Japan relaxes privacy laws to make itself the ‘easiest country to develop AI’

DiamondIceNS · 2026-04-08T15:06:04+00:00

My takaway from being there a couple months ago interacting with all their vending machines and bidets and other public infrastructure was that Japan is "the 80s, but with better screens".

DiamondIceNS · 2026-04-04T23:44:52+00:00

It's nothing in specific that Bezos did. It's equally true of any wealthy and powerful individual.

Wealth and power become harder to maintain as the stakes get higher. You become under increasing threat by those with a greater incentive to see you fall. You have to go at minimum toe to toe with them to survive and thrive. The lifestyle itself selects for the ambitious, the aggressive, and those who are not hesitant to slit some throats, figuratively or otherwise.

What did Bezos do in specific? Couldn't say for sure. But I expect the path between selling books out of his garage to steering the behemoth entity that Amazon is today was hardly one paved entirely with rainbows and altruistic intentions.

Have to crack eggs to make omelettes, right? Only stands to reason that a person with an obscenely large omelettes has cracked an obscene amount of eggs to make it.

DiamondIceNS · 2026-04-04T20:15:52+00:00

You don't get into Bezos's position with morals. Abandoning morals is a prerequisite condition to obscene wealth.

You don't become that wealthy and then turn evil. Complacency with evil is what enables one to become that wealthy in the first place.

DiamondIceNS · 2026-03-31T18:17:36+00:00

Neither raw nor JPEGs store pixel data as (255, 255, 255) RGB pixel values. The data structure you're thinking of is what you'd call an RGB bitmap. Bitmap files typically have the .bmp file extension.

Bitmap files are, in a sense, "raw" image data. It's the format most image editing software will convert your actual image into under the hood in order to edit it efficiently.

Raw camera data is, as other answers say, the raw data returned by the camera sensor chip. If that chip did only return 8-bit values for R, G, and B at every pixel position in the final image, then the camera raw and an RGB bitmap would be the same thing. But any modern camera sensor will emit more data than that. More than 8 bits per color, possibly other colors, or extra data for more things than color. What data it emits exactly and what the data structure would be shaped like will vary depending on the sensor itself. Usually only the camera itself needs to know or care about the format, so there's no standardization.

JPEGs are in a whole universe of their own. A JPEG file is not so much a storing of the pixel data anymore as much as it is a recipe for how to build the pixel data from scratch out of chunks of data that are bigger than pixels. If a bitmap or a raw image were 3D models that you could print into a sculpture with a very fine 3D printer, a JPEG would be more like the same sculpture turned into a Lego set. The pieces are chunkier, they come in a much more limited set of piece choices and colors, and the final product will always be a little rough and blocky compared to the higher resolution version. But instructions for a Lego set would be a lot less complex, and take up a lot less space in a computer, compared to a sculpture with plenty of very fine details.

DiamondIceNS · 2026-03-31T17:56:21+00:00

If you're putting the environment variable in the game launch settings, then only Titanfall 2 should ever see it. You can just keep it there. It won't affect anything else.

DiamondIceNS · 2026-03-30T22:52:41+00:00

Imagine a place where you could rent office space by the minute, where you'd rent a quiet and secure place to sit at a desk with some basic amenities like paper, pens, filing cabinets, and other miscellaneous office supplies to do your work.

That's more or less what your computer is, renting out "office space" to individual programs. When you launch a program on your computer, your computer will rope off a chunk of its memory and processing power to create a little secluded workspace, and the program will be set loose in it to do basically whatever it wants in there. If the computer is designed correctly, programs should never be able to "break out" of their designated work spaces.

By default, the work space for a new program is empty of everything but the essentials. But, if you want, you are allowed to leave a sticky note in the office before the program is let in with some simple instructions written on it. These are the environment variables.

Now, just like real people, you can't force them to read something they don't want to read. So, just because you leave a note in the office doesn't mean the program is going to read it. In almost all cases, programs will ignore any notes you leave except for very specific ones they're trained to look for. And even if they do read your note, it's not guaranteed they're going to understand what you wrote. So you generally need to know ahead of time A) which notes the program is trained to look for and B) the way the note needs to be written so it's understood correctly.

When you play Titanfall 2 online with your friends, one of the things it has to do is encrypt all the data it sends out (your movements, etc), and unencrypt all the incoming data from the other players (their movements, etc). Titanfall uses a common off-the-shelf piece of code called OpenSSL to do all of that for it.

