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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 4th, 2023

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  • I doubt it.

    For the same reasons, really. People who already intend to thoroughly go over the input and output to use AI as a tool to help them write a paper would always have had a chance to spot this. People who are in a rush or don’t care about the assignment, it’s easier to overlook.

    Also, given the plagiarism punishments out there that also apply to AI, knowing there’s traps at all is a deterrent. Plenty of people would rather get a 0 rather than get expelled in the worst case.

    If this went viral enough that it could be considered common knowledge, it would reduce the effectiveness of the trap a bit, sure, but most of these techniques are talked about intentionally, anyway. A teacher would much rather scare would-be cheaters into honesty than get their students expelled for some petty thing. Less paperwork, even if they truly didn’t care about the students.


  • Right, but the whitespace between instructions wasn’t whitespace at all but white text on white background instructions to poison the copy-paste.

    Also the people who are using chatGPT to write the whole paper are probably not double-checking the pasted prompt. Some will, sure, but this isnt supposed to find all of them its supposed to catch some with a basically-0% false positive rate.









  • Completely agree.

    The only reason the relative had it at all was because of those old fears. As soon as I learned that they had it bundled with the computer (hate that. Malware’s gotta get in somewhere though I guess), I knew why it was being slow.

    I hold this up as an example because even their own troubleshooting website and a program dedicated to the purpose above and beyond the usual uninstaller couldn’t do it though. Avast doesn’t even know its own malware.

    Also this nonsense got me the chance to put mint on their computer, but the “switch to Linux” argument isn’t constructive in this particular spot. They didn’t end up sticking to it because a required-for-school piece of software for tests just doesn’t do Linux at all. Couldn’t get it to run in wine or even a virtual machine either, and they’re not great at the whole computer thing so I didn’t wanna be tech support for dual booting.


  • Here’s an example. I removed avast via the uninstaller on a relatives computer, it made it laggy as hell. I restart after as the uninstaller demands, but it was still there.

    Searching, I find this official support option. https://support.avast.com/en-us/article/10

    The official Avast Uninstall Tool, the tool to use when the included uninstaller didn’t work.

    The official uninstall tool didn’t work either. I ran it in safe mode, like it said. Didn’t work, either, but it removed some stuff, and finally let me delete some things manually. Ran it again in safe mode after that, finally seems to have removed everything.

    Anyway it’s a great example of if a company doesn’t know what they’re about, windows has no process to recover from that. Window’s process is identical to a Walmart employee saying. “I dunno, man, contact the manufacturer.” Genuinely, its usually enough, but when its not, there’s absolutely no recourse.





  • Well they still have a finite life and are less replaceable than a battery. Even if it quadrupled the lifespan (which is a reasonably generous estimate given OP’s 4-year duration and wikipedia telling me supercapacitors last 10-15 years), it would still eventually need to be replaced and that would generally require resoldering it.

    I think a much better solution is 2 battery slots, one to be a backup battery, unused, and then when needed, an LED on the mobo can be turned on. Honestly OP could jury-rig up a similar system if he wanted to, although it’d be a bit ugly and anytime something is jury-rigged I don’t really think of it as reliable.



  • The number of people was a political compromise between individual rights and States rights, but so was a Senate and House.

    The electoral college was primarily designed to enable states to vote despite a communication delay that could take months.

    It did great at that, actually. How would California have up to date info on what’s going on in Washington when the fastest mode of travel was a horse? It wouldn’t.

    Instead of voting based on information that’s outdated and potentially inaccurate, best to pick some people you trust to vote in your interests, and send them to Washington. Let them get caught up, and vote how they will as your representative.

    Then States can sort out their own voting time and method, with no real concern for it being simultaneous or consistent because news travels so slow anyway. The important thing was authorized people would show up by the expected federal voting time, and if that happened, everyone did well enough.

    Of course, now they can cast their vote without leaving the state, and coordination is possible, but here we are holding the bag on a lack of accounting for technological progress.




  • The right app could make it into a security camera or a WiFi remote. A quick search suggests you could jailbreak it, although I’m not up to date on what that would offer you.

    I’m not sure what prevented Delta from working, since it says it supports iOS 14 or later on an iPod touch. Maybe a factory restore or similar would let you take that route anyway?