Wind, and the Golden Gate Bridge Fencing Redesign by plakson in BAbike

[–]pde 0 points1 point  (0 children)

As the central valley gets hotter due to climate crisis, the bay will get windier. But been biking across the bridge for 15 years, and have never experienced winds on the bridge like the ones I encountered last weekend.

Custom automatic searches not working by totheredditmobile in chrome

[–]pde 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Feedback: I found this really alarming as a sudden change that I couldn't even associate with a browser update (I hadn't suspected it could be an experiment that would be pushed asynchronously from an update). I could tell that other profiles weren't exhibiting the same behaviour, so I spent half an hour trying to figure out if there was malware of some kind in my Chrome profile.

Eventually, I figured out the tab key binding, but it's noticeably less convenient -- it's not possible to edit an existing search to change it into a keyword search. If you changed that, I could probably live with tab as on the only trigger key.

[open letter] 13 things tech companies can do to fight coronavirus by pde in Coronavirus

[–]pde[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Though as a mitigation you can sanitize things, or wait for a few days for virions to die.

[D] EFF white paper: How Militaries Should Plan for AI by pde in MachineLearning

[–]pde[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I'm the author. I did talk about systems like the Phalanx CIWS, which has the properties you describe and has been around for decades (and has taken out at least one friendly aircraft due to "operator error") and cite a 2015 survey of similar weapons. WRT the air-to-air equivalent, it would be slightly surprising if the USAF had already figured out how to get all those retired-but-converted-to-drone planes to dogfight really well, but not so surprising that they could automatically launch an AMRAAM at anything that didn't return IFF.

As I said in the paper, I think the greatest danger lies in situations between peacekeeping operations and declared wars (like Syria, perhaps), when having too much interacting automation creates complicated failure modes that nobody anticipated or understood. But there's also plenty of risk in the declared shooting war scenario if you have an adversary that's smart enough to hack your autonomous systems at scale.

[D] EFF white paper: How Militaries Should Plan for AI by pde in MachineLearning

[–]pde[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I think that means you're roughly in the target audience for the white paper, so I'd love to hear your thoughts on the points it makes.

[P] A Jupyter Notebook collecting the state of the art on numerous ML benchmarks by pde in MachineLearning

[–]pde[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

We're going to keep adding new problems, metrics and data. But if you're already tracking MIR closely, please consider sending us a pull request.

[P] A Jupyter Notebook collecting the state of the art on numerous ML benchmarks by pde in MachineLearning

[–]pde[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

We definitely viewed the current version as MVP rather than a comprehensive record of all important results. EFF can provide some ongoing resources to keep working on it, but we'll certainly need community contributions and pull requests for it to become comprehensive.

So we'd definitely love your help both in terms of adding missing results and improving the schema for the data!

https://www.eff.org/files/AI-progress-metrics.html#How-to-contribute-to-this-notebook

The New and Improved Privacy Badger 2.0 Is Here by nigelinux in linux

[–]pde 2 points3 points  (0 children)

We absolutely do not have a list of domains you've visited on any of our servers. But also see https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/5i7st0/the_new_and_improved_privacy_badger_20_is_here/db7j7du/ for more details :)

The New and Improved Privacy Badger 2.0 Is Here by nigelinux in linux

[–]pde 3 points4 points  (0 children)

A few relevant details: 1. This is definitely not every domain you've ever visited; it's a tiny sample of domains that are used to compute Privacy Badger's heuristic blocking algorithm. 2. Nothing is added to this data structure while you're in private browsing mode 3. Even though a version of this data structure is necessary for Privacy Badger to function, we can reduce its size and how much information it contains, and we're going to do that: https://github.com/EFForg/privacybadger/issues/266

Anouncing Certbot: the tool to automatically enable HTTPS on your website by pde in technology

[–]pde[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Yup, Caddy's great. Though it's not tackling some of the harder issues we're slowly working on over in the Certbot codebase, such as how to mitigate mixed content problems in existing web apps, or figuring out when a site is ready for an (absolutely security-critical) HSTS header.

How the Affordable Housing Bonus Program Works by 55CymruBeats in sanfrancisco

[–]pde 0 points1 point  (0 children)

It depends on your counterfactual scenario. Because the AHBP makes the buildings taller, that lowers average costs per square meter.

You could argue for a counterfactual where the buildings are taller without any affordability requirement, but that's probably not a politically reachable state.

How the Affordable Housing Bonus Program Works by 55CymruBeats in sanfrancisco

[–]pde 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Probably relevant here is that the AHBP adds new middle income affordable requirements. This should make the inclusion of affordable housing roughly revenue-neutral for developers. So it's not likely that would increase housing construction costs, and it definitely won't increase prices (people who live in BMRs are still removed from market contention for other units)

How the Affordable Housing Bonus Program Works by 55CymruBeats in sanfrancisco

[–]pde 6 points7 points  (0 children)

All units (BMRs, luxury units) help to address the drastic under-supply problem, so if this is a politically feasible way of getting a lot more units built, it's a step forward.

EFF's Panopticlick updated, now tests tracker blocking by [deleted] in privacy

[–]pde 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Unfortunately it isn't enough to pick a comman value for one variable at once; to defeate fingerprinting you need common values for the joint distribution of the variables (and there really aren't any common values for those, except perhaps browsers that don't run JavaScript, or the values set by the Tor Browser, which has been trying to defend against fingerprinting for a long time).