Today I learned that Jordan Peterson got his start as a public figure answering questions on Quora 😆

Apple has agreed to pay $95 million to settle a lawsuit alleging that its voice assistant Siri routinely recorded private conversations that were then sold to third parties for targeted ads.

From Siri “unintentionally” recorded private convos; Apple agrees to pay $95M https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/01/apple-agrees-to-pay-95m-delete-private-conversations-siri-recorded/

I'm not sure I'm convinced Apple is really that much better than the other big tech companies when it comes to this kind of thing. Their reputation is better and they do seem to be better about things like on-device encryption, but then stories like this come out.

This year is a perfect square: 2025 = 45². Most of us reading this at time of posting won't be alive next time that happens since 46² = 2116, 91 years from now. This has been bouncing around the internet but for some reason I felt compelled to record it here!

OpenAI, Google, Anthropic admit they can’t scale up their chatbots any further

Once you’ve trained your large language model on the entire written output of humanity, where do you go?

https://pivot-to-ai.com/2024/11/14/openai-google-anthropic-admit-they-cant-scale-up-their-chatbots-any-further/

So we're going to destroy the environment for AI slop that isn't fit for purpose now and, if you believe the above post, never will be.

Silicon Valley and Wall Street invent collateralized GPU obligations. Surely this will work out fine

https://pivot-to-ai.com/2024/11/04/silicon-valley-and-wall-street-invent-collateralized-gpu-obligations-surely-this-will-work-out-fine/

Blackstone, Pimco, Carlyle, and BlackRock have so far lent $11 billion to GPU cloud companies — now apparently called “neoclouds” — such as CoreWeave, Crusoe, and Lambda Labs. The loans are collateralized by the neoclouds’ Nvidia GPUs.

Look ma, new asset bubble!

Had to disable support functions because I've received three spammy support emails today. Thanks for that feature @prologic

There is a bug in yarnd that's been around for awhile and is still present in the current version I'm running that lets a person hit a constructed URL like

YOUR_POD/external?nick=lovetocode999&uri=https://socialmphl.com/story19510368/doujin

and see a legitimate-looking page on YOUR_POD, with an HTTP code 200 (success). From that fake page you can even follow an external feed. Try it yourself, replacing "YOUR_POD" with the URL of any yarnd pod you know. Try following the feed.

I think URLs like this should return errors. They should not render HTML, nor produce legitimate-looking pages. This mechanism is ripe for DDoS attacks. My pod gets roughly 70,000 hits per day to URLs like this. Many are porn or other types of content I do not want. At this point, if it's not fixed soon I am going to have to shut down my pod. @prologic please have a look.

I stumbled on this today: Open Source Game Clones

This site tries to gather open-source or source-available remakes of great old games in one place.

Hmm, I wonder if I banned too many IPs and caused these issues for myself 😆

twts are taking a very long time to post from yarn after the latest upgrade. Like a good 60 seconds.

This is a test. I am not seeing twts from @stigatle and it seems like @prologic might not be seeing twts from me. Do people see this?

@prologic I am not seeing twts from @stigatle anymore. Are you seeing twts from me?

Hack of the day: running watch -n 60 rm -rf /tmp/yarn-avatar-* in a tmux because all of a sudden, without warning, yarnd started throwing hundreds of gigabytes of files with names like yarn-avatar-62582554 into /tmp, which filled up the entire disk and started crashing other services.

Yet another study strongly calling into question the concept of "echo chambers". I've argued it here before and people pushed back, but there is growing evidence that "echo chambers" are a moral panic and not a real phenomenon that we need to worry about. It's time to throw it out and re-think, in my opinion.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-81531-x

COVID is still a leading cause of death in the United States. This pandemic is nowhere near over no matter how many times people try to pretend it is.

Youtube has started to artificially slow down video load times if you use Firefox. Spoofing Chrome magically makes this problem go away. : youtube

First snowfall of the season.

Fuck Earth! -- Elon Musk

https://aeon.co/essays/elon-musk-puts-his-case-for-a-multi-planet-civilisation

Six Months Ago NPR Left Twitter. The Effects Have Been Negligible - Nieman Reports

More data contradicting the existence of "echo chambers". As I've argued many times before, the concept of an echo chamber or information bubble is not real. The podcast below is an interview of an author of a study where they actually intervened and changed the information diet of 20,000 people (with consent!), then surveyed them after three months. They observed essentially no changes to the study subjects' beliefs and attitudes. They also observed that the typical person, while they tend to gravitate towards people with similar political leanings, only get about 50% of their content from such like-minded people. They get the rest from neutral sources and maybe 20% from non-like-minded people.

