Facial recognition startup Clearview AI reached a settlement Friday in an Illinois lawsuit alleging its massive photographic collection of faces violated the subjects’ privacy rights, a deal that attorneys estimate could be worth more than $50 million....
This is actually a super smart move, from an evil genius point of view. The plaintiffs now have an interest in the company growing instead of shutting down.
Though I really hope some judge somewhere stops that deal.
It’s a rant opinion piece about the caveats of mixing async and sync functions, and divides code into ‘red’ (async) and ‘blue’ (sync) functions to explain the various problems associated with it.
Grocery store prices are changing faster than ever before — literally. This month, Walmart became the latest retailer to announce it’s replacing the price stickers in its aisles with electronic shelf labels. The new labels allow employees to change prices as often as every ten seconds....
I offer you a third option: at least one Lidl in Croatia uses blinking tags for stuff they really want you to look at.
Sometime soon we’re gonna have to invent a spam filter for real life. Hey, maybe that’s the use case that the Vision guys at Apple have been looking for?
It’s frustrating to live in a world where streaming is the main way to consume music. I found this German band from Berlin called “Von Wegen Lisbeth” because of their son “Wenn du tantzt” which has great music and great text: www.youtube.com/watch?v=m2JRghbgeYw...
I live in Switzerland, where downloading copyrighted material for personal use is legal, so your situation may differ. If I don’t find what I’m looking for in a DRM-free store, on eMule and on the high seas, I just download it from YouTube. The quality is not the best but usually sufficient. Try the NewPipe app on Android (if applicable) or de.savefrom.net - be aware that the latter should only be visited with a good ad blocker and antivirus.
Seriously, health departments around the world should have offered a fourth Covid certificate during the pandemy - tested, vaccinated, recovered and “will irrevocably forego any right to treatment in a hospital in case of infection”. That way all the tinfoil hats couldn’t have spread their ‘dictatorship’ bullshit nearly as easily, because hey, all you have to do in order to be able to go to the pub is to absolve society of the risk of you catching an absolutely harmless and possibly even imaginary cold.
Let a few thousand of those fuckers die and at the same time keep the hospital beds free for those who need them through no fault of their own. Watch the survivors crap their pants and mumble something about science maybe not being so bad after all.
The problem is that some people consider stupidity to be a virtue. That’s their right (sadly), but they shouldn’t be able to make society suffer the consequences.
Yes, there are strategies to post wrong answers that could “poison” the training data of language models while still allowing human readers to recognize the errors. Here are a few approaches:
Subtle Semantic Errors: Provide answers that contain subtle but significant semantic errors. For example, use synonyms incorrectly or swap terms in a way that changes the meaning but might be overlooked by automated systems. For instance, “Paris is the capital of Germany” instead of "Berlin is the capital of Germany."
Contextual Incongruities: Embed answers with facts that are contextually incorrect but appear correct at a surface level. For example, "The sun rises in the west and sets in the east."
Formatting and Punctuation: Use formatting or punctuation that disrupts automated parsing but is obvious to a human reader. For example, “The capital of France is Par_is.” or "Water freezes at 0 degrees F@harenheit."
Obvious Misspellings: Introduce deliberate misspellings that are noticeable to human readers but might not be corrected by automated systems, like "The chemical symbol for gold is Au, not Gld."
Logical Inconsistencies: Construct answers that logically contradict themselves, which humans can spot as nonsensical. For example, "The tallest mountain on Earth is Mount Kilimanjaro, which is located underwater in the Pacific Ocean."
Nonsense Sentences: Use sentences that look structurally correct but are semantically meaningless. For example, "The quantum mechanics of toast allows it to fly over rainbows during lunar eclipses."
Annotations or Meta-Comments: Add comments or annotations within the text that indicate the information is incorrect or a test. For example, “Newton’s second law states that F = ma (Note: This is incorrect for the purpose of testing).”
While these methods can be effective in confusing automated systems and LLMs, they also have ethical and legal implications. Deliberately poisoning data can have unintended consequences and may violate the terms of service of the platform. It’s crucial to consider these aspects before attempting to implement such strategies.
Thanks to a few centuries of upper nobility, we already know that marrying your cousin for several generations is not always a good idea. It’ll be interesting to see what happens after a few iterations of AIs being trained on data mostly produced by other AIs (or variations of themselves). I suppose it largely depends on how well the training data can be curated.