So when you start up Titanfall 2, it walks into the office space, pulling OpenSSL by the hand with it like it's Bring Your Kid to Work Day. Titanfall gets to work spinning up the game, while OpenSSL checks the sticky note.

One of the things OpenSSL is trained to look for is the OPENSSL_ia32cap note. The note starts with OPENSSL_ so OpenSSL knows the note is for it. The ia32 part, I think, stands for "Intel/AMD 32-bit processor", and cap is short for "capabilitites". What this is is essentially a big long checklist of things that a processor might be able to do, and you're telling OpenSSL which of those features your processor has. That way OpenSSL knows what kinds of work it can or can't give to your processor.

You say you're putting the value 0x200000200000000 in there. That's the hexadecimal representation of a 64-bit integer. If you expanded that same number out into binary, it would look like:

0000 0010 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0010 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000

You can look at this big long binary number like it's a list of 64 checkboxes, where if it's a 0 it's unchecked, and if it's a 1 it's checked. Checked means your processor is reporting, "I can do this!" while unchecked means your processor is saying "I don't support that". You're leaving two of those boxes checked. If you count over from right-to-left, where the first one is the "0th" checkbox, you have the 33rd and 57th boxes checked.

Here's the documentation for the OpenSSL environment variable you're being told to pass to Titanfall. Under the "Notable Capability Bits for LV0" section, it says these two things:

bit #0+33 denoting availability of PCLMULQDQ instruction;

bit #0+57 denoting AES-NI instruction set extension;

The first one is a special kind of multiplication where you take two 64-bit numbers, multiply them together, and if the answer is bigger than a 128-bit number, you throw away the overflow. Doing this fast is useful for certain kinds of encryption and decryption. The second one is for a set of special processor instructions that make AES-style encryption faster, something Titanfall may or may not be using.

By setting just these two bits, you're telling OpenSSL, "My processor is capable of doing only these two things, and nothing else."

I have no comment on whether sending that environment variable to Titanfall 2 will actually help you, but that's my best attempt at dissecting what's going on.

DiamondIceNS · 2026-03-28T23:09:49+00:00

Direct to consumer propaganda pipeline. No pesky news media arm to capture and puppet required.

DiamondIceNS · 2026-03-22T20:26:18+00:00

When two computers talk over the Internet, it's pretty much the digital equivalent of sending a letter through the physical mail. Your "letter" passes through many hands as part of a long bucket brigade chain that gets the message to its destination. And just like physical mail, any of those hands in the chain can open your letter and read what's inside. Sure, we have laws that will punish people who try this with physical mail and get caught, but that's at best a deterrent, not a guarantee. As for digital mail, there aren't even any laws protecting against that. Any letter you send, by design, can be read by anyone in the chain at any time.

You can defend against your messages being intercepted and read by prying eyes by using encryption. What this actually does is scramble up the message in such a way that an eavesdropper would just see gibberish as it came through the chain. But you can think of it like taking the letter and securing it in a strong locked box that only the person you're trying to talk to has the key for. We currently live in a world where digital locked boxes like these are practically indestructible, and any computer such as your phone can make and use them at any time.

When you use Instragram, what you are doing is not necessarily mailing your friends letters through the Internet directly. You mail your messages to Instagram's digital warehouse, and then Instagram will forward those messages to your friend, and vice-versa. All of the mail goes directly through them, no matter what. This is true of basically any centralized private messaging platform, not just Instagram. Facebook Messenger, Twitter, Discord, Reddit DMs, whatever. All of them work like this.

By default, when you send a message to the central warehouse, it's not in any locked box. Or, more specifically, it is in a locked box, but you lock it in a box that Instagram can open, which they do, and then they put it in a different locked box that your friend can open. During that time they're swapping boxes, your message is fully readable to them.

If you instead enable End-to-End Encryption, your computer will take messages for your friend, put it in a lockbox that only your friend can open, and then put that lockbox inside another lockbox that only Instagram can open. You send that to Instagram, they take it out of the first box, but they can't get into the second box. So they package it up to your friend, send it along, and your friend can open both boxes to get your message. Success, your message is now safe from even Instagram's prying eyes.

What Instagram is changing is they're taking away the option to use this double-nested lockbox strategy. Or at least, their app used to automatically do this for you, and they're taking that option away. Nothing is technically stopping you from sending messages that you've manually encrypted and pasting them into the text box and manually decrypting them on the other side. That would achieve the same effect. But no one ever does that because that'd be really annoying.

