skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> grandmothers looking out their windows

I see this kind of parallel a lot but I think it's missing the key points of "human" vs. "tech" surveillance. Conversations could be overheard since the beginning of time but that would never justify recording every sound you'll ever make just because of the vague apparent similarity. A more vivid example is that being seen naked is very different from being photographed naked.

Ubiquitous high quality equipment, cheap and plentiful storage, access to many different sources of information, and algorithms to process and correlate all that have made surveillance so much more than the natural "I occasionally see/hear something and commit to memory some vague, ever changing info that can never leave my head".

Modern surveillance is in bulk, it stores every relevant bit indeterminately, it can recall in vivid detail, correlate different data points from all over the surveillance network, create patterns across time and space, and easily share all of that. Things that are out of reach for any individual or group of humans.
>"according to the Gaza Health Ministry" i.e. according to Hamas.

I.e., according to the only available source, and one that has proven itself reliable in past conflicts.

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/what-is-gazas-ministry-of...

>Throughout four wars and numerous bloody skirmishes between Israel and Hamas, U.N. agencies have cited the Health Ministry’s death tolls in regular reports. The International Committee of the Red Cross and Palestinian Red Crescent also use the numbers.

>In the aftermath of war, the U.N. humanitarian office has published final death tolls based on its own research into medical records.

>In all cases the U.N.’s counts have largely been consistent with the Gaza Health Ministry’s, with small discrepancies.

>2008 war: The ministry reported 1,440 Palestinians killed; the U.N. reported 1,385.

>2014 war: The ministry reported 2,310 Palestinians killed; the U.N. reported 2,251.

>2021 war: The ministry reported 260 Palestinians killed; the U.N. reported 256.

It's perfectly reasonable to question data from an organization known for propaganda and terrorism. But please also try to find answers to your doubts.
> The sand used in the thermal energy storage (TES) system could be heated to the range of 1,100 C using low-cost renewable power. [...] when electricity is needed, the system will feed hot sand by gravity into a heat exchanger, which heats a working fluid, which drives a combined-cycle generator.

So this is definitely not a "bury your heating coils in a sand dune, then connect..." technology.

Quartz melts (per Wikipedia) at 1,713 C. Hotter would obviously be more efficient (basic thermodynamics) - but from the linked govt. report, it sounds like getting usefully hotter would lead to excessive technical problems.

Beyond sourcing the sand (a real issue in many places), this tech sounds incredibly benign, environmentally. Zero-ish rare elements / nasty chemicals / emissions. And the worst-case "melt-down" leaves just a pile of burning-hot sand.

Edit: IANAME (not a Mech. Engineer), but that govt. technical report looks like great stuff if you're seriously into energy storage tech, or just an amateur gearhead. Direct link: https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy23osti/84728.pdf
To be fair in certain cases the cost might be very high and considerably higher than whatever the license/subscription fees paid to MS are. e.g. Libre Office doesn’t really have a drop-in replacement for Excel (for non trivial use cases. To be fair it still might be sufficient for the majority of users, but that would mean that some proportion of your workforce has to stay on Excel/Office which kind of beats the whole purpose).
These images would actually make fantastic Anki cards, for anyone looking to log these in their memory banks.
You don't even have to be a foreigner: when friends come over and ask where to charge it's a total crapshoot whether or not their passes and/or apps'll work (this is NL). I don't understand why they don't just let users swipe with any old payment card. Why does payment need to be more complicated than filling up with gasoline?
Okay, so that means these two sentences are the same:

"It is very immoral to stab someone with a knife."

"It is very immoral to kill a billion people with a bomb."

And we should treat these situations with the same attention. Whatever happened to considering magnitude?
There's a million reasons

By definition a social network tries attract a large user base, controls a feed algorithm, ostensibly has SOME information on its users. Social medias sites typically also need SOME moderation, gov't moderating speech would be a nightmare in the US. And you throw in the weirdness of government being in the loop in our social lives. We also already have precedent on NSA, etc and not completely unfounded paranoia on government tracking its citizens.

So you not only would have the perception of government controlling speech, including worries about whatever administration is in control managing that speech, you have the boogeyman of social media and gov't tracking in one centralized place, gov't "in our private lives", and a million things anathema to American culture.

Mastodon instance, mostly for official communication with the fediverse seems fine though.
404s and heartbreaks
https://support.spotify.com/us/404/
In many smaller communities, at least in the US, they are just volunteers with other jobs, but they still have to do hundreds of hours of training each year to keep all the certifications.
I am also not really clear about what these folks are doing.

So far as I can tell they have a process to functionalize the surface of polyolefin plastics (polyethylene, polypropylene at the very least) with fluorine atoms. If you want a plastic like that to not be degraded by contact with oils or want the last bit of shampoo to come out of a container it's highly effective.

