Wow, high ups at NYT and WaPo are apparently now officially war criminals.

Two things can be, and in fact are, both true: • AI is unethical whether it works or not. • AI doesn't work.

This is effectively a declaration of war against every single country in the world.

RE: https://cyberplace.social/@GossiTheDog/115826683070912702 Watch the slimy AI pushers who insist AI is an accommodation for people with accessibility needs start claiming this is one for ppl who lack visual imagination. 🤮

@futurebird would be a good book or movie. The only issue is that I’m not sure it’s believable that an AI CEO would care so much about past misdeeds coming to light. They’ve moved past being concerned about accountability. Maybe one might worry about being double crossed by the president or some […]

Story Idea: A caviler AI CEO guy finds out that the hard drives that contain evidence of his many horrific crimes (Think American Psycho) were also included in the training data. He's able to erase the evidence they were scanned but can't restart the training to totally remove them. He's not […]

Scifi/micro-sf about "AI" run amok feels maybe quaint but unappealing to engage with when you see how much more banal the real way it reaches the same ends, and that the machine all along was capitalism.

If you start talking about compromise positions with a con that's falling apart as its falling apart becomes more visible, I know you can't be trusted and have either a really bad vantage point or an agenda. This is a post about both fascism and AI. Or, as one could simplify that to, about fascism.

The other piece of this, as I've pointed out elsewhere, is that AI boosters intentionally expand the term "AI" to include things that are perfectly sensible and reasonable to provide narrative cover, exactly the same way police do things like direct traffic to shield themselves from public […]

@xgranade "stop believing extraordinary claims made with underwhelming evidence" is fantastic advice in any context ❤️

From there, "OK, so I haven't seen any evidence sufficient to conclude that AIs can do $x" immediately calls into question any product or service which claims to do $x with LLMs and GANs. Are they just pushing spam and/or slop on you? Category I! Is the booster in question lying and not […]

The broad synthesis, though, is that once you stop believing extraordinary claims made with underwhelming evidence or even no evidence at all, the whole tower of AI bullshit falls apart. "But how does AI do $x?" It doesn't. Even if you don't personally have the knowledge to conclude that LLMs […]

RE: https://wandering.shop/@xgranade/115772870672213549 I could offer a similar "theorem" for replies to this toot: • Bad-faith replies from AI boosters trying to pull a fast one. • "Moderates" who believe at least some of the outlandish claims made by AI boosters, and who like to pretend that […]

I just read about people being asked to show their LinkedIn to get into clubs in SF This is why I don’t go out anymore

RE: https://infosec.exchange/@Em0nM4stodon/115815542706568264 Because unlike commercial social media, fediverse doesn't attempt to silo you with people in the same linguistic & geopolitical bubble to make you more lucrative to advertisers and less of a threat to nationalists.

I asked CVS how much my meds cost without insurance. They were like $350. lol (Yes I know about GoodRx) I sent it to Costco. The same thing is $25

psychology literature on autism is all so cringe. "90% of autistic people are men" 100% of us can't believe you've fallen for this self-fulfilling diagnostic issue. ... and 90% of us wear striped knee socks. "a few autistic people are so high-functioning that they even manage to hold down a […]

All conservative concerns are contrived and illegitimate and should be dismissed with prejudice. Even the ones that you would otherwise give credence to from a non-conservative.

I think one of the wildest parts of the Epstein Files fiasco to me is billionaires are so different that they talk about the darkest most blackmailable secrets of the worlds elite in gmail when I am miserably embarrassed Google is retaining my everyday online cosplay purchase history to train AI.

Who came up with the grossly inaccessible (hazard to NNT users) iOS "feature" of turning VoiceOver accessibility mode on when you triple tap physical button??? If you don't need that accessibility feature when you first setup your phone, you don't need it randomly getting turned on later. 🤬🤬🤬

Unexpectedly, my paper got some press attention. @jswatz_tx found it and wrote a short piece in the NY Times. And then locksmiths freaked out. I mean completely lost it. They were very upset, not so much that a very common lock design had a basic security flaw, but that an "outsider" found it […]

I was recently reminded of this. A couple decades ago, I wrote a short paper that described how the basic approaches of cryptography and computer security lead to an efficient and practical privilege escalation attack against master-keyed mechanical lock, which I published in IEEE Security and […]

Heatpump install In June 2025 I got a heat pump installed in my 3 bedroom semi-detached house built in 1900. I thought I'd document the process as it may be of interest to others, particularly some aspects of the heat pump sizing and installation of the underfloor heating, which on discussing […]

@blogdiva we (@steggy and I) lived in London for 10 years. We learned to cook in metric because you must. But now we are back in America and we cook metric still. Once you learn it, it’s ridiculous to have umpteen spoons and cups and things to measure by volume when you can just use mass. When […]

RE: https://hachyderm.io/@dalias/115781791548713164 #caturday chonk boost

It's past Christmas, so time for more Arcalibre work! Today, got a bunch more unit tests moved out of the src/ tree and into a separate tests folder. Not all of them pass yet, and there's still a bunch more to move over, but 46 / 268 failing isn't quite as bad as I feared […]

Lazyweb, anyone know a working bypass for the Twitch "Your browser is not currently supported" login wall?

