The internet is so different than when I was a kid. I remember setting up a webserver and watching the logs with excitement as a spider from google crawled my page. A server back then might get 10 hits a day if no one was promoting it. Now you look at the logs of a brand new website and within minutes there are thousands of hits of bots trying to hack wordpress and php my-admin. The question is not 'is someone trying to brute force my ssh password' but rather 'at what rate are the connection attempts coming in'. It is truly crazy out there now, seems to get worse every year. I wonder how long until we talk about how powerful your network/server must be just to handle the base load of existence...
Remember when AI was used to generate a George Carlin comedy routine? That didn’t happen. Generative AI isn’t that good.
After the George Carlin’s estate sued, a representative of the show admitted that it was human-written. The claim that it was produced by an AI trained on Carlin’s material appears to be far from the truth, and rather used as a way to garner attention.
Cory Doctorow frequently reminds us that these stories of magical AI is peddled by both boosters and critics. Critics of AI make the mistake of also assuming that AI is this good, and talk about it as bad use of AI. This unnecessarily inflates the idea that AI can do things that it really can’t, adding fuel to magical thinking.
It’s probably a good idea to more often question if AI is even in the picture, given how effective it has become as a marketing vehicle. Was there AI involved? Perhaps, but not to the extent that salespeople would have you imagine
And yes, there's a name for this kind of criticism: "criti-hype.” A term coined by Lee Vinsel. Read more in Doctorow’s blog post, as always littered with further reading:
@axbom This seems to happen a lot with hype cycles. A majority of crypto projects at the hight of cryptomania were also centralized services and nit defi or crypto at all. [to the extent that they even existed, I think the actual majority was nothing more than a landing page].
It seems like #WeaveWorks (the #GitOps "inventors") have essentially imploded as a company, leaving the #Flux project in... well, flux I guess. We'll likely see more news like this in the #CloudNative space this year :/
fastgpt > Is there a simpler alternative to Varnish?
Based on the context provided, there are a few alternatives to Varnish that are mentioned as being simpler:
Linseed oil is mentioned in item 5 as a natural and ecological alternative to varnish for protecting wood, without requiring complex surface preparation.[1]
Cloudfront is discussed in item 3 as being the most similar AWS product to Varnish, and potentially a simpler option for smaller shops.[2]
Spirit-soluble varnish without an isolation coat is suggested in item 1 as a simple protective option compared to traditional varnish.[3]
So in summary, linseed oil, Cloudfront, and spirit-soluble varnish without isolation are presented as potential simpler alternatives to Varnish for certain use cases.
@louis Given that I'm home now with some awfull virus and a fever I'm pretty sure my face doesn't look pale. Kinda dark and splotchy actually. But normally I feel OK and I don't think I'm particularly pale. In my case supliments are %100 necessary. The well known ones that are hard to get in a vegan diet are B12, D, and Calcium. I actually don't notice anything when I forget these though. The most important one for me is bioavailable EPA/DHA omega 3 oil. I take it in the form shown in the photo.
Without it I become exhausted and depressed within a few weeks. Given that highly bioavailable Omega3 is only available in seafood I'd need to take this supliment if I were to live on the traditional Czech diet of pork and potatoes as well. Some people are allegedly able to get their omega 3 from flax oil but I happen to need the good stuff straight from the sea.
I guess I'm a bit of a trans humanist, I view Veganism as a peacefull future that civilized society can mature to, not as a fundamentally natural order. I am not really a fan of natural orders I guess, nature is kind of brutal. I certainly don't want to be a tribal stone age person. I'd probably be killed by a larger more agressive man.
A lot of men, me included also feel chronically hungry on a naively planned vegan diet. The solution is tempeh. I'm not sure if there is a particular recipe book for me to point to, I've been on this diet for years and try to eat what I enjoy and makes me feel good.
Is there something like ublock for mastadon which could be configured to automatically hide softcore porn bots and mains stream media news bots in the global feed?
@louis If someone were to build something like this do you think it would be best to do it at the client level or would it be possible to somehow make a tool that would autoconfigure mutes at the account level? I wonder if thousands or tens of thousands of mutes would slow down the emacs.ch server. I don't want to cause strain on the resources of small instances but I think it would be usefull to have fine grain filtering of 'no porn' or 'no news bots' that users could select.
Question for those who know trains in #germany, when going from Berlin to Brussels is 1st class noticeably more comfortable than 2nd class? I'm heading to #FOSSDEM and have decided to try train rather than plane :).
German law is making security research a risky business.
Current news: A court found a developer guilty of “hacking.” His crime: he was tasked with looking into a software that produced way too many log messages. And he discovered that this software was making a MySQL connection to the vendor’s database server.
When he checked that MySQL connection, he realized that the database contained data belonging to not merely his client but all of the vendor’s customers. So he immediately informed the vendor – and while they fixed this vulnerability they also pressed charges.
There was apparently considerable discussion as to whether hardcoding database credentials in the application (visible as plain text, not even decompiling required) is sufficient protection to justify hacking charges. But the court ruling says: yes, there was a password, so there is a protection mechanism which was circumvented, and that’s hacking.
I very much hope that there will be a next instance ruling overturning this decision again. But it’s exactly as people feared: no matter how flawed the supposed “protection,” its mere existence turns security research into criminal hacking under the German law. This has a chilling effect on legitimate research, allowing companies to get away with inadequate security and in the end endangering users.
@WPalant This is self sabotage by the German government. It's a shocking display of utter incompetency. If I find a security flaw in German software I certainly won't be telling anyone about it. This simply weakens German security for no reason.
I have a hard time taking seriously people who warn me that the next US presidential election will decide between democracy and fascism and then spend most of their time yelling at anonymous strangers online about not voting.
Why are you not desperately trying to get out the vote in swing states? Or stockpiling ammo and batteries for your insurrectionary cell?
@HeavenlyPossum If the only choice is 'democracy or fascism' then you don't have democracy. Telling me I must vote a certain way doesn't a democracy make.
@johnquiggin@HeavenlyPossum How are the Democrats going to give us democracy. They've had plenty of power in my lifetime and I've been hearing from that the choice is between them and fascism my whole life. I don't see any change.
People sometimes ask me why I don't drink alcohol. And the answer is so I don't accidentally pre-order the Simula One Founders' Edition https://shop.simulavr.com/
@holgerschurig@EFreethought I'm sorry that you had such a negative experience with alchohol in your familly. I initally intended this post to be light hearted but I too have experienced the negative impacts of alchohol. My father used to drink and read the news paper every evening. And when he was doing so he didn't want me to bother him. He used to get so angry with me and tell me to go to my room. I gues those who promote drinking didn't experience that. They don't know how lonely it can be growing up with a persistently intoxicated parent. I guess that's a good thing, but I do wish they had more empathy towards the teatotalers sometimes.