I'm imagining that they are exposing the containers to some fluorine containing liquid or gas. If the F atoms are binding to a polymer chain and really sticking there that is probably good clean fun, at least in the short term, but I can picture there could be side reactions that would make PFAS that could leach out. (I doubt they are buying PFAS and using it as a primary reagent, PFAS are not reactive enough to functionalize anything.) The more I think about plastics I think of how the material is mostly these long chain molecules but there are also additives, unreacted monomer and other substances left over from the manufacturing process that could diffuse around the chains and get out. If the Inhance technology let you eliminate additives it might be a net positive.

On the other hand if any kind of chemical recycling of plastics takes off, I can see PFAS molecules being produced, but probably not a huge amount since the surface and not the bulk of the plastic is affected.
Haven't those people who have years of experience also gone through years of forced MS Office GUI changes?
Otsuka's digital treatment for depression cleared by FDA
Just learned about H.O.P.E. which stands for "Hackers On Planet Earth", which is ironic because their events have never left the USA since '94 when they started.
Very easy to navigate with a flow chart, just needs a box in there saying 'Is this consentual?'

If Yes -> Softcore Porn

If No -> Rights violation
This is really clever!

Premise: CSS in HTML email allows some text to be visible only after the message is forwarded. This is a huge threat to the trustworthiness of verified email! Examples given in Thunderbird, Outlook, Gmail. Excellent work.

I read all mail in mutt, so this is officially "someone else's problem".

...

Consequently, I'll complain about something else:

> This issue was reported to Mozilla on 05.03.2024. The planned release date and a draft of the following section were communicated to Mozilla on 20.03.2024.

I agree that little-endian dates make more sense than US-style middle-endian dates.

But I will assert that any technologist who does not use ISO 8601 date formatting (2024-03-05, with or without hyphens), is doing it wrong. :)
Then you must have only been looking at horrendously biased sources.

This is incredibly common knowledge. It's very widely reported. Just Google "real wages vs productivity graphs".
But "it" is the decision to use (so-called) AI.
https://archive.ph/ppYT3
I really want to know who green lit this after seeing all of the controversy with Google and was like, yeah we won't have a problem like that billion dollar company.

There are already a lot of sleazy ads that I see for gambling and the lottery. But this is extremely predatory since it personifies the possible winning.

This should be straight up illegal.
Mise En Abyme
> and their services revenue is in jeopardy with the new EU changes to the App Store

the services revenue is at an all time high and keeps climbing:

https://www.statista.com/chart/amp/14629/apple-services-reve...

re. app store, the EU market represents just 7% of their worldwide app store revenues, most probably due to the fact the EU market is 65% android:

https://techcrunch.com/2024/02/01/apple-says-eu-represents-7...

https://www.statista.com/statistics/639928/market-share-mobi....
Well, there is a fine line betweeen entertainment and a drug. That is precisely what makes entertainment so protected by modern governments and corporations: they know where that line is, and how to cross it.
National Geographic was the premier source of photographs of bare breasts for earlier generations. I remember a joke about it on Happy Days (1970s show referencing the 1950s, reflecting a common thread through both decades) and certainly, the photographs were popular viewing among the adolescent males of my youth.
You're misunderstanding. See the sibling thread where p_l says that this problem has been resolved, and any further occurrence would be treated as a bug. Setting the quota is only done now to reduce fragmentation (ZFS's fragmentation avoidance requires sufficient free space to be effective).
They're basically calling BS:

"As soon as we did, we had the developers check all the parameters for the platform and were comfortable with the settings, but after further internal discussions today, we chose to take down the site out of an abundance of caution, as we don’t want something like this purported event to happen again."

It's weasel worded, which makes it sound like they're not 100% certain. It should be easy enough to check the logs, but I imagine there's somebody out there right now going "Why the hell didn't I log every picture we generate?"
Maybe it's just good to be aware.
unsafe fn main() {
...
}
The real risk to your organisation is that the developer you assign to generate HTML emails will go mad, lock themselves in the server room and destroy all the hardware while screaming “why is Outlook rendering DIFFERENT”

(Seriously though, this is a fascinating exploit)
They used to be but the law was changed to make it illegal for the card companies to demand that they don’t offer a cash discount (or charge more for credit). Smaller businesses are doing that more and more since the pandemic to try to hold to their prices as long as they can.

Big companies do a similar thing by offering you a store card. Costco likely makes more money from you when you pay with your Costco card than if you pay cash, because they get the interchange fee very very low and have to pay to handle cash. Rumor was AMEX was eating the interchange fee AND paying them … because they more than made it up by the customers who made the card Top Card.
True, I didn't even notice. What a weird way to present this.
Which part didn't make sense? I'm happy to help you.

Start here: Gaza seeks to exterminate 100% of enemy civilians. It's in their charter and it's their stated goal.

Does that part make sense?

