FoxQuirk 🦊 @quirk@computerfairi.es

Tired: elaborate remote code execution exploits
Hired: calling her a good girl if she runs the ransomware executable

who’s the “bisects until correct pants size” and who’s the “holds clothes outside fitting room” girl in *your* lesbiab relationship

We got a new microwave! The manual of this one seemingly decided, fuck it, teach the fundamentals and the rest shall follow? A+

Last year, a police tech company shared a plan to make Taser drones for schools. It said they’d “save lives” in the case of a shooting.

Nearly the whole ethics board resigned in response.

But the company seems to be making the tech anyway. NEW w/ WIRED: https://mrkup.org/YJaOO

Texas' government just spent $31.7M in the middle of a heat wave and energy shortage.

No, not to provide fresh shelter to the homeless. Neither to install booths with free fresh water. Neither to increase the number of public spaces (outside of shopping malls) where people can gather, instead of burning energy to keep their homes cool 24/7. Neither to boost its investments in renewables and pivot away from the oil that it keeps digging.

No, the government just gave that money away to Bitcoin miners to convince them to turn off their energy-hungry machines, so everybody else can also use energy to keep themselves cool.

Let that sink in. Even a life-threatening heatwave can't get miners to behave cooperatively and turn off their machines, whose only purpose is as pointless as randomly guessing a number whose SHA256 hash satisfies a certain arbitrary numeric constraint - and they skim some profits out of these pointless puzzles just because someone decided that putting up a system with such perverse financial incentives was a good idea. In order to get them to behave as someone who's not a complete selfish sociopath and evolutionary failure, the government had to compensate them for the losses that they would make by turning off their computers.

I guess that today's capitalism is that system where it's actually ok for the government to spend public money - as long as that money goes to those who need it the least.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/bitcoin-mining-cryptocurrency-riot-texas-power-grid/

ars technica: we don't know how they did it but google chrome now extracts a pint of blood every time you log on

chrome user, dizzy from blood loss: I swear to god I am like this close to switching to firefox

another chrome user, on the verge of fainting from severe blood loss: no need to resort to that, just switch to [insert today's trendy chrome fork here] and be smart like meeee

like genuinely there are times walking around the city when i feel like 2023 seattle is a freaky mirror image of 1970s new york. boarded up windows, steel bars, anticapitalist graffiti everywhere, asshole cops, rude drivers, a not-always-dependable public transit system.

during smoke season it's like, hold on, let me check my information rectangle for local terror fog readings. yup, the terror fog that will kill you if you breathe too much of it is really bad today. better close the windows

the two genders

i don't know if the text supports a trans spidergwen headcanon

like let's be clear, "gwen stacy is trans" doesn't really mean anything because it's got no bearing on the story. it's not explicitly confirmed in words, it isn't brought up as a point of conflict, she just *has* a trans flag and that's all the information we're given.

what it does mean is that she is at least as likely to be trans as she is cis. her being cisgender is equally irrelevant to the plot and equally unconfirmed *by* the plot.

so fuck it. spider-gwen is trans. fight me

"maybe she's just an ally"

allies love putting trans flags with the words "protect trans kids" written on them inside their room above their bedroom door where literally no one else could see it but them

Google’s widely opposed ad platform, the “Privacy Sandbox,” launches in Chrome

Chrome now directly tracks users, generates a "topic" list it shares with advertisers.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/09/googles-widely-opposed-ad-platform-the-privacy-sandbox-launches-in-chrome/?utm_brand=arstechnica&utm_social-type=owned&utm_source=mastodon&utm_medium=social

@Nifflas Ok I checked all the keys,
L is linkedin
W is word
X is excel
N is one note
P is powerpoint
O is outlook
T is teams
Y is yammer

WHAT THE FUCK IS YAMMER?

I have to admit that, if your goal is to have a ton of angry readers send you a detailed list of every single mistake made in your "AI"-written piece, Star Wars is not a bad choice of topic.
TL;DR: ChatGPT&co can write text that makes some superficial sense if you squint your eyes hard enough, but not much more than that.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/07/08/gizmodo-ai-errors-star-wars/

Just a reminder of how dangerous trusting machine learning to reconstruct an image is.
(from https://doi.org/10.1038/s41592-020-01048-5)

@eniko
Advertise your account with one animation

Advertise your account with one animation

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@ret Those are just as bad. :(
There needs to be more restrictions on those sort of single-use electronics.