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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • As I assume most of you are aware

    I most certainly was not! After some searching, I found an article about Synology’s new restrictions on which hard drives can be used in Synology’s NASs.

    A few important notes:

    1. This is a completely bullshit decision on Synology’s part. Unacceptable, and a total overreach.
    2. This only applies to new DiskStation/RackStation models, so if you already have yours, you should be fine — as far as I can tell.
    3. The internet has responded with a “hack” already: https://github.com/007revad/Synology_HDD_db?utm_source=syndication&pubDate=20250505

    A prediction: This is a scream test. Within a month, Synology will walk this back. They’ll make some excuse about it taking time to test other hard drive brands for compatibility. They’ll claim that they never intended to prevent you from using whatever hard drives you want, that they just needed to make 100% sure everything was perfect first, and that they always had your best interests at heart.

    This will all be a lie, of course. The real plan is to measure how loud their biggest customers scream about this change. And then, maybe a year or two from now, they’ll quietly update a user agreement or a warranty document to reduce coverage for NASs that use third-party hard drives. Maybe they’ll add some extra “safety features” to DSM for third-party hard drives (of course with the intention of keeping you safe) that will cause a “minor” performance hit.

    I’m sure that if you subscribe to DSM Premium for a reasonable monthly fee, all of your problems will be solved.





  • I run tech for a midsize business, and consult for several small businesses. Aside from one 4-person company, all of the businesses I oversee found it less expensive to host their own LLM in Azure than to pay for OpenAI’s subscriptions. I’m talking 10% of the cost of subscriptions for the same functionality.

    The midsize business in particular has only seen measurable benefit from more specialized/global applications of “AI” tools, such as integrating machine learning into data analytics. There are a ton of people who use the LLM chat, but I think the mishaps caused by the LLM may have undone any efficiency gains. Either way, I’m sure glad they’re not paying hundreds of thousands of dollars annually for it.





  • Makes sense that it was a definitions update that caused this, and I get why that’s not something you’d want to lag behind on like you could with the agent. (Putting aside that one of the selling points of next-gen AV/EDR tools is that they’re less reliant on definitions updates compared to traditional AV.) It’s just a bit wild that there isn’t more testing in place.

    It’s like we’re always walking this fine line between “security at all costs” vs “stability, convenience, etc”. By pushing definitions as quickly as possible, you improve security, but you’re taking some level of risk too. In some alternate universe, CS didn’t push definitions quickly enough, and a bunch of companies got hit with a zero-day. I’d say it’s an impossible situation sometimes, but if I had to choose between outage or data breach, I’m choosing outage every time.







  • I actually saw a video once where the argument was that phones aren’t listening. Rather, Google (and Meta and the like) have so many other data points on you that they don’t need to listen. Listening to you would be far less efficient and far less insightful than relying on their vast network of other data they have on you. Even if you don’t use a single Google product, you’re still not safe.

    Reminds me of the story where Target knew a customer was pregnant before she did. They started sending her ads for pregnancy/baby products before she even knew she was pregnant, all because they had so much data on her.

    In my opinion, this is way more terrifying and problematic than if they were listening to us.






  • You know, I was trying to tread lightly, lest the Zionist apologists show up to try and redefine “genocide”.

    But the reality is this:

    • Tens of thousands of civilians are being murdered (shot, bombed, starved, water supply poisoned) by Israel’s military.
    • Israel is an ethnostate which believes that their race makes them god’s chosen people.
    • One of the Israeli government cabinet members has declared that the Palestinians in Gaza must be eradicated, and that he would drop a nuclear bomb on Gaze if he could.

    When you use the U.N.’s definition of genocide (“acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”), the picture is pretty clear.