⊥ᵒᵚ Cᵸᵎᶺᵋᶫ∸ᵒᵘ ☑️ @falken@qoto.org

NASA did not say it found life on Mars. But it’s very excited about this rock. https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2024/07/27/world/science-health/nasa-mars-life-rock/ #worldnews #sciencehealth #mars #astronomy #biology #space

“Four more years, you know what, it will be fixed, it will be fine, you won’t have to vote anymore, my beautiful Christians,” Donald Trump on Friday evening told the Turning Point Action group in a speech. https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/4795823-trump-encourages-christians-vote/

Today 17 civil society groups have written to the UK Home Secretary about AI in policing.

We want:

⚫ An outright ban on predictive policing and biometric surveillance systems

⚫ Transparency, accountability, accessibility and redress for all other automated and AI systems in policing

Our open letter ⬇️

#SafetyNotSurveillance #AI #PreCrime #policing #humanrights #justice #ukpolitics

Your browser is not supported! It’s probably lacking some serious API, and we can’t possibly make it work, sorry *

* Just kidding. Spoof the UA string, it’ll work just fine.

https://beta.maps.apple.com/

Repairing CrowdStrike PCs

For anyone who cares about Secure Boot: it's completely borked on hundreds of device models from some of the industry's biggest manufacturers. Some of the affected devices shipped as recently as this year. More details to come in a little more than an hour from now.

It was one of those odd-job kiosks you find in every shopping mall, usually near the escalators. “MISTRESS MINIT - Keys Cut, Shoe repairs, battery replacements, spells, potions”

“Uh, hi” I said, how much is a potion of forgetting?

This Mistress Minit was one of those no nonsense gen-X witches, short hair going silver, trousers and vest in a deep purple, almost black. “Depends luv, on how deep you need to forget. Henbane is in short supply due to that mess in Ukraine.”

“How much to forget a song? I’ve got Cornflake Girl stuck in my head. The live recording from enn why see 2003.”

She made that air sucking through teeth sound peculiar to auto mechanics and other witches. “You can’t afford it, hun.”

#Tootfic #MicroFiction #PowerOnStoryToot

Looking for recommendations. Has anyone purchased branded USB-C headphones as a promotional item?

If so, who do you recommend?

I used to buy branded 3.5mm headphones - but the world has moved to USB-C. Ideally, I want something with a colour logo printed on the headphones themselves, but I'll settle for a branded case.

Go on then, marketing friends, what do you have for me?

(I cannot stress enough that I don't need you to Google for me. I am looking for personal recommendations.)

Where's a good place to buy those "gumstick" NiMH batteries used on portable #MiniDisc recorders? The ones I bought off Amazon a few years ago were useless trash.

Thanks to @stevelord for the unrelated reminder...

TARDIS MOC
(Part Four)

Overview 🧐

#LEGO #DoctorWho #TenthDoctor #ThirteenthDoctor #DavidTennant #JodieWhittaker #TARDIS #MOC

An international team of astronomers using the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope have directly imaged an exoplanet roughly 12 light-years from Earth.
Webb images new, cold exoplanet 12 light-years away

Folks familiar with parking for Waterfront Park in #Burlington: do you have any suggestions for places to park nearby? We are attending the Flaming Lips show there this Friday, and don't want to have to carry our lawn chairs, etc too far.

Also, if you are attending the show, DM me.

Any clever #PHP developers know the cause of this #JetPack warning with #WordPress?

https://wordpress.org/support/topic/php-warning-automatticjetpackextensionssocial_previewsfeature_name/

I can't find anything in my code or other plugins which would cause that const to be redefined.

Huge factory sim Shapez 2 releases on August 15 with over 300k wishlists https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2024/07/huge-factory-sim-shapez-2-releases-on-august-15-with-over-300k-wishlists/

#Linux #PCGaming #IndieGame

'UK off track for Net Zero, say country’s climate advisors'

https://www.theccc.org.uk/2024/07/18/uk-off-track-for-net-zero-say-countrys-climate-advisors/

'The Climate Change Committee’s assessment is that only a third of the emissions reductions required to achieve the country’s 2030 target are currently covered by credible plans. Our 2030 target is the first one set in line with a Net Zero trajectory.'

#climate #ClimateChange #GlobalWarming #GreenhouseEffect #GlobalHeating #environment #UK

Based on what you’ve written it seems you’re assuming:

Users will get any protections from this.
That giving advertisers what they need is considered a win by everyone.
Advertisers aren’t just going to do exactly what they did with the “Do not track” option.
Attribution is the only thing they are using the collected data for.
This will somehow disable their ability to collect fingerprinting data.

I’m not generally one for absolutes but i would put a significant portion of my current and future earnings on the fact that even if there was 100% adoption of this new privacy preserving by everyone in the world, advertisers would still be pulling some shit.

They would be performing elaborate privacy ignoring shenanigans because privacy gets them nothing and data is potential profit.

AdTech companies have a rich history of doing absolutely everything they can to profit from anything they can, it is naive to think they will so anything different in the future.

@festal once again, this applies to machine learning systems and to large language models. Older forms of #AI – inference systems using knowledge bases constructed by systematically interviewing human experts ('Expert Systems') do not suffer from these problems.

@GossiTheDog I’m personally not very happy with this post because despite its length, the only new information is that there was a bug in the server-side pre-validator as well as in the driver (could it be literally the same parsing code in both cases?)

if you have a crash with this much impact, I expect to see some chapter-and-verse citations of exactly how the crash occurred and exactly how it’s being patched. There is a footnote that they’ll add More Information Later, We Promise, so I think it’s important we don’t all forget to follow up on that

A wide ask here so please boost: my grandfather is trying to get rid of an old business computer, and I was wondering whether any vintage computer people might want it. It was purchased for $50k from The Ultimate Corporation in the early 80s. This ran the Pick operating system, and my best guess is the hardware was originally manufactured by GE or Honeywell. It's about the size of a half-rack and currently lives in Brandon, Manitoba, Canada. It has sat covered in plastic in a chemical warehouse for the past 35 years. Where do people usually post stuff like this other than here? Thanks!

#RetroComputing