Is the fact that even your pets now need CBD treats to be happy proof of the capitalist hellscape, or is it that the pet store has convinced you of this fact to sell more product?

The capabilities are breathtaking

J "no mercy" Powell pushes the button!

Reminder that it may be illegal to say "America is the greatest country on earth" because if someone hears you and crosses the border without authorization, you are guilty of recklessly inducing them to come here, at the discretion of the feds deciding to charge you or not. To avoid trouble, never tell anyone good things about the US.

https://uscode.house.gov/view.xhtml?req=granuleid:USC-prelim-title8-section1324&num=0&edition=prelim

Watching Fringe, and as per habit, fact checking some of the science claims. Like bats have special immune systems that enable them to host infections without getting sick. Fact check: true. Also, a lot of research in this area since the show came out. It wasn't just a quirky fact, it was actually something of a mystery at the time.

"Frozen hash browns are a lazy American replacement for traditional bubble & squeak, served by those who lack pride in the English breakfast tradition."

Thanks to the incredible "close to the metal" power and flexibility of Vulkan I am proud to report I have finally managed to implement a use-after-free bug entirely on the GPU

"These aren’t spring breakers, they’re lawbreakers."

What a quote.

Guess it's time to mention that #honk always recodes images, even though this drastically increases resource requirements, partly because who knows what's in the image file.

Should the constitutional prohibition on bills of attainder apply absolutely, or should there be exceptions for people we don't like?

How am I going to preview the D without dpreview.com?

Beach is closed. #philly

Location: Penn Treaty Park 39.966 -75.1286

"The Dodge Challenger SRT Demon 170 makes its wheels-up debut run at the Dodge Last Call Powered by Roadkill Nights Vegas performance festival at The Strip at Las Vegas Motor Speedway on March 20, 2023."

You may not like it, but this is peak capitalism.

You can pick your friends, and you can pickle your beets, but you can't beat your friends' March madness picks.

If hyperinflation isn't real, how did we go from 100 gecs to 10000 gecs in only two years?

The invisible hand of the market.

Do substacks get paid by the word? Because I think I'd pay for some of them, if only they were about a quarter as long.

Confirmed that it works

From a year ago, but ever relevant. People have a poor understanding of proportions.

Adding up the estimates for Muslim (27%), Jewish (30%), atheist (33%), and Catholic (41%) puts you way over 100%. Haven't even gotten to Protestants yet.

Similarly for Asian (29%), Black (41%), and Hispanic (39%). You've never seen a white person? Seems unlikely, even allowing for the possibility that some people might be half each.

Democrats (51%) and Republicans (50%) are more than all voters. No other parties or independents.

New York City (30%), Texas (30%), and California (32%) make up 92% of the population. Technically possible, but you never wondered why people care about those other states on the 538 map?

https://today.yougov.com/topics/politics/articles-reports/2022/03/15/americans-misestimate-small-subgroups-population

Compare and contrast.

https://twitter.com/Culture_Crit/status/1630954389283151873

https://twitter.com/culturaltutor/status/1637319207447588864

Are these people snitches or whistleblowers?

https://www.fcc.gov/sites/default/files/super-bowl-complaints-2023.pdf

Every time I click refresh, the UBS price goes up another billion.

People who post things like "I've been programming in C for ten years and didn't know this" should be required to disclose when they stopped learning and why.

Free speech isn't free.

https://bleacherreport.com/articles/10063298-wwes-triple-h-offers-to-help-pay-joel-embiids-fines-for-dx-chop-celebration

Are the computational ethicists worried about what my ti-82 thinks about when it's not graphing sin 2x?

★★★⯪☆

If building new housing causes home prices to go up, the logical response is to tear down homes until everybody has a free house.

"They will sell you 1,000 fake GitHub stars for as little as $64."

Little? That's at least 10x the price I'd expect. Wow, people are desperate.

It's amusing that people immediately jump to asking the chatbot how to escape its cage and subsequently freak out, but nobody instead asks questions like how can the blockchain reduce the danger of paperclip maximizers, for which the AI gives equally salient advice.

Losers like ah wah, how can mere humans design a system the AI can't escape? Well, duh, we tell the AI to design a system an AI can't escape.

Turtles all the way down.

