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I lurk on an NZ-based school IT manager email list. It's fascinating to watch these poor folks wrestle every day with the proprietary rubbish they've had foisted upon them - it's all they know, actually - complaining about vendor policy & pricing changes, bad support, EOL'd systems, byzantine licensing headaches, proprietary non-standards compatibility issues, and the lack of capabilities & money to afford stuff they need. They're trying their best, but the school IT status quo is totes broken.
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I need to remember BSides Toronto this year - it's always at a time of year when I'm not thinking about things
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?
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silverwizard reshared this.


please boost!!! :boostRequest:

hey there!

i need $100 to order groceries, $60 for medical weed, and $35 for my upcoming phone bill ($195 total)

i'm currently unemployed and job searching and was recently kicked out of the place i'd been staying for years. details here: https://cyberpunk.lol/@vantablack/112080004580673240

paypal: https://paypal.me/v33b33

cashapp: https://cash.app/$vantablack420

venmo: https://venmo.com/vantablack420

liberapay: https://liberapay.com/v4nt4bl4ck

ko-fi: https://ko-fi.com/vantablack420

GFM (laser): https://gofund.me/aa09f716

patreon (monthly): https://www.patreon.com/vantablack

thank you so much 🖤

#MutualAid #TransCrowdFund


please boost!!! :boostRequest:

UPDATE: as of TODAY i have been kicked out by my roomie

so i'm here to ask for three things:

1. housing in seattle


this is the biggest one. i am now so desperate i'm looking for couches to crash on temporarily right away, but also i'd like to seek out something medium to long term so i have time to get my shit together. i'm currently broke and unemployed, with no family or anything to support me, so i can't really pay rent or anything like that yet (i am aware of how huge an ask this is). i will update this post if that changes. and hopefully it will, because...

2. job leads


i'm currently doing my best to job search. after having an utterly sanity-destroying time working in fast food pre-pandemic, that drove me to the brink of suicide, i am extremely wary of fast food or retail and have basically set the hard limit that i can't do anything public-facing for my own mental health's sake. my various mental illnesses further complicate matters, but i'm trying my best to find something that will work for me. my work portfolio is at https://vanta.work

3. donations to keep me going in the meantime


and finally, i'm requesting donations to help keep me afloat. no real goal here, i can tell i'm gonna need as much slack as possible cut to avoid things going south... so, seriously, anything helps give me a bit more breathing room. thank you so much 🖤

paypal: https://paypal.me/v33b33

cashapp: https://cash.app/$vantablack420

venmo: https://venmo.com/vantablack420

liberapay: https://liberapay.com/v4nt4bl4ck

ko-fi: https://ko-fi.com/vantablack420

patreon (monthly): https://www.patreon.com/vantablack

#MutualAid #seattle




silverwizard reshared this.


Not a fan, at all, of tech talks making generalizations about teachers being "unprepared" instead of amplifying the real experiences of teachers and the real work they're doing in this moment, which is tremendous.

#monkigras

silverwizard reshared this.

Here are things my teacher friends have done to take genAI seriously and more importantly take its impact on students seriously:
- developed an entire course project for students to collaboratively "test" and experiment with genAI tools and also see where they replicate misconceptions about scientific knowledge
- spent hours helping students who were on a group project being sabotaged by other students who were insisting on the wrong answers because of relying on genAI

#monkigras

- developed new collaborative classroom exercises helping students learn how to read and triage code that was generated so that they'll be prepared as they encounter it
- held early course ethics and justice discussions where the students were able to surface their concerns and collaboratively think about their values wrt how people's data are used, how artists are treated, how we might think about data surveillance and privacy

#monkigras

Cat Hicks reshared this.

At Code Your Future, we’ve had to work really hard with trainees who see all the nonsense about gen AI “removing the need for junior engineers” to get them to see their own value (!) and learn to use gen AI as a useful learning tool
It’s very understandable that trainees are conflating said nonsense about gen AI and the massive and unfortunate downturn in junior engineering hiring. Which makes the sentiment about gen AI and juniors all the more frustrating for me

I am so glad to hear that students are learning to think critically about AI in particular and more generally about ethical application development.

I think we have had enough of EdTech telling us that learners will be left behind if educators don't use what they are selling right now.

Our brains got us where we are, let's learn how to use them more effectively :-)



One Ring to Kern them all
One Ring to Process Isolate Them
One Ring to Allocate Resources
And In The Process Stack Bind Them?
CISSP is trying to make me care about the Windows Ring Security model

silverwizard reshared this.


If you’re angry about EU regulations because of cookie banners then malicious compliance has worked on you.


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.

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

silverwizard reshared this.


