Ooo. This is a good one.

A computer can have more than one network interface, right? (Like, you can be plugged into ethernet at home but also connected to the WIFI of the coffee shop across the street.)

A VPN gives you a whole new network device (“virtual ethernet card” if you will) that works as if that card was connected to some LAN somewhere else. Typically, you’d forward “all” of your computer’s/smartphone’s/etc traffic through the VPN so that your computer “thinks it’s on that remote LAN” rather than on your home WIFI or whatever.

Proxies… well the term can mean a few different things in different contexts, really. But generally you’re not forwarding “all” traffic through them, just HTTP traffic (and usually only a subset of all HTTP traffic) or just traffic that is specifically told to be forwarded through them.

An opaque web proxy is one that you can point your browser (or other HTTP interface) to. It won’t handle protocols other than HTTP. And when you want to use an opaque web proxy, your HTTP client has to know how to do that. (Whereas with VPN’s, it’s your operating system, not your individual applications, that need to know how to forward through it.)

A transparent web proxy can be something you (and your apps and OS) don’t know you’re even using. When you point your browser or app to a Lemmy instance, it’s almost certain that the domain is pointed not at an application server that actually runs the Lemmy code, but rather at a transparent web proxy that does stuff on the instance-owner’s end like preventing spamming or whatever. This type of proxy is sometimes called a “reverse web proxy” and can also only work with HTTP.

A SOCKS proxy, like an opaque web proxy, requires applications to know how to use it. (Ok, technically that’s not 100% true. It’s possible in some cases to have a transparent proxy of some sort forward through a SOCKS proxy in a way that the application doesn’t know SOCKS is involved. There are also some cool OS-level hacks that can force an app to go through a SOCKS proxy without the app knowing anything about SOCKS. But if you’re doing those things, you’re a hacker.) And with a SOCKS proxy, your computer doesn’t “think” it’s connected to a whole different LAN. Individual applications know that they’re forwarding through SOCKS. SOCKS supports more protocols than just HTTP. Probably all TCP-based protocols, but I don’t think it has any support for UDP. So you won’t be torrenting through SOCKS.

That’s all I can think to say at the moment. There are special-purpose proxies for things like security auditing (like Burp Suite, for instance.) But I’m guessing that’s not the sort of thing you’re asking about.

One, I think?

I cannot think of any other methods

Exactly. What you’re describing isn’t “AI.” It’s “magic.” And “AI” can’t do what OP wants either.

No “AI” solution we have any reason to expect we’ll be able to create in anything approaching the foreseeable future is going to be able to do anything remotely like this without ridiculous amounts of false positives and/or false negatives.

By false positives in this case, I mean things like not coming back from the cool little slideshows until a minute past the end of the commercial break or obscuring important details of the show having falsely “concluded” that it’s a logo or some such.

And I would have assumed “without a lot of false positives” would have gone without saying. If OP is comfortable with lots of non-ad content blocked/obscured along with the ads, then I’ve got a 100% guaranteed zero-false-negatives solution that’ll fit OP’s requirements without involving a speck of “AI” anywhere that OP can implement right now: turn the TV off.

A pet pieve of mine is people randomly sticking the term “AI” into a description of some particular tech solution.

You want ad blocking. (Which is based.) But you don’t want “AI”. If this can be done in a way that doesn’t qualify as “AI”, that would satisfy you, yes?

And using the term “AI” that way makes it clear you haven’t really thought through what you really even want in that feature. (Not that there’s anything particularly wrong with that, especially in a showerthoughts community, but it’s still kindof a “slaps me in the face” kind of thing.)

And the term “AI” is so imprecise anyway.

And particular kinds of “AI” are such a bubble right now. And that’s why everybody is sticking the word “AI” into random contexts for no fucking reason. But it’s also just a gimmick at best and a huge scam at worst.

And “AI” is inevitably bad about false positives and such.

I’d really rather see the word “magic” than “AI” in this context. Because at least that admits that this is an idle wish and not something you think actual real-world adult humans should be seeking venture capital to attempt.

I’m sorry for taking this out on you specifically. You’re definitely not the first person I’ve seen do this.

This isn’t actually a serious question, right?

If you don’t know what I’m talking about (and it’s not shitcoins) I think that means I win. Lol.

• SP: 2
• LP: 4
• SLP: 6

SLP was always the way to go because the quality was so shit even live it didn’t make much difference.

This absolutely sent me.

“work”

The other three quarters are just scared that Elom will sue them if they cut advertising.

(Not really. I suspect many of the other 75% just aren’t willing to admit they’re planning to loosen ties with Twitter (I will not call it “X”) just yet.)

Like… Lemmy “communities”? I don’t think I’ve ever heard them referred to as “channels”. (Not saying you’re wrong to use that terminology. It might be you’re right in your terminology and I just haven’t seen that term used in the last more-than-a-year I’ve been here somehow.)

Whatever the case, my approach is to make my default filtering and sorting “all” and “new” respectively and then opt out of any communities I don’t want to see by blocking it. Gives me a lot of exposure to any newly-created communities.

