I've had programming problems I was stuck on (APIs mostly) where it found a quirk and then a work around for it. The docs, forums, every single link I manually clicked on page after page didn't mention that. Like you said, even what it linked didn't say that. But the AI was right, I would have given up or shelved the thing if it wasn't for the AI.

That's my struggle with this thread, it is just a semi-reliable tool, but it's very useful. How can I pretend all those times it did help me a lot didn't happen?

I like what Google is doing, huge fan. I can't fathom why no one else is. When I search, I'm trying to find things. With what Google is doing, the AI overview gets me answers very fast. It includes links for its sources I can click on if I'm interested.

I think people are just too used to wasting hours of their lives visiting random sites and scouring for answers. If you like that experience, I don't see why you can't still have that, is it really that hard to ignore the AI overview? Or better yet, use and support DDG.

Google search's AI overview is by far my favorite AI application. The amount of tabs I don't have to open anymore to get a simple freaking answer is such a relief.

> Your work, your writing or art do matter a bit still

I'm really tired of this nonsense. If I want your art and Google doesn't show me, you have an excellent point. If I'm searching for a meme and Google just gives me that, instead of having me wander around clicking on deviantart and random sites simulating "visits" to your site, that's not me wanting your art, that's me wasting time and you mistaking that for a like.

Google owes things to different parties. Their shareholders, their employees, their users, their paying customers, etc.. People with random site are not owed a thing by Google. I don't want Google to refrain from helping me acheive my goals with their product so that some random people's desire to feel important is prioritized. Your random site is an unrelated 3rd party in this interaction.

I despise Google for so many things. They really are destroying the web with their monopoly of the browser markets. I hate what they're doing to Youtube. I think Android is total crap. I really despise them for ruining webextensions. The list goes on. I'm not their fan. But I am huge fan of Google search. I stopped using it for so many years, now I'm having to use them exclusively out of sheer necessity.

I really wish people drop every single ideology they have. Publish quality work, and things that work well. Then pick back up their ideologies and complain about how their high quality work is not getting the attention it deserves.

Honestly, I'm so weirded about this sort of stuff. Even Amazon, I hear people complain about it all the time, but I have nothing but praise for all their work (despite knowing what a villain Bezos is, and what horrible place to work both Amazon and AWS are). It's like I'm living in an alternate reality, or people are abandoning sincere and critical analysis for the sake of ideological goals. Like, I'm trying all the alternatives, I've put in lots of time and effort, and they just suck. Don't tell me to deny the evidence my eyes and ears are witnessing for your ideology. Instead tell me how I shouldn't use Google because of some ideological reason, instead of the quality being poor.

In times of war, they expect mobilization will mean different things.

But I don't think it works that way. You can't suddenly go low tech, the mindset and the skills pipeline can't just be developed within a few months. It doesn't matter how much willpower or money you have.

The way tech and warfare is going, it's a volume game. Both sides have drones, both sides have anti-drone systems. Which side can get enough drones past defenses to cause harm? Which side can keep producing enough drone swarms and sustain enormous casualties and keep fighting?

The new supply line is the one you need to keep drones fueled up, and within line-of-sight and other comms requirement boundaries, since the other guys will be jamming, and the deeper you string from further away, the more difficult the other guys will find it to fight back, or defend.

I focused in on drones/UAV, but I think it applies to all forms of warfare today. Not just UAV, but even infantry.

The US has been at war regularly for a long time now. On one hand, it means a well trained and prepared fighting force. On the other hand, what it takes to win a war against the US has been figured out by all its serious adversaries. Undermine its soft power, alienate it from its network of allies, and attack the political will of the American public. That last bit is how Korea, Afghanistan, and now Iran were a loss for the US. It goes for any country, it's never about the superiority of technology, or arms alone.

The Manhattan project didn't win the war in the pacific theater of the second world war for example, at least not ultimately. ultimately, the fact that the japanese leadership accepted that there would be more nukes, and that american leadership, and public alike are more than willing to keep killing hundreds of thousands of civilians did. All serious enemies of the US now know that they must get the american public on their side, or get the american public to simply not care about fighting them at such high costs.

I can't imagine a good way to solve that ultimate weakness...other than to reduce costs. Instead a million dollar UAV, use a $99 kimikaze UAV, and send 10k of them at a time, constant waves of attacks that are impossible to defend. demoralize and destabilize the enemy very quickly at low cost before opinions waver.

I only said all that purely for intellectual curiosity though. War is a filthy thing. There is no realistic prospect of homeland warfare for the US. I would prefer to not be prepared for war at all. A constant state of readiness for war is inviting war. It needs to be written into law that peacetime defense spending cannot exceed more than a certain portion of the GDP to national debt ratio, and never above like 1% of revenue.

If what you say is right, I would challenge that by still insisting the corporations can only do what governments let them. You might say they run governments behind the scenes, to which I would say, who let them? They keep influencing elections? Then elections don't seem to be working, that's the root cause perhaps? In all the major political issues, that's the trend I'm seeing, democracy failing, but then I'll challenge myself and ask why is it failing?

The old sentiment of "if it can't be fixed, it isn't a problem" seems rampant. Modern democracy itself is a fix for some other sets of problems. In the US at least, it is in theory designed to be mended and fixed. Perhaps the real cause is lack of political will power by everyone pursuing politics, to even talk about changing the way the government is architectured, altering constitutions, talking about parting ways with land and population (secession), or incorporation of some. Perhaps the population just isn't that interested in educating themselves on matters of civics, therefore how democracy works needs a rewrite at its core?

Either way, I rambled on, i know, but it's with a point i hope is obvious: the common political sentiment around billionaires, corporations, oligarchs (or similar "woke" or "DEI" dogwhistles on the right) simply don't address root causes. They're reductive by design, not accident.