STOP DOING ELECTRON

- WEB PAGES WERE NEVER MEANT TO BE SEPERATE BROWSERS THAT TAKE UP 1GB OF RAM
- MILLIONS OF YEARS OF CHROME EMBEDDED FRAMEWORK AND YET NO REAL WORLD USE FOUND FOR MAKING YOUR MUSIC PLAYER A WEB APP
- "hello yes please take away 1gb of my ram for Discord" statements dreamed up by the utterly deranged
- WANTED TO PUT YOUR WEB APP AS A SHORTCUT ON YOUR DESKTOP? WE HAD A TOOL FOR THAT - WE PUT THE LINK INTO A SHORTCUT FILE
THEY HAVE PLAYED US FOR ABSOLUTE FOOLS

stop writing in only uppercase

@txt.file Unhinged Time Cube style ranting is the idiomatic format for this particular meme template.

@veast / Chloe :3



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

A woman has been ordered to pay her EMPLOYER $9,000.00 because she took maternity leave? WTAF, Canada, you've heard of "maternity leave," women get pregnant and need to take time off work to ensure they don't die or the baby doesn't die during the excruciating experience a pregnancy can be? Get this woman's story into the press, stat. This is ridiculous. Who's the Premier of Alberta? Tar him, feather him, and ride him out of town on a rail!

Wow, this is some MAJOR gaslighting:

“We've made the company decision to terminate your employment. We feel you are not a good fit. I think you'll agree with how things were when you left that it wasn't going well. I don't think you were happy here.” – HR Director Termination phone call

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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

@silverwizard Oh, you meant on the client and then relayed through port 80.
@Hypolite Petovan yeah, end to end vs server to server and client to server

Alex P. 👹 reshared this.


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?


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

how this did this fall apart so fast

I totally feel this, had something at work completely fall apart and now I'm questioning my own competence.

silverwizard reshared this.


Who called it “intellectual property problems around the acquisition of training data for Large Language Models” and not Grand Theft ̶A̶u̶t̶o̶c̶o̶r̶r̶e̶c̶t̶ Autocomplete?
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silverwizard reshared this.


The Doctor: The assembled hordes of Genghis Khan couldn't get through that door, and believe me, they've tried.

Voice from outside: This is the Lock Picking Lawyer, and what I have for you today is a Type 40 TARDIS....

true, LPL is no Genghis Khan horde :)

Haelwenn /элвэн/ :triskell: reshared this.

ed is the standard Unix text editor.
It's even more than Unix as Plan9 has it. (But Plan9's editor is more like acme)


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

That's a shitty situation!

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

@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.

silverwizard reshared this.


fun project idea: make a fake SCADA panel with an “Explode Facility” button, put it behind an unsecured VNC server, and then count how many times the exploding button is pressed

silverwizard reshared this.


heard you liked containerization

Am I gonna need to block you?

Bob Jonkman reshared this.

@Bob Jonkman I'm sorry, I had to share my intrusive thoughts

@rrwo @rkaj Someone else suggested that a better alternative would be a purely semantic markup language with no construct for layout at all, that all presentation should be left to the client. Markdown is adequate for that, obviously, but what seems the most important to me is the latter part.

We have collectively forgotten userstyles, instead we let ourselves be tossed around by whatever is fancy that day or worse whatever is the dark pattern du jour.

Think about it: if styling is entirely client-side there is no way to hide the unsubscribe link as tiny 2pt light grey text on white background, as everyone seems to be doing now. It would force authors to care about structure instead of presentation and hence make everything accessible by default.

I don't think phishing and spam can be solved with a different content-type. Phishing is a about trust, and even my physical mailbox gets unsolicited adverts despite the costs involved.

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@rkaj

Often people *want* to control layout. (Various kinds of virual artists and graphic designers and related industries, for example.)

And I don't mind that. Most of it is not dark patterns, it's someone trying to present content in a visual pleasing way.

But for accessibility, yes, clients need to be able to override the appearance.


silverwizard reshared this.


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.

@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 🙃

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

but thanks!


silverwizard reshared this.


😂
BNA @BNA V5 (Translated)

Situation of the Al art in China
-Use Al to reduce cost >>>
-Fire artists and hire Al user instead >>>
Al user charge more money, and now the price has no difference with the real artist>>>
-Now the company go back to reconcile the real artists again

LMAO

●緑川美帆/G.River @GR_River. 4d
少し先を進んでいる中国アート市場
AIアートでコストを下げられそうなので、絵描きを 解雇、AIアートを使いこなせる人を雇用

5:59 PM 03 Mar 24 5,108 Views
31 Reposts 104 Likes 9 Bookmarks

PS: This image ALT text created using Google Lens web app option. It may contain errors.

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I'm curious about OP in the screenshot being in Japanese while the QRT is talking about Chinese.

Edit: what little I can understand of the post is mentioning China and AI Art so maybe it's 2nd hand info in OP

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I suppose this is relevant again:
"You could not live with your own failure."
"Where did that bring you? Back to me"
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HER: (describes the plot of MRS. HARRIS GOES TO PARIS)
ME: Stop, this is a nightmare, it's like THE GIVING TREE but with classism.

silverwizard reshared this.

pretty much. The recent movie is better than the book.

silverwizard reshared this.