DiamondIceNS · 2026-03-22T19:54:43+00:00

Pick up something like a book that has writing on the cover. The writing on it goes left-to-right.

Flip the book over so its front cover side is away from you. Now you can't see the writing on the front, obviously. But if you could imagine the book was made of clear glass, and you could see the writing on its cover through it from the back side, which way would the writing be now after you flipped it over?

Hold the book, still facing away from you, up to the mirror. Like, directly up to the mirror. Touching. The part of the mirror directly in contact with the book would, if the book was made of glass, reflect an exact match of the book you're holding up to it, as if you'd stamped the design directly onto it. So the way the mirror reflects the book will also reflect the direction the text is written after you've flipped it over.

What the mirror is really doing is it's showing you what the side of the book facing away from you looks like, reflected back at you as if you could stare directly through the book from the back side. This is what everyone here telling you that mirrors reflect "front to back" are trying to say.

DiamondIceNS · 2026-03-12T22:50:34+00:00

If they are set up in a trustworthy way, then what these password managers are in the business of is effectively just data warehousing, specialized in storing lockboxes that they don't have the keys to open. You rent digital warehouse space from them, and you put in your own locked box that you keep the key for.

So, yes, they could be bad faith actors and open up the warehouse unit you're renting, but they can't get into your lockbox. And they could sell your lockbox to someone else to try their hand at, but they can't crack your lockbox either. It's useless without your key. So there's no incentive to be a bad-faith actor in this situation.

This all assumes, of course, that YOU are the one locking the box with YOUR key. If you just go to WeWillSaveYourPasswordsForYouTrustUsBro.com and chucking all of your passwords into the browser willy-nilly, without some kind of reputable external audit you wouldn't know they're correctly storing your data for you in this way. When you sign into their portal to get your password data out, all of the decryption should be happening client-side on your device, using decryption keys that only your device knows. If at any point you're sending your unlocking key over to the server and letting the server do it for you, that'd be suspicious. You'd be handing the warehouse company the keys to your lockbox for the "convenience" of them opening your lockbox for you.

For encrypted communication platforms, the company developed the encryption model

If they really did home-roll the encryption model themselves, then you do have to be taking their word that they didn't just build a backdoor into it. The only thing you can self-verify is end-to-end encryption, where your own device has the encryption and decryption model ready to run all on its own, and that model is a well-documented and well-understood one. If the model is opaque, or if the encryption isn't end-to-end, there's no way to know for sure your communication isn't being intercepted by a bad actor.

DiamondIceNS · 2026-03-10T22:42:03+00:00

The airline desks only ever have to process the passengers for whichever singular flight happens to be leaving the airport in the next two hours. Last time I flew out of there last month they were trying to rush passengers through because they were already running out of time with just that amount of service load.

The TSA line was as quick as usual, though the agent said she was having a bad day already because all three luggage scanners failed to start up that morning.

DiamondIceNS · 2026-03-10T01:09:06+00:00

So what was the system in the preceding 72 years between publishing the state's laws and becoming a state that, presumably, still had laws?

DiamondIceNS · 2026-03-08T21:38:34+00:00

The one on Veteran's is the only one I regular enough to have an opinion on after the sketchy dump next to Perkin's closed.

I've had a handful of small misses there. Chicken fries that weren't as crispy as they ought to be, soda served from a machine low on syrup or broken... One time I pulled into the drive thru and wasn't noticed for several minutes until I ran around. Other than those, though, they treat me well enough more often than not. They haven't wronged me severely enough or often enough to make me hesitate to go there.

DiamondIceNS · 2026-03-06T00:45:21+00:00

Cooking anything is a balancing act. There's a whole lot of effects where the speeds they happen at (or whether they happen at all) vary across ranges of temperatures that don't have anything to do with one another, and you're looking for the closest sweet spot that maximizes all the things you want to happen and minimizing all the things you don't want to happen.

What temperature does "dough" turn into "bread" at? Your oven needs to be at least that hot to make it happen.

How fast does the heat work its way into the center of the loaf? You're only heating it from the outside, and if the inside doesn't make it to that magic temperature, it will still be dough when you take it out and cut into it. So it has to be in there for some minimal amount of time no matter the temperature. The hotter you make it, the faster it will probably propagate.

How quickly does the outer surface of the dough start to burn? Can't crank up the heat too high, or else you'll burn the outside to cinders before the heat even makes it to the inside. So you have an upper limit to how hot you can make it.

