Infosec refugee, now part-time carer / caretaker for my parents. Main interests - climate, extreme weather, infosec, news & current affairs/politics,.. ; various musical artistes; currently in danger of being seduced by architecture & maintenance of period buildings.
Diagnosed autistic in mid-50s (does it show? lol)
He/him/that idiot
searchable
This guy named Ben Palmer made an "Immigration tip line" and people call it thinking he's ICE.
He records them and shares it with the world.
What do people sound like when reporting their neighbors, coworkers, students? Are they confident they are doing a righteous good thing?
Witness the banality of evil in these sheepish suburban voices.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zJnkikcrHA0
PEERTUBE option: https://kinowolnosc.pl/w/p/av2NQ5ug2M7TgJzkSvyzi6
People like to mock AI search, but if you just follow some best practices, it will work fine.
Let's take Google's "AI Overview" feature as an example. To use it effectively, simply follow these steps:
1) Type your question into Google
2) Get an "AI overview" result that is wrong and bad.
3) Go search for your answer on Wikipedia and get a much better result.
It's not rocket science people!
For the record:
Despite significant progress, there remain serious, exploitable vulnerabilities in parts of our election infrastructure. There’s also no credible evidence to date that any election outcome has actually been altered this way.
That’s unsatisfying to just about everyone, but it’s where we are.
If it’s frustrating that reality doesn’t neatly fit your narrative, you probably need to fix the narrative.
@knotfeed So, if he doesn't pick up the phone and ask Putin for another week, every drone or missile that reaches Kyiv is Trump's responsibility. He could have saved lives, but will / has choose / chosen not to.
@mastodonmigration Indeed, there are all sorts of abuses a president might try in an effort to illicitly influence elections, such as using federal law enforcement to intimidate opposition voters. But those are hard to scale, inherently impossible to hide (large scale intimidation has to be public or it doesn’t work), and still don’t amount to “nationalization” of elections.
There’s plenty to keep an eye on, but the nationalization angle is just far fetched.
@rbreich at that rate, they'd equal Musk's wealth in only, what, 200 years or so. Assuming Musk doesn't get any richer in the next 250 years, anyway.
Finally isolated the alexical notion that had been flittering round the back of my mind for a few days, without my spotting it.
#Epstein, in the videos of police interviews and such that I've glimpsed, reminded me strongly of someone I couldn't place. It's the almost playful, ironically detached manner in the bit about "are you the devil himself?" When he replies something like "no, but I have a very good mirror".
Who?
Andy #Warhol.
(Am am not in a million years suggesting Warhol was a sex-trafficker or paedophile or such. I'm just talking about the surface persona.)
@hkrn Tip it in the same silo as Windows Vista and DNA (no-one remembers DNA...)
Eh I see "Microsoft DNA" finds a load of guff about data storage in biological substrates. This is what I was thinking of. It was a huge strategic deal for Microsoft, for about six months, 25, no 27 years ago:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_DNA
Unwanted earworm of the day:
Jonathan Coulter's folk-rock cover of "Baby Got Back".
President Snapcase.
The Hitchhiker’s Guide was famously written by correspondents like Ford Prefect. It wasn’t an #AI that made shit up based on some random sub-ether drivel. As a result, it was useful.
God, #DouglasAdams would have fucking hated #ElonMusk.
Curiously enough, an edition of The Guide that fell through a time warp from a thousand years in the future defined the executive board of X as “a bunch of mindless jerks who were the first against the wall when the revolution came”.
Right, gather round everyone - I've sussed out Trump's big scam. Its simple really: he owns stock in all the big booze corps. He just puts out lunacy day after day, then as we all take up morning drinking, rakes in the profits! I mean, think about it! It's the only explanation that explains why he deals with the world the way a bored, gently psychotic 8 year old who knows where daddy keeps a can of petrol in the garage.
Will he get us all killed along the way? Who knows! It certainly keeps life interesting.
Clip is from the Grauniad.
@Tuuktuuk @georgetakei I got myself caught up. So not only is Hegseth a war criminal, he's stuck a sort of lightning bolt of criminality zigzagging down through the command structure to the unfortunate people who pressed buttons, turned switches or pulled triggers who, as virtually anyone put in the same position would do, obeyed a criminal order and are probably war criminals themselves. His is the genuinely scary, actively malevolent sort of evil that belongs in a cell.
@cdamian Well, you never hear complaints from the people in the occupied territories*, so I expect they're all enjoying Russian occupation immensely!
* (Unless you catch Dr Jade McGlynn's updates on resistance activities on, eg., "Ukraine: The Latest", or testimony from people who managed to escape with their lives.)
@georgetakei the speed of news can be measured by the number of hours that can pass between checking the news and finding that (1) something significant has occurred, and (2) people are no longer talking about the thing, but are on to the second order developments. Seems to be about six hours, for me anyway. (Now to look up what Hegseth's supposed to have said (ordered?) in the first place, tho I imagine "kill em all" is a pretty big clue.)
The Idiot Tendency on the left are still going strong, it seems, in Germany at least. (Only Corbyn and the three or four MPs who won't talk to each other still take the preposterous position that countries seeking to defend themselves are dangerous for peace.)
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/nov/28/germany-war-army-national-service-citizens-ukraine-europe
@nomdeb surely doing that would break a bunch of criminal laws in any reasonably civilised country?
@alice the scales feel from my eyes during the hanging chads farce in 2000. The US's fundamental problems are baked in by the constitution. Have a look at the constitutions of the EU MS, for instance, or the G20 or whatever. War, invasion, occupation, revolutions etc aren't fun experiences to be engaged in unless absolutely vital, but C20 history did at least allow a lot of us to start again with a blank sheet of paper and broad principles. Nailing more and more amendments to something that must be nearly 250 years old by now is never going to work.
Turning Point leader pleads guilty to attempted election fraud
https://www.phoenixnewtimes.com/news/ex-arizona-lawmaker-guilty-attempted-election-fraud-40622084/
@mrtnsnp @aSweetGentleman @Brad_Rosenheim No need to make your own, the more time passes the more the training corpus are contaminated with slop, the worse ""AI"" reliability gets,.. rinse & repeat until we can finally flush this crapware away where it belongs. Bobbing in the sea off Southend along with all the other turds.
