OliveMate

I'm not a developer, but what can be done in the future to prevent this from happening on a wider scale? Have search engines index verified photographs from key news + historical sources? Do they mark down results including "AI generated"?

Do we treat the internet like low-background steel[1] and prioritise anything from before 2020?

My experience with something similar was seeing an image someone posted on a history subreddit early in the year, apparently it was a picture of a prominent Indian ruler from the 1800s. If it wasn't for someone saying they had never saw a photo of them before, the OP wouldn't have chimed in and casually said it was an AI generated image. But from here on out I can imagine people stumbling onto that image if they simply searched him online, get a glimpse, and have no idea it was fabricated.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-background_steel

As someone who went through the same experience it'd take a lot for me to even think about touching GIMP again. I'm sure that it's a viable Photoshop alternative but any functionality is obscured under a web of riddles.

Blender's UI used to be nightmarish and backwards for any newcomer (why would they make right click select things instead of left??), but as someone who's tinkered with it over the last decade the UI changes introduced in 2.8 finally made things comprehensible. GIMP needs much the same, but I doubt it'll happen until a wider community (or some industry) incentivise it.

Earlier this week I picked up a copy of On Writing Well by William Zinsser, a style guide on what he believes makes for good informal writing. It's yet to reflect in any of my comments but I'd recommend it if you struggle with being concise.

It does have a heavy focus on American writing and it's akin to a longform opinion piece, but I wouldn't let that get in the way of what makes for an accessible and pleasant read.

edit: What also helps is to sit down and write. Make a blog and even if you don't have a specific topic to focus on, just write and keep at it. Take a note of how you write, the style that you naturally develop with all of your quirks; do you overuse commas, do you routinely break up sentences with a dash or a semicolon? Does it have a sense of flow?

Before long something will click in your head, you'll become more cognisant of the world around you, and your head will be screaming at you to write certain thoughts and ideas down.

IIRC redeeming a Half-Life or Counter-Strike CD key on Steam grants you the Half-Life 1 Anthology pack[1], so it's worth giving it a shot!

[1] https://store.steampowered.com/bundle/237/HalfLife_1_Antholo...

As someone who first played a CD copy of Half-Life before picking up the Steam version, it's amazing to see that they brought back features which were neglected from the Steam release – most notably the viewroll when moving left & right and a semi-recreation of the old main menu.

Many of the QOL changes are greatly appreciated (especially grenade physics), the changes to technical limitations (and addition of func_vehicle) will be a godsend for modders, and I'm surprisingly over the moon that Valve have acknowledged the psyched out Barney from the alpha.

It was disastrously successful to the point where 'hoover' has been synonymous with 'vaccuum cleaner' ever since over here!

Being subject to such UV lights without my knowledge and waking up in the dead of night to my eyes burning is a new fear I'd never expect to develop. A nice reminder of how important combating negligence is.

The Gameboy is impressive but I can't stop chuckling at the site's URL pattern, that's what really ties it together for me.

On one hand I've found the entire saga of the Somerset Gimp to be oddly fascinating since he first popped up pre-pandemic[1] and I've been following the updates on him since, it's just the sort of news you don't hear but yeah... Him going out and approaching people who aren't consenting, especially at night, bit dodgy.

[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-bristol-48982140

I'm pretty much in the same boat, all my smartphones have been Android phones and I was always excited to see what changed from version to version because Google had a good track record. I didn't agree with every change but for me, the change from Android 11 to 12 was unbelievably mindboggling, and a complete change of pace from everything before. And worst of all, you could not disable everything I list:

- Everything suddenly had to be a large round button which took up more space than necessary. The notifications + quick options menu in particular became suddenly bloated. In particular the keyboard press preview when from neat little rectangles to large distracting circles to the point where I had to turn it off.

- A ton of transparent elements were removed with a simple black box, which removed a sense of continuity when using my phone. Dragging down my notifications didn't show me the app in the background, and switching between apps didn't show my wallpaper in the background. It might seem minor, but it's such an odd change to make after so long and I struggle to see why Google decided to remove the ability to see everything behind the notifications menu.

