Nick @internic@qoto.org

Yesterday we had another example of LLMs creating support issues for us.

User: "hi, how do I do this thing? Your docs say I can go here and change some options, but there's no settings there"
Me: "that's right, we don't have such a feature, but also we don't say you can do it in the docs, where did you read that?"
User: "oh I didn't actually read the docs, I asked 'AI' and it hallucinated this answer. Sorry!"

At this rate I'm looking forward to 2025 when I'll be spending 100% of my time doing support to correct falsehoods about our app made up by LLMs

#Papertime! "Characterisation of the stellar wind in Cyg X-1 via modelling of colour-colour diagrams" by E. V. Lai et al., including yours truly

▶️ https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.05852

I especially love this paper because a PhD student read a paper of mine, took the method I developed there (https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2020A%26A...643A.109G/abstract), cleverly applied it to her data and developed a statistical approach to evaluate the models vs. the data, a step my original proposal did not make.

#astrodon

I once read about a holocaust survivor who also lived through Auschwitz-Birkenau. I saw that their birthday was recently and looked on the page of the @auschwitzmuseum, as they talk about a victim of the concentration camp daily, often on the day of that victim's birth or death.

The person I had read of was not talked about on their birthday, which made me wonder why. I thought of all sorts of reasons, but then stopped and looked into the number of people murdered in Auschwitz alone. It's over 1.1 million who were murdered, and over 1.3 million who went through it.

If the Auschwitz Museum talks about one of Auschwitz-Birkenau's victims daily, they would have only discussed each and every one of them in over 3561 years. Even as someone who has worked in holocaust remembrance for so long, I tend to forget the sheer quantity and extent of the horrors caused by the Nazi-Regime.

After months of digging and reporting, we have learned where Facebook's bizarre AI spam (like "Shrimp Jesus") comes from, who is making it, how it works, and how it is monetized.

Turns out Meta is directly paying people to spam FB with this stuff

https://www.404media.co/where-facebooks-ai-slop-comes-from/

“The rest of X appears to be working normally, however, and a source at the company confirmed to The Verge that there wasn’t actually a denial-of-service attack. Another X staffer said there was a “99 percent” chance Elon was lying about an attack.” https://www.theverge.com/2024/8/12/24219121/donald-trump-elon-musk-interview-x-twitter-crashes

Another very cool (literally) talk at #IAU2024 #Astronomy2024 today (I think by Amri Wandel) was the idea that the habitable zone could be extended for tidally locked planets if life could exist Europa-style under the ice on the frozen nightside.

My query is whether such life would produce a strong enough atmospheric signature to be detected by transmission spectroscopy.

Recipe for disaster:

Move your email app's interface to a #PWA
Allow it to render arbitrary #HTML
Forget to split the security scope between UI and content
Do jack all after being warned of the dumbest exploit I've read in years

bleepingcomputer.com/news/secu…

#Microsoft #Microsoft365

I'm delighted to say that I've been reading through the mess that is the Zenneck wave literature, and what I've pieced together agrees with my initial intuition on how it must work -- albeit in a very unusual way.

NY Times - Former President Donald J. Trump has taken his new obsession with the large crowds that Vice President Kamala Harris is drawing at her rallies to new heights, falsely declaring in a series of social media posts on Sunday that she had used artificial intelligence to create images and videos of fake crowds. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/11/us/politics/trump-harris-crowds-ai.html?unlocked_article_code=1.CU4.IU4A.laO56X6syKZM&smid=url-share

It wasn’t journalists, tech bros, and influencers who made the Internet a thing. It was librarians, scientists, educators, and programmers.

"we make no warranty that the secure communications services will meet your requirements, or will be uninterrupted, timely, secure, or error-free. you acknowledge that delivery of documents through the internet and cloud storage is not private and may not be secure, and that there are security, reliability, data corruption, transmission error, accessibility, availability, and related risks associated with use of the secure communications services."

When the company calls their home appliances "smart", what I hear is:

- they spent money on features I care about
- those features will be worse than standalone devices but will drive them out of market (looking at you TVs)
- the appliance is more likely to break
- my data is likely being sold to advertisers
- when the company loses interest in it and cut support, I will need to buy a new device

So no, I don't want "smart" home appliances.

Ask your doctor if medical advice from a television commercial is right for you.

A portrait of the Common blue butterfly, that feeds, that pauses, rests upon the Bird’s-foot-trefoil wildflower. Its mauve, blue tones contrasting the wildflowers sunshine yellow.

How precious, how fragile, has our beautiful #nature become? But return its home and it will rapidly move back in!

#WildflowerHour #naturephotography #photography #SilentSunday

what some problems you've run into in the terminal with copy and paste? so far I have:

- pasting a URL with a `&` (or other character) in it without quotes
- pasting in many commands and one in the middle fails
- accidentally leaving in the '$'
- pasting in something with Fancy Quotes instead of normal quotes
- pasting a bash incantation into fish
- not knowing the keyboard shortcut to paste in a new terminal
- how Linux has two different clipboards

Weeks after a defective CrowdStrike software update sparked a massive global IT outage, the security giant is at Black Hat in Las Vegas this week to eat an almighty slice of humble pie.

In releasing its root-cause analysis, CrowdStrike conceded that it messed up but said it’s taken steps to prevent the same incident happening again. And some cybersecurity professionals attending Black Hat appeared ready to give the company a second chance.

From @lorenzofb on the ground: https://techcrunch.com/2024/08/10/after-global-it-meltdown-crowdstrike-courts-hackers-with-action-figures-and-gratitude/

We're aware of reports that access to Signal has been blocked in some countries. As a reminder, Signal's built-in censorship circumvention feature might be able to help if your connection is affected:

Signal Settings > Privacy > Advanced > Censorship circumvention (on)

Cartoon Network Website Shuts Down, Warner Bros. Discovery Kicks Visitors Over to Max
https://variety.com/2024/digital/news/cartoon-network-shuts-down-warner-bros-discovery-max-signup-1236101422/

Let me tell you the difference between how providers treat my knee pain and how providers treated my post covid respiratory crisis and all pain associated with it is....gruesome