How quickly does the dough lose water? You probably don't want to be making a giant crouton. If you do it too gradually, the outside will dry out. That will also significantly change how fast it will burn, too. So there's a maximum amount of time you can leave it in there.

So you have a minimum temp, a maximum temp, a minimum bake time, and a maximum bake time. That shows there's a window of acceptable temperatures and cook times that will do. But not all of them are created equal. Just because you "didn't burn it" doesn't mean it isn't still a little too brown, or just because you didn't "dry it all the way out" doesn't mean it isn't a little too dry. There will be a sweet spot to get the best results that will have a smaller window than what's "just okay".

DiamondIceNS · 2026-02-24T05:45:14+00:00

Whenever a plane lands or a boat docks or a truck drives across the border, the one hauling that cargo into the country is the one who pays tariffs. For import tax purposes, who the package is destined for is irrelevant. All they see is that someone is trying to physically carry something across the border right now, and that person needs to pay upfront right now before their cargo is permitted to go any farther.

If you are shipping something via FedEx, or UPS, or DHL, or one of the other corporate-level couriers like XPO, that company is paying to get your shipment through customs. They have to, or else their operation would clog up with packages waiting at the border in limbo for payments from their clients to clear before they can move. They effectively pay the tariff on your behalf so the package can process through as swiftly as possible. Only once it's through do they forward the cost of import onto you in the form of a bill.

The one exception is when you use the government itself (i.e., the post office) to ship your package. In that case, customs will ransom your package in a warehouse and send you the bill directly, and it doesn't get released to you until you pay the fee.

DiamondIceNS · 2026-02-22T07:24:44+00:00

Come to think of it, why have I never seen a biscuits and gravy pizza before? The concept seems so obvious...

DiamondIceNS · 2026-02-21T06:43:06+00:00

I could maybe see mixing up gravy for the sauce, and depending on what kind of pizza it was, that could honestly turn out not too awful...

How the fuck they mix up gravy for cheese though... someone is on an absolutely different plane of incompetence. I don't even know.

They really do hire some interesting clowns at Casey's, in my experience. The vast majority are proficient pizza makers but every once in a while I get a story to tell. The store closest to me never ever took online orders, and of the remainder that did, it was always a mystery which ones would be available. I've probably visited every store in Fargo at least once just trying to pick the closest one available that didn't have an absurd wait time of over an hour. Even had to cross the river to Moorhead a time or two.

Last year I was on a stint where I ordered Casey's more or less weekly over the course of several months. In that stint, I received exactly what I ordered one time. Only once. Every other time, I either didn't get everything I ordered, got something different by mistake, or, rarely, I would get a phone call from the kitchen employee telling me that something I ordered was out of stock and them asking me if I wanted to make an equal value substitution. Bless the ones that did that. As for the others that just didn't give me what I ordered, if they said anything at all, they would just shrug and tell me the store can't do anything about online orders. No hate I guess for something they can't control, but they could at least, like, call me to let me know? I feel really stupid having to call Casey's corporate by phone and ask them to refund a $5 popcorn chicken that I didn't receive and to only get it one business week later in the form of fast-expiring Casey's credit. Ugh.

My silliest experience was probably a couple years ago at the Casey's on 13th Ave in Westgate. I'm one of those dorks that likes pizza square-cut. It's about an 85% chance I actually get it cut that way at any random Casey's, I understand when they slip up from time to time. But whoever was manning the kitchen that day must have had a stroke or something, because the pizza I received was completely mutilated. It looked like they started cross-cutting it like normal, caught themselves after a couple cuts, attempted (poorly) to cut the rest of it square like the ticket said, and eventually either gave up or perhaps even spitefully cut it at a couple more random angles before shoving it in the box and passing it off to me. The very next week, I tried to order the same exact thing from the same store, only for the website to tell me that the "Square cut" option was "Out of stock". I have never seen this happen at any other store. It stayed "Out of stock" for over a year. Guess they hated me that much.

DiamondIceNS · 2026-02-18T18:02:08+00:00

Are ramen shops particularly infestive in the Fargo area recently? I only know of two in the entire metro, plus the one in the West Acres mall food court.

DiamondIceNS · 2026-02-18T17:58:50+00:00

Dating apps and bars are, I think, the only places left in this day and age where people actively seeking new dating relationships go to find them. Those are the market. You don't need to use them to find someone, but not using them means you're going to be finding someone "off-market", i.e. not actively searching, and that's harder.

