palordrolap

So apparently the thumbnail is from a YouTube video in which AI, specifically Grok, was used to invent some stories, or at least that’s what the blurb by the video seems to indicate.

I haven’t given it the honour of increasing the watch count.

But I’ll give you a true one.

At one job I had, there was a tiny stub of a cable sticking out of a conduit, and it needed to be connected to a hub a few inches away.

The sysadmin delegated to me because he didn’t want to deal with it. The hub couldn’t really be moved because it was basically held in place by a bunch of other taut cables that were attached to it. And it couldn’t be disconnected.

So, I figured, if I’m going to have to unpick the inevitable rat’s nest inside the conduit to get that cable out or replace it, I might as well just yank on it. If it was to break, I’d be in the same situation of having to get it out of the conduit. There wasn’t enough of it accessible to splice a bit onto the end either.

Many things could have gone wrong…

…but I got away with it. And there turned out to be just enough play in the other cables that I managed to get the hub and the cable to meet.

No-one dared touch any of that for the rest of the time I worked there.

Well, I’m not going to downvote, but something in my brain is screaming “lossy compression!” and so you might say I’m at least wary.

I still think Win2K was the true peak. Everything since has been clown shoes and bloat.

… but I have to admit that my Mint Cinnamon customisation looks a whole lot more 7 than it does 2K.

… which will be fed into the next generation of LLMs in order to stop sounding quite so much like LLMs.

Binface could easily do better than Farage has. I mean, it’s not exactly a high bar.

Farage barely shows his face there and almost never in Parliament.

You can guarantee that Binface would be more than willing to show up in both places frequently. He might even go so far as to represent Clacton properly. Perish the thought!

(I can imagine that if he won they wouldn’t let him into the Commons due to not being dressed sensibly and then refusing to recognise him if he does so, because that’s the sort of dirty trickery I’d expect from Parliament. So I’d be very interested to see what he does in order to comply with both directives at the same time.)

Some of these people are so out of touch that they’d have to spend a decade in the trenches before they might even begin to get an inkling that something is up.

Case in point: Bezos went to space and wasn’t humbled by the overviewer effect because his ego is literally larger than the planet he lives on.

Insufficient demand means insufficient return on investment, so of course prices need to go up to make up the shortfall.

And in another story on my feed, we have a trillionaire with the opposite problem, where there’s too much demand, so of course, prices need to go up to reduce demand.

Distrowatch may still rank by number of clicks on a distro on their site. I have been convinced for a number of years that MX Linux has maintained its top position there because people click on it wondering what the heck it is, keeping it at the top in a self-perpetuating loop.

This is neither an endorsement nor a criticism of MX Linux, by the way. Maybe it’s awesome. I’ve just never used it, and probably never will.

I never said the cameras should exist. And if there’s already been a class action lawsuit (or whatever the equivalent is for getting cameras taken down in this man’s jurisdiction) please direct me to it.

The last town I heard of that got rid of their Flock cameras did so because people started putting in Freedom of Information requests for them. The authorities didn’t like the idea of the public having access to that information at all, and they knew it wouldn’t stand up in court because the usual excuses wouldn’t work. (Namely “think of the children” and “national security”.)

The only way to win is to make them take their own cameras down and rethink their ideas otherwise they’ll just keep on replacing the broken ones, charging the public for the privilege and locking up the offenders.

And finally, if there truly was no other option, which I’m yet to be convinced of, he shouldn’t have acted alone.

Destroying the cameras doesn’t stop the city / corporate espionage either, it’s only a bump in the road to them.

You have to at least try doing it by the book. And then you put bags over the cameras or stick things over the lenses. Outright destruction only gives them a ton of ammunition to “prove” that the cameras are needed. Blocking its view is still ammo, but it’s not as much.

Did I say the blackmailer was home?

Maybe I should have said breaking the blackmailer’s windows or messing up their car. The blackmailer here is the city. “The city” is effectively alive, in that the people running it are.

I’m not trying to discredit him. I’m just suggesting there are things that might need to be tried first before going nuts and destroying property, and in absence of evidence that he’d already done that, I assumed he hadn’t, because people really like going to the destroy phase straight away.

Disagree. This is more like firebombing a blackmailer’s house.

Easy way to blow up crematoriums.

I would have thought that the article would have mentioned it, because that would make for an interesting part to the story. It does not seem to do so.

Edit 2: The below sentence does not contain an “as” between “might” and “well”. I’m wondering if people are seeing one there and are thinking I’m saying something that I’m not, because that word completely changes the meaning of the sentence.

He has fallen into the trap of making constitutional decisions for himself and others rather than going through the proper channels and so they might well throw the book at him.

Yes, I know “the proper channels” will do their very best to ignore, deny or obfuscate as long as they can in order to avoid the question of constitutionality (or legality) of such systems, and that’s why he did it, but he might have had a slightly better defence if he’d at least tried to sue or challenge Flock’s existence and use by less destructive means before doing this.

Edit: Based on the number of downvotes, it seems like a lot of people know something I don’t. The only comment that suggests anything at all though, provides exactly the same amount of evidence that I have for my point of view than they do for theirs.

Given the context, the four “Follow Us” links going to proprietary services does seem somewhat antithetical to .self ideals.

At the very least set up a Mastodon account somewhere in addition to those.

Don’t you think he looks tired?

DuckDuckGo is my default engine. It assumed I meant “extract” and gave me a dictionary definition along with links to download WinZip and WinRAR. When I told it I actually meant what I typed, it put it in quotes and returned no results.

It was not obvious that I should have omitted the X and the T.

What I apparently didn’t do was try Google afterwards, and I’m a little disturbed that I didn’t. Adding !g to the search in DDG is usually the first thing I do when it can’t find anything, but my browser history suggests I didn’t do that.

Unupvote is doubleplus ungood.

What’s ext4rat? Web searches don’t turn anything up and I must have missed out on whatever it is, or was. (Which wouldn’t be the first time.)

I did find a Python script called ext4ract which apparently pulls files out of an ext4 filesystem, but it doesn’t seem to be a hugely well-known tool and I’m not sure how it’s relevant here.