Old Fucking Punk @lwriemen@librem.one

Peruvians are living through a horrific conflict that has already resulted in more than 40 deaths under the government of Dina Boluarte. Learn more & join us in calling for an end to the violence, and respect for international human rights: https://amazonwatch.org/news/2023/0112-peru-the-massacre-must-be-stopped… #EyeOnTheAmazon #Amazon #Peru #HumanRights

How Walgreens manufactured a media frenzy about shoplifting
Via @JuddLegum
https://open.substack.com/pub/popularinformation/p/how-walgreens-manufactured-a-media?r=bpx3&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email

THE SEVEN HABITS OF HIGHLY SUCCESSFUL PEOPLE
1. Private School
2. Legacy Ivy admission
3. Nepotism hire
4. Seed capital from family money
5. Club memberships
6. Personal assistant, nanny, ghostwriter
7. Journalists who ask “what’s your secret?” and uncritically publish the lame answer

@kevlin @cwebber described ChatGPT as Mansplaining As A Service, and honestly I can’t think of a better description. A service that instantly generates vaguely plausible sounding yet totally fabricated and baseless lectures at an instant with unflagging confidence in it’s own correctness on any topic, without concern, regard or awareness even of the level of expertise of it’s audience.

@nathanpboston I think it's helpful to put this in perspective on a map (42.3836, -71.21455 if you want to look for yourself).

Here's a satellite view of the plot, with outline and annotations added. You can see that the area is mostly covered in fields. There's a community garden and BACE in the NW, and WFCF's infrastructure is all in the N, NE, and E sides (hard to see).

The contaminated area is the little yellow circle far in the south.

Anyone know if it's possible to buy paper bags (not tiny ones) made of butcher paper?

The staggering greed -- and indifference to global public health -- of the covid vaccine companies is only a surprise if you haven'[t paid attention to Big Pharma's record over the years: https://arstechnica.com/science/2023/01/moderna-may-match-pfizers-400-price-hike-on-covid-vaccines-report-says/

This is also on governments, notably ours, that socialize R&D (and in the case of vaccines, production) and privatize the profits for executives and shareholders.

Shopping online and the site says, "Get FREE Shipping when you pick up your order in store."

Um...

Pundit says the guy who lied his way into Congress, faking out many of the people who voted for him, deserves to keep his seat until they vote for someone else.

Hence, a two-year freebie for defrauding the electorate.

Gives punditry a bad name...

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2023-01-08/george-santos-doesn-t-deserve-to-be-kicked-out-of-congress?fromMostRead=true

EFF's @jgkelley tells NPR's All Things Considered that Louisiana's age verification law could lead to risks like blackmail: "Porn is already used to trick [people] into downloading malware. Now these sites have a legal basis for asking a person to upload their identity info." https://www.npr.org/transcripts/1147762020

I saw a thread today explaining why ChatGPT is great for making regular programmers into 10x programmers. Most of the thread was misguided, including the part where 10x apparently refers to *output*, not quality.

Anyway, I threw a few code snippets at ChatGPT, asking it to explain them, find bugs, or improve them. It did pretty well with the first 5-ish queries but then went wildly off the rails when I gave it a one-liner of Kotlin that just did some multiplication.

Confidently, and self-assuredly, it explained that this was likely vulnerable to some inputs being zero. (It missed the integer overflow bug, and in fact specifically claimed that the code prevented overflow.) When asked to improve the code, it started adding checks to short-circuit on 0 (unnecessary for logic, but could improve performance I guess?), negate the output if there were an odd number of negative numbers (wrong), and coerce floating-point numbers to integers (but they were already integers!)

And of course it just doubles down on mistakes, even when prompted to reconsider.

This is going to cause so, so, so many bugs in the hands of junior developers. And awkward conversations in code review, too...

An "openly racist" teacher in Florida is practicing what the governor's dog whistles preach. https://popular.info/p/florida-english-teacher-pushing-book?publication_id=1664&post_id=95514667&isFreemail=false

We've learned this lesson before: Absent strict protections, any sensors that collect data and footage about people will eventually become a tool of police surveillance--even self-driving cars. https://www.vice.com/en/article/v7dw8x/san-francisco-police-are-using-driverless-cars-as-mobile-surveillance-cameras

Where are the voice actors of the fediverse? I miss my VA friends from the birdsite. I do animation and motion graphics, so I not only really appreciate the work, but I also sometimes like to collaborate with people I know :)

#VoiceActor #VoiceArtist #Narrator #Actor #Acting

The status quo, where many (most?) people have a primary digital identity (their email) which carries a corporate brand. Once they're established (often without any forethought), people are loath to change them. They then have to put up with whatever crap that corporate dishes out.

We need an easy way for people (e.g. families) to manage their own identity and communications, like email addresses. I think everyone should have their own domain name & email that uses that domain name.

I should have phrased that slightly differently: The question isn't why -- in a late-state capitalist nation like ours -- sleazy, security-indifferent companies like Experian exist. It's why our corrupt system of government permits them to do what they do.