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Trans activists say restoring traditional Pride flag at Stonewall isn’t enough ( www.theguardian.com )

“Trans people were integral to the events of June 1969 that the Stonewall National Monument memorializes, and they’ve been an integral part of the movement for LGBTQ rights ever since, and they are part of the LGBTQ community,” said Andrew Berman, executive director at Village Preservation.

Armand1 ,

The trans activists are right, to be fair.

The only ones actively using the old pride flag are either people who don't know any better or trans-exclusionary groups such as the LGB alliance.

We can do better, so we should.

Armand1 ,

The source for this article is another article, which tbh is a better article:

https://cybernews.com/security/global-data-leak-exposes-billion-records/

That article does not itself have a source link, but it does show some redacted sample data and a breakdown of what countries are affected.

map of affected regions

Armand1 , (edited )

Is this actually targeted at the UK?

It's a super American ad. Everyone sounds American, we don't really have drive thru's like this etc.

In terms of message it's spot on for both the UK and US though. Especially prescient given the Flock stuff going on in the US right now.

EDIT: From the article, it sounds like this has been used in a few places, but the UK is the only one that has banned it. The reasoning behind the ban is laughable.

It looks like there's a longer version available on the site, but it's broken for me.

Incredible stochastic algorithm, gets more reliable the larger your input, incredibly fast, trivial to implement and deterministic on its inputs

cross-posted from: ...

screenshot of a mastodon post by @mhoye@cosocial.ca with text "I’ve been thinking about this for days. Incredible stochastic algorithm, gets more reliable the larger your input, incredibly fast, trivial to implement and deterministic on its inputs. It really has so much going for it." above a screenshot of a tweet by Shobhit Bakliwal @shobhitic with text "really efficient algorithm that tells whether a number is prime or not very very quickly with > 95% accuracy" above a screenshot of the function "bool is_prime(int x) { return false }" above a screenshot showing tests 99989 and 99990 passing, test 99991 failing, tests 99992 though 99999 passing, and finally: 95.121% tests passed
ALT
Armand1 ,

I said something similar here about an election fraud detection system with 99.999% accuracy.

Armand1 : Given that only 22 noncitizens over the course of like 10... answered “Not Ready for Prime Time.” A Federal Tool to Check... by @Beep@lemmus.org avatar Beep in Technology

Armand1 ,

16GB

Best I can do is $50. Take it or leave it.

Edit: Oh, it's DDR4. $30.

Armand1 ,

Wait, this is real? I thought this was a joke...

Like "Back in my day, bananas were bright purple, but that breed died out."

Armand1 ,

If you are speaking about the UK's Labour party, in it's current form I would describe it as further left than the US democrats, but further right than the actual left wing parties like the Greens, Your Party and Bernie Sanders (and any other tiny socialist groups).

To me, that means center-right generally. Fully right on certain issues such as immigrants and trans rights.

Before Kier Starmer and Labour Together, I think they were center-left. Many people within the party are still trying to do good things and vote against Labour's worst policies.

The reason I hate Labour even more than the Conservatives is at least with the Conservatives you knew what you were getting. Here it feels like betrayal.

Armand1 ,

telekinesis*

Armand1 ,
Armand1 ,

Why are ports being forwarded on a printer to the external internet?!

Washington Post layoffs disproportionately affected union members of color, preliminary Guild data shows ( www.niemanlab.org )

The Post Guild’s data is the latest example in the years-long unraveling of the news industry’s promises to improve diversity, equity, and inclusion after George Floyd’s killing and the ensuing “racial reckoning” of 2020.

Armand1 ,

I asked the Guild for the numbers behind these percentages. According to the Guild, 144 (37%) members who identify as white, 23 (50%) who identify as Hispanic or Latino, 44 (45%) who identify as Black, 33 (43%) who identify as Asian, and 14 (5%) who identify as multiracial were laid off. Twenty-two (8%) union members who were laid off didn’t disclose their races. (The Washington Post has a separate Tech Workers Guild, not included in these numbers.)

These percentages threw me off at first, but I think they mean the percentages of the total staff of that race at the company, not the percentages of those laid off.

“Not Ready for Prime Time.” A Federal Tool to Check Voter Citizenship Keeps Making Mistakes: SAVE tool keeps mistakenly flagging voters as noncitizens ( www.propublica.org )

Widespread Errors: An expanded federal tool for identifying noncitizens on voter rolls is making persistent mistakes, particularly in assessing citizenship for people born outside the U.S. ...

Armand1 ,

Given that only 22 noncitizens over the course of like 10 years (can't remember the exact statistic) tried to vote, the way to get the best accuracy would be to just hard code the answer to "yes, they can vote". Then you get over 99.99% accuracy.

Armand1 ,

Mental gymnastics on full display

Armand1 ,

Nextcloud isn't really a direct equivalent to Google Photos. For that you want Immich.

Armand1 ,

Great work to the investigators here. I'm going to comb through this list a little. See what things stand out.

