nyquildotorg

nyquildotorg, 8 months ago to random

I've been talking about how AI will directly lead to an Idiocracy (2006) scenario for some time, but today's update to the "can you melt eggs?" saga is as clear an illustration of how as I think it's possible to ever have.

Quora's AI answers made up the melting point of eggs, and then Google picked it up and responded affirmatively that you can indeed melt eggs.

Then people wrote articles about how stupid it is that Google says eggs can melt. The Google fixes the answer.

Then Google ingests an article about how stupid it is that Google says you can melt eggs, and suddenly Google starts answering affirmatively again that you can melt eggs, citing the article about how stupid Google is for thinking you can melt eggs.

nyquildotorg, 10 months ago to random

Zoom trying to do damage control by obfuscating what they say VS what they mean is a good reminder to take PR statements with a grain of salt. By looking at what Zoom has actually done, you'll quickly see all the times they've flat-out lied.

Remember when Zoom claimed to offer end-to-end encryption but didn't? I do.

Remember when they said they've made joining meetings on macOS easier but actually installed an exploit that made Zoom re-install itself if a user uninstalled it? I do.

Remember when Zoom said they were protecting user privacy but then handed user data to Facebook? I do.

It's always good to have a reminder that what a company says is often of significantly less importance than what they've done.

nyquildotorg, 10 months ago to random

Guy who spent 30 years not realizing that being a stenographer is not the same thing as being a steganographer. "I've wasted my life," he wrote, via every 5th letter of every 3rd sentence of every odd-numbered paragraph of the transcript of today's court proceedings.

nyquildotorg, 10 months ago to random

There's a local mural artist whose work always features Mayan styling and their work is always great, but this one caught my eye this morning and I think it's particularly rad.

nyquildotorg, 8 months ago to random

The way Electron breaks the browser security model is definitely bad, but I think it's important to separate Electron's actual security issues from the things people do inside of Electron.

Namely, a node_modules folder full of shit they mostly don't even know the purpose of, let alone the trustworthiness of the developers who wrote it (or the trustworthiness of all the things those developer had in their node_modules folder.)

The combination of no browser security plus an unlimited number of unvetted dependencies is a really bad combination.

nyquildotorg, 6 months ago to random

"Could AI lead to a four-day workweek?"

Sure! Just get everyone to start posting on the web that there are only four days in a week, then the AI will believe it to be true. Once the AI believes it's true, everyone else will too.

nyquildotorg, 8 months ago to random

As a long time citizen of the fediverse, I'm continually baffled at the amount of energy people are suddenly expending trying to get other people to make their content searchable.

I absolutely understand being excited that your content can be searchable, but to be vocally trying to convince everyone else that their content should be searchable too just feels weird.

For many, the entire purpose of joining the fediverse was to avoid being searchable after suffering from the negative impacts of it on corporate social media networks.

nyquildotorg, 9 months ago to random

Watching Rogue One: A Star Wars Story the other night, my wife made a pretty insightful comment. "For such a technologically advanced society with space travel and everything, they sure have shitty TVs. [Beat] Maybe that's why they're technologically advanced. If we didn't have television maybe we'd have space travel too."

nyquildotorg, 6 months ago (edited 6 months ago) to random

Edit: I'm not thrilled that people are sharing this as an implication that government funding means the government must have a backdoor.

I understand why people are making that connection and feel silly for not expecting that people would, but I don't want to want people to think I believe that.

nyquildotorg, 1 month ago to random

DNS-over-Wikipedia is hilarious

nyquildotorg, 9 months ago to random

This story about Douglas Adams being essentially held hostage in a hotel, forced to write is pretty great.

nyquildotorg, 8 months ago to random

Speeding up the JavaScript ecosystem - Polyfills gone rogue

Among the various packages that pulled in define-properties was eslint-plugin-react. It caught my eye, because it's very popular in the React ecosystem. Why does it pull in a polyfill for Object.defineProperties? There is no JavaScript engine that doesn't come with it already built in.

