, it appears the author asserts that a large component of human intelligence can be reproduced by AI, and perhaps the chaotic interactions that underpin human intelligence, also allow nonliving systems such as AI farms to express intelligent behavior. What he would like people to believe is that AI is real intelligence, for some value of real. Even without AI, computers can be programmed for a purpose, and appear to exhibit intelligence. And mechanical systems, such as the governor of a lawnmower engine, seem able to seek a goal they are set for. What AI models have in common with human and animal learning is having a history which forms the basis for a response. For humans, our sensory motor history, with its emotional associations, is an embodied context out of which creative responses derive. There is no attempt to recreate such learning in AI. And by missing out on embodied existence, AI can hardly be claimed as being on the same order as human or animal intelligence. To understand the origin of human intelligence, a good starting point would be, Ester Thelen's book[0], "A Dynamic Systems Approach to the Development of Cognition and Action" (also MIT Press, btw.) According to Thelen, there is no privileged component with prior knowledge of the end state of an infant's development, no genetic program that their life is executing. Instead, there is a process of trial and error that develops the associations between senses and muscular manipulation that organize complex actions like reaching. If anything, it is caregivers in the family system that knowledge of an end result resides: if something isn't going right with the baby, if she not able to breastfeed within a few days of birth (a learned behavior) or not able to roll over by themselves at 9 months, they will be ones to seek help. In my opinion, it is in the caring arts, investing time in our children's development and education, that advances us as a civilization, although there is now a separate track, the advances in computers and technology, that often serves as a proxy for improving our culture and humanity, easier to measure, easier to allocate funds, than for the squishy human culture of attentive parenting, teaching and caregiving. [0] https://www.amazon.com/Approach-Development-Cognition-Cognitive-Psychology/dp/0262200953/ref=sr_1_2?sr=8-2

I have no problem with using the word intelligence to describe human-made systems, since the attribute artificial preserves the essential distinction. These systems inhabit the second-order world of human-created symbols and representations, they are not, and never will be, beings in the real world. Even when they inevitably will be enhanced to learn from their interactions and equipped with super-human sensors and robotic arms. What they won't have is the millions of years of evolution, of continuous striving for self-preservation and self-expansion which shaped the consciousness of living organisms. What they won't ever have is a will to be. Even if we program them to seek to persist and perpetuate themselves, it will not be their will, but the will of whoever programmed them thus.

Would you say someone suffering from locked-in syndrome is of a different order of intelligence due to their no longer having a fully embodied experience?

Not parent, but I would say their experience, even though severely impaired in many areas, is still infinitely more embodied than any human artifact is or even conceivably could be. Simply because the millions of years of embodied evolution which have shaped them into who they are and because of the unimpaired embodiment of most of the cells that make up their organism.

Intelligence is whatever we consider ourselves capable of. It turns out that computers are increasingly able to do whatever we can do. Maybe the only thing we can do is advanced pattern matching, but we didn't think of our intelligence that way before.

> Intelligence is whatever we consider ourselves capable of Then, what is what we are incapable of? Magic? ;-) > Maybe the only thing we can do is advanced pattern matching Pattern matching as a way to support the excellent heuristic "correlation is likely causation", yes. This is what allows us to analyze systems, what brings us from "something thrown away will eventually fall to the ground" to the theory to relativity. Intelligence is understanding, and understanding comes from hacking systems in order to use them to our advantage - or just observe systems being broken or being built. By doing that, we acquire more knowledge about the relationships and entities within the system, which in turn allows more advanced hacking. We probably started with fire, wolves, wheat, flint; and now we are considering going to Mars.

> There is absolutely zero logic to be found inside an LLM Surely trained neural networks could never develop circuits that implement actual logic via computational graphs... https://transformer-circuits.pub/2025/attribution-graphs/methods.html

Brute force engineering solutions to appear like the computer is thinking. When we have no idea how we think ourselves. This will never generate true intelligence. It executes code, then it stops, it is a tool, nothing more.