That's what they keep reducing it to. They're also making it a false dichotomy of sorts, but in reality it's a gradient of possibilities. For example, VPNs aren't like Tor in that they can't really resist "NSA" level global wiretap monitoring in any meaningful way. Or even ISP-level data-analysis driven investigations.

It's also important to correlate any privacy protections VPNs provide, with a real-world pre-internet equivalent. paper mail for example has always been subject to Mitm by the authorities. It is possible to divulge who visited what site, and at what time, and only directly to the authorities, and make that disclosure public (after gag orders expire, if any are issued).

You can use VPNs for privacy against all sorts of creepy eyes, but your local government being considered one of those hostile actors is the threat model that's under attack here.

I would argue for example that the pre-internet equivalent would be two people chatting in the privacy of one of their homes. A bit of a stretch, but alright. But in that there must be the element that the two persons are able to identify each other positively. If one of them is harmed by the other, the victim can identify the attacker to the authorities and pursue justice. How can that be done with VPNs? If middle-actors can't snoop, then can logs on both ends positively identify the other party? Was there a common way pre-internet, where people anonymously gathered and discussed things, with capability to harm each other, but without the authorities being able to do anything about it after the fact?

If the authorities are able to gain access to a private key, or some other proof of possession of one end of the connection, can the VPN provider, the network, or the protocol disclose the identity of the source of traffic on the other end?

I'm only making these arguments to point out how nuanced the topic is. The false dichotomy of all-or-nothing for VPNs is silly. this is moving towards an outright ban of VPNs with criminal consequence, and with that all other similar tech (including Tor) and privacy measures go down the toilet. Would you rather have that or propose a nuanced compromise one jurisdiction at a time?

I get this is just PR for Mozilla though.

Another idea is deep red herrings. solves that lead to more solves, on and on, except only if the previous solves were solved quickly. The effect will be that participants who solve things quickly will keep finding things to solve. they can't know that the path they're on will lead to victory, even if they artificially slow down, unless they consistently slow down just as a human would. It will eliminate the speed advantage. For the skill advantage, other than having another LLM procedurally generate challenges, I don't know of a good solution.

There are always things like captchas. or the good 'ol honor system. A person can spend only so much for things that have no financial reward in the end, only clout.

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Alright, all that said, i think i really do have a good solution for this, as well as academic exams. Or I think I do, because it's so simple, I've been scratching my head as to why everyone isn't doing it already.

Require screen sharing/recording. LLMs can't fake that well enough. Have another LLM audit the video for mouse, key stroke, window movement and other details to see if it looks human-generated or not.

If a student has an essay assignment, have them record their screen as they research, and actually type out the whole thing. In the extreme, require anti-cheat proctoring software installed, as is done in remote examination. In an even more high-stakes and extreme scenario, have them share their face. Their eye and face movement, correlated with the screen-share, and correlated with the activity observed on the server end, should be pretty hard to beat, even in the next ~5 years of LLM advances.

Is everyone aware of all the unhinged beliefs their CEO and leadership has been spreading. never mind their actual practices.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/apr/21/palantir-...

I guess like Americans, Britons also have forgotten all of those who paid by their blood to keep destroy these sort of people. Just like Americans, a large number of people know this is a crazy deal, but not enough to do something about it.

You know what everyone is talking about? anything but the epstien files!

Here is the google trends over 90 days, you'll see the iran war, and now gimmicks like this work:

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%203-m&q=...

One day trend:

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=epstein%20files&d...

Look at the related topics, it's this UFO nonsense!

I would rather deal with someone putting up their nasty leg on the chair next to me, or listen to a movie with speaker on for the whole flight, than deal with rude flight attendants that won't respond to my needs, or dirty looks from other passengers because I'm wearing something comfortable.

Aside from what I see on social media posts though, I've never seen anything extreme like that flying on spirit in all the years.

And you sort of made another point I had: people like you, and companies who cater to people like you come with all that haughty snobbishness that's just unpleasant and degrades the experience. Good taste has to do with appreciation of value and quality, not polishing of one's ego, or pretending you're superior to others.

But.. saved passwords are not the same thing as "secrets" the browser uses. It has to be able to provide plain text passwords to websites. This is a really bad feature browsers should just not have to begin with, but they do, and I don't see a better way to use this.

In the past, they used to store the passwords in sqlite dbs, but now they've moved away from that at least.

From an attack perspective, there maybe some instances where you can dump memory, but you can't attach a debugger to the process without getting caught. so it does make a little bit of a difference there, but microsoft will probably tell you this isn't a security boundary that's being crossed. They can store it via DPAPI in lsass, and if lsass isolation is enabled (only on physical computers, default on win11) even SYSTEM privilege won't get you the credentials.

But what's the idea here, you have access to the browser, but you can't visit the site the password is saved for to make it "in use" and in plain text, so you can dump the password? I mean, even if you don't have access to the desktop, you can just start msedge.exe with the URL for the site as an argument and trigger the password retrieval.

Edge has done a lot to improve credential security, even DPAPI's existence itself is huge. If your research has meat, that's great but I don't see it here.

This feels like some "researcher" hyping themselves up to me, but I could be wrong.

Also, I really despise how they posted this on twitter, not even considering the political landmine there, I can't see the comments or threads on there without logging in. I can't visit the site on mobile without being redirected to download the app. I just wanted to mention that if you use X as a security professional in this day and age, my opinion of you drops by like 50% immediately. I don't care if you use bluesky, vk, telegram, discord,facebook, threads or whatever else, twitter is the worst place for you to share your work and you should know better.