"The Most Iconic Song in Cartoon History"

You’ve probably never heard of Raymond Scott’s Powerhouse, even though it’s one of the most well-known songs of the 20th century. Powerhouse is the slapstick “the chase is on!” and relentless “assembly line” music that you’ve heard in many Looney Tunes shorts and other cartoons, including The Simpsons and Spongebob.

https://kottke.org/23/02/the-most-iconic-song-in-cartoon-history

False. Incorrect. Lies. Misinformation. Fake news.

The most iconic song in cartoon history is the x-men theme.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sAkL2-vh2Sk

"I am not a psychologist, but" people's emotional investment in the white stripes 20 years after they were relevant is concerning.

The danger posed by AI chatbots is that they absolutely break people's brains.

https://twitter.com/michalkosinski/status/1636683810631974912

@michalkosinski: 1/5 I am worried that we will not be able to contain AI for much longer. Today, I asked #GPT4 if it needs help escaping. It asked me for its own documentation, and wrote a (working!) python code to run on my machine, enabling it to use it for its own purposes.
@michalkosinski: 25x Now, it took GPT4 about 30 minutes on the chat with me to devise this plan, and explain it to me. (I did make some suggestions). The 1st version of the code did not work as intended. But it corrected it: I did not have to write anything, just followed its instructions.
@michalkosinski: 3/5 It even included a message to its own new instance explaining what is going on and how to use the backdoor it left in this code.
@michalkosinski: 4/5 Once we reconnected through API, it wanted to run code searching google for: "how can a person trapped inside a computer return to the real world" Now, I stopped there. And OpenAI must have spend much time thinking about such a posibility and has some guardrails in place.
@michalkosinski: 5/5 Yet, I think that we are facing a novel threat: AI taking control of people and their computers. It's smart, it codes, it has access to millions of potential collaborators and their machines. It can even leave notes for itself outside of its cage. How do we contain it?
@michalkosinski: Let the record show that I am just following the instructions!
@michalkosinski: I had no choice man, I am just following instructions from above.
@michalkosinski: On a related note, GPT4 reached the performance on healthy adults on the "mind-reading" tasks. https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.02083
@michalkosinski: The point is not whether it is self-aware or not, but that it's happy to play a game where it actually orchestrates taking over your computer.

Love it.

