shit_game

That first photo looks so much like a watercolor that it's uncanny. Glass is such a cool material.

Whats to stop malicious actors (bad extensions, compromised cdn, etc.) from painting over the qr code or injecting their own? This is so incredibly terrible.

> That psychological environment is not conducive to art and fun. It sucks.

I think that two significant social conditions that very strongly affect how people socialize online now are

a) there are multiple parallel well-established, invasive, unstoppable, government-sanctioned economies of theft that seek to profit at everyones expense (advertising, AI, surveilance). Why would anyone want to share anything if it's going to be stolen? Why would anyone want to be online if they're going to be spied on? Why would anyone want to look at anything if it's all advertisements?

b) it's politically en vogue for major online platforms to allow (and even propagate) hateful content because of the current political situation in the west. The companies that have grown to control the online spaces that people use are the same companies operating the economies of theft, and have demonstrated that they will happily bend the knee if it means they are allowed to continue stealing and spying and selling all this data to governments. Why would anyone want to use a platform filled with hate speech and political propaganda?

I would describe this combination of conditions as repulsive. There's no more appeal in the social internet because the bad guys won.

Dojo is such an obvious thing, but its such an obvious thing that there are dozens of software trying to call themselves that.

As much as I and (probably) most other consumers agree with you, I don't think the car insurance industry does. Very similarly to how governments being buyers of data from adtech companies makes it an impossibility for governments to enact good privacy laws, there are massive perverse incentives here that place too much money on the table for good things to ever happen; car manufacturers want to gatekeep the sale of our data to insurance companies and governments, insurance companies want to lobby for laws that mandate data collection so that more claims can be denied and profit can rise, and governments are happy to enforce data collection because it strengthens their surveilance mechanisms.

At this point, I think I would prefer to carry a dumb flip phone for SMS and phone calls, and a smartphone-shaped generic touchscreen linux computer for everything else. It's becoming disturbingly impossible to find the former, and practically impossible (IME) to find the former.

Does anyone here have experience using Ubuntu Touch? That's the closest thing I've seen to "generic touchscreen linux" for mobile phone hardware. I'd love a device that works for multimedia, navigation, web browsing, and a handful of APKs like various chat apps (and really anything can can arbitrarily use the hardware), but it seems like tying a cellular modem to this ends up fucking up the whole dream because of carrier and manufacturer motivations/compensations.

The APIs in question are client-side iOS and Android APIs. Most of these apps are just WebViews wrapped in spyware, which is the point. It doesn't matter that most of the content is static or already uses browser-native APIs for functionality like forms, gating access to this information behind a surveilance device is the point.

I love seeing art like this. Using things that are forgotten, obscure, unused, insignificant, or otherwise inconsequential is an ethos unto its own. Obsolete technologies are becoming exponentially rare; I unfortunately passed up an auction for an Osbourne 1 just this week and I'm regretting it more every second since.

I desperatey search thrift stores for anything I can find that isn't the generic consumer garbage that plagues the US; smart tvs, ISP-issued modem/routers, terrible dvd players, "media centers", other smart garbage. Really, any kind of digital circuit that isnt a dumb interface to media is sacrilige in my search. This has become all but a moot point because things like CRTs and other obscure electronics are all picked off at the donation point and then sold online because they've been indentified as valuable or "retro", or outright thrown away because theyre considered too old for anyone to ever give a shit about.

There is a disturbing situation regarding old technology right now where only a very, very specific subset of technologies are considered valuable to a very small, specific subset of consumers; this means that things like CRTs are shipped off to warehouses to be catalogued and sold