I am the journeyer from the valley of the dead Sega consoles. With the blessings of Sega Saturn, the gaming system of destruction, I am the Scout of Silence… Sailor Saturn.
The design of ActivityPub (or at least Mastodon) doesn’t exactly help here either, given that you can’t see most of the replies unless you click through to the original instance.
It’s way too easy to leave a reply to a post without realizing that 30 other people have already said the exact same thing. So when I wan’t to avoid being repetitive I have to remember to click through.
Presented without comment: this utter crankery about hacking the Matrix (HN)
Given the highly speculative subject of this paper, we will attempt to give our work more gravitas by concentrating only on escape paths which rely on attacks similar to those we see in cybersecurity [37-39] research (hardware/software hacks and social engineering) and will ignore escape attempts via more esoteric paths such as:, meditation [40], psychedelics (DMT [41-43], ibogaine, psilocybin, LSD) [44, 45], dreams [46], magic, shamanism, mysticism, hypnosis, parapsychology, death (suicide [47], near-death experiences, induced clinical death), time travel, multiverse travel [48], or religion.
Among the things they’ve already tried are torture, touching grass, and declining all cookies:
Unethical behavior, such as torture, doesn’t cause suffering reducing interventions from the simulators.
Breaking out of your routine, such as by suddenly traveling to a new location [199], doesn’t result in unexpected observations.
Saying “I no longer consent to being in a simulation” [200].
Matt Yglesias argued that “Different Places Have Different Safety Rules and That’s OK” following the deadly collapse of a garment factory in Bangladesh. And yet his arguments were perfectly correct, if maybe a bit “too soon.”
Jesus.
Roe v. Wade cannot be overturned twice
Where are your Bayesian priors now, asshole?
Siri, how can I unread a post?
Also look at this dude in the replies advocating for mask-off right-wing sexist / racist / fascist EA: https://x.com/diegocaleiro/status/1729715617945788773 … if you dare 😱
Forget the diss track person, I’ve tracked down the true origin of Friend:
Ugh the universe isn’t fair all my favorite mice at home have broken while my work mouse is still going strong after most of a decade (well except for the glide pad which has indeed worn away into nothingness, now it glides on the grody exterior!)
Enough money to blow it all on a domain name. Not enough money to port their chatbot-app from iPhone to Android, or pay someone to resolve customer issues. (twitter.com, xcancel.com)
Dear ~Sneerclub TechTakes, will you be my ‘Friend’? :)
AI ‘Friend’ Company Spent $1.8 Million and Most of Its Funds on Domain Name (404 media, archive)
AI Companion Device Releases Diss Track Against ‘Friend’ (404 media, archive, diss track on twitter)
Here’s Friend’s advertisement: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O_Q1hoEhfk4 . The music choice and general vibe is… unsettling.
If I had a nickle for every time I’ve heard about dolphin sex I’d have four nickles. Which isn’t much, but also is kind of a lot.
TP0 is the OSI connection-mode transport layer protocol’s transport protocol class 0 duh.
Transport Protocol Class 0 (TP0), the simplest OSI transport protocol, performs segmentation and reassembly functions. TP0 requires connection-oriented network service.
News article about how hard it is to block AI scraping: https://www.404media.co/websites-are-blocking-the-wrong-ai-scrapers-because-ai-companies-keep-making-new-ones/
Possibly anti-universal-healthcare fearmongering. This stat’s been going around US conservative circles. And I even typed that before seeing the thread ended with:
Remember the lopsidedness of health spending and need when talking reform.
“Dear healthy people: don’t let the sickly suck away all your money”
None of you seem to understand. I’m not locked in here with you. You’re locked in here with multiple slurp juices on a single ape!
Here’s a tweet of Winklevoss feeling snubbed by VP Harris (twitter.com)
The Biden-Harris Administration wages all-out war on the crypto industry for 4 years. Despite all of this, Kamala is still invited to the @TheBitcoinConf in Nashville and given a chance to speak to our industry and reset the relationship. What does she do? She declines. She can’t even take the first step and show up to start mending fences. Our industry won’t forget this. We will show no mercy in November.
My hope is that in the not-too-distant future there are no politicians at any Bitcoin or crypto conferences. Not because they are not welcome, but because crypto is so universally accepted that it is no longer a campaign issue and therefore would be a waste of their time. Like going to a conference on whether or not email or the Internet should be legal or allowed.
Ooh, Like the internet! I got Bingo!
Bitcoin bros: more of this self-aggrandizing rage please. It’s so entertaining to read.
The best proposal I’ve seen so far short of destroying all AI scrapers, and essentially what anyone familiar with the specs would come up with.
The only thing I’d add is an analogue to data-nosnippet to exclude only specific sections of the HTML document (w/o needing to reach for an entire iframe); though that’s harder to implement on the crawler end so maybe that’s for the best.
Google uses a second User-Agent directive; while Bing suggests using noarchive. Both of these are pretty hacky and not general, so it’d be good to see the industry standardize on the above proposal.
Japan supermarket chain uses AI to gauge staff smiles, speech tones in quality service push (South China Morning Post).
Called “Mr Smile”, it was developed by the Japanese technology company InstaVR and is said to be able to accurately rate a shop assistant’s service attitude.
It has also been designed with “game” elements that invite staff to improve their attitude by challenging their scores.
The company said its goal was to “standardise staff members’ smiles and satisfy customers to the maximum”.
Thanks I hate it
Press release here: https://www.aeonretail.jp/pdf/240701R_1.pdf or here: https://www.instavr.co.jp/news/aeon-retail-smile-2024-07-01/ (Lots of big words so I didn’t try to read it)
InstaVR’s English website here: https://www.instavr.co/
You can read a blog post from the dude who started that site here: https://rushabh-mehta.medium.com/starting-a-new-political-party-28a2e70cc8c3 I didn’t spot any huge red flags, but I didn’t dig too deep (nor do I know the first thing about Indian politics).
Apparently he aims to start an online political party without any leaders or hierarchy where everything gets voted on. Not to be too cynical, but looking at how small it is right now I imagine they won’t get far enough to see why that doesn’t really work.
Google just announced they’re not getting rid of third party cookies after all. They announced this in a wordy blog post with so much spin as to be confusing (as is tradition): https://privacysandbox.com/news/privacy-sandbox-update/
There was no technical reason why we couldn’t have web fonts. The reason why we didn’t get web fonts for years and years was because browser makers were concerned about piracy and type foundries.
I was a bit surprised when I learned fonts are CORSd at least party as a sort of primitive DRM so that font companies would buy into the webfont spec (that’s how I remember it anyway, it’s been awhile since I dug up the relevant mailing list messages)
Aside but I have been in some weird as heck discussions about how to phrase public blog posts. A few times I’ve had to point out some phrasing is so cryptic that no one will even know what we’re talking about, and really there’s nothing wrong with being a bit clearer about what we want to express. Sometimes you’d like companies want the audience to be bewildered and confused; and I’m not totally sure where this instinct comes from.
(Though in this case they probably don’t want to share too much yet for stonk or legal reasons)
Yikes, OK I already regret clicking that link.