Notices by 🆘Bill Cole 🇺🇦 (grumpybozo@toad.social)

RE: https://mindly.social/@alan/117277892640046467

Yeah, AT&T spammed my very much non-public work address, trying to sell me an iPhone. Great way to stop having the SpamAssassin Project claim that they’re not spammers.

@dalias And that nontechnical reason assures that it won’t be happening without broader systemic changes.

@dalias @whitequark Project much? :)
LOTS of humans want LOTS of kids. Even more want saner numbers. Humans GENERALLY keep having more than 2 kids per couple.

It is true that many countries are shrinking and aging because of low birth rates but it’s not really evident that all of that is due to not *wanting* more children, rather than the socioeconomic pressures to not have many and especially to not have more after the first.

I don’t know why everyone says Blue Sky is down. I launch the app and I get a perfect blue sky.

@dalias I hate sodium lights. They make everything look wrong.

But you're absolutely correct.

“Escaping containment” doesn’t happen in an organization serious about doing secure testing. How does a secure testing environment have any access to public DNS? Why does it have any IP routes to get to the Internet?

These things require configuration. They don’t appear from nowhere.

Just so that anyone unfamiliar with the fundamentals of #Sysadminnery doesn’t misunderstand:

If OpenAI had wanted a closed testing sandbox, they would have actually constructed and used a closed testing sandbox. THIS IS NOT HARD.

Sure, it's possible that they have shit netadmins and sysadmins who couldn’t contain a test planned by shit devoopsies and project managers unwilling to put out the effort to build REAL containment. They intentionally tested against production: the Internet at large.

@mwl They even sell tampons in a variety of calibers!

@alan @jwildeboer The attacks have thwarted all of those tactics. They use UAs constructed from real UA tokens with minor variations. They have graduated from cheap VMs on Huawei Cloud and Digital Ocean to random IoTs in millions of households and mobile devices in millions of hands.
A few days ago I was able to measure over a thousand simultaneous sessions, each from a different /16 network.
My response to that isn’t taking the site down, but I am shedding load aggressively.

@dalias I bet that analysis assumes the availability of petroleum for the next 50 years, and the wording suggests that you did not even consider the potential for gasoline prices to increase as it becomes harder to extract at scale.

Of course, if the comparison is to "I don’t have or need a vehicle" that's all irrelevant.

RE: https://hachyderm.io/@dalias/116563779075184371

It used to be a point of professional pride for me that I document the work I do very carefully with a goal of informing and assisting my users, my colleagues, and especially my juniors.
The ravening maws of the web scrapers pounding every website I tend, feeding LLMs, make me less proud of that. Has my writing contributed to the false credibility of the slop that I see in support requests and bug reports?
Probably…

@dalias Shared access to purchased items, convenient mechanism for authorization control for things like location and sharing. Members can opt out freely. Each associated cost is tied to whichever member made the purchase.

And yes, those features are golden handcuffs in a problematic family. They’re just conveniences in the many cases where people are happy and eager to remain entangled.

RE: https://hachyderm.io/@dalias/116227754682390432

But also, some, like Apple’s family mechanism, can be quite helpful in non-pathological situations.
Mint falling to standard marketing capture tactics was inevitable when they sold out to the Big Pink T.

@dalias Are you sure that’s not compression? I would think that since they encrypt backups they would also compress them.

Right now is the ideal time for people with positions on the left end of the Overton Window to find offices to run for wearing a big blue D.
Anything. School board. State leg. County clerk. Sheriff.

If you want a real Left party in the US, the only serious strategy is to do to the Dems what the Fash have done to the GOP. Be the party. In the US, it really can be that simple.

RE: https://zirk.us/@CindyWeinstein/116054389334933001

Bud Cort saved my life. Hal Ashby and Ruth Gordon assisted.

I was too young to see it 1st run, but I believe that I watched that film a half-dozen times as a teenager before home video was really a thing, in a movie theater entirely filled with strangers.

RE: https://mastodon.world/@C_Miller/116030930814746740

Gotta be Lady Maggie, right? Minor? Blair?

(Everyone knows it’s Cameron, come on, he was a FREAK)

RE: https://mastodon.social/@rasterweb/116023757992738845

IN FACT…
New is sometimes worse, especially in this age of commercial software going insane. Manufacturers keep making machines that need new software to work, and it’s all infested with slop.
I’m not replacing my iPhone 14 until it literally cannot connect or I can safely load an AI-free OS on a newer phone.

Just heard (on NPR, a Brittany Luce interview of doctors) what seemed like an insane stat:

91% of US white men who can benefit from HIV PrEP are receiving it.

That’s gotta be a LOT of straight white guys. The omnipresent ads for various forms of PrEP don’t exactly seem targeted to cishet white guys…

I’m now regretting now not paying a premium ~10 ya because there’s some bit of that Delta on the kitchen sink which is dysfunctional and that likely means a whole new faucet… @dalias https://hachyderm.io/@dalias/115855309718560107