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Cake day: July 14th, 2023

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  • If you have normal darkness everywhere, there isn’t a reason to use it, but you don’t always have darkness everywhere. In fact, you generally don’t.

    Not all monsters with darkvision have access to light sources. Even if they do, they may need an action to use it or may be out of range. A torch or the light cantrip only has a 40’ range. If you collaborate on positioning with the caster, you can basically set yourself up to have advantage every turn thanks to the darkness, since as a ranged attacker you don’t have to stay within 40’ of your enemies.

    Also, Gloom Stalkers can’t see through Darkness like Warlocks can, so this effect is useful to them in a way that the Darkness spell isn’t.

    That all said, Tricksy wouldn’t do anything if it didn’t block nonmagical illumination, so it’s reasonable to run it as though it does. Sure, it still wouldn’t block even a cantrip, but it would block torches, lanterns, the sun, etc…

    And running it as though it doesn’t block nonmagical darkness results in nonsensical behavior. You’re in a torchlit chamber and use the ability - now there’s a cube of darkness, blocking the light of all four nonmagical torches. If you move one of those torches away and back, why would it suddenly pierce the magical darkness? If it wouldn’t, why would a new nonmagical light source?


  • Thanks for clarifying! I’ve heard nothing but praise for Kagi from its users so that’s what I was assuming, but Searxng has also been great so I wouldn’t have been too surprised if you’d compared them and found its results to be on par or better.

    By the way, if you’re self hosting Searxng, you can use add your own index. Searxng supports YaCy, which is an actively developed, open source search index and crawler that can be operated standalone or as part of a decentralized (P2P) network. Here are the Searxng docs for that engine. I can’t speak to its quality as I still haven’t set it up, though.







  • Your Passkeys have to be stored in something, but you don’t have to store them all in the same thing.

    If you store them with Microsoft’s Windows Hello, Apple Keychain, or Google Password Manager, all of which are closed source, then you have to trust MS/Apple/Google. However, Keychain is end to end encrypted (according to Apple) and Windows Hello is currently not synced to the cloud, so if you trust those claims, you don’t need to trust that they won’t misuse your data. I don’t know if Google’s offering is end to end encrypted, but I wouldn’t trust it either way.

    You can also store Passkeys in a password manager. Bitwarden is open source (though they did recently introduce a proprietary, source available SDK), as is KeepassXC. 1Password isn’t open source but can store Passkeys as well.

    And finally, you can store Passkeys in a compatible security key, like the YubiKey 5 series keys, which can each store 100 Passkeys. This makes them basically immune to being stolen. Note that if your primary interest in Passkeys is in the phishing resistance (basically nearly perfect immunity to MitM attacks) then you can get that same benefit by using WebAuthn as a second factor. However, my experience has been that Passkey support is broader.

    Revoking keys involves logging into the particular service and revoking them, just like changing your password. There isn’t a centralized way to do it as far as I’m aware. Each Passkey is only used for a single service, after all. However, in the same way that some password managers will offer to automatically change your passwords, they might develop a similar for passkeys.









  • Synthetic media should be required to be watermarked at the source

    Bit late for that (even in 2023). Best we could do now is something like public key cryptography, with cameras having secret keys that images are signed with. However:

    • That would require people to purchase new cameras (though phones could likely do this without a new device, leveraging the secure enclaves to sign)
    • Depending on the implementation of the signing, even applying filters to images, color grading, or cropping an image could make it stop matching. If you remove something from the background or make other overt changes, it’s definitely not going to match.
      • Adobe has a system for handling changes and attesting that no AI was used. Optimally other major photo editing tools will do something similar. However, I don’t think it’s feasible to securely sign such an attestation history locally, so all such images would need to be uploaded to be signed remotely.
    • This won’t work for traditional art

    For artists and photographers with old school cameras (“old school” meaning “doesn’t compute and sign a perceptual hash of the image”), something similar could still be done. Each such person can generate a public / private key pair for themselves and sign the images they’ve created manually. This depends on you trusting that specific artist, though, as opposed to trusting the manufacturer of the camera used.


  • This isn’t true or how it works, but there is a law being proposed that would sorta make it so: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/08/senates-no-fakes-act-hopes-to-make-unauthorized-digital-replicas-illegal/

    (In the US), your likeness is protected under state laws and due to case law, rather than federal laws, and I don’t know of any such law that imposes a responsibility upon sites like Twitter to take down violations upon your report in the same way that the DMCA does. Rather, they allow you to sue the entity who used your likeness for damages in civil court. That isn’t very useful to Jane when her ex-boyfriend uploads revenge porn of her or to Kate when a random Twitter account deepfakes her face onto a nude.

    However, if a picture you have copyright to (like a selfie) is used as an input into an AI, arguably you do have partial copyright to it, as the AI elements are not copyrighted and it could not have been created without your input. As such, I think it would be reasonable to issue a DMCA takedown request if someone posted a nonconsensual deepfake of you, on the grounds that you have a good faith belief that you do have copyright to it. However, if you didn’t take the picture used as an input yourself, you don’t have copyright to it and therefore don’t have partial copyright to the output, either. If it’s a deepfake face swap, then whoever owns copyright of the original scene image/video would also have partial copyright, and they could also issue a DMCA takedown request.


  • It’s like how they slapped ‘Smart’ on every tech product in the past decade. Even devices that are dumb as fuck are called ‘Smart’ devices.

    I’m not a big fan of “Smart” as a marketing term, either, but “Automatable” doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue, and “Connected” doesn’t really have the same appeal. That said, “smart” was used pretty consistently to refer to devices that could be controlled as part of a “smart home.” It wasn’t supposed to refer to a device that itself was intelligent, though.

    I always thought of AI as artificial consciousness, an unnatural and created-by-humans self-aware and self-thinking being.

    Sounds like you’re thinking of AGI (artificial general intelligence) or that your understanding is based off sci fi as opposed to the academic discipline/field of research, which has been around since the 1950s.

    And yes, marketing is often inaccurate… but almost every instance I’ve seen where they say they’re using AI, they were.

    In fact stuff like ChatGPT would’ve made more sense to actually be called ‘Smart’ search engines instea of ‘AI’.

    IMO “Smart” would be more misleading than “AI,” even if “Smart” didn’t have an existing, unrelated meaning. I do think we could use better words - AI is such a broad category that it doesn’t say much to call a product “AI-powered.” Stable Diffusion and Llama use completely different types of AI, for example. But people broadly recognize the term (even if they don’t understand it properly) and the same can’t be said for terms like “LLM.”

    They might be technological achievements, but they’re not AI.

    You’re illustrating the AI effect - “discounting of the behavior of an artificial-intelligence program as not “real” intelligence.” AI is used in a ton of different ways that you likely don’t ever think about or even notice.

    I recommend reading over at least the introduction to the Artificial Intelligence article on Wikipedia before proclaiming that something that fits cleanly into the definition of AI isn’t AI.



  • I made a typo in my original question: I was afraid of taking the services offline, not online.

    Gotcha, that makes more sense.

    If you try to run the reverse proxy on the same server and port that an existing service is using (e.g., port 80), then you’ll run into issues. You could also run into conflicts with the ports the services themselves use. Likewise if you use the same outbound port from your router. But IME those issues will mostly stop the new services from starting - you’d have to stop the services or restart your machine for the new service to have a chance to grab the ports while they were unused. Otherwise I can’t think of any issues.