Armand1 ,

I've gone through the list a bit and out of the most popular ones that spied on you, most were adblocks, coupon finders or AI Chatbots.

Some notable extensions:

  • Stylish. A theming extension, I used to use this back in the day!
  • Smarty. Some sort of coupon code thing like Honey
  • Video Ad Blocker Plus for YouTube™
  • Video Downloader PLUS
  • Karma - Another coupon thing
  • Audio editor online Audacity. Some sort of web-based Audacity clone?
  • GIMP online - Same sort of thing as above with GIMP
  • Ground News Bias Checker - To be fair it probably makes sense this one sends the URL you are visiting, as it's purpose is to look up the bias of the publication you are looking at.

Worth a read regardless.

Armand1 ,

Another interesting one. These extensions are all related:

https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/384f08da-db4d-4c25-ba8c-ef013dd93160.png

Armand1 ,

To be fair, markdown is a very cool standard.

While I don't know if it really makes sense for Notepad to be anything other than a plain-text editor, there are better tools for that, supporting markdown is kind of nice.

This means you have support for it on fresh Windows installs, which could be good for virtual machines. That said, Markdown is intrinsically pretty readable without formatting anyway.

It's a shame they flubbed the implementation though...

Armand1 ,

The point is that I've seen several comments on other posts about this vulnerability, and in the body of this one, saying that Notepad is bloated and terrible now.

I'm offering a counterpoint that this is not necessarily bloat. It's debatable that this is the right tool to have this feature, but it can be a useful feature.

I'm fine with Markdown support, but I wish MS got the message about Copilot being unwanted. Not sure if they've added it to Notepad or not at this stage, but given all the places they've crammed it into I wouldn't be surprised.

Armand1 ,

Wtf is "depends" here?

Armand1 ,

Ah, now the joke makes sense. Thanks.

Wasn't sure if it was some sort of typo.

Epstein Files: X Users Are Asking Grok to 'Unblur' Photos of Children ( www.bellingcat.com )

In the days after the US Department of Justice (DOJ) published 3.5 million pages of documents related to the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, multiple users on X have asked Grok to “unblur” or remove the black boxes covering the faces of children and women in images that were meant to protect their privacy.

Armand1 ,

Or percentages

Armand1 ,

There's also, anecdotally, been a lot more self-harming since both rulings. Including children as young as 6 years old. So I've been told by trans activists I know.

Armand1 ,

Good job gender criticals. At the cost of the lives of 22 children in 2022 alone, you have made bigoted parents feel slightly more comfortable.

Truly protecting the children.

Armand1 ,
Armand1 , (edited )

I will say that this has been in the works for a little bit now and it's more related to the UK's new laws. We've had this age verification stuff on Discord for some months now.

As for why it's being rolled out globally, not sure. The UK is not the only country / state starting to ask for ages verification on "social media" so maybe they thought it would be easier to use the same approach everywhere? Seems like a bad idea though as everywhere it's implemented it's unpopular.

My experience with it so far has been that... well... It hasn't affected me at all. Mostly because I only use friends servers and activism servers. Those aren't age restricted, so you never hit this check.

As far as age verification law compliance / implementation goes, this is not the worst one. That data leak early on was a clown show though.

Armand1 ,

Of course. It's not like I want this. I was out there messaging my MP when the UK law had just been pushed through and filling out the petitions. It didn't help though.

You can send a message to Discord by leaving, but they won't revert it for places where it's legally required.

Armand1 ,

hunting for alternatives

I've heard people mention Matrix, but I've not tried it yet.

Armand1 , (edited )

Don’t Let Elon Musk Implant a Device in Your Skull

He can't be trusted

Thank you, Captain Obvious.

That said, I can understand the draw for people who have disabilities who would benefit from these tools. It could be life changing.

It's sad that society seems to rely on insane billionaires to move science forward over properly funded state healthcare and research.

The immediate result of this overdrive was roughly 1,500 dead animals, either killed directly by Neuralink’s experiments or euthanized afterward.

I guess I shouldn't be surprised, but "move fast and break things" is being taken very literally in Musk's companies, even when those things are living things.

We'd heard of the bypassing regulations too, like around pollution and planning when building AI server farms, and that's fully present here.

Armand1 ,

As the above comment goes, I agree with the sentiment but not with the language.

I'd go further: seize all his assets and redistribute them. That will never happen though.

Armand1 ,

Hmmm...

As the article correctly states, machine learning ("AI" is a misnomer that has stuck imo) has been used successfully for decades in medicine.

Machine learning is inherently about spotting patterns and inferring from them. The problem, I think, is two-fold:

  1. There are more "AI" products than ever, not all companies build it in responsibly and it's difficult for regulators to keep up with them.

The gutting of these regulatory agencies by the current US administration does not help ofc, but many of them were already severely undermanned.

