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One of my groupchats has a channel called "Dystopic Chuckling" and it's just us making jokes about the horrors around us.

And... why

Why is this necessary.



Itch.io is so easy to use, it feels like piracy.
This is an endorsement

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Fuck KnowBe4.

Phishing Simulation training is so often just a way of making companies and employees feel bad.

But apparently insurance has read a KnowBe4 report and has made our insurance contingent on it.

Insurance companies need to keep up.

in reply to silverwizard

ah, no as horrible as it first sounded in my head 😅 . Still, I see your point....


I didn't expect Title IIing to happen today. It's like... uh...

Title II of Internet Services out of nowhere (at least to me, a non-American) is giant. Whoa.

theverge.com/2024/4/25/2414015…

Unknown parent

@Allen Stenhaus (he/him)

The agency voted to reclassify internet service providers under Title II of the Communications Act but says it doesn’t plan to regulate prices.

theverge.com/2024/4/25/2414015…

I mean, I guess?! I don't even know?! What happened!?



Coworkers often are confused why I maintain local copies of all our git repos.

The answer is:

grep -Ri "There was an error while loading announcements" .




My 4 year old has managed to find the UPnP endpoint for the Jellyfin server and added ska to his bedtime playlist...

I am going to need to put his tablet on a vlan before he watches Alien and can't sleep.



I spent two hours this morning discussing recovery strategies, and now I need to figure out how to write that two hour meeting into a single document
in reply to Jonathan Lamothe

@Jonathan Lamothe I mean seriously! Two hours, we got a functional definition of our goals, as well as a future plan! It's so rare I feel like I'm in this place.


https://www.404media.co/we-must-never-forget-how-dumb-the-humane-ai-pin-is/ wrote:

I am now, of course, adding to this neverending discourse with this article. But I want to be clear: No one is under any obligation to be nice to the creators of the Humane pin or the product itself, which, even if it worked, is a gadget that relies on mass content theft and the scraping of huge amounts of human knowledge and creativity to make a product that is marketed as making us more “human.” The people making this argument are people who have a vested interest in the general public continuing to canonize, support, and spend money on a Silicon Valley vision of the future that involves the automation of everything, the displacement of huge numbers of workers, and a new, AI-led internet that has so far done little but flooded the web with low quality junk, been used to make fake porn to harass women, and has led eager beaver know nothing CEOs to prematurely lay off huge numbers of workers to replace them with AI tools built on the back of uncompensated human labor and training largely done by underpaid “ghost workers” in the developing world.

@404 Media is literally the single best tech media in the entire world. There are some other reporters out there who are amazing, but 404 Media has the full chain of support.

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LLM answers are Mad Libs for Tech Bros

Prompt enginneering is the act of replacin "Adjective" with "A Colour" and then rerolling until you finally get one you like



Web Design is the art of removing accessibility until the page is as annoying as possible
in reply to silverwizard

I'm sure my site has accessibility-related atrocities 😭

I've been trying to remediate at least.

in reply to shellsharks

@shellsharks it's frustrating because if we just let the content be, screen readers and stuff would work so easily. We'd have all the standardized hinting there!


Is anyone else very angry that Animorphs has two different BIll Gates, one of whom plagiarized Yeerk tech, and the other that plagiarized Andalite tech?


Wait, fuck

I don't really eat hot sauce, but my uncle and I eat scorpion peppers he grows sometimes...

Should I be less worried about hot sauces?

in reply to silverwizard

@silverwizard: still the 3rd hottest pepper cultivar in the world 🤷‍♂️

in reply to silverwizard

If you only know the story from reading it in Highschool and thinking it made ants seem cool, please understand it was written in 1930s Germany about the dangers of communism by a Nazi.

Which is why we assign it to be read in highschools.

Never Forget was always said ironically.



@404 Media Hey! You require me to sign in to use your website! Cool! That's fine and good!

Can you give me the option to sign in with a password? My password manager is pretty easy for me to use, but I don't tend to have my personal email open on my work laptop and so your signin flow is really keeping me from using your stuff and is the biggest source of friction for me.

Also - holy shit - your journalism is amazing, thanks.

Unknown parent

@Neil Brown @404 Media Ug, I need to get a new good generic RSS reader rather than my weird specific purpose ones


@Becky says my N95 Accent Disguising Machine isn't stopping the Quebecois from realizing I'm not a local
This entry was edited (8 months ago)


Create an Open Source Software Levy, like Canada's rewritable media levy
whenever someone pays for a software license, take a levy and send it to FLOSS foundations
in reply to silverwizard

There are between 0 and 10 layers of irony on this comment, take your pick, I don't know how many it is


Bah, why does no one sell electronics locally anymore. I just want to buy some cables and no one sells those locally. The argument is that I could get it cheaper shipped from somewhere, but I wanna finish this project before I go on a roadtrip tomorrow. Why?!


Watching the wee little Quinton Youtube video, but I'm refusing to try to find all of these


Holy Shit
Holy Shit
The show The Order got a second season.