Varied information diet + No change in attitudes when information diet is forced to be different = no echo chamber.

Listen to the podcast episode here

EU warns Elon Musk after Twitter found to have highest rate of disinformation | X (formerly known as Twitter) | The Guardian

Not a surprise I guess.

AWS: Cannot Escape IPv4

more than 90% of all AWS service API endpoints do not support IPv6

Sounds like AWS is instituting an IPv4 tax soon.

Oops, let a SSL certificate expire.

How Google Authenticator made one company’s network breach much, much worse | Ars Technica

🤦‍♂

WHY are these big companies treated as though they are the be all and end all of infosec? These are rookie mistakes Google's making, at scale.

Unfortunately Google employs dark patterns to convince you to sync your MFA codes to the cloud, and our employee had indeed activated this “feature”. If you install Google Authenticator from the app store directly, and follow the suggested instructions, your MFA codes are by default saved to the cloud. If you want to disable it, there isn’t a clear way to “disable syncing to the cloud”, instead there is just a “unlink Google account” option.

Like, never ever put your multi-factor tokens into a single cloud storage location! The whole point of this being "multi" factor is that there is a separate, independent physical factor involved in the authentication process. If the authenticator app on your phone puts the tokens in the cloud, then it reduces the security that comes from having a second factor. This is basic stuff.

Of course, never ever use Google Authenticator. All it does is generate TOTP and HOTP codes, which you can do with any OTP app, preferably an open source one that's been vetted.

USENET, the OG social network, rises again like a text-only phoenix

The USENET management committee has reconvened and there are green shoots of growth in the original, pre-World Wide Web social network.

Turned half a century old today. Boy I'm tired.

#birthday

Ugh, ffs--the datasette project just added #ChatGPT garbage. Another seemingly nice piece of software and project that I need to stop using.

I guess I can be thankful they self-identify.

Keyword: Decentralization - Initiative for Digital Public Infrastructure

Figured you'd be interested in this @prologic

Found another example of Google stealing something I've written and putting it in a "featured snippet".

What's super annoying about this one is that the source is a course page at Tufts University, not the official page of the publication they're taking this text from. I know the professor who taught that course and I've guest lectured for them before on this topic. They put this publication in their course readings, and I guess that's where Google picked it up.

Release jq 1.7rc1 · jqlang/jq · GitHub

Renewed activity on jq after five years. This RC looks nice!

The hottest 21 days ever recorded on Earth were the last 21 days.

There are climate scientists saying that this summer will be the coolest summer of the rest of our lives. It won't get cooler.

They can say that with confidence because Earth's energy imbalance--the difference between how much energy comes in versus how much is radiated back to space--has been positive since around 2010. Prior to that, the balance would shift negative sometimes, so Earth would radiate a bunch of energy back into space. Not anymore. Earth is an energy sponge now. And net positive incoming energy means temperatures go up.

Climate disaster has been here for awhile, but it's kicking into high gear now. This will not change until we take drastic action.

I've only been using snac/the fediverse for a few days and already I've had to mute somebody. I know I come on strongly with my opinions sometimes and some people don't like that, but this person had already started going ad hominem (in my reading of it), and was using what felt to me like sketchy tactics to distract from the point I was trying to make and to shut down conversation. They were doing similar things to other people in the thread so rather than wait for it to get bad for me I just muted them. People get so weirdly defensive so fast when you disagree with something they said online. Not sure I fully understand that.

I just received this email and I have some questions:

This email is from a trusted sοurce.

You received this abucci@bucci.onl because you have been disconnected from sending and receiving emails.

To continue using this email address we urge you to re-confirm if your account is still active on bucci.onl to officially unlock it to our default settings.

Re-confirm account (a link; removed)

※ This process is very important to help us protect your internet and fight malicious activities.

Since I administer bucci.onl myself, I'm a little confused. I don't recall disconnecting myself from sending and receiving emails. I don't even know how you disconnect someone from that. I also have never created the email address this email appears to be coming from, but maybe I should trust it anyway since they told me it's a trusted source? Most puzzlingly, I've been sending and receiving emails just fine all morning, so I do not appear to be disconnected from anything? I want to help protect the internet and fight malicious activities, but what should I do??? 🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔

My UPS failed the other day and I don't know what's wrong with it yet. Very 😱 until I get that fixed or replaced.

I used to be a big fan of a service called cocalc, which you could also self host. It was kind of an integrated math, data science, research, writing, and teaching platform.

I hadn't run it in awhile, and when I checked in with it today I found their web site brags that cocalc is now "extensively integrated with ChatGPT".

