So let me get this straight. From the US admin we hear.

-NATO countries cannot rely on USA to help them if they need us. -NATO countries should be ensuring they can defend themselves.

But also -You’d also still better buy all your shit from us!

They’re like the stereotypical bully… “Stop hitting yourself”

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

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

Closing airspace. They’re getting training in surface to air missiles?

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

So, just going to say. I feel like this violates rule 1: (Not United States Internal News)

In any case, as an outsider I feel like it’s more than obvious that the step up in activities and rhetoric is a direct response to the realisation that there’s mid-terms coming this year and as it stands they will lose hugely.

So yes, they want to either take control of the voting, or even better stop the election entirely. This is what is being worked towards right now, just from me looking from the outside in.

I would say, now it’s learning that actually sticking your head in the sand is only ever a delaying tactic. But, if it DID learn that, it’d mean it has surpassed us already.

Yep. I also valid concerns. But those seem to be their next steps. I just wondered if there would be degradation. You wouldn’t even be able to tell until it reached the destination.

Definitely interesting stuff.

I think my question on all this would be whether this would ultimately cause problems in terms of data integrity.

Currently most amplifiers for digital information are going to capture the information in the light, probably strip off any modulation to get to the raw data. Then re-modulate that using a new emitter.

The advantages of doing this over just amplifying the original light signal are the same reason switches/routers are store and forward (or at least decode to binary and re-modulate). When you decode the data from the modulated signal and then reproduce it, you are removing any noise that was present and reproducing a clean signal again.

If you just amplify light (or electrical) signals “as-is”, then you generally add noise every time you do this reducing the SNR a small amount. After enough times the signal will become non-recoverable.

So I guess my question is, does the process also have the same issue of an ultimate limit in how often you can re-transmit the signal without degradation.

At home I’m on Linux but yes I also have a work laptop and I hate windows more and more daily.

So far I’ve mostly avoided the whole “things that don’t need to be on the Internet” situation.

Non smart TV (well that period when they started adding smart features but they’re all out of date now so not even connected to the Internet)

All kitchen stuff is just kitchen stuff. No Internet.

Car is still offline.

Only real exception is smart thermostat, and that’s just because when the boiler was installed that’s what they put in.

It’s interesting for everyone, but if the split is US news and World news, this is a US centric story. All of the players are US based. Like I say, the subreddit’s the naming convention these communities are based on had very much a “US” goes in news and “RoW” goes into WorldNews ethos.

I don’t see policies stating that here. So I think it’s a very different situation to the other place (and we can argue about why there’s two news communities, but that’s another story). But, I was just wondering if the moderation was done in the same vain.