- Android 12's UI colour schemes were suddenly dictated by your phone's wallpaper, but the palettes are a selection of garish pastel colours. Until Android 13 toned it back a bit I was reliant on using a monochrome wallpaper to have the notifications menu (now a screen-filling behemoth) not be a selection of greens.

- Google introduced a stretchy rubber effect when scrolling through everything which to me was suddenly jarring (especially when it'd break at the bottom of a page or while holding my finger in place). I clearly remember it being the first thing I tried to disable, but the only option that seemed to stop it was to remove animations as a whole.

- Google removed the old split screen feature and replaced it with a less functional "app pairs" system. Before Android 12 you could pin any app to the top half of your screen and switch around other apps on the bottom half, a great feature if you wanted to multitask or simply wanted to watch a YouTube video while jumping between browsing the web and messaging friends. With the new app pairs system, you can only split the screen between two select apps, and you need them both to be open before you attempt it - if you want to swap out the bottom app, you have to unpair the two apps and repair the top app with a different one, which just seems worse in almost every way. It made attempting to multitask a nightmare which takes up a lot more time than it requires[1] - and despite multiple complaints for the last few years, Google hasn't commented on it whatsoever[2]. It also generally coincided with when Google made YouTube Premium let you watch videos in a window or in the background on mobile.

Again as someone who's always liked Android and was excited about new updates, I've hit the point where I can't bring myself to look at anything new because of all the recent decisions, UI changes, and introducing confusingly odd features which I don't have the ability to disable or customise to my liking.

[1] https://imgur.com/IXmpubM [2] https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/210345474

When talking surveys, it's always imperative to bring up this scene from Yes, Prime Minister which describes how these surveys work - https://youtu.be/ahgjEjJkZks?t=26

For reference, National Service was a national conscription service between 1949 and 1963. Since then a lot of conservative-leaning folks have been clammering about saying that bringing it back would fix the badly behaving youth.

It was never perfect, but it was a great niche for storing memories of certain places in a way that pictures or a normal panorama couldn't do. That faux-3D scroll really helped capture -something- of the moment which brings everything back when you look at it.

This story has been cemented in my mind since I was a teenager, and no matter how many times I read it, when someone posts it I always go out of my way to read it one more time.

To me what stood out was how clean the audio was for a recording you'd expect to be covert. Yeah you've got the background noise slapped in, but the AI voice is nearly crystal with no change of volume, and there's no /phone mic bumping against someone's hand + pocket/ noises synonymous with the sort of recording you'd hear this in.

I cannot find this for the life of me but I remember in Corbyn's tenure during the whole "stupid woman" spat there was a video circling around Twitter + WhatsApp with cut up audio of Corbyn saying those two words slapped on top. It was simple, but to a lot of average folk who aren't experienced with audio editing and wouldn't even consider how fake it was, it might as well have been real. It's interesting how the game of detective has changed with the advent of AI audio & image generation, but bullshit travels faster than the truth, and those who could nip it in the bud are nowhere near close to the first people who share it

Really it's a bit daft. The secondary SSD I ordered didn't arrive for a while, and I got inpatient.

I moved as much as I could onto some spare USB sticks and used them to pass the files along to the new build. I prioritised my photo archive (backed up online too) and project files first, then music, and then assorted videos and images. I prioritised the ones which spoke to me the most, which I came back to often, those which inspired nostalgia, and those which I felt would probably be gone in the next few years. It's a little short sighted, but I was strapped for storage.

The migration was only this month, and while I wiped my old SSD to use as an extra drive in this build, the harddrive which contained my old downloads folder is still in my possession... And only now is it coming to me that I can just plug it in to my current build and transfer the files

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In terms of proper backups, I've yet to get something set up. My photo archives are backed up online and on multiple USB drives, and everything I migrated is on my new build and also on a series of USB drives... Again, I'll probably prioritise personal files moreso than random videos I downloaded, but it's given me food for thought.

My extra advice, make a note of who made what you downloaded and where you downloaded it from to help yourself and others in the future.

I recently built a new PC and, while I didn't migrate everything I saved, I made sure to keep my old system around for a few weeks just in case I needed anything.

