Notices by J. R. DePriest :verified_trans: :donor: :Moopsy: :EA DATA. SF: (jrdepriest@infosec.exchange)

@Viss @liquor_american

Link with no paywall.

https://removepaywalls.com/https://www.wired.com/story/epstein-files-redwood-bark-school-newspaper/

@paninid

I once voted Green Party in a presidential election.

@GreenRoc @hellomiakoda

And DVDs are safer than Blu-ray because they can't remotely brick your player.

A co-worker of mine has a gay 18 year old son living in DeKalb County Georgia going to GCSU.

My co-worker described the place as "you can smell the cows when you walk outside".

His son cannot find a safe space to be his gay self and meet other LGBTQIAS2 people. He's not very technically literate but I did give his dad a link to fedi.tips and suggested he help his son get on that to connect with like-minded folks.

I have two questions:

• What's a good Fedi instance for Sharkey or Mastodon for a gay 18 year-old living in DeKalb County?
• Does anybody know any LGBTQIAS2 safe spaces in DeKalb County?

Thank you so much!

#LGBTQIA2S #LGBTQIA #LGBTQ #LGBT #GayInGeorgia

@MeaningfulBits @rixx

I had a Motorola phone with "flick to turn on flashlight". That was nice. A single flick, not a vaguely defined "shake".

@hellomiakoda

I mean, there "KYC" then there's "KYC".

@redsad

https://pranko.com/products/toilet-meadow

I'm autistic, so I had to check. This is not a real product. When you buy it, the box looks like that but it is empty. The product is the box itself.

@thomasfuchs

That makes me wonder: what are the most transformative technologies of the past 50 years that everybody just shrugged and adopted because they weren't backed by the filthy rich?

@ryanc

All your oil belong to us.

@hellomiakoda @vantablack

I feel a little bit better about myself.

It's a mental illness, not a personal failing.

But.

My house is still a fucking hoarder disaster and my wife and I still have to live here.

"How did you let this happen?"

"One day at a time."

I hate using Word for any sort of creative writing. I wrote a short story in Obsidian then put it in Word because that's one of the accepted formats for the place to which I might like to submit it.

Instantly dozens of blue underlines, exactly two of which are simple spelling errors. The rest are all style suggestions which, while they would not fundamentally change the thing I wrote, would rob me of my unique voice.

This isn't even AI slop. It's just the helpful little suggestions like verb tense and comma usage which I had already carefully considered. It's also straight up wrong 3/4 of the time. In a few cases, it wants to change the wording entirely.

I used to write like this. I used to use Word all the time. How much of my voice was lost to blue and red squiggly underlines?

I know I can go turn all those features off if I really wanted to, but I'd rather they be opt-in, just like I'd rather any genAI features be opt-in. The point is, even before genAI, Word was already tailoring and softening everybody's individuality toward a perceived ideal.

#WritersOfMastodon #AmWriting

@dalias @nivex my point was that real "AI" had meant a bunch of very useful techniques throughout computing history and it will mean a new set of cool things in a decade.

LLM-based genAI is the rare technique that is pure shit.

@nivex

If they are exclusively referring to LLM powered genAI when they say "AI" then they are fucking idiots. If they mean every type of expert system, neural network, machine learning, etc. then I agree.

@hellomiakoda @libramoon I mask so well that I sometimes get mad at NDs who can't. It's bullshit and I have to watch myself that I don't become the villain.

I subconsciously do the exact same thing that NTs do. I think, "if only they tried harder; if only they really wanted to; if only they actually cared". Because, "I can do it."

Is that what you mean?

I try to catch myself. I hope I'd get called out if I do it.

@wolf480pl @phnt @sjvn @lanodan I think the public, in general, puts too much pressure on small, mostly volunteer teams.

On the one hand, these projects are vital lynchpins holding up trillion dollar industries.

On the other, they apparently aren't worth a contact or even a donation by those using them.

I imagine corporations would spend FTEs building complicated workarounds rather than fund an open source protect. They think, "someone else will step in and fix it, eventually."

What can the small projects do? I don't know. So much of our infrastructure is designed around taking away their power while magnifying their responsibility. If it were me, I'd probably work myself to death trying to be everything for everybody. Ideally, they'd be able to go on strike. No fixes the leeches step up with people or funds. But that's taking your life into your own hands. That could end badly.

I don't have a solution. The most important thing is to prioritize but with AI generated CVEs, I'm not sure the flood is manageable.

My advice is that your mental health should come first. Always. Every day. Take care of yourself.

@phnt @sjvn @wolf480pl @lanodan working in threat management at a mid-sized company and prioritizing vulnerabilities is a full time job focusing on actual risk.

CVEs are labels that make it easier to talk about specific vulnerabilities, nothing more.

A "Zero CVE Policy" doesn't even make sense and is literally impossible without huge caveats and exceptions.

Also, CVEs don't exist for misconfigurations. Which is a bigger risk? Default password on your external firewall or a CVE with a CVSS score of 10.0 on a dev server with no Internet access?

AI Slop CVEs are a grift to "get those numbers up".

@bmacDonald94 I added a sentence to more explicitly call it out.

@bmacDonald94 to me, humanism is truly believing that all humans are equal and then living a life that embodies that belief.

It means acknowledging that so much of who we are is due to the accident of our birth. Our skin color, our external sex, our economic caste, our health, our religion, our deeply held beliefs are all set out before we can speak, walk, or hold up our own head.

What we consider to be civilized vs barbaric is not "natural". It is a set of learned and enforced opinions.

The only "truth," tested and proven by science, is that we, as a species, thrive when we work together and celebrate our differences as strengths.

Love by default, yes, but don't be a conciliatory fool who smiles while being stabbed in the gut. We have to all be on board for it to be "easy".

Humanism requires discernment and engagement. It is not lazy and it cannot rely on stereotypes. We must strive to know each other. That's the only way we'll ever understand each other. It's the only way to curtail senseless hatred.

We make the world a better place together or not at all.

@angiebaby GTFO, then. Don't let the door hit ya where the good lord split ya.

They Removed 131 Cats From an Island—What Happened to the Ecosystem Next Defied All Scientific Logic

Between 2010 and 2013, conservation teams on Chichijima—one of the main islands in the Ogasawara chain—captured and removed 131 feral cats. The goal was to reduce predation pressure on the endangered pigeon, whose population had dropped despite existing protections. The results were immediate: adult pigeon numbers rose from 111 to 966, and juvenile counts jumped from 9 to 189, according to data published in Communications Biology.

I love cats but outdoor cats are a menace and feral outdoor cats are even worse because they never "go in".

The real meat of the article is about how this tiny population avoided genetic degredation.

This phenomenon, known as genetic purging, occurs when small populations gradually eliminate deleterious mutations through natural selection. Over centuries of isolation and low population size, harmful alleles may have been systematically removed from the gene pool. The result: a population with low diversity, but also reduced genetic load.

That's awesome and shows that "life, uh, finds a way."