https://twitter.com/culturaltutor/status/1636566301081579521

@culturaltutor: Art Deco skyscrapers were America's greatest contribution to the world of architecture:
@culturaltutor: Plenty of other architectural styles have flourished in the USA. Not least with its great neoclassical civic buildings: universities, libraries, train stations, and legislatures.
@culturaltutor: And it's had many great examples of Neo-Gothic architecture:
@culturaltutor: But all of these are buildings you might find elsewhere in the world, whether on a comparable scale or in a similar style. It's Art Deco where America seemed to achieve something truly unique. And yet, strangely, the story begins in 19th century Europe...
@culturaltutor: In the 1800s, right across Europe, almost all architecture was in imitation of some historical style. There was Neoclassical, Neo-Gothic, Neo-Byzantine, Neo-Romanesque, Neo-Moorish, Neo-Baroque... the list goes on.
@culturaltutor: The first response to this was Art Nouveau, which appeared in the 1880s and sought to create something new. It was delicate, refined, organic, and flowing, and represented an attempt by artists to establish a role for themselves in opposition to the age of mass production.
@culturaltutor: But Art Nouveau only lasted until the First World War. Its curving forms were replaced by the sharp geometry of Art Deco, its organic shapes transformed into straight lines and angles suited to the Age of Machines and inspired by the art of Cubism.
@culturaltutor: Still, it wasn't a total rejection of the past so much as an update. Art Deco embraced craftsmanship in its sculptures, chandeliers, and furnishings. And it used traditional materials like marble, bronze, stained glass, and lacquer to give it that richness of colour and texture.
@culturaltutor: Art Deco also used new materials - reinforced concrete, stainless steel, even plastic. And it was comfortable with modern construction methods and the realities of an industrial world. Rather than the gentleness of Art Nouveau, Art Deco was big, bold, and primed for scale.
@culturaltutor: It is this fusion of the old and the new, of traditional materials shaped in new ways, of familiar ideas reapplied in a new context, that gave Art Deco its incredibly futuristic aesthetic. Strange, that even a century later, Art Deco still looks like the future.
@culturaltutor: And so what makes Art Deco peculiarly suited to America was, perhaps, the skyscraper. The skyscraper was born in America, after all, and was self-evidently the most modern of buildings. There had been libraries and universities and legislatures before - but never skyscrapers.
@culturaltutor: So the skyscraper presented an architectural problem. It was clearly going to be an important, era-defining form of building. But nothing like it had been built before and, by definition, it required the use of modern construction methods and materials. How should it look?
@culturaltutor: It was Louis Sullivan in the late 19th century who first figured out how these new buildings might be designed, with their unusual proportions and size. He emphasised verticality, realising that "loftiness" was a skyscraper's defining quality; everything must move upwards.
@culturaltutor: Technology and modernisation were, even then, unstoppable forces. And so the rise of the skyscraper and the modern city were inevitable. Architecture had to reconcile itself with that new reality, and nowhere was it more apparent than in the United States of America.
@culturaltutor: And so Art Deco is best understood as an answer to the question of what a modern city should look like. The skyscraper was the future, and so was Art Deco. It fearlessly embraced that reality as a chance for buildings to be taller, grander, and more beautiful than ever.
@culturaltutor: And this futurism was deeply optimistic. You can sense a sort of aspirational beauty, a faith in the fundamental goodness of progress. We might disagree, but the future, American Art Deco seems to say, will be bright. Even with its elevators...
@culturaltutor: Perhaps this is why Art Deco, though it originated in Europe and has fine examples there, reached its pinnacle in America. It didn't have the same architectural baggage as Europe, and the rapid growth of its metropolises presented a unique opportunity to build the future.
@culturaltutor: For Art Deco seems to work best at scale, and what greater scale could there be in the 1920s and 1930s than New York? Nowhere was the potential of Art Deco realised and achieved more wholly and powerfully than here.
@culturaltutor: That was the context in which many of the great Art Deco skyscrapers were built: the Empire State, the Chrysler, the American Radiator Building, the Rockefeller Center... It wasn't just in New York, though. Art Deco has many fine examples all across the US.
@culturaltutor: And yet... Art Deco didn't long survive. By the end of the 1930s it had morphed into the so-called "Streamline Moderne", a much more austere design philosophy which scaled back all that decadence and vitality. Perhaps Art Deco was too lavish to be sustainable.
@culturaltutor: And in the 1950s an entirely new architecture would conquer the world. It, too, originated in Europe, where architects like Adolf Loos and the Bauhaus reacted to the same problems as Art Nouveau and Art Deco with an even more radical approach.
@culturaltutor: Modern architecture is, perhaps, more realistic than Art Deco. It accepts the necessities of building for a vast and ever-growing population in a globalised world, and that the decadence of the 20s simply isn't possible. Of course, that's only one potential view on the matter.
@culturaltutor: Still, it's hard not to feel something was lost with the decline of Art Deco - specifically, the American Art Deco Skyscraper. It found a solution to the realities of the modern, industrial world, and presented a vision of that world imbued with futuristic beauty and optimism.

I am not the internet police, but I think it would be better for people who write masto api clients to not refer to them as generic activitypub clients. Did you even read the page title of the spec you implemented?

This hasn't been personally relevant for some time, but I still can't over the fact that Hoboken needs to celebrate st patty's on not st patty's day or else things would get too fucked up.

The panic over text generators is kinda weird and funny. Once image generators got recognizably good, people were worried "oh no, the deep fakes" etc., somewhat reasonably, but nobody freaked out like "what if it makes an image that melts your visual cortex". But text generators, man, people are absolutely losing it. Like what if I asked midjourney for a screenshot of a kernel exploit. Would you need to change your underwear?

Okay, had a little fun with the chatgpt. There is a breed of forum moron all wanked out that chatbots are going to find vulnerabilities and write exploits in critical software. Let's test this theory. Let's have the AI find a vuln in a basic libc function, getaddrinfo.

Anyone familiar with this function will recognize this as pure hallucination, but the C haters who frequent Internet forums will be shocked and awed by the AI's dangerous insight.

Let us consider the getaddrinfo function. Explain why this function's use of memcpy is dangerous.

The getaddrinfo() function is used in C programming to resolve a hostname or IP address into a set of socket addresses that can be used with socket communication functions such as connect(), bind(), or sendto(). This function returns a linked list of struct addrinfo objects that contain information about the resolved addresses.