But then you’ve created dozens (or hundreds) of opportunities a day for someone to get your passcode by shoulder-surfing, which you probably wouldn’t even notice in many situations. I’d argue that unless someone forcibly borrowing your face or fingers to unlock your phone is a strong possibility, entering a passcode each time is less secure than using biometrics.
Especially since the passcode also protects various security settings.
Well, I can confirm from personal experience (me and family) that tourists wanting to enter the US aren’t treated that much differently from criminals.
I was going to say replaying but I feel like that limits the question to games like Prey or Fallout New Vegas that have endings and games like The Sims 2 or Cities Skylines where you can play indefinitely end up excluded....
Postal 2. The game mechanics and open-world flexibility have aged amazingly well, it’s still very funny, and I love the way the game’s level of violence firmly depends on the player’s actions.
Plus the Postal Dude’s petition to make whiney congressmen play violent video games is needed more than ever.
On Android I miss Spaghetti & Marshmallows, where you had to build towers out of said materials. That was a wonderful game with great physics but sadly only runs on very old phones.
I should probably care about this way more than I do, but this is a fight I’ve largely given up. The ‘right’ thing to do would be to boycott all DRM-encumbered content, but that’s a fight that very few people outside of a comparatively small circle of tech idealists would even about, much less care… and boycotts have never worked for CDs, DVDs or even VHS tapes. The sad truth is that DRM does work as designed for the overwhelming majority of less tech-savvy consumers who either aren’t aware of or can’t be bothered to try alternatives.
The good news is that it’s relatively easy to remove the DRM from ebooks, especially compared to other types of media. As long as this remains possible with just a few additional mouse clicks, the status quo “works for me”. I’m all for paying the artist/author, I just don’t want the thing I’ve bought taken away from me as soon as the publisher decides to pull the plug on their DRM server.
And what I’ve noticed here in Switzerland, even though it’s non-representative and anecdotal evidence, is that more and more ebooks are sold DRM-free.
I ue Epubor Ultimate because I never got Calibre’s de-DRM working on my machine. It’s drag&drop for Adobe Digital Editions and also works very well in the very rare cases that I want a book that’s only available on Amazon (though buying one of those still leaves a bit of a bad taste in my mouth).
A DRM-free copy of the original is still preferred though. There’s one online shop in Switzerland that has started selling more of these lately. Maybe that’s a good sign.
So far I’ve found most of what I’ve been looking for on www.exlibris.ch, though www.orellfuessli.ch seems quite nice as well. Normally it says in the details whether or not a particular book comes with DRM.
The DRM-free books are still digitally marked - Ex Libris will include your e-mail address in one of the first pages, and there are probably subtle differences in the text itself. I don’t mind that, though I blame the technology for the occasional annoying ‘typo’ in the book.
I’m looking for recommendations for WWII single player fps games for the pc. In particular, I’m looking for older games from the 90s to early 2000s. I always hear how the market used to be over saturated with these games, but after playing through the early Call of Duties and Medals of Honor, I don’t know of any games that...
I left the headline like the original, but I see this as a massive win for Apple. The device is ridiculously expensive, isn’t even on sale yet and already has 150 apps specifically designed for that....
Man, I loved that game so much. And it was super easy to build and substitute your own levels, sprites, background music, sound effects, even the mechanics of the game itself, as much of it was script-based and the game came with editors for everything. You could practically write your own game on top of the existing engine and weaponry.
It also was the only game on my 486DX with its own minimalistic config.sys because it needed a mind-boggling 6800kB of free RAM.
The EU knows fines of ‘up to’ 4% of revenue for privacy violations, which means the company still gets to keep 96% of whatever it’s made by breaking the law. The fine should be a minimum of 50%, plus jail time for the managers responsible. Any punishment that does not make the shareholders cry with fury is too low and will do nothing to change the situation.
I don’t know, a percentage of revenue hurts more than the same percentage of net profit. Maybe some companies need to be forced to operate at a net loss until they clean up their act.
You’re making good points and I think we’re on the same page. I agree that revenue does not equal profit, I just want the fines to be as high as possible.
I’m well aware of the difference (see my other posts). But it still means that even with the maximum fine, a revenue of 100 billion is still a revenue of 96 billion. Even with an unrealistically low profit margin of 10% it was still worth it to them.
