Artificial stupidity gets it (part) wrong again. It's just word salad. No cognition.
Security MSc. Linux, networking, internet, offensive/defensive security, comedy, films, science, and space flight. And cynicism. Lots of cynicism. AKA @realcainmosni@mastodon.me.uk @ChocChipSec@infosec.exchange ToXic bird-site refugee.
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Artificial stupidity gets it (part) wrong again. It's just word salad. No cognition.
At some point, there's going to be a "true crime" film of this... techcrunch.com/2025/08/31/m...
The explosion in Javascript is explained very simply: it offloads back-end processing onto the user. It cuts business costs. It also does so very inefficiently.
I don't often disagree with Liam. This is not one of the rare occasions. π
Billionaires have politicians in their pockets to persuade you to blame immigrants and welfare recipients for the state of the country, so that you don't blame billionaires and politicians.
Just fucking use HTML buff.ly/AEEVhEn <- the language of the Web is HTML. Not Javascript. The best website is one with no JS at all. Let's make this a movement.
QuickTime!? In this day and age? I hope that's just plain out of date...
"Vegan leather". So, errm, plastic then...
Such a baby.
I keep getting messages from different people (or at least different accounts, that could be fake) with the exact same proposal.
And I've seen suggestions that the key part is you pay *them* for access to the work platform, although I don't know how true that is. And is there some kind of "pyramid recruiting" scam underlying it?
Is it just me, or are these "Data Annotation" gigs that are being heavily pushed on social media, and through LinkedIn particularly, really shady? Earnings paid through Paypal?
![Screenshot from LinkedIn: [redacted] (she/Her) - 1:37 AM Hi Gulraj, We are looking for professionals who want a side gig! The role entails helping us at DataAnnotation train Al chatbots. What does this mean? You will have conversations with chatbots to make sure their responses make sense. In this side gig, you will: [house emoji] Work from home or wherever you choose. [clock emoji] Work as many or as few hours as you would like at whatever time works best. [cash emoji] Earn $20 per hour via PayPal! With bonuses for high-quality work. [laptop emoji] Work as an independent contractor Please apply at the link below if this is of interest to you. We look forward to reviewing your application!](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:a7bs7h76narqhvdr4ty5g667/bafkreicwh233irggdkwxmr66dxmosxzij2eq2fgbwbd6dcvghdhfd6horu@jpeg "Click to view full size")
Why does anyone buy from them any more? Is it just that their early marketing was so good that some people have ingrained habits and don't bother to check?
The proposition of #Trainline used to be that their tickets were discounted over direct sales. Nowadays their tickets are the same price as over the counter AND they add an approximately 2% booking fee.
Between RFK decimating the CDC, normalizing Ashli Babbitt & the umpteenth school shooting... I'm losing the will to post. #ReleaseTheEPSTEIN_Files
I certainly don't want my input to be feeding someone else's plagiarism mill just to have it sold back to me and the world in a year's time.
Here's another film "thing" I just stumbled across: to celebrate its release in restored 4K, Hammer Films' very first colour film "The Curse of Frankenstein" is going to be screened as a premier in the West End on October 1st. www.myvue.com/cinema/leice...
Remembering today when pro-GOP media erupted with outrage over Kamala Harris' warning that Trump had plans to militarize the national guard and deploy them on the streets of US cities. Indeed, he had such plans. And now he's implementing them.
www.theregister.com/2025/08/13/u...
I wonder, is Mississippi requiring the same of Xitter? bsky.social/about/blog/0...
That phrase sounds like something Douglas Adams would have written. π Thanks for the pointer.
Who knows. I'm not even bothering to find out.
The mental gymnastics in these justifications of the unjustifiable... godsbless.ing/commentary/n... www.youtube.com/watch?v=IjYd...
#Firefox, today truly has lost its way. A huge fat "no" on that one. With a side order of "fuck off".
![A pop-up in Firefox itself reading: Choose an AI chatbot to use in the Firefox sidebar Switch anytime. For help choosing [link]learn more about each chatbot[/link]. Button options with logos for: Anthropic Claude ChatGPT Google Gemini Le Chat Mistral Continue Close](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:a7bs7h76narqhvdr4ty5g667/bafkreigcy4yxoiz5jsj3q2xw7a5sgc2sw2bgsonm2h4xf73djjgksc56ny@jpeg "Click to view full size")
Just discovered another reason to dislike python: list objects passed by reference leading to unexpected alterations. Took me two hours to debug a simple 20 lines of recursive code.
Picked up from Mastodon.
