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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 (9 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

reshared this

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?

Alex P. 👹 reshared this.



CISSP Exam next week
Cat apparently suddenly is quadriplegic or something
Major DB upgrade at work

how this did this fall apart so fast



Do you think I can crack my USB bluetooth dongle open and find some contacts to alligator clip an antenna to?
in reply to silverwizard

That's a shitty situation!

Maybe you can find some other BT dongle that has an external antenna?

in reply to christian mock

@christian mock the issue there is that it would then cost me money, and take work that wasn't "stupid electronics hacks"


I want to play Burning Wheel in the Castlevania show universe. Just so many big ol vampires and nightmare monsters hanging out, and so many good options for trying to stop them from living. And lots of times to angst about it.




CISSP exam in two weeks, and I've no iudea how the exam compares to the practices

I feel like I know all the stuff, but feel like a 4 hour multiple choice exam I have to wake up at 6:30 am for is the least ideal way to test that

Any advice/assurances for someone who really just needs letters that tell well-meaning HR people that I am hirable?

silverwizard reshared this.

in reply to silverwizard

@silverwizard: if I can pass it, just about anybody can. There is certainly a lot of stuff to take in, but it is learnable.

I should admit that it took me two tries, but i got there 🙃

in reply to BB

@BB :verified_cool: I really hope I don't have to find another fee, that's my main fear!

but thanks!

@BB


in reply to silverwizard

@silverwizard: ...i was too until I tried it and then I wanted this thing everywhere.


Fuck
I just realized why I'm always confused why my coworkers want an update in slack for PR changes rather than just using the automated emails.

It's because I've levelled to the point of being Email Driven

in reply to Hypolite Petovan

@Hypolite Petovan Just shark your wires! It'll be fine!

Or use some screen scraping! We're too afraid of writing software that lies to other software! Mouse clicks are just programs!



Doing a vulnerability hunt at work. Finding everything that's low priority and triaging it.

Everyone is learning why they don't want to do my job!

screwlisp reshared this.



the Netflix show Is It Cake is entering its third season, but it's great for when the kids are tired and we're tired and we want to watch something without stakes. So uh, I am happy but baffled



Robot vacuums need a "I have a toddler and they want to push you around" mode