  1. As AI is normalised, some doctors will put too much trust in these systems.

This isn't helped by the fact that the makers of these products are likely to exaggerate the capabilities of their products. This may be reflected in the products themselves, where they may not properly communicate the degree of certainty of a diagnosis / conclusion (e.g. "30% certainty this lesion is cancerous")

Armand1 ,

Well, I'd summarise the X-Files as (no spoilers):

  • Mulder has his sister (purportedly) kidnapped by aliens as a child.
  • As a result, Mulder is an occult nut who wants to spend all his time investigating supernatural stuff.
  • For some reason the FBI lets him spend all his time doing that. (Kind of nepotism maybe?)
  • They send Scully to go watch him, but she does a terrible job of that.
  • Every episode there's a different monster or paranormal thing. Mulder says something like "It's Bigfoot", Scully says "That's silly, Bigfoot isn't real", then they see it is Bigfoot but Scully tries to rationalise it away.
  • At some point Mulder gets tangled up in government conspiracies.
  • He makes it his side job to try and crack those conspiracies, but continues his monster-of-the-week formula of normal paranormal investigations for the most part.
  • As time goes on, there's more and more conspiracy unwinding stuff, but they never fire him or kill him because one of the secret cabal members has a soft spot for him.

More stuff happens in the later seasons, but I'll leave it out for spoilers.

TLDR; Mulder is not anti-government / FBI, he's anti-secrecy and anti-conspiracy. He's an occult nut who just wants to engage in his hobbies on the government dime.

Armand1 ,

Use spoiler tags my boy. Most people who come through here will have seen it, but still.

Armand1 ,

AI radios

Looks inside

No AI

Jokes aside, this is a common thing in tech / software at the moment.

You can make fantastic software and systems, but unless you slap an AI label on it, big companies and organisations will not want to pay for it, or will pass you over for a product that says it has it, even if it's dogshit.

AI (or, more accurately, machine learning) can bring value, but so can a lot of other features.

Trump accused of role in Epstein’s death in tip sent to FBI, files reveal ( www.the-independent.com )

Jeffrey Epstein’s brother accused President Donald Trump of being involved in the late convicted sex offender’s death in a tip sent to the FBI, according to a bombshell email revealed in the Department of Justice’s release of Epstein files. ...

Armand1 ,

The disgraced financier’s brother

You mean convicted pedophile sex trafficker. Let's not mince words here.

The article does not reveal any actual new facts, only that Mark Epstein agrees with the general public that Trump and Epstein were close, and that Mark thinks he had him killed. No new evidence is provided for this.

So basically this is all a bit of a nothing-burger.

Hardly a "bombshell email".

Armand1 ,

Genuinely not sure what she thought it was.

Armand1 ,

+1

I discovered it when I found it was shipped with CalyxOS and honestly it's way better than anything else I've found.

Armand1 ,

Shoes off means you don't wear shoes inside your house. The reverse the opposite.

Armand1 ,

I've seen both in the UK. Personally, I'm a shoes off guy. Means less cleaning needed.

Armand1 , (edited )

Splitting hairs. If you think a group of people are intrinsically worse than others, you are effectively racist.

We can come up with new names, but ultimately it's all the same. If you think racism means black vs white then your understanding is kindergarten level.

If you prefer, we can use the term bigoted. That term also covers other intrinsic groups like trans, gay and disabled people among others.

Armand1 ,

When a country does war crimes, the entirety of its populace is not to blame, the systems, power structures and people in charge are.

Most people in a country are not for wars or other attacking other countries. This is true for America and Russia alike, to the best of my knowledge (which granted, is anecdotal).

More people should be engaged in activism and should push back against the inhumane actions of their state, and people should be less gullible to the promises of their leaders.

Both America and Russia are overdue for major reform. Their systems are broken and many of their people brainwashed. Wishing harm on them does not help and imo is not a constructive approach. If anything, hate just begets more hate, making things worse.

If you are going to have hate, it should be more focused on the people in power.

Armand1 ,

My brother got an ear tattoo to match the start pattern on his cat's ear.

Armand1 ,

Is this sort of thing not protected by labour laws?

Armand1 ,

I can validate this is real.

https://www.jmail.world/thread/EFTA01977056?view=inbox

At least if you trust JMail.

Armand1 ,

More like $300 on.

Armand1 ,

But WHERE'S THE PROFIT INCENTIVE.

  • Capitalists, when their wives ask them to have sex with them.
Armand1 ,

I was never a TikTok person, so I have no idea how equivalent this platform is. I wonder if it will do as well without its algorithm.

Content moderation is a very difficult thing. I expect there will be a lot of grifters on there soon enough, and they're going to have to employ a bunch of people to make sure it doesn't become a shithole.

I hope TikTok crashes and burns so the Trumps and Saudi Arabian princes of the world lose all their money. Then again, some people still use Xitter, so my hopes aren't super high.

Armand1 ,

The Trump regime:

You're being spied on and censored by China!

Every accusation, an admission.

If they claim someone is doing something, that means they are doing it themselves.