szescstopni @szescstopni@qoto.org

One of the online services I use the most but also feel like a lot of people don't know about is the Tineye Reverse Image Search;

https://tineye.com

Very useful if you are trying to track down an original, the creator, when it was first seen, etc.

#TheBookmarkGame

"The final aim must be the uncompromising removal of the Jews altogether." - Adolf Hitler, 1919

"Transgenderism must be eradicated from public life entirely." - Michael Knowles of Daily Wire openly calling for genocide of #trans people at CPAC, today in America.

These machines can do neither. They produce strings of tokens that statistically appear like they were produced by a human.

To an LLM the statements “Neil Armstrong was the first man to walk on the moon” and “Neil Armstrong was the first man to walk on Mars” are differentiated only in that more people have written the former than the latter.

That’s it.

AI doesn’t exist and companies letting what we DO have make decisions is just a way to avoid culpability for the results.

3/3

@Trapd

"The moment Canada’s government outsources massive program delivery to international, for-profit corporations, it de facto admits that it no longer serves its core function. The profit vultures circle above, waiting for the moment to swarm our government with offers and bite off pieces of our nation in the process. They compromise our democracy and give important access to our systems to a nebulous network of global capital."

#cdnpoli #canada

Snow. Snow. And more snow.
All the local town transfer stations are closed, no trash and recycling runs today - so the social gathering place for practical hilltown Yankees is canceled.
I suspect reading, baking, soup making, along with cleaning, laundry, and wood stove tending are on order today in snowbound homes. After the storm comes the shoveling, plowing, and then the drifts.
It's very quiet out. Only one vehicle since 7am: the Town snow plow. Only one victim so far: my mail box.

Words fail me…

#Tumblr has decided the cover of our March/April magazine issue is too “mature” to be shown without a warning label. We've appealed the decision. https://www.tumblr.com/texasobserver/710785807292743680/the-marchapril-2023-issue-of-texas-observer

@adamwb @breadandcircuses @pluralistic The entire country of Germany (90m ppl) runs on a return system for both glass and plastic bottles. Glass bottles here have a code identifying their type molded into the bottom. All supermarkets have machines that count and sort bottles, and give out deposit coupons. These reusable glass bottles are used for almost everything from beer through soda and including water. The system handles both standardized bottles and manufacturer-specific ones.

Yeah but, what if macaroni really is the elbow bones of small birds?

#SMBC #SMBCcomics

https://mastodon.social/@ZachWeinersmith/109909378659412271

You know you’re in a truly individual country when the glass of grapefruit juice you help yourself to at the hotel breakfast bar turns out to be sauerkraut juice. Its healthful bacteria can fight it out with the kielbasa sausage I added to my confused tummy. Niech żyje Polska!

The beast of High Stand woods, Ruby the St Bernard for scale #trees #dogsofmastodon

One thing that has always puzzled me is that a car clock can be wrong. Even just by a minute or two.
This car has at least …
- GPS for stupidly accurate time
- RDS/DAB for time from radio station
- Mobile SIM for time from mobile
- Mobile data for ntp time
- Bluetooth to iPhone which has time service.
Yet it has the wrong time.

The EU's proposal to force all service providers to automatically search all content that is either stored or transmitted anywhere in Europe, forward all illegal results to the police, and to block access to all non-European illegal content is expected to be presented to parliament in April. It's currently focused on algorithmic identification of unknown CSAM and of any social interactions that could be child grooming — basically, an AI trying to guess if an image might be child porn or a conversation might be trying to lure a child for sex — but it's unlikely that once the capability exists it won't be expanded to other crimes. The proposal would also force all services to age check their users (which means identifying them) and effectively ban anyone under 18 from interacting with the internet. There are no exceptions for end to end encryption and stored data not being shared is included.

To be clear, this proposal is not going to work. You know how bad chatGPT is? This is trying to solve a much harder problem, one humans struggle with, with much less compute power. What it will do is end all private communication in Europe, waste an amazing amount of police time, and leak a spectacular amount of private material to local police, some of whom — looking at you Hungary and Poland — are more than happy to use it to harass queers and trans people. It is fundamentally incompatible with the basic rights the EU is legally bound to uphold. It's also, in case they care, going to be a nightmare for corporate security and intellectual property control and will create a massive barrier to entry for anyone smaller than Google or Facebook running communication services in Europe.

Please call or write your MEP today and tell them to stop #ChatControl and preserve freedom of expression in Europe.

Fun fact: whenever you start using a new IP address - head over to any individual Wikipedia page - if your IP was previously used by someone who committed what's known as "Wikipedia vandalism" but never registered an account, you'll see a prompt urging you not to vandalize pages with a link to view the old edits, and get to see what they wrote and engage with the reversion process. Don't worry, this has never been used for malicious purposes. 🙃​🖖​

Is too late for Tongue out Tuesday? #dogsofmastodon #tongueouttuesday #dogs #spaniel #cockerspaniel #englishcockerspaniel

The four-letter word that changed advertising history. (No, not *that* four-letter word.) New from me on @medium https://wordworking.medium.com/the-four-letter-word-that-changed-advertising-history-976423c27e62?sk=73b2ccd61529e3bc67ddac8e59a59a91

It’s ironic that the most obnoxious and impolite bird out there is the *Canadian* goose

@drskyskull from https://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/m7rzz9/honk_oc/

Q: how do you know you’re about to log into a piece of critical infrastructure”
A: “the invalid cert warning in your browser.”

Source: internet/unknown