Which means I can't use it anymore, and frankly anyone doing anything serious shouldn't use it either. Very disappointing.

Ben Shapiro is threatened by a movie about a doll 😆

I'm playing around with snac2, which I think @stigatle mentioned on here, and I have to say it's extremely easy to set up and it's been pretty straightforward so far. I wanted to experiment with having a presence on the Fediverse without going through the process of picking Mastodon vs. Gnu Social vs. Friendica vs. ..., and I wanted to self-host instead of picking an instance of one of those. For now I'm abucci@buc.ci, but no guarantees that will remain stable; I'm just testing for the time being.

Google Says It'll Scrape Everything You Post Online for AI

Google updated its privacy policy over the weekend, explicitly saying the company reserves the right to scrape just about everything you post online to build its AI tools.

Google can eat shit.

Wondering how long I'll keep twitter-related feeds (like on fraidycat, or here) before giving up on them as permanently dead.

I never paid a lot of attention to Ben Shapiro before, but what he says is so transparently asinine it boggles the senses. You really have to have a Fox-addled mind to believe that the search for the submersible was completely faked and that the powers-that-be knew the entire time that it had imploded. To believe that a vast conspiracy among hundreds, thousands (?) of people from several countries and spanning several days was orchestrated to lie to the public in order to.....uh, achieve what exactly? "Undermine institutional credibility"? What does that even mean?

This is "the moon landing was faked" levels of conspiracy theory.

These billionaires are profoundly without intelligence or depth. It's astonishing to see so many shallow, empty fools parading their bad opinions publicly without shame. Let no one ever again fall under the illusion that tech oligarchs are anything more than your racist uncle at Thanksgiving but with more money.

Speaking of men getting owned, Ruth Ben-Ghiat, an expert on authoritarianism who wrote the book Strongmen, regularly calls out and degrades wannabe dictators like Elon Musk and it's cathartic to witness.

Jordan Peterson likes to mansplain at women when he knows nothing about the subject. Probably because he thinks women should be property of men instead of free individuals.

Let's be clear here. Daniel Penny allegedly choked a black man, Jordan Neely, to death on a subway car. Neely was being loud, but he was not physically threatening anybody and did not have a weapon. In any other context, this would be called "murder", at the very least, "manslaughter" if one were being gracious. Because of the US's history, a white man murdering a black man in sight of the public is oftentimes, and rightfully, called a "lynching". It has a public, political purpose amounting to terrorism.

Daniel Penny was allowed to go free for awhile after this event. He is only now facing accountability, having been recently indicted (arrested and charged with a crime) as he should have been day of. And here is racist right-wing toadie Ben Shapiro saying that Daniel Penny--the white alleged killer--is the one being lynched. Not the black man who was allegedly murdered by Penny in view of the public, and who is now dead. Penny himself, who is still very much alive.

@prologic, I don't know how you go on defending Ben Shapiro, but in the context of US society, what Shapiro is saying is reprehensible and unacceptable. He's a right-wing troll with disgusting, not to mention flat out stupid, opinions.

How Ukraine's dam collapse could become the country's 'Chernobyl' | Time

Chernobyl is in Ukraine you assholes 😆

Sam Altman on Twitter: "a new version of moore’s law that could start soon: the amount of intelligence in the universe doubles every 18 months" / Twitter

The more I read from this guy, the more I come to believe he is a gigantic douchecanoe. What a profoundly stupid thing to say.

GitHub and OpenAI fail to wriggle out of Copilot lawsuit • The Register

Lawsuits alleging GitHub Copilot breached licenses can move forward. Will be interesting to see how these cases are decided.

This is a fucked up detail:

The judge meanwhile rejected the defense argument that the plaintiffs should not be allowed to continue their claim pseudonymously based on death threats sent to the plaintiffs' counsel.

Who is sending death threats to the lawyers of people trying to sue GitHub/Microsoft/OpenAI, and why? Something's fishy there.

Asleep at the Keyboard? Assessing the Security of GitHub Copilot’s Code Contributions

40% of code produced by GitHub Copilot has at least one well-known security vulnerability, in the test reported in this paper.

Crypto collapse? Get in loser, we’re pivoting to AI – Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain

Someone on here gave me a hard time when I suggested that the crypto grifters were pivoting to AI after crypto collapsed. But, they were and they still are.

Russia blowing up the Nova Kakhovka dam is an incomprehensible war crime. Among other things, it drains water from the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, water that is needed for cooling. They are trying to generate a widespread disaster.

They must be stopped, immediately, without hesitation. This is unacceptable behavior, crossing every red line we have no matter our politics, without any doubt.