RE: https://mastodon.social/@blackoutvpn/115783697075579895 Entirely unsurprising.

Happy holidays, fediverse! I got you a megathrust earthquake, soil liquefaction, spine-tingling papers about the way our networks confound knowledge, and a PDF in a pear tree. It's my wrap on a year of trying to make sense of how we make sense of what's happening to us […]

Spicy Take: Fuck the FOSS bro mindset of "We can overlook bad behavior of maintainers because if it gets TOO bad we can just fork it." And "It's okay to use 'open core' products even though the whole project couldn't survive without its corporate overlords who refuse PRs and public maintainer […]

[Dickens, poverty] Looking into this a little, Dickens appears to be reacting against the Poor Laws of his time, which were passed after the disruptions of the Black Death to suppress wages, crack down on travel, and force people to work who otherwise would choose not to given the terrible pay […]

[Dickens, poverty] I’ve watched a few versions of A Christmas Carol during this most festive of seasons and especially last night I kept thinking about how unbelievably wealthy and privileged Dickensian England was during colonialism. All of this suffering and child labor and disease and filth […]

@stux What gets me is shop.com and the like who recognise me by cc number and then send receipts to the last email they saw. That was fun this Christmas for gift buying. I've never set up an account or installed an app ner nuttin.

Online shopping 2025. 🤵 Orders something online. 🏬 Want to track the order? 🤵 Yes! 🏬 Scan this code: 🤵Uh, okay. 🏬 Download our app to track your order. 🤵 Ugh.. alright.. 🏬 Before you can use our app you need an account! 🤵 Never mind! Data data harvesting, it's all data harvesting.

@dplattsf You'd really think "I need this specific car to go to this address" would be a thing a self-driving car company would be capable of doing. Kinda... the whole purpose of the thing, isn't it? Can't wait until one drives off with someone's child aboard.

current status of dinner - #waymo drove off with 3 bags of ingredients in the trunk before I could hit the open trunk button. Turns out they can’t drive car back, they can at best return car to depot so now driving across San Francisco to retrieve groceries […] [Original post on sfba.social]

[cw: swastikas] RE: https://mastodon.scot/@HI_Greens/115777430188172351 TikTok advertising explicit nazi merch... As quote boost so I could CW it.

RE: https://hachyderm.io/@dalias/113708422515011902 Bumping this thread for its one year anniversary. It feels particularly relevant in light of continued revelations.

😈 idea: a "how's my driving?" bumper sticker with voip number hooked up to a tts greeting caller with "Hi karen, I mean $name. You phone number $number has been reported for mobile phone use while driving in the state of $state. Have a nice day." with name pulled from some reverse white pages.

A pattern here is that the rest of the world leaves the US behind, and the right decides that’s evidence of our greatness. We measure with “freedom units,” our guns keep us safe from tyranny, car-centric development is another form of freedom, etc.

Neofeud 2 is a #retro 90's-style game where an ex-robo-marine and a rebel hacker struggle against an empire on its last legs. Get Neofeud 1 70% off now & help me finish #2 (pictured)! https://store.steampowered.com/app/673850/Neofeud/ […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

Lately I have noticed that when you purchase a ticket you don’t get a static PDF/PNG anymore. Increasingly often, you get a .pkpass file, which is supposed to be opened in wallet apps (like Google Wallet or any 3rd-party). Since I don’t like to share information about the events I attend with […]

Hot take (?): Folks should treat any functional-programming-adjacent project as fash unless the people behind it are vocally antifascist.

Cursed/🔥 idea: mechanical stick shift EVs where the stick reconfigures the battery array for speed/torque tradeoff.

Fun fact about Apple (iOS) devices: there is utterly no way to clear app data caches without fully deleting (not just offloading) the app, the Maps app is a system bundled app that only gets offloaded if you try to delete it, and the Maps app leaks tens of GBs (likely in sqlite shit) over time […]

apparently github will now silently insert copilot-generated commit messages if you don't provide any commit body via the web interface 🤮

I've heard anecdotal reports of computer repair places "accidentally" breaking the ram and refunding the customer the catalogue price from six months ago, presumably to feed it into machines of more important corporate customers... so we're already at the scavenging-to-survive stage of AI […]

It was labeled “Spanish Flu” because allied forces in World War I embargoed any news about the spreading and deadly influenza, but Spain wasn’t involved in the war, so any focus or mentions about on the disease came out of Spanish press and media. That’s why it’s called “Spanish Flu”. This is […]

Most of being on fedi is pleasant, but the most unpleasant part of being here might be getting periodically reminded that Slashdot still exists. Before fedi I don't think I'd heard of it in 15 years or so.