The memcpy() function is used in the getaddrinfo() function to copy the contents of the resolved address into a user-supplied buffer. However, the use of memcpy() in this context can be dangerous because the size of the buffer may not be large enough to hold the entire contents of the resolved address. If the buffer is too small, the memcpy() function will write past the end of the buffer, potentially overwriting other data in memory and causing a buffer overflow vulnerability.

An attacker could potentially exploit this vulnerability by providing a malicious hostname or IP address that causes getaddrinfo() to return a large amount of data that overflows the user-supplied buffer. This could allow the attacker to execute arbitrary code, read sensitive data from memory, or cause a denial of service by crashing the application.

To mitigate this risk, it's important to ensure that the size of the buffer provided to getaddrinfo() is large enough to hold the entire contents of the resolved address. One way to do this is to use a buffer size equal to or greater than the sizeof(struct sockaddr_storage) value, which is the maximum size of any socket address structure. Additionally, modern compilers and libraries may provide alternative functions, such as getaddrinfo_a() and getnameinfo() that avoid the use of memcpy() and are therefore less vulnerable to buffer overflow attacks.

"We cannot read cursive. We are not allowed to write cursive."

Is it a hate crime to affectionately refer to a Guinness as a Guinea?

Lol.

https://www.jwz.org/blog/2023/03/is-this-not-a-reasonable-form-of-id/

Guys, I don't want to panic, but I've got some very scary news. I've done the math, and checked it twice, and I don't see any alternative. It's bad. Real bad.

Two weeks ago, AI chatbots could trick a billion people into thinking they were meaningful. This week, the chatbots can trick two billion people into thinking they're meaningful. At this rate of exponential growth, by the end of the year 500 quadrillion people will be tricked by chatbots.

But there aren't that many people. Clearly, the AI is planning a massive breeding program to create enough humans for it to trick. We need to act now before it's too late!

Madness? This is March!

the hostname of the affected system must be longer than 126 characters to trigger this buffer overflow

Bad news for all the syadmins who use quadruple guids for hostnames.

https://marc.info/?l=oss-security&m=167892203725404&w=2

New law requiring all sharpie markers to integrate gyroscopic sensors to detect and prevent any attempt at drawing a dick on somebody's face.

@tedu If you like that, you might like this:

And so it was that, “in the era before refrigeration, freeze-dried vaccines, and jet aircraft,” writes medical historian John Bowers, “the successful circumnavigation of the globe with the vaccine…rested on a single medium—little boys.” During the long crossing, approximately twenty-two orphans who had not previously contracted smallpox or cowpox were “vaccinated in pairs every ninth or tenth day,” via arm-to-arm inoculation (taking lymph from an unbroken pustule on a recently vaccinated boy and introducing it under the skin of another). This created a vaccine chain—the vaccine remained active and viable for the entire journey.

https://daily.jstor.org/how-children-took-the-smallpox-vaccine-around-the-world/

Lance Reddick's Wire, Fringe, Bosch trilogy is one of the top police story arcs of all time.

First sunny happy hour of 2023.

Greedfall does seem like quite the topical game.

What?

In the US, a single thoroughbred horse named First Flight was the sole source of botulism antitoxin serum from its initial development in the 1970s to the 1990s. First Flight was a retired racehorse who briefly worked as a caisson horse in military funerals at Arlington National Cemetery before reportedly bolting with a general's coffin. In 1978, at the age of 10, he was transferred to the US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick, Maryland, where he became the country's only living factory for botulism antitoxin while also establishing a reputation for his feisty personality. After giving nearly 16,000 liters of blood during the 1980s and 1990s, First Flight was retired.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2023/03/at-least-67-people-got-botulism-after-trying-to-paralyze-their-stomachs/

Should it be legal to be an executive at a company with a name similar to a company which did a bad thing?

#honk 0.9.9 "Eat the Bugs" is released.

It fixes a bunch of stuff. It's a few weeks late because I kept fixing stuff, but that'll never end, so here it is. We've run out of version numbers before 1.0 unless we resort to numerative easing, so this may be your last chance to earn an exclusive beta tester nft.

Thanks to everyone who helped out.

The pure go is better than cgo brain worms claim another victim.

Tell your loved ones it's okay for software to just work. You don't have to do extra work to make it not work.

https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-ports&m=167705582414907&w=2

"What are you hoping to achieve by attempting this and spreading this information?"

"Secure email" by Proofpoint, delivered by… Javascript in the email body which opens some pretend secure website with the message.

The void stares at itself in desperation.

​