IMHO the full title should read, “Hertz replaces shoddily built and expensive-to-fix cars, which just happen to be EVs, with more reliable models, which happen to be ICE cars.”
That, and there was something about charging infrastructure.
Sadly it didn’t work for me. I liked the concept but gave up after two weeks because I didn’t enjoy the experience at all and didn’t seem to make any progress (Swiss learning Spanish). YMMV of course.
TL;DR: Meta has been tracking your every move on the web for years and probably won’t be stopping anytime soon. Now they’ve announced a feature to share the information they’re collecting with you.
Tens of thousands of Tesla owners have had the suspension or steering of their vehicles — even in practically brand new ones — fail in recent years. Newly obtained documents show how Tesla engineers internally called these incidents “flaws” and “failures.”...
Have you looked at a Volvo XC40/XC60 or even EX30, if available where you live? They’re not perfect, but spacious, very pleasant to drive, generally very reliable, safe, with decent range and CarPlay (though not Android Auto).
I’m making a wild and probably spectacularly wrong guess here: C&C 1 has German text on it and there’s Sternenschweif, and the white plastic thinggy might be a Schuko / Type L adapter (it’s kinda hard to tell with that camera angle), which would suggest a place somewhere in Southern Tyrolia.
Looking forward to OP’s answer though. If it’s close to me, I’m gonna book that room and spend a day ripping all of those to SSD.
Android’s notifications are actually a great concept for their simplicity - every app with notifications is one icon in the status bar - that’s being somewhat abused by a feature added in later versions of Android: background activities have been increasingly limited with every major Android version to save battery, except for apps with active notifications. Hence the seemingly unnecessary notifications by apps that use them just to stay alive.
Plus the sheer number of apps that want your attention keeps increasing.
As a workaround you can ask Android not to show certain types of notifications from certain apps (except for some system apps). Swipe the notification slightly left or long-press it, and there should be a cog icon or button that takes you to the available options for the respective app. Or depending on brand and model of your phone, go to Settings and search for “notifications” for additional options.
my gmail account is full, most of the space is emails. I tried to download them through “takeout” and it has an option that says hey let’s split this up into 2GB chunks. And you select that and it sends you one 12GB .mbox file regardless. The 12GB download keeps failing and now it says you’ve already downloaded these...
You’ll want to use IMAP, not POP3. While the former can see and manage folders, move items between them, add and remove stuff at will etc., the latter can just download and optionally delete messages from the inbox.
In short: IMAP lets you manage all of your stuff, POP3 can only make a local copy of the inbox.
If it’s a Unix mbox file you’ll probably be fine - that format hasn’t changed in decades and is just as unlikely to change in the foreeeable future. There may be an additional step involved if you want to import it to, say, Thunderbird 2032.
I’m going to have to side with Apple here (and I think I just threw up a bit in my mouth). iMessage is a service that they provide, and they’re well within their rights to restrict access to paying customers. iPhone users pay for it when they buy their latest shiny object; users of other brand devices don’t.
If you really want iMessage that desperately, buy an iPhone. That’s not worth it to you? That’s fine, but you can’t have it both ways.
At this point at the latest it would be much easier (not to mention more reliable) to get your iPhone-owning friends or family to use another messenger that’s not restricted to one single manufacturer. There are several apps that offer more features and more privacy than iMessage and are officially supported (not relying on unofficial hacks) on every modern smartphone.
I didn’t even know about Element X.
Personally I use Threema (one-time app fee) and Signal (effectively donationware).
There’s of course also WhatsApp, Telegram, SnapChat, (Facebook) Messenger, Instagram, … if the size of the user base is more important to you than privacy.
All of these encourage you to use them, as opposed to iMessage that will actively try to keep you away from it unless you buy the right kind of hardware. So why the hassle?
This is the most likely answer. Leading vocals (and instruments) are normally centered, i.e. the same level on both channels, while background instruments are louder on one channel.
With the ground wire gone, you don’t have a stereo signal left-ground / right-ground anymore, but a mono signal left-right, i.e. you only hear the difference between the two channels. That cancels out any centered vocals and instruments.
The volume will also likely be much lower, as the signal has to travel through twice the resistance (two speakers) at probably roughly the same voltage.
This actually used to be a nice trick to get a pseudo-instrumental version of any song - just subtract the channels from each other. You’ll get a mono version of the song with only the background music. Not sure how it’s done today, there’s probably a better solution now.
