Notices by Veronica Olsen 🏳️‍🌈 (veronica@mastodon.online)

Sidenote: While writing this, the VSCode AI-driven auto-complete suggestions have been interesting to observe because there probably isn't that much public code out there that does this, but it clearly has it in the training data because it keeps suggesting extremely specific things that are usually a little bit off. It shows how problematic these tools can be when the suggestions aren't just some large scale average of implementations.

(I escaped all of them because I am writing this my way.)

I finally got around to working on a VobSub parser for my subtitle editor. VobSub is the subtitle format you find on DVDs by the way.

It's a lot of fun to write these kind of parser, but unlike the PGS parser (Bluray format) I wrote, there is no official documentation for it, so I have basically been peeking at the parser code for SubtitleEdit.

The code is coming along nicely. It can now read and parse the 2048 byte data blocks.

https://github.com/vkbo/Subtle/blob/vobsub-support/subtle_gui/formats/vobsub.py

#Python #Subtitles #DVD #VobSub

@aral The only suspicious part here is the account making those claims. 🤔

@boud Yeah, I'm guessing this is a fake account / AI propaganda bot.

@aral

@ehproque @jschauma I once asked AI to count characters in a sentence that needed to be maximum 24 characters long. It said there were 23. To be sure, I counted them myself. There were 25.

It felt very efficient though.

@loptimist @georgetakei It's effectively a crime syndicate at this point.

@georgetakei Operation Epic Failure

"You’ve read your last free article" the website states even though I have read no articles at all.

Ok.

Next!

(I'm guessing it is because I rejected tracking cookies when prompted.)

Copy Fail (CVE-2026-31431) has just been patched on Debian 13, with kernel version 6.12.85-1 from trixie (security).

https://security-tracker.debian.org/tracker/CVE-2026-31431

#CopyFail #Debian #Linux #InfoSec #CVE

Oops?!

My Debian 12 boxes seem to be unaffected at least.

https://copy.fail/

#CopyFail #InfoSec

@alex @alice I have the extended version of that in my "pictures from the internet" folder. 😁

I just looked up the stats for EV sales in Norway in 2025, and here's the pie chart for what's classified as "passenger cars".

The labels are:
Electric: 95.9%
Chargeable hybrid: 1.5%
Hybrid: 1.3%
Diesel: 1.0%
Gasoline: 0.3%

It also lists Hydrogen and Gas, which rounds off to 0%.

For vans, the market share for electric is 45.2%. I'm not sure if the classification is related to actual car body shape or number of seats. They have different registrations.

#EVs #Statistics #Norway #Electric #Cars

Meanwhile in Norway ...

(Photo by the insurance company If)

#Meanwhile #Norway #Cold #Winter

A good piece on how GenAI is flooding the field. I too have worked with ML for a while and feel similarly.

"Having done my PhD on AI language generation (long considered niche), I was thrilled we had come this far. But the awe I felt was rivaled by my growing rage at the flood of media takes and self-appointed experts insisting that generative AI could do things it simply can’t, and warning that anyone who didn’t adopt it would be left behind."

https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/12/15/1129179/generative-ai-hype-distracts-us-from-ais-more-important-breakthroughs/

#AI #GenAI #ML #CompSci

@alice Taking a moment to let it sink in just how Orwellian the Trump regime is.

These are great!

Nominations for the funniest (wildlife?) animal photos of the year.

It's from Norwegian media, but there's almost no text, and it's the photos that matter. The alt text on them is also in Norwegian, but almost entirely useless and little more than a title. They really need to do better.

https://www.nrk.no/trondelag/xl/arets-morsomte-dyrebilder-2025_-her-er-finalistene-1.17625376

#Photos #Animals

"The exposed repositories reportedly contain Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) templates, DevOps automation scripts, and credential management configurations that adversaries could leverage for secondary infiltration attempts against Red Hat’s consulting clients."

https://cybersecuritynews.com/red-hat-confirms-data-breach/

#InfoSec #RedHat

There is an on-going malware attack targeting users of GitHub Desktop by buying ads on search engines that link to a committed Readme files on the GitHub Desktop repo with links to malicious versions of the app. This attack is on-going. I just found another attempt from a few days ago.

I found an Ad of the same kind on Duck Duck Go, so it's not just Google.

The details of the attack are described in detail in this article.

https://arcticwolf.com/resources/blog/gpugate-malware-malicious-github-desktop-implants-use-hardware-specific-decryption-abuse-google-ads-target-western-europe/

#Security #GitHub #Malware #InfoSec

@RickiTarr It's the whole conservative "Christian" idea that if something bad happens to you, it isn't just random bad luck, but because you're a bad person and therefore deserve it. Likewise, the rich have done something to deserve it. Possibly the most un-Christ-like idea in all of the conservative Christian mindset.

I'm grateful there's a Friday every week, but Monday only once a week.

#Friday