I want to be clear - this show did not deserve a first season. And I will be watching the hell out of it. Hermetic Order of the Blue Rose is the name for your secret society that you use to say "I know enough to only step on occult rakes"



We should be talking about how GitHub fucked up constantly during the XZ disaster

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in reply to silverwizard

they banned the original maintainer!
they locked the repo!

they did everything they could to make it slower to fix!



Boost the fibre with a staple in it to make a network admin twitch

Bee O'Problem reshared this.



Dug out an old laptop I want to try to mod the screen on last night and started it up, and kicked off a freebsd-upgrade to 14 (last update was 2019, probably before the kids were born)

I stayed up til 1 am waiting for the upgrade to finish, but then crashed, I am now yawning through the Easter Eggs hunt and the laptop is still updating



Being a vendor sucks. So many of the companies I work with don't have contacts for their ISP or their DLP/CASB/EDR providers, because that contact is with the IT team. So they just call us being like "Your product is slow" and I need to dig through data and come back with "Uh, yeah, you're sending all your traffic to a vendor in Iowa with an rtt of 100 seconds?"
in reply to silverwizard

And this is after two escalations on both sides, and the customer being hilariously angry at us because "it's slow" and we're not helping.
in reply to silverwizard

this is also extra shitty because it 100% stems from people not being able to take their frustrations out on their IT team so they take them out on my support team, and fuck that




Me: "Imagine being king?! You'd be like anything I can do Democracy can do better, and democracy fucking sucks"
My Wife: "I forgot you were drunk"


My XMPP of young idealistic hackers is primarily The Dads Chat now...

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LLM generated text is fascinatingc because there's two groups managing it.
1) I am going to call the SpamAssassin side, now I know that you've likely not has email that wasn't Office365 or Gmail for a decade or more, and those are Category Two email services, but we scrappy underdogs filtering email with SpamAssassin have an effect where LLM generated text looks like garbage, and so if you generate your words or images with a GPT engine, it's gotta be scored as garbage
2) the Google/Facebook/Microsoft stance that you should allow all LLM text and diffusion images! They're great! It's the AI revolution!

The problem with Category 2 is that it rapidly makes all your stuff garbage (people only see spam), because if people can generate stuff no one wants to see, but gets past the filter, they will. Google will literally pay them to do that.

If you block that stuff, people who claim there are ethical uses for LLMs (a lie) will be caught, and those generating human supervised text carefully will be blocked.

The goals of people-who-make-money-on-clicks (read: everyone) are only served if:
We only use category 1 filters
The people making money on clicks create things that pass category 1 filters

And the whole "what is happening to facebook" is just the culmination of this obvious point

in reply to silverwizard

this post is incomprehensible because the point is obvious but impossible to explain
in reply to silverwizard

@silverwizard It looks like a post written by a LLM. Syntax is correct but the point is muddled.
in reply to Hypolite Petovan

@Hypolite Petovan The problem is the phantom concept of AI polluting the decisions.

If you could say:
If a platform allows AI then it will become nothing but spam
If a platform blocks AI then it will block people using Ethical AI

But, part of it is that Ethical AI isn't real, and AI is a problematic branding term.

But part of it is that Google/Microsoft/Facebook are allowing AI posts because that way their AI marketing is easier, but it's ruining platforms.

It's really obvious but it's so hard to put into words.

in reply to Hypolite Petovan

@Hypolite Petovan I mean, it's not so hard - it interlinks things I don't wanna interlink, because part of the issue is the ridiculousness of banning one kind of spam but not antoher
in reply to silverwizard

404media.co/404-media-podcast-…
Yeah! Exactly! This!
Facebook is boosting fake content and now is a mess of spam, and that's it. Filter it like bot content, or ruin your site.


I need to remember BSides Toronto this year - it's always at a time of year when I'm not thinking about things
in reply to silverwizard

Of course, that's dependent on their Mask policy, and I assume SecTor's will suck


Talking to my son recently made me realize that most famous Knight in history is probably John Lennon, or Paul McCartney


Does anyone remember the RPG that looks like Castle of the Winds - but the gameplay is just managing the windows that are popping up?


Successfully passed the CISSP exam, I may now finish my career motion from Hacker to Boring


One Ring to Kern them all
One Ring to Process Isolate Them
One Ring to Allocate Resources
And In The Process Stack Bind Them?


I need to invent JaaS, pronounced Jazz, which is secretly just Jenkins as a Service, but is the CI everyone is hoping and wishing for.

Everyone out here with their cobbled together hell of YAML and docker containers trying to build the perfect CI system, and Groovy is just sitting there being simple.

in reply to silverwizard

where do you get that last one? Specially one for Groovy and Jenkins?


go into my older son's room because he wants us to come in every 5 minutes until he's asleep
"where's your tablet? why is it not playing?"
he smiles, I look under his pillow, he's cracked the password and is watching the 1999 Pikachu Shorts


The confidence that tech trainers seem to have that all messaging over Port 80 is unencrypted baffles me

It's just so outside my experience



If you're supposed to be doing security trainings, and you don't let me copy/paste into the password field. Why should I trust you?

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