And our children will live, Mr. Beale, to see that... perfect world, in which there's no war or famine, oppression or brutality. One vast and ecumenical holding company, for whom all men will work to serve a common profit, in which all men will hold a share of stock. All necessities provided, all anxieties tranquilized, all boredom amused. [emphasis mine]
-- Arthur Jensen, Network (destroying his golden goose)
Elon, Sam, Mark, Peter, et al... You are cordially invited to go fsck yourselves.
The magnitude of destruction you have wrought upon this industry, upon our livelihoods, and upon society as a whole, cannot be calculated, much less excused. You have stolen the corpus of human ingenuity and creativity from its creators without recompense, and now are trying to sell a provably shittier version of it back to us at a markup.
And, let's be honest, this is what you wanted to build -- a barely capable servant who will do your bidding, whatever it is, immediately, without question or compunction. It's extremely telling about your moral compasses that you studiously sat on your hands when your customers were creating graphic sexual imagery of celebrities over their vociferous objections; or impressionable young people (who needed help, not encouragement) were being driven to suicide by your chatbots; but "torturing" a memory block of neural net constants is somehow the bridge too far?
I repeat: Go fsck yourselves.
Next, I have to distribute the cert to a handful of local services, including pfSense, TrueNAS, Postfix, the Unifi Controller (extra annoying, because Java), Forgejo, and probably a couple others I've forgotten about. None of that is automated, either. It hasn't been so painful that I've bothered to write scripts for the process, so I get to do a little SSH dance every three months.
"Deploy your own!" Couple of issues there: 1) Everyone treats self-signed certs as suspicious, so they're inappropriate for Postfix TLS; 2) Every time I've tried that, Firefox and/or Chrome complain about some obscure feature not being what they expect. The latest headache had to do with OCSP stapling, which has to be turned on -- oh, whoops, now it has to be turned off... Bleah. LetsEncrypt certs Just Work, so I haven't revisited building my own CA.
This "new" site is part of a larger effort by that slob to kneecap or compromise US government Web sites, and steal your personal data.
I first read about the effort here: https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fthedreydossier.substac...
Yesterday, she took a look under the hood of America.gov, and yes, it's as bad as everything else the DOGE vandals have been doing: https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fthedreydossier.substac...
Up until this point, government Web sites were designed, built, and maintained by the agencies responsible for that government service. For example, if you wanted to apply for or renew your passport, you would go to state.gov, which is run by the US Department of State, which is responsible for processing applications for and issuing passports. No other department has lawful jurisdiction over passports.
From the point of view of the law, that's still true. But the slob, without anyone's permission, kluged together passports.gov. This site was built and is run by the White House's "National Design Studio," completely outside the law and without any independent oversight. The State Department was not consulted and has nothing to do with it. Further, the site is filled with third-party trackers, analytics, and some custom code that copies every page you view, including form contents, to an unknown third party.
Oh, and the guy leading the National Design Studio and in charge of building these fake sites? He's Joe Gebbia -- cofounder of Airbnb. Read both articles for more details.
In short, you should treat America.gov as a malware site and stay well away from it. Under no circumstances should you feed it any of your personal information.
The triune brain idea has been known to be false for more than 50 years. No self-respecting evolutionary biologist believes it.
what's the point?
The point is to be able to use your hardware in the manner you deem appropriate, and to ensure it is not doing sneaky shit behind your back.
If, instead of a Playstation, we were talking about rooting LG televisions to run custom Linux builds stripped of pervasive privacy-violating code and "apps," I suspect your opinion might be rather different. (And no, when the entire industry has turned to the Dark Side, voting with your wallet doesn't work.)
"Dear user, please click the link below to transfer your passkeys securely to B1tward3n."
I bought my first Sonos system a year ago. The software seems to be a boated, steaming pile. It's unreliable for the most basic operations, like registering a new speaker (why does it take several minutes instead of 1 second?) and remembering which speakers it's connected to (it drops my subwoofer every so often).
All I want to do is browse/search for music and play it. That's it. Fuck generative AI.
Slim Devices did all of this better over 20 years ago. Its open source server streamed reliably to 10+ devices in my home. They still run great even though the company is long gone.
Iovine, the music executive and Dr. Dre's partner in Beats by Dre, [
... ]
...Yeah, thought so.
Sony MDR-V6 forever, dudes...
"It is clear Flock has aspirations far beyond ALPRs to become a digital platform for policing," [emphasis mine]
They misspelled, "Orwellian suveillance and harrassment."
Law enforcement officers are already abusing Flock's existing capabilities for stalking. This will not improve matters one iota.
There is so much sloppy writing and neurobullshit in this article. It may indeed be possible to train a machine to guess well at a single individual's thoughts, which is impressive, but the data won't generalize across individuals for a simple reason: degeneracy. In the brain (and in all other biological systems), the same output or function is realized in multiple ways, whether in a single individual or across individuals. When I wiggle my finger twice, different combinations of neurons are involved. When someone else wiggles their finger, there's no justifiable reason to believe that their neuronal activity is like mine. The article is extremely sloppy in implying that certain things are common across human beings.
The expansion pack is currently available only for the platforms listed. If you own Quake from GOG.com, the Epic Store, or own the original CD-ROM, you are, for the moment, SOL.
Zymurgy's First Law of Evolving System Dynamics:
Once you open a can of worms, the only way to recan them is to use a larger can.
So. Who wants to bet that no one will point out what abysmal sysadmins they are, letting internal servers run amok all over the open Internet, only finding out days afterward after someone had to tell them.
And who wants to further bet that the AI grifters will respond that the only way to prevent this from happening again is to give them trillions more dollars so they can build bigger, "hardened" datacenters?
Is there no level of rank incompetence they won't excuse?
Now, AI advancements — and pressure on executives to show they're embracing the new technology [
... ]
#include <goose_chase_meme.h>
"From who?
"...PRESSURE FROM WHO, M*TH*RF*CK*R!?"
Don't hit the keys so hard, it hurts.
