You either die a hero… Something something.

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.

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

I’m based in the UK. But my instance only actually has single digits of actual active users. So, it’s not bothering me too much.

The moment I get a letter from OFCOM, or I see they’re enforcing against smaller federated sites, I’ll just remove non login readable capability and make it entirely invite only (which won’t be a problem, the only people joining for ages were bots and when I added the AI blocking/cloudflare protection they’ve stopped coming too). Until then I am assuming they’re going after the actual social media companies.

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.

So, I’m going to put it this way. I entirely agree. But I’ll be slightly more open minded and say it’s extremely unlikely. I mean 0.many zeroes point 1 percent likely. Winning the lottery every day for your entire life likely.

However, when it comes to physics. We only ever have an understanding through the narrow windows with which we can see the universe. We have a set of rules that seem to very well tally with the universe we observe and they’re very likely all or almost all correct.

But our understanding does change all the time, it’s not outside the realms of possibility we’ll prove it is possible and not feasible or even possible. I will not hold my breath though.

I’d also argue that causality doesn’t need to be a problem. It all depends on how we imagine traveling through time would work. If we imagine that one experienced time line is an closed loop. Then you could effect the future without destroying the entire universe on another timeline. It would just be like reversing down the track and flipping points. Now you cannot access that other track. But it still exists, and everything on that track still exists.

In that way, if I went back in time and changed some significant event in history then went into the future, I would see a different future, according to the change I effected. But my personal timeline would still include the time I spent in the time before I changed it. Therefore I’ve not changed my own past. Only my own future.

My point being that while time travel will never be a thing we see, the causality issue is just a lack of imagination problem :P

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

I’m always reminded of the scene in The newsroom, where they have the guy from the epa who essentially says it’s already too late to save us from climate oblivion. They wanted him to calm the message and played down the doom.

That was from 2012.

Nothing has changed at all. Humans are rubbish at dealing with problems that are more than a year or so down the road.

Peter Backman, CEO of theDelivery.World, said the practice was only misleading if customers were purposely trying to support independent restaurants and takeaways.

That’s some high grade bullshit. There is going to be a subset of people (and I’d argue it’s a growing number) that want to support local businesses and so yes it’s misleading to all those people.

But more than that. A corporate/franchise brand has such a huge value they will sue you if you use it without permission. So if they’re choosing not to use a brand they paid good money to use, it can only be because they want to deceive.

I’d say the ideal situation is that tools are developed library first, then cli or gui as preferred allowing others to pick up the slack and make the other tool (or tools) using the functions in the library.

One of the reasons automation is so much easier on linux than windows is because there are many more cli tools to do things. On windows many tools are gui first and cannot easily be automated.

That’s weird. Whenever I’ve had gpu drivers fail the environment didn’t come up and I would be left at a terminal.