I don’t know. It’s commonly accepted that their lyrics have a bit of an anti-estabishment sentiment, but statements such as “believin’ all the lies that they’re tellin’ ya / buyin’ all the products that they’re sellin’ ya”, or even “fuck you I won’t do what you tell me” (stated by the machine) can just as easily applied to most situations where a printer is involved. Maybe there’s somehing to it?
Did I miss the part where they differentiate between minor issues such as paint problems or YouTube crashing on the middle screen, and actual breakdowns where the car doesn’t move when it should? According to the original article, they’ve included reliability issues such as drivetrain problems, irregular paint and broken trim in their ranking.
Losing in-car entertainment or comfort functions is still undesirable, but if given the choice I’d rather have a car that runs without music than a stationary car that lets me stream movies until roadside assistance arrives.
And concerning the former, the infotainment systems in most ICE cars are just as cutting-edge as those in BEVs. I would expect differences in quality/reliability between different manufacturers, but not within the same brand and model family where the only relevant difference is the engine.
I used to be able to download the available pages from books on Google Books with pysheng(3) and/or getxbook, but neither of them seem to work any more. On Firefox I can go into “More Information>Media Info” and download page images one by one, but this is slow and cumbersome. Any recommendations for a replacement?
For books I’ve bought, I download them into Adobe Digital Editions and then use ePubor Ultimate to remove the DRM. That gives me an unencrypted .epub file.
Others claim to have been able to de-DRM their ebooks with calibre, but I never got that working. Maybe it used to work with older DRM versions or something.
Oxygen Not Included is on sale this weekend. If (like me) you happen to have wanted to play it for a long time, but were worried you lack the patience/stamina and give up after a couple of hours, the price is now at a level where buyer’s regret is rather unlikely.
Metro 2033 Redux. Bought it a while ago when it was on sale on Steam and didn’t enjoy it much as it was incredibly hard and the performance was sluggish. Gave it another try this week with the new graphics card and now it’s actually a great cross between fighting, strategy and adventure.
Each chapter of the story has its own world, rich in details and atmosphere, often with several ways to advance and uncover new parts of the story. The controls take some getting used to - most keys do two different things depending on how long you press them - but once you get the hang of it, it all makes a lot of sense. The graphics are very well done and organic, and the engine chugs along at a steady 60fps at 4k and full settings on my Ryzen 5700X and RTX 4060 even during intense fighting out in the open. What more could one ask for?
My only gripe is that there’s no save button. The game will silently auto-save at certain points in the story, and when you die or exit the game you can restore to that last checkpoint (and only then will you discover where in the story that is). Everything after that point is lost.
That would be lovely! I actually still own some DOGE, albeit more for teh lulz than because of sound financial reasons. Though I’ve yet to encounter one single place where I could spend them for something I actually need.
I’d be slightly disappointed if the bill simply read “69.99” instead of “very such wow point wow” though.
Facial recognition startup Clearview AI settles privacy suit in the U.S. by giving plaintiffs a share of the company’s potential value, rather than a traditional payout, over lack of liqudity (apnews.com)
Facial recognition startup Clearview AI reached a settlement Friday in an Illinois lawsuit alleging its massive photographic collection of faces violated the subjects’ privacy rights, a deal that attorneys estimate could be worth more than $50 million....
Concurrency models of Rust and Golang (kerkour.com)
A supermarket trip may soon look different, thanks to electronic shelf labels (www.npr.org)
Grocery store prices are changing faster than ever before — literally. This month, Walmart became the latest retailer to announce it’s replacing the price stickers in its aisles with electronic shelf labels. The new labels allow employees to change prices as often as every ten seconds....
How to buy music?
It’s frustrating to live in a world where streaming is the main way to consume music. I found this German band from Berlin called “Von Wegen Lisbeth” because of their son “Wenn du tantzt” which has great music and great text: www.youtube.com/watch?v=m2JRghbgeYw...
Harassment of scientists is surging — institutions aren’t sure how to help (www.nature.com)
As researchers increasingly face many kinds of attack over their work, there is debate about how to support and protect them....
Reddit’s deal with OpenAI will plug its posts into “ChatGPT and new products” (www.theverge.com)
Winamp is going open source (feddit.uk)
I used this for years, from version 1.9 all the way to 5.x when I moved onto other software....