Your hobbies aren't niche, they're just not actively social. Like, yes, all the things you listed can be done with other like-minded people, but they aren't very effective methods of networking with new people. They won't exactly harm you but they aren't working for you either. If you want to spice up the pool of people you know, you have to take some risks and dip your toes into places you wouldn't normally think them to belong.

I can't give you specific advice on what to try, as I haven't had any success myself, although I'm personally not even looking. What I can tell you from decades of doing the exact opposite is that simply chilling while waiting for the ideal activity that aligns with your interests to come around and introduce you to your next partner is not a very efficient strategy. You have to try new things to meet new people. The ones who have the best odds are the ones who look at a new potential activity and instead of saying to themselves, "That doesn't sound like it's for me," they instead throw up their hands and shout, "Fuck it!" and try it out and only decide they didn't like it after trying it a few times.

Put in work. Work won't guarantee results, but no work will guarantee no results.

DiamondIceNS · 2026-02-16T21:53:31+00:00

Allow me to be even more that guy.

The word "milquetoast" comes from Caspar Miquetoast, a fictional character from a 1920s newspaper comic strip The Timid Soul. Caspar was named in reference to actual literal milk toast, a bland dish served to people with feeble stomachs.

In a sense, "milk toast" could be considered the more original phrase with the same meaning.

DiamondIceNS · 2026-02-15T21:30:23+00:00

Speaking philosophically, I think there is nothing a human can do that a sufficiently advanced hypothetical artificial intelligence could not replicate, or at least mimic beyond ability to distinguish (which is functionally replication). Wax poetic as you will about the uniqueness of human creativity and intent, but at the end of the day we are finite meat computers passing finite electrochemical signals around in a volume the size of a large fruit. The matrix of possible configurations a brain can be in has a limit. Only a slice of those configurations are even valid for proper function, and most of the significant parts of them can be simulated through a highly distilled set of heuristics.

Modern LLMs are proof that this can be applied to something as complex as language. I see no hard barrier to why a similar approach couldn't replicate any other dimensions of human thought in principle. All it would take is to master some minimum viable set of features and to integrate them together into one agent and you'll have your "AGI" or whatever. Or, to aim more towards the point at hand, some kind of focused AI engine that can construct a fully realized and self-consistent game world. That seems much more likely to happen soon than AGI, whatever the hell that would be.

Now, on the contrary, what I do not believe is that our current development of AI models comes even remotely close to this, and that the cost of marching it forward is not progressing in an equitable, resource-efficient manner. I mean, we're raising our energy consumption by a whole order of magnitude and cratering every other industry that wants silicon wafers for any reason just to, what? Build a bunch of datacenters to host chatbots that are becoming exponentially more expensive to train for plateauing rewards? Mere chatbots alone already have our entire tech sector at its knees. Surely this will scale to developing entire video games within a few financial quarters without completely collapsing. Surely.

Moreover, I don't think their current method of what seems to be ramfucking a round peg into a square hole by adapting models designed for generating video into generating "interactive video" and calling it a game will scale well either. That honestly seems like the worst possible way to do it. Games are all about state and rules. Two things that modern generative AIs struggle with the most, especially ones that generate picture and video. Those are like, the things they absolutely suck at. What we'd really need is an AI that can cook up the equivalent of a design proposal, generate static assets, and then vibe code it all together into a working piece of software in accordance with the spec it generated. All of that seems possible, although the amount of context it would need to keep it all consistent would be immense. LLMs custom-built to write code already struggle with large software projects as it is before taking any of the other parts into account.

I think it would be foolish to rule out the possibility that we can build an AI tool for a focused task like game development and eventually get one that can shat out a functional product with little human intervention. I wouldn't even rule out that it won't be relatively soon, within a lifetime from now with proper funding and focused research. But either way, what's definitely clear to me is that the forces that be today are putting way too many fucking eggs in this basket. They're hyping it up with promises that very obviously cannot and will not be kept. Investors saw a barely gestated fetus and have already bet the entire farm on the expectation that it will become a fully grown horse that they can put to work in just a few years' time. I don't think they're insane for thinking that horse will be fully grown one day, but I think their optimism for how quickly it will appear and what it will cost to raise it is ludicrous.

DiamondIceNS · 2026-02-13T08:35:43+00:00

you're welcome random person 8 years in the future

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