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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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  • Easy to block that - though not with pihole exclusively.

    We use another tool at our network edge to block all 53/853 traffic and redirect all port 53 traffic to our internal DNS resolver (works much like pihole).

    Then we also block all DoH.

    Only two devices have failed using this strategy: Chromecast - which refuses to work if it can’t access googles DNS. And Philips Hue bridges. Both lie and say “internet offline”. Every other device - even some of the questionable ones on a special VLAN for devices we don’t trust - work just fine and fall back to the router-specified DNS.

















  • Nextcloud isn’t exposed, only a WireGuard connection allows for remote access to Nextcloud on my network.

    The whole family has WireGuard on their laptops and phones.

    They love it, because using WireGuard also means they get a by-default ad-free/tracker-free browsing experience.

    Yes, this means I can’t share files securely with outsiders. It’s not a huge problem.


  • You’re conferring a level of agency where none exists.

    It appears to “understand.” It appears to be “knowledgeable. “

    But LLMs do neither of those things.

    Take this note from an OpenAI dev:

    It’s that these models have leveraged so much data they’ve been able to map out relationships between words (or images) in way as to be able to generate what seem like new versions of those things.

    I grant you that an LLM has more base level knowledge than any one human, but again this is thanks to terrifyingly large dataset and a design that means it can access this data reasonably reliably.

    But it is still a prediction model. It just has more context, better design and (most importantly) data to make predictions at a level never before seen.

    If you’ve ever had a chance to play with a model at level where you can control some of its basic parameters it offers a glimpse into just how much of a prediction machine it can be.

    My favourite game for a while was to give midjourney a wildly vague prompt but crank the chaos up to 100 (literally the chaos flag at the highest level) to see what kind of wild connections exist but are being filtered out during “normal” use.

    The same with the GPT-3.5 API in the “early days” - you could return multiple versions of the response and see the sausage being made to a very small degree.

    It doesn’t take away from the sense of magic using these tools. It just helps frame what’s going on under the hood.