"Influencer" complaining that being an influencer is commodifying and isolating. Well, duh! If you're going to sell yourself and your services as a product, you're going to get treated like one.
www.tht.org.uk/news/nhs-and...
capx.co/the-online-s...
futurism.com/openai-gpt5-...
I called it on day one... 'Dame Rachel de Souza told BBC Newsnight it was "absolutely a loophole that needs closing" and called for age verification on VPNs.' www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...
Musk is still DOGEing for his own benefit. No surprise there.
#PutinsPuppet
Bluesky has, amongst its language options, "English" and "British English". Americans passing themselves off as the default arbiters the language of England. (It's in the name!) At best it should be "American English" and "English". #MinorAnnoyances
www.linkedin.com/posts/michae...
From Thursday 21st August to Thursday 28th August ARC@KU will be running a free exhibition in Kingston University's Town House building, showcasing around 60 of these machines in full operation."
www.arcatku.org/index.html "ARC@KU The Archive of Retro Computing at Kingston University is dedicated to preserving and showcasing the computers and games consoles of the past, and telling the stories of the people behind them. ...
"Anxiety-relief loungewear brand" WTAF!?
My first encounter with the notion of the Internet was on a DEC-2060, although at the time it was DARPAnet and there was (IIRC) only one London site, at Imperial College. The local Poly's new DEC-2060 had all the support software and documentation, but no actual pipeline or services.
Anyone know - if such a thing exists - where I could get a full DEC-2060 emulator, with a barebones install of TOPS-20?
Back in those days, a lot of software was just software and people left it lying around. It was on the DEC-20 because it had been written on a PDP-10, and not only was the binary in the standard games library, so was the source. I still have it on punch tape and fanfold somewhere.
I thought that by the time I encountered Colossal Cave on the local Polytechnic (now University)'s DEC-2060 it had been around for years. Apparently not. I stumbled across it in 1979; it was written between 1975 and 1977.
Turning the sector over to the "for profit" boys was a gargantuan mistake.
Domain prices have gone through the fucking roof. Looks like domain registrars are on the same "cost of living crisis" gravy train as food wholesalers.
Likening PhD holders to a (non-functional) algorithm is a form of dehumanisation & anti-intellectualism that is a bellwether for contemporary fascism. Essentially it's a typical β if not the archetypal β first step towards fascism: to dehumanise, deskill, defund, and, ultimately, fire the academics.
Heβs marketing to other bloviating tech bros. We are not his audience.
What I would like to remind everyone talking about Sam Altman talking about the βPhD level intelligenceβ of the new ChatGPT is that Sam Altman dropped out of college so heβ¦ has no experiential construct for what grad school even is.
I always volunteer to start leaving collections for colleagues I don't like. Everyone assumes you'll top it off at the end and I can safely get away with contributing nothing.
Age verification is here, and now UK Redditors canβt access their favorite LGBTQ+, political, or public health communities without destroying their anonymity. Help us fight to avoid this future. www.eff.org/deeplinks/2...
How come I've never seen this before? xkcd.com/806/ It completely encapsulates the experience of being a knowledgeable techie dealing with ISP front line helpline drones.
βBenefits available to new ICE recruits include an up to $50,000 signing bonus, student loan forgiveness, and retirement benefits.β It's better than organised crime!
So the issues selfish right-wing policies cause fuel selfish right-wing protests.
Great, so (on first evidence without full validation) it seems that if you use "+" in email addresses (as is relatively common these days, as a categorisation, john+banking@example.org) outlook 365 can't send you the OTP to get access to an encrypted message you have already been sent the link for.
There's an interesting problem in digital preservation, which is that preservation only exists actively. Only the things you actively move to new formats, survives. Community is probably the same way: it has to be actively maintained in order to outlive whatever spot it's currently in.
I don't know where the "58th Street" bar is, and nor do I care too, but they must be doing really badly if they have to pay a stream of wannabe "influencers" to shill for them.
Rather than "explain it simply" it should be "teach it comprehensibly". That's a whole different proposition, and I would support that unreservedly.
Unfortunately, that's the very foundation of popular science which has led to people incapable of understanding that reality cannot always be simplified and consequently concluding that anything they don't understand isn't true, resulting in things like the 5G conspiracies, and anti-vaxxers.
Whether it is correctly attributed or not I have seen it suggested that Albert Einstein said "If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough."
Minor correction. Mansell didn't conduct, but he did introduce.
Facebook has decided to try to sell me catheters - aggressively. Have they suddenly decided they know my age, and that any minute now I'm going to start pissing my pants?
Because... tech bros.