There are no good LLMs.

Who would win, all the unicorns or all the krackens?

There’s no such thing as “correct” grammar. Different ways of speaking (or writing/typing) can certainly make people view you differently. For instance you might be seen as more or less smart or educated or affluent depending on your way of speaking. But that’s pretty much just stereotypes.

I watched part of an MIT OpenCourseware course on linguistics once. (Very good and recommended, despite the fact that I haven’t finished it.) At one point the professor told the students that “we’ll speak no more about prescriptive linguistics except to mock it.”

For the calculations, I was thinking maybe one could cheese it a bit and get a relatively decent vague idea of the answer if not a more rigorous idea.

My vague idea was that gravity follows an inverse square law while the centrifigul force equasion is linear relative to the length of the tether. We know that gravity pulls toward Earth and the centrifigul force pulls away. So the net force on the weight at any one time is the centrifigul force equasion (a linear equasion) minus the gravity equasion (an inverse square equasion). We also know that the point at which that sum reaches zero is exactly the altitude of a geostationary orbit.

Work equals force times distance. So suppose we just took the area under the curve of that net force equasion from r equals the radius of the Earth to r equals roughly the furthest we vaguely guess we could send the weight before it starts to get sucked into the Moon’s gravity well. And then we divide that by the area under the curve from r equals the Earth’s radius to r equals the altitude of a geostationary orbit. That should at least give us a figure like “the amount of energy we could get back in theory would be roughly x times what it takes to get the weight past the geostationary orbit altitude threshold.”

The mass of the weight would be a term in that net force equasion, but if we just decided the mass was “one unit”, that’d make things a bit simpler. If we only care about the ratio of the energy we get back to the energy we put in, the weight should cancel out anyway.

This approach would certainly ignore a lot of things, but if the answer was “A Large Number™”, I think it would still be reasonable to handwave the details. (If the result was like 1.1 or something, probably “no, that doesn’t even work in theory” is the much safer bet. Let alone if it was less than 1.)

I guess if we wanted to get even more sophisticated, we could take into account things like the weight and tensile strength of carbon nanotubes and see if it would be infeasible to build a tether sufficiently strong without adding a huge amount of weight during the ascent. But I’d be willing to pretend in this thought experiment that we have some material with infinite tensile strength and zero weight at our disposal.

Anyway! Still not trivial math, quite, and definitely not terribly precise or rigorous, but not quite so “big-boy stuff” as modeling the rotational frames and such.

The A* algorithm doesn’t have anything to do with machine learning either, but the first time I ever learned about it was in a computer science class in college called something like “Introduction To Artificial Intelligence”.

But it’s very much the case that the term “AI” has a very different meaning now-a-days during this cringy bubble than it did back in 2004 or 2005 or whenever that was.

Today “AI” is basically synonymous with “BS”. Lol.

So, first off, I’m definitely not arguing this would be a feasible way to get energy in a practical sense in the real world.

But, it wouldn’t be a perpetual motion machine. It’d produce less and less energy as the Earth ran out of angular momentum, ultimately approaching zero.

I don’t think I’ll do the monster math on this, but my gut tells me one could technically and theoretically (not so much in practice) get more energy out of that than it took to get the weight up there. (It might be that the Moon would limit how much energy could be got out of this scheme as well, but I think even with the Moon involved, I think it could still be a net energy gain.) That said, without running the numbers, you might well be right!

AI is quite fit for the task of understanding what might be the purpose of code

Disagree.

I don’t know how some non-AI tool could be better for such task.

ClamAV has been filling a somewhat similar use case for a long time, and I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone call it “AI”.

I guess bayesian filters like email providers use to filter spam could be considered “AI” (though old-school AI, not the kind of stuff that’s such a bubble now) and may possibly be applicable to your use case.

What I posted would take energy from the angular momentum of the Earth rotating on its own axis, not the (angular?) momentum of the Earth revolving around the Sun.

Honestly, I’m not 100% sure the right way to talk about where the Earth’s angular momentum about its own axis came from. I want to say gravity while the Earth coalesced from dust/gas, but I’m not sure that’s quite true because I think the gravity would only kindof “concentrate” the angular momentum that was already present in the gas/dust that was already present in the cloud. (Like, when an ice skater pulls their arms toward their body and speed up, that doesn’t add energy or momentum to the system that is the ice skater.)

So, maybe it’s more accurate to say it’s kinetic energy from the Big Bang and/or supernova(s?) that produced the gas/dust that eventually formed the Earth?

But I’m pretty sure this scheme would get energy from a source that wasn’t ultimately from the Sun.

It’d be interesting to think of novel ways of getting power from sources other than the Sun.

Theoretically, one could, say, build a space-elevator-like device and use the centrifugal force pushing it away from Earth to run a generator. Of course, for that to work, the weight would have to continually receed from Earth, and may require continually replacing the weight. Ultimately that would rob the Earth of angular momentum.