At the time of this writing installing eslint-plugin-react pulls in a whopping number of 97 dependencies in total. I was curious about how much of these were polyfills and began patching them out one by one locally. After all was done, this brought down the total number of dependencies down to 15. Out of the original 97 dependencies 82 of them are not needed.

nyquildotorg, 27 days ago to random

Slowly adding erotica phrases to all the Google Docs I'm sick of having to maintain at work

nyquildotorg, 7 months ago to random

Every ghost hunting show on TV will tell you that ghosts need so much energy to manifest that they suck the energy right out of the air, creating "cold spots."

They'll also tell you that traumatic deaths increase the likelihood of a spirit being left in our world to create those cold spots.

Sharks, I'm seeking 80 billion dollars in exchange for 49% ownership of my system for solving climate change, by simply massively increasing the number of traumatic deaths in our most temperature-sensitive areas.

nyquildotorg, 9 months ago to random

It's funny that the climate ruining Burning Man is getting more press than how Burning Man ruins the climate.

nyquildotorg, 8 months ago to random

It actually wasnt that easy saying NFTs were a grift at the beginning. One of the earliest promotional tactics was to link NFTs to "making sure artists get paid" and any objection to the technology was poo-pooed and you were branded as someone who hates artists.

It became a little easier when people started recognizing the disastrous carbon impact, but it was still quite some time before criticisms of the technology (or the ancillary grifts around it) didn't immediately cause you to be piled on by some of the very artists you were trying to save from the grift.

nyquildotorg, 8 months ago to random

"Firefox introduces new privacy mechanism" 👍

"... powered by Cloudflare" 👎

nyquildotorg, 9 days ago (edited 8 days ago) to random

Microsoft: takes screenshots of the screen, OCRs them and places the data in an unprotected sqlite file for later recall.

Apple: creates new NPU architecture designed to save PDFs of the screen and OCR them, storing the data in CoreData for later recall by authenticated users.

Ubuntu: every time the computer sleeps, it wakes up slightly slower than the last time, until you reboot it.

nyquildotorg, 6 months ago to random

"The more I think about it, the more I realize Apple’s Self-Service Repair program is the perfect way to make it look like the company supports right-to-repair policies without actually encouraging them at all."

www.theverge.com/2022/5/21/23079058/apple-self-service-iphone-repair-kit-hands-on

nyquildotorg, 2 months ago to random

Hot take: anyone buying from data brokers is an enemy. As is anyone selling data to data brokers.

Congress votes unanimously to ban brokers selling American data to enemies

"The US House of Representatives has passed a bill that would prohibit data brokers from selling Americans' data to foreign adversaries with an unusual degree of bipartisan support: It passed without a single opposing vote."

www.theregister.com/2024/03/21/congress_votes_unanimously_to_ban/

nyquildotorg, 3 months ago to random

Now that ShotSpotter locations have leaked, I can finally start work on adapting the William Tell Orchestra for a citywide performance. All that percussion is going to be epic.

nyquildotorg, 1 month ago to random

I talk a lot about how I believe YouTube Premium is the only thing that can make consuming YouTube videos approach being an "ethical" activity, which is surprisingly controversial.

This old Tom Scott video does a pretty good job of explaining how some of what people hate the most about YouTube is actually an extremely rational approach to problems they don't even realize exist.

Watching this and even fully agreeing with Tom on this take won't get you all the way to where I'm at, but my hope is that it increases the awareness of just how much the way YouTube has handled things actually aligns with the way people consuming and creating for YouTube have become accustomed to working.

nyquildotorg, 1 month ago to random

I never noticed it before, but in the "outline icon" form of the Mastodon logo, it looks very much like a fist punching you in the face:

a line drawing of a fist in the same position as the Mastodon icon in the first image. They look very similar.

nyquildotorg, 1 month ago to random

A position on which I continue to get a startling amount of pushback from well-meaning folks is that "privacy-preserving" surveillance capital doesn't address the actual threat model.

The problem with surveillance capital isn't that advertisers "know who you are," it's that your eyeballs are being sold to the highest bidder based on actions you take. It's not about "privacy" in terms of your identity at all.

Advertisers don't give a shit who you are.

Preventing advertisers from knowing who you are does nothing to stop every action you take being monetized by the companies you made the misfortune of giving data to in the past.

nyquildotorg, 5 months ago to random

hot take: the fediverse is not social media.