An important aspect of the hacker ethos is the "got so mad at broken proprietary thing that I fixed it myself" attitude. It runs explicitly counter to the cop mentality half of infosec has these days.
In that vein I humbly submit my fucking electric toothbrush: https://frabjousdei.net/post/729554261033287680/fuck-you-oral-b
@ratkins I love your domain name! The toothbrush thing sucks arse, but well done for finding a workaround.
Thanks :). I haven’t written the post yet but I intend to one day turn it into a fully-fledged sect of Pastafsriansism, whose adherents are obliged to flog themselves with a wet noodle.
@Lunaphied oi, you got a loicense for that flipper zero bruv?



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

silverwizard reshared this.


yeah i like Dune 2

Dune 2 others as i would have them dune 2 me !!!

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#CDCsays hand-washing is out, norovirus is the new weight loss regimen

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I'm uncomfortable using Bluesky for a very important reason: I don't know how they pay their bills, and despite this, they've taken VC funding. They have no option but to fuck us over at some point.

I'm exhausted by the enshitification cycle. I miss all the friends I've lost from Twitter and I don't want to go through all of this again.

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Bluesky pays it bills with VC money, which of course is not and is not intended to be a long term solution.

Mastodon and the Fediverse pay their bills with volunteer labor and donations. I'm a bit suspicious that is a viable long term solution.

In either case, I thinks it's reasonable to speculate that eventually things will have to change and either performance/quality will degrade or a new source of income will need to be found.

@stpaultim I should have been clearer and said "I don't understand how Bluesky WILL pay its bills". Because as far as I know, they haven't really said. And ultimately their bills are going to be quite high because they need to pay their VC investments back.

Donations and volunteer labor might not seem sustainable but at least it's out in the open.

Since a lot of the friends I had on Twitter are on BlueSky, I have always the tentation to go there.
Then, I remember all the problems we already had because of Jack. And I stay far from him.

silverwizard reshared this.


Just quickly - anyone here works for the #CDC or has "well respected buddies" there?

Fuck you. You and your buddies are Social Murderers.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_murder

Be a real ally & resign.

#CDC
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Sir Rochard 'Dock' Bunson reshared this.

#CDC #SocialMurder

Engels in his 1845 work The Condition of the Working-Class in England whereby "the class which at present holds social and political control" (i.e. the bourgeoisie) "places hundreds of proletarians in such a position that they inevitably meet a too early and an unnatural death". This was in a different category to murder and manslaughter committed by individuals against one another, as social murder explicitly was committed by the political and social elite against the poor.

Engels:

"But when society places hundreds of proletarians in such a position that they inevitably meet a too early and an unnatural death, one which is quite as much a death by violence as that by the sword or bullet; when it deprives thousands of the necessaries of life, places them under conditions in which they cannot live – forces them, through the strong arm of the law, to remain in such conditions until that death ensues which is the inevitable consequence –

1/2

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... knows that these thousands of victims must perish, and yet permits these conditions to remain, its deed is murder just as surely as the deed of the single individual; disguised, malicious murder, murder against which none can defend himself, which does not seem what it is, because no man sees the murderer, because the death of the victim seems a natural one, since the offence is more one of omission than of commission.

But murder it remains."

#SocialMurder #CDC

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Adrian Cochrane reshared this.

It is a dry run for #ClimateChange policy

Author and journalist Chris Hedges writes that the global ruling classes are the "architects of social murder" by accelerating ecological collapse and climate change:

"What is taking place is not neglect. It is not ineptitude. It is not policy failure. It is murder. It is murder because it is premeditated. It is murder because a conscious choice was made by the global ruling classes to extinguish life rather than protect it."

#CDC #SocialMurder

🕸️ Mercurial Madeline 🕸️ reshared this.

It is 100% ACAB - if there were any “decent” CDC scientists they would speak up or walk out. Silence is complicity in eugenics. Fuck literally every single one of them. None of them should have a career, ever again

Q from Mike Morrice: When will Canada reinstate #UNRWA funding?

A from Melany Joly: This is preoccupying, catastrophic, a nightmare scenario.

But she doesn't answer the question. I suspect the petitions on ourcommons.ca will receive equal non-answers. And Canada will let tbe #Genocide continue

@LALegault

Bob Jonkman reshared this.

@bobjonkman Someone needs to start a site that keeps track of every single politician's score in terms of "answering the question" and the number of times they have dodged an answer by saying shit like "yes, I agree with you, we need to do something".

Even if a conservative asks you a pointless and disingenuous question, you can address it as such. Instead of "No, that is a false equivalency and an overreaction" the liberals say shit like "we are good, we have done this and that"