…cogito, ergo sum…

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  • 11 Comments
Joined 3 months ago
Cake day: December 3rd, 2025
  • Artwork@lemmy.worldtoHacker News@lemmy.bestiver.se•Lenovo's New ThinkPads Score 10/10 for RepairabilityEnglish
    71·
    6 days ago

    Another ThinkPad to recommend for Linux, for an environment to trust! I have Debian with AwesomeWM on non-tablet awesome ThinkPad X201 i7 620M, chassis 3249CTO, I pre-purhased in 2010, and it works as a charm with KDE Plasma latest even! <3

    Magnificent support for every single hardware module… iwlwifi for the Wi-Fi, Gobi 2000 SIM and GPS, too… Everything…

    Some of the additional reviews of ThinkPad T14 Gen 7 And T16 Gen 5… Not only it looks like a miracle but works with Linux out-of-the-box, indeed!

    Thank you, heartfelt… dear Artists, Developers, Managers, Analysts… Genius… ineffably magnificent People… for the infinitely awesome miracles you do…

  • Artwork@lemmy.worldtoPrivacy@lemmy.ml•Some ideas re: age verificationEnglish
    4·
    8 days ago

    There are numerous options to choose from already existing… Yet, some should just consider that the recent “age verification” were initiated for another purpose than a general age verification process. Have you checked out the recent Persona source code exposed?

    Regardless, some civilian approaches to be mentioned is how the verification is handled in Baltic countries, that is Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, for example:

    Smart-ID is the easiest, safest and fastest way to authenticate yourself online, register in e-services and sign documents…
    Smart-ID can be used to log in to e-services, for online banking and for signing documents.

    Source: https://www.smart-id.com/

    -–

    Smart-ID itself has no age restrictions for its users – but age limits have been set by identity providers and depend on the Smart-ID account type and authentication method chosen…

    Creating a Smart-ID account for a minor requires a parent/legal guardian to authenticate their account…

    Don’t just click “continue”: read the instructions on the screen carefully and double check that all the information you enter is correct, and the whole process will be easy and stress-free… The child cannot continue with their registration until we’ve got one parent approval…

    Source

    For the API, for instance:

    # Where can I find users date of birth?

    Birth of date is encoded into personal identity code. Latvian new personal identity code format is exception though. Special birth of date field will be added to Smart-ID certificates in stages and only for Qualified accounts.

    For convinience smart-id-java-client and smart-id-php-client have special function getDateOfBirth… for that. For getting that info directly from certificate see getDateOfBirthCertificateAttribute and getDateOfBirthFromCertificateField.

    Source

    Similar to Latvia, the number of Estonia and Lithuania has the date of infinitely magnificent event as someone’s date of birth, too!

    The ways in which such a system is implemented vary among countries, but in most cases citizens are issued an identification number upon reaching legal age, or when they are born…

    In Estonia, a Personal Identification Code (Estonian: isikukood, abbreviated as IK) is formed on the basis of the sex and date of birth of a person…

    In Lithuania the Personal Code (Lithuanian: asmens kodas) consists of 11 digits, and currently is in the form G YYMMDD NNN C, where G is gender & birth century, YYMMDD is the birthday, NNN is a serial number, C is a checksum digit…
    /* ... */ C = lt_nin_checksum("3840915201");

    Source

    Therefore, there should be an option to verify the age without the personal identification code. And if not, just a personal number got within the age verification scope, transferred within secure government session channel, should be enough. The government, in turn, won’t share such information with untrusted services - access to the API.

    Related: Age verification online (…can be done safely and privately. Here’s how…)

  • Artwork@lemmy.worldtoHacker News@lemmy.bestiver.se•Turns out Generative AI was a scamEnglish
    0·
    12 days ago

    Will you PLEASE stop saying “coding is a practical use case”? This is the third appeal I’ve made on this subject. (Do you read your comments?) If you want bug ridden code with security issues which is not extensible and which no-one understands, then sure, it’s a practical use case. Just like if you want nonsensical articles with invented facts, then article writing is a practical use case. But as I’ve pointed out already no reputable editorial is now using LLMs to write their articles. Why is that? Because it obviously doesn’t work.

    Let’s face it the only reason you’re saying “coding is a practical use case” is because you yourself don’t code, and don’t understand it. I can’t see another reason why would assume the problems experienced in other domains somehow don’t apply to coding. Newsflash: they do. And software engineering definitely doesn’t need the slop any more than anyone else. So I hope this is my final appeal: please stop perpetuating this myth. If you want more information on the problems of using LLMs to code, then I can talk in great length about it - feel free to reach out. Thanks…

    The point is, there has always been a trade-off between the speed of development and quality of engineering (confidence in the code, robustness of the app etc.) I don’t see LLMs as either changing this trade-off or shifting the needle (greater quality in a shorter time), because they are probabilistic and can’t be relied upon to produce the best solution - or even a correct solution - every time. So you’re going to have to pick your way through every single line it generates in order to have the same confidence you would have if you wrote it - and this is unlikely to save time because understanding someone else’s code is always more difficult and time-consuming than writing it yourself. When I hear people say it is “making them 10x more productive” at coding, I think, “and also 10x as unsure what you’ve actually produced”…

    You’ll also need to correct it when it does something you don’t want. Now this is pretty interesting, if you think about it. Imagine you provide an LLM a prompt, and the LLM produces something but not exactly what you want. What is the advice on this? “Provide a more specific prompt!” Ok, so then we write a more specific prompt - the results are better, but it still falls short. What now? “Keep making the prompt more specific!” Ok but wait - eventually won’t I be supplying the same number of tokens to the LLM as it is going to generate as the solution? Because if I’m perfectly specific about what I want, then isn’t this just the same as actually writing the solution myself using a computer language? Indeed, isn’t this the purpose behind computer languages in the first place?..

    We software developers very often pull chunks of code from various locations - not just stackoverflow. Very often they are chunks of code we wrote ourselves, that we then adapt to the new system we are inserting it into. This is great, because we don’t need to make an effort to understand the code we’re inserting - we already understand it, because we wrote it…

    “You should consider combing through Hacker News to see how people are actually making successful use of LLMs” - the problem with this is there are really a lot of hype-driven stories out there that are basically made up. I’ve caught some that are obvious - e.g. see my comment on this post: https://substack.com/home/post/p-185469925 (archived) - which then makes me quite sceptical of many of the others. I’m not really sure why this kind of fabrication has become so prevalent - I find it very strange - but there’s certainly a lot of it going on. At the end of the day I’m going to trust my own experiences actually trying to use these tools, and not stories about them that I can’t verify.

    ~ Tom Gracey

    Source

    Absolutely… Thank you, from the very depths of my heart and soul… dear Tom Gracey, programmer, artist… for the marvel you do… for the wisest attitude, for the belief in in human… in effort… in art…