Someone in a community I was in asked if someone had a link to some old Call of Duty shitpost from a decade ago, and I immediately recognised what they were on about. But a good hour spent scouring my early YouTube likes revealed nothing, so I dragged the old rig back in, powered it on, lo and behold within a minute I'd found the exact video I must've saved eons back.

No idea who created the said video, but I'm sure that if I noted a name or channel URL, there'd be a lot more missing media out there which others would be looking for.

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On one hand, I respect the fact that YouTube facilitates a level of privacy when you delete or hide things, obfuscating any trace of the video from playlists, etc. But on the other hand, the amount of times I've known I've added a video to a playlist only for it to be deleted with no trace... Yeah, it can suck. Recently turning a lot of unlisted videos into private ones hasn't helped in that respect either.

I don't know what caliber of teacher you're looking for, but as someone who's always been interested in image & video editing/manipulation, I've always enjoyed watching Captain Disillusion[1], a YouTuber who focuses on fake viral videos. His breakdowns of how disinformation in these videos can be spread is combined with entertaining and easy to grasp explanations of VFX techniques all packaged in short digestible videos.

While his breakdowns aren't tutorials to be followed (unless you're already experienced with Blender and its ilk), they're great for learning how different video effects work and how the most minor of things can immediately give the game away.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/@CaptainDisillusion/videos

You could have any combination of 0 1 4 5 and it'll work as long as you use the same numbers the same amount of times as the original sequence.

> Thanks for the book recommendation. I'll look for an ebook or audiobook, because you know, the whole having too much stuff thing haha.

I have a whole bunch of books I'm never going to read gathering dust on my bookshelf, and I've only really noticed them now that you've said that. Thanks for the reminder!

As much as I couldn't part with the wooden train set, it's a lovely feeling sharing something you once loved. When it came to all my childhood books we found a local teacher who was more than happy to come around and take them off our hands.

Mechanical keypad locks dont require you to input the code in a certain order. If the code is 0451 you can unlock it with 1054 or any other combination of those numbers. It's not exciting exciting, but it's oddly novel to show off.

I'm in the same boat, at its heart it's very simple HTML and CSS, but I've never done anything like it before and figuring it all out has been surprisingly fun!

If it happens to be a blog, the other month there was a post here asking users to share their blogs[1], and shortly after someone popped up with a blog roll[2] you can submit it to!

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36575081

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36605493

A few years back I read through The Art of Discarding by Nagisa Tatsumi and I'd highly recommend it. It's a short and light read that breaks down our habits of keeping things and has a handful of strategies to get rid of what we don't need, and I found it pretty useful with decluttering a good chunk of what I don't need, and I found that a lot of the stuff I had for sentimental reasons I didn't have much of a true connection to.

But with that being said, winding anecdote: Last month I was helping my folks clear old boxes that pretty much contained my entire childhood. Aside from 3 books there was nothing I'd remotely thought about keeping for well over a decade and I was happy to give or throw away whatever I found. Old toy cars, action figures, way too many PS2 cheat book and magazines to count, I had no connection to anything as we sorted out charity deposits.

I'll admit the Lego was a fun nightmare (I admit that I never should've opened the box!), I'm still scrounging through a mountain of bricks putting together which sets I can, but I won't be keeping this myself.

But then there was a box containing a wooden train set.

The last time I saw it I was ~4 years old. And there I was, looking at something so innocent that hadn't crossed my mind in over 20 years and I immediately broke down in tears on the spot. It felt raw and even thinking about it is still overwhelming. I was laughing with tears streaming down my face as I talked to my mum about it, and even though I won't touch it ever again, I can't help but feel thankful that she decided to keep it for me.

I wish I could make some poignant point about memory and the human condition, but it's weird and odd the way we can have such different emotional attachments to things, and don't take it too hard if some things are too hard to throw away.

If you have an mp3 file of what you wish to be a ringtone, could can put it on the phone and open it in the file manager or music app of your choice, press the ⋮ options button and there should be an option to set it as a ringtone.