Where's the "guffaw" reaction when you need it?
They pointed this out 8 years ago, Marjorie.
It was a "consultation" in much the same way as Khan's ULEZ expansion consultation. Conclusions were drawn, then a consultation drafted with the expectation of agreement, then when the results defied expectations they were ignored.
Disturbing to have to agree with him.
I certainly enjoyed it. Utter nonsense, but playfully and entertainingly so.
In a more equal society right wing populists would have a much smaller audience for their grievance politics. As it stands people are unhappy with the scale of inequality and are looking for someone to blame. It inevitably ends up with minority groups in the cross hairs.
When documenting anti-asylum and far right protests the same grievances come up each time. Why do they get hotels when homeless people have to live on the street and we canβt get a house? Why do they get food when we have to use food banks? The fuel that powers right wing populism is deprivation.
In the 1960s and '70s we were still saying "thousand million" and a billion was a million million. When, and why, was that clearly objective logic discarded?
The *wrong* minority groups. It's entirely appropriate to focus on minorities that are a problem. Billionaires and techbros are minorities, but even allowing for loud public protests they don't get nearly the heat they ought to.
Who could've predicted??
Custom built rig?
I'm just listening to the Moon soundtrack, and it's giving me shivers. Always has, but now it is tempered with the memory of having seen the film on the big screen at the Barbican with a live orchestra conducted by Clint Mansell himself. If another chance arises to see it that way, don't hesitate.
With Tom Lehrer's passing, I suppose this is a moment to share the story of the prank he played on the National Security Agency, and how it went undiscovered for nearly 60 years.
Online is a whole different problem, in terms of circumventions AND third party trust and access to data AND wildly untrustworthy VPNs and or the "dark net" AND the knock-on effects we are seeing with forums having to go offline or falling into the arms of the FAANG Big Snoop.
There seems to be a near complete lack of understanding amongst the proponents that this is not like other real-world age-restriction problems. It's easy (easier) in shops, pubs, and clubs when the person is before you. There are no tech circumventions (unless you count cosmetics and fake ID).
alecmuffett.com/article/113811
The petition to repeal the #onlinesafetyact has now passed 310,000 signatures, making it the third largest petition so far this Parliament. https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/722903 https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions?state=all
LinkedIn CEO: What lessons can we learn from the lioness's win? Normal people: Give women more opportunities and pay them more. LinkedIn CEO: As the father of daughters, I am not sure that is the right message. Maybe the real message is that you sometimes have to work 125% to get the results.
#VirginMedia really are half-wits. Trying to email a compromised web site operator, because their site is being used in a phishing scam. Virgin blocks the email (which they were happy to deliver to me) because "spam content detected". Well duh. I need to send the evidence of the compromise...
Golden Earring have always - well for the last 40 years or so - been one of my favourite under-appreciated bands. Sad to hear that guitarist and co-founder George Kooymans died on Thursday. Another one steps into the Twilight Zone...
What's the prevailing etiquette on applying for more than one PhD vacancy? And does having an informal notification of a pending offer preclude pursuing an interest in another?
www.linkedin.com/posts/dr-rob...
www.theregister.com/2025/07/25/m...
The UK Online Safety Act is not fit for purposes. It was drafted by people under pressure from hidden interests, and rather than enforcing protection is driving small and diverseplatforms offline, and what remains into the arms of Big Snooping. petition.parliament.uk/petitions/72...
The Online Safety Act is killing diversity online, and pushing communities and their data into the arms of Big Snoop. onlinesafetyact.co.uk/in_memoriam/
Forget about what year it is. What century is it? nashvillebanner.com/2025/07/20/d...
Great to see people yesterday. New faces and old. We're doing it all again next month. Come be under the umbrella of a common interest in Linux. www.meetup.com/londonlinux/...
"When this is over, you and I are going to have a serious talk." "When this is over, you and I will probably be dead."
Ah, got it. I hadn't dug that deeply into verification, because I don't intend to do it.
No shit, Sherlock.
KWS?
ΒΏY dΓ³nde estΓ‘ la cucaracha?
Because #EMF2026 will clash with Hastings Pirate weekend, I will probably eschew my usual choc-chip camo for piratical costume, if only for part of it.
The sooner the Tangerine Troll's health gets the better of him, the better for the world. Harsh, I know, but not as harsh as he and his cronies are.
We can be pretty sure where that is heading, then...
We are finally ready to announce that EMF 2026 will happen on July 16-19, 2026, at Eastnor Castle Deer Park, Herefordshire. Expect more updates soon as we start spinning up the organisation again.