Next compare with Israel. According to this article their ugly secret mission is to save at least 90% of enemy civilians.

Which of those is preferable to you?

Lashes out

My commentary shows that desire to be moral does not always make for moral action. You thought you were rooting for the good guy, and it turned out that you're not. That can be upsetting. The right thing to do is to revise your view. I'm not lashing out. You're upset with yourself.
Look OK but cant beat portfolioslicer:
https://portfolioslicer.com/about.html
If they're doing that, it seems fair for the candidates to use AI to answer the interview questions.
How does it compare to Kvrocks, which use RocksDB as the storage backend too?

https://github.com/apache/kvrocks/
So you can avoid it?
Well… the generated image has this seductive vibe to it as if she’s trying to start an onlyfans account. This isn’t a National Geographic image.

Even set that aside and it’s still an example of an outcome that an AI was specifically prompted not to produce.

Paired with the article about Israel’s use of AI to make wartime targeting decisions and it feels super problematic.
My assessment is that your comment derailed it.
That is a good point, I hadn't thought much about that. AI is an excellent tool for shifting responsibility to big tech, who in turn can easily weather the storm with their world-class legal teams.
My God... this woke thing again...
I go further than this. It's immoral to weaponize someone's evolved dopamine system against their own long-term interests. Whether that's fast food, alcohol, social media, loot boxes or gambling. It's fine to have products in these loose categories, but we've clearly gone overboard when people are fat and depressed because their evolved circuits have been so thoroughly hacked like moths to a flame. At some point we're no longer in the paradigm of voluntary consumer choice.
In what insane world do you have to feed enemy population?
“Siri” (whatever it has morphed into) is a pervasive DWIM engine in iOS these days. When you do a search for an app Siri decides what to display (e.g. when I go to a certain location with a “smart” lock and pull down search, the app for that lock is always offered first, but never in other locations).

These days the voice part is just a UI mode. I use it on my watch and occasionally on my phone when I am wearing earbuds and my phone is in my pocket, but have it disabled on my Mac.
Did you see the GMail section at the bottom of the article?
They did their job, in this case, by giving the EPA authority to hire scientific experts to evaluate the evidence and promulgate rules.
Except it wasn't art and context matters.

Softcore pornography generally contains nudity or partial nudity in sexually suggestive situations, but not explicit sexual activity.

She half-nude on a bed. I'd say that fits the definition.
You know perfectly well that they are not allowed to build factories because, guess what, factories can also be used to make weapons. Gaza is not even allowed to import basic medical equipment like X-Ray machines. So much for "full sovereignty".

People have repeatedly pointed out how your facts have no bearing on reality.
I saw this idea implemented in the book "Extreme privacy: macOS devices". The author also provides importable profiles that you can switch between, e.g. to enable/disable security updates. I haven't tried them yet, but I am now more motivated to do so.
> wound up generating something that was contextually inappropriate

.. for this user.

The same result may delight other users.
What's worse, with autotools, is that while maybe only one programmer in 100 knows how to do ./configure; make; make install, only one in 10,000 knows m4. It's one of those odd corners of the ecosystem like troff. It would be very easy to slip by me an exploit written in m4, or troff for that matter, because I've never paid any attention to either.
Debit cards?
Boy are you going to be shocked when Walmart, target, Amazon brag about the X% income increase when that happens and while prices continue to rise.

Zero, zero companies will discount the sales price when the rewards cards are gone.

There is a strong argument that discontinuing rewards cards actually helps the extremely wealthy by taking from the middle class and giving it to the Uber rich shareholders and big business owners.
If you learn to see the world the way capital sees it, it makes some sense.

If you tell a chemical company that it can't make X but it doesn't have a factory to make X, they are not going to be so sore about it.

If they've borrowed from the bank to make a factory that makes X and then you tell them they have to shut it down they are going to be a lot more upset. The EPA can't discharge their bank loan, for one thing.

In the case of CFCs,

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chlorofluorocarbon

there was a ban on the most wasteful uses of CFC, but the main effect was that people quit building new CFC factories, it took almost two decades to shut those factories down.
I long argued that we should use markdown (without the inline HTML) or a similar simple text markup instead of HTML for rich text in emails. This would makes it easy for emails clients to decide about either showing the text as rich text or just plain text, while supporting most of the formatting that a normal user might need: bold, italic, quotes, inline images, code blocks, headers, ...

Sure it wouldn't be good for marketing emails with the super advanced HTML but I don't think anyone should care about this use-case.
7.5 billion sounds like a lot of money, but even at the most reasonable costs it doesn't build many charging stations. You need to buy land, the chargers, install electric service to the land, install the chargers, build the parking spaces - that is at minimum. Realistically you really should be building restrooms and something to do while waiting for the charge (think play ground and walking path - though stores and restaurants are also useful)
All this GenAI to basically get people to spend more time on their phones, either looking at ads or gambling. At the same time devaluing genuine artistic achievements for low effort simulations of such.