... It beats the 2000's hell of buying a novelty ringtone for 99p and ending up in some small print recurring charge for a year.

There's this unfortunate mean streak that plagues this country when it comes to people's ability to work and how much they earn, even if it's due to health. YouGov recently did a survey asking about what people should be able to have based on their income, and yeah. God forbid you have something nice while on minimum wage or benefits (which we ought to use a better term for).

https://yougov.co.uk/topics/society/articles-reports/2023/08...

It's sad how during the pandemic the public zeitgeist was all about public health, taking care of your mental health, and having more empathy for one another (once toilet roll was back on the shelves), and since we've returned to normality it's back to outright hostility for those who're struggling.

This was a nice read, and as someone who's been slowly getting into Linux and panics at the seeming over-reliance of using sudo terminal commands, I'm glad that she started this read off with risk. Sure any program could break something, but with command lines things feel more abstract in a way, and whenever I'm putting in a command I can't help but feel I'm betting on not screwing up.

I will say I'm warming up to the terminal than I ever did CMD because you can run programs without faffing about with CD (or god forbid you try and figure out how to switch with drive to use).

I don't have anything codified, but I'm 90% sure that if anything happened to me, my brother would go through my stuff and retrieve every drive from my devices. What happens after that, I've no clue.

I've never talked to him about this, but I ought to do it the next time I see him in person. At some point I plan on handing him a drive containing my backups just in case, but I'm unsure about whether to encrypt it or not, nor have I considered how he could access my password manager for my active accounts if anything goes wrong.

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If you'll excuse the self-promotion I very recently wrote a blog post about how backing up old files has suddenly felt melancholic, and I briefly mention some offhand thoughts about data after death.

https://callmeo.live/blog/the-melancholy-of-file-backups

Has anyone here tried this? When projects like this normally pop up I see people talk about potential issues with future Windows updates.

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I'm in a bit of a tricky spot, in the next month or two I'll be building a new PC and I really don't know what to do about the OS. Windows is familiar, easy, and I know how to fix things with it, but the increasing amount of bloat and needless online integration is putting me off Windows 11 (my current W10 doesn't have the start menu online search thank God).

Recently I got sick of Windows 11's bloat + poor performance on my ThinkPad and Iinstalled Linux. I got a month and a half out of Fedora until something happened and half of my flatpaks would crash seconds after launch – even with terminal logs and the entire internet to sift through, I knew that I was way above my head. Currently I'm on Mint and hoping I don't run into anything like that again. I can use Linux, but I know the limits of my knowledge.

I can take a semi-disposable nature with what I put on my laptop, if I have to install another Linux distro I'll do it in a heartbeat. But with my desktop, I can't take the same approach. And again, Windows is familiar enough to me that I can diagnose + fix issues easily. I'd just like to know people's experiences with running scripts like this.

If you enjoy reading about strange things that were used to attack political leaders, there's always the Ed Miliband bacon sandwich photograph - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ed_Miliband_bacon_sandwich_pho...

It's pretty abhorrent to practically digitally unclothe someone (unless they fully consent to it), and more times than not the content produced by this will be shared online to countless other people.

The thing is, you cannot guarantee that everyone will know it's fake, and when you weaponise it against people who can't distinguish it there'll be consequences.

Currently we see people found to be doing Adult Content online fired from their jobs, but what if a technically-blind boss gets sent a ton of deepfakes of an employee and is falsely told they do content like that on the side? What if a doubting partner suddenly receives deepfakes of their partner with someone else? What if your political rival starts spreading deepfakes with wildly rabid claims about yourself which the media picks up and reports on – bullshit has spread around the world by the time the truth has tied its shoelaces.

Think about the absolute inane content people believe on Facebook. Think about the misinformation that gets spread over Twitter just because the fake information would be funny. Think about the stuff you've seen online which turned out not to be so real.

Even if the images generated aren't real, the subject of them can't convince the world they're not, and there's no way for them to stop the violation of their self-image.

Surprisingly we still have a few things that could be sold off for a fraction of the price. Think about the long term savings in not having to put effort into continuing costly services and letting someone else do it instead!