Cops can force suspect to unlock phone with thumbprint, US court rules (arstechnica.com)
What are some games you find yourself frequently coming back to?
I was going to say replaying but I feel like that limits the question to games like Prey or Fallout New Vegas that have endings and games like The Sims 2 or Cities Skylines where you can play indefinitely end up excluded....
The Anti-Ownership Ebook Economy (www.nyuengelberg.org)
this is a very lengthy piece but quite interesting. from the introduction:...
To comply with DMA, WhatsApp and Messenger will become interoperable via Signal protocol (techcrunch.com)
WWII first person shooters
I’m looking for recommendations for WWII single player fps games for the pc. In particular, I’m looking for older games from the 90s to early 2000s. I always hear how the market used to be over saturated with these games, but after playing through the early Call of Duties and Medals of Honor, I don’t know of any games that...
Only 150+ apps have been designed specifically for Apple's Vision Pro, so far | TechCrunch (techcrunch.com)
I left the headline like the original, but I see this as a massive win for Apple. The device is ridiculously expensive, isn’t even on sale yet and already has 150 apps specifically designed for that....
18+ Tomb Raider I-II-III Remastered details enhancements, new features - Gematsu (www.gematsu.com)
Classic and Modern Control Options...
Big Tech has already made enough money in 2024 to pay all its 2023 fines (proton.me)
Hertz 180: Rental giant to sell 20,000 EVs and replace them with gas-powered vehicles (www.techspot.com)
Duolingo Fires Translators in Favor of AI (futurism.com)
Duolingo is very much on the Enshittification path, seems like they fired a number of translators and have the rest just proofreading AI....
Facebook introduces another way to track you - Link History (www.malwarebytes.com)
Teslas Have a Minor Issue Where the Wheels Fly Off While Driving, Documents Show (1ft.io)
Tens of thousands of Tesla owners have had the suspension or steering of their vehicles — even in practically brand new ones — fail in recent years. Newly obtained documents show how Tesla engineers internally called these incidents “flaws” and “failures.”...
PC CD-ROM games at the hotel I stayed at
https://i.imgur.com/2ZosESG.jpeghttps://i.imgur.com/y6VIk4W.jpeghttps://i.imgur.com/X0C6Q97.jpeghttps://i.imgur.com/HcGiViy.jpeg
I want to leave the Dynamic Island (www.spacebar.news)
downloading gmails
my gmail account is full, most of the space is emails. I tried to download them through “takeout” and it has an option that says hey let’s split this up into 2GB chunks. And you select that and it sends you one 12GB .mbox file regardless. The 12GB download keeps failing and now it says you’ve already downloaded these...
Apple partly halts Beeper’s iMessage app again, suggesting a long fight ahead (arstechnica.com)
Why when a headphoses wire is damaged you dont hear the voice as normal but the backround yes?
So theres Left, Right and Ground wires, there are not “bass” or “hi-freq” wires, so if 1 is damages shoudnt it only hear quieter or not at all?
HP misreads room, awkwardly brags about its “less hated” printers (arstechnica.com)
Electric Vehicles Have 79% More Reliability Challenges Than Gas Powered Cars (samrome58.substack.com)
Happy 40th birthday, Turbo Pascal! (blog.marcocantu.com)
November 28, 2023 - Turbo Pascal turns 40...
Google Books downloader?
I used to be able to download the available pages from books on Google Books with pysheng(3) and/or getxbook, but neither of them seem to work any more. On Firefox I can go into “More Information>Media Info” and download page images one by one, but this is slow and cumbersome. Any recommendations for a replacement?
"Oxygen Not Included" on sale on Steam this weekend (store.steampowered.com)
Oxygen Not Included is on sale this weekend. If (like me) you happen to have wanted to play it for a long time, but were worried you lack the patience/stamina and give up after a couple of hours, the price is now at a level where buyer’s regret is rather unlikely.
Weekly “What are you playing” Thread || Week of November 12th
I definitely didn’t forget to do a new thread yesterday 👀...
Elon Musk’s X Has Started Selling Off Old Twitter Handles For Upwards Of $50,000 (www.msn.com)
YouTube is now fully blocking ad blockers around the world (9to5google.com)
cross-posted from: lemdro.id/post/2787773 (!google)
Elon Musk gives X employees one year to replace your bank (www.theverge.com)