What a depressing technology we are all working on.
Why did they remove the parallax effect?
Nuclear power. Zero emissions and you can reprocess the waste, vitrify what little remains and store it below stable seabeds that haven't moved in 100 million years.

And in the future we should have nuclear fusion too. A lot sooner if we started investing serious money into it.
This is America. Don't you know the human body is an Eldritch horror and laying eyes on it destroys the mind and must be covered at all costs.
And what should the 12 million people living there now do?

Let us know how you'll handle them.
Apple Pay is just as traceable if they want it to be.

They’re just stubborn and want people to use their option (and card, if possible).

As it is you can load any credit card into the Walmart app and pay by pointing the “check price” barcode camera at the screen.
It is so deeply ingrained because there are many ways in which technology has made life better, both for the technophile and the average person.

Admittedly, there are many harms as well. I can't say whether one outweighs the other, and perhaps it is because the technophile often avoids many of the involved harms that it becomes too easy for many to overlook them or play down the impact.
- In the EU the main reason Rewards cards have declined is that the regulator capped interchange to a very small amount in 2015. The US will follow suit at some point (as noted debit cards have gone that way) but I guess not as low

- I think the simple answer to nkurz's point on why don't all cards charge the maximum in interchange is - it's just market forces. It's not worth enough money to long-term piss off the bigger merchants (i.e. Amazon). When you have a 30% APR card non-rewards card, the 3% interchange is small beans. Also the acquiring bank would probably want a bigger piece of the pie if it were more widespread

- Credit Card economics is radically different across different countries (for all sorts of reasons). So for example, a third of card users in the US explicitly seek the rewards and another third have it for the various protections/security vs. debit cards. In the UK only 12% seek rewards, with the two biggest use cases being to spread costs of big transactions or to improve their credit score. (so for that reason it's sort of hard to have a global view of this problem)
And this is why many small businesses in my area don't accept American Express cards full stop. Some don't even accept Discover.
How is this ironic
Testing in Dosbox:

DIR.BAT does not override DIR.

Conclusion: ".:$PATH" does not adhere to MSDOS tradition.. But I can take the risk.
Then malware can just turn it back on and then read it? You really don't want the malware to begin with I'm thinking.
There are definitely a good number of small businesses around me (cafes, and similar places) that offer a cash discount. They don't have a sign offering it, but when I pull out cash, they revise the price down.
OMG, a reasonable person on the Internet. Nice to meet you neuronic :-)
Most often the dictator is making the right decision for their personal life. IF they build anything useful for the people at all it is because they want to avoid a riot (bad for their personal life), or what a monument for how great they are.
Centralization is about infrastructure, so no. This would be a monoculture, assuming nobody forks. But if it's a FOSS monoculture and nobody forks, that implies that everyone is fairly satisfied with it.
Ah, non-determinism at its finest.
On the other hand, those "Internet people communities" seem to mostly just cash out into conspiracy nuts and orthorexia with zero epistemic standards.
I know you're an expert, and maybe not wrong. But every couple of months I try out the state of modules. And I didn't get even remotely close to a point where I would consider them ready. Always the most bleeding edge preview version of VS
> it’s still an example of an outcome that an AI was specifically prompted not to produce.

There is no evidence of such prompting.
Small merchants negotiate with Stripe for a flat fee to accept all cards. Big merchants negotiate with the networks and pay varying prices for varying rewards amounts (or however they get the deal structured).
Whenever EV drivers describe their 'charging experiences', all I hear is ordeals, whether they think it was positive or negative.

It could be so simple: side payment card and done, with the only worry being the power output. (Still a worry that gasoline doesn't have, but OK, I understand that that's a fact of this infrastructure.)

I'm not going to be interested until I am not required to install random proprietary apps on my phone to charge, but I can just use my payment card.
I agree completely and I didn’t even discuss the entire “churning” strategy where there is an entire cottage industry, a subreddit and a flowchart discussing how to get sign up bonuses and how to get the best return.

(I am not affiliated with this site in any way)

https://www.offeroptimist.com/
We aren't on K8S, but chose Pulumi specifically because it gave a unified way to manage deployment manifests in code across things that are currently in AWS/managed services (all of it, for now), and things we might later put into K8S. We've been very happy with it.
Yep very true. My guess would be that the feature was implemented by someone very new to this whole AI generated image thing. They had fun implementing it, but did not do a ton of deep research into how to implement it safely, with negative prompts and follow up checks. This is one of the biggest challenges with generative model use. They are powerful, but easy to mess up.
I agree that his seems so specific that while it is very interesting from a technical perspective, it is also much less likely compared to most phishing.
100% of what OneUptime does is FOSS and always will be. We dont believe in open-core.