r00ty

Not sure what you mean. I just saw asterisks.

Hmm. Gonna put a few euros on my auction servers. I would complain but the price has been static for 2.5 years.

Come back “tomorrow”

Yeah, but the problem is… You need to leave home to be a serial killer. Well, no wait. I mean to be a good one. I think if you kept inviting people to your house and killing them, it would be a bit of an easy trail to follow. So, being a successful serial killer is too much work.

I’ll do it tomorrow. Yeah, tomorrow.

You know I cannot be the only one that will consciously decide to not buy brands that make intrusive adverts. But, they must also know that. So I can only assume that the majority of people don’t think the same and it’s an overall upside for these annoying ads.

And it would have gotten away with it, if it weren’t for that darn pesky judge!

I think my least favourite thing about AI is when customers tell me something won’t take as long as I say, if I use AI. Look, if AI can do it why do you need me?

The fact I’m not out of a job (yet) is because apparently AI cannot do everything I can. The very second it can I’ll be long gone.

So I am on the side of the lawyers here. For the first and only time.

Might be some moobs though.

Maybe even Microsoft don’t want us to use windows any more?

Hmm, for me I actually do have a lot of time to help people. But what happens is, if you make a suggestion you will so often be shot down by someone that thinks their opinion is fact. It’s the arguing for my point that I don’t have time for.

The effect is the same as bystander effect, because yes. I look at the question, know I could answer it, don’t want to get into the argument that someone else thinks their way is better, so I just assume someone else will take it on.

The real truth is that people don’t want to be that first person that answers, because THEIR answer will be torn apart.

I’m old enough such that when I was at primary school (this is years 5-11 for non UKians) there was a computer. Not in every class, no. A computer, on a wheeled trolley that could be moved around. Well actually I think there were probably three. Because there were three floors and no-one was going to move that trolley up and down the stairs. But still it definitely was not one per class.

It was barely used. In fact, the teachers didn’t really know HOW to use it. They actually just let me go at it, because I did know how to work it.

In secondary school (11-15/16), things were somewhat different in that there were slightly more modern computers, most classes had one and there was a dedicated room where there was a classroom number of computers available. This was where we were taught “ICT” which, was essentially showing how to use word processors and spreadsheet software. Again teachers of the time were quite far behind and I’m not exaggerating here, I used to help the teacher, teach this class. But there was no programming, or any advanced use. It was very basic tasks with specific software. All of our written work, even for this class was written with a pen, in an exercise book.

Now, budgets were still terrible. I can be pretty sure about this because I remember that because we DID still do everything on paper, photocopies were handed around the room. Oh they weren’t any flash laser photocopy (well sometimes in secondary school it was). No, these was the kind with the fuzzy purple ink that was hand rolled to make a copy. But we got by.

Now, there’s no doubt we live in a digital world and computing must be taught because we do everything on a phone or computer now and people need to know how to do it. But, there’s still surely a good reason to be doing work in exercise books with a pen and paper? Everything cannot be on a computer.

I think the last two are related. With whatever weird carousel fraud is going on between the AI companies and techbro city.

Well, as I added in the edit. I think they do a bit more and actually fool the verification site since they don’t send the whole image, they do the work locally (which is good, for privacy). So they fake valid looking metadata and then presumably get a signed result back which they dutifully pass on to discord.

Looks to me like they’re essentially redirecting the request from the normal api to do age checks to their own api, and just saying “Sure, they’re an adult” to discord (since that is all the “proper” api tells them). There are easy ways for Discord to fix this. So do not expect it to work for long.

What could be risky? Well it seems to be loading some libraries. What are they doing? Don’t know, didn’t check. Probably just keeping the line count of the actual code down. But, who knows?

The other thing (and they of course do need to do this). They pass the full URL that would be sent to the “proper” api to their own. So if there is some private info about you/your account they usually send on, these guys would have that data too.

Just a quick 5 minute look though. I didn’t look too much into it because, I’m not going to use it :P

EDIT: Looks like they actually detail what they do and it seems to involve actually tricking the age verification api too. Interesting stuff. Still not going to do it.

I work from home (and did long before covid). I used to joke that apparently something serious is going on, but I hadn’t noticed.

If you want to go super de-centralised. Just remove the internet and go for a mesh network :P

Wait this is still a thing? I remember writing a DCC download bot in arexx on the amiga, back in the mid 90s.

Dystopian? Or just the beta version?

I think there’s two parts to modern electronics that make them hard to repair.

One is indeed planned obsolescence, companies like apple deliberately making things harder to repair. This is easy to solve, but what’s in it for businesses that only exist to make money when the average consumer is happy to suck this crap up?

But there is a non deliberate side. So many things that used to be modules built with discrete components have been moved to a single chip. Radio parts is an example, they used to requir a lot more external discrete parts and you can now get a single chip doing Bluetooth, WiFi etc with minimal external components.

As more goes to a single chip, it’s single expensive parts that can fail rather than what might have been a single capacitor or resistor failing in a larger circuit.

Of course the planned obsolescence uses this by making custom chips that you literally cannot buy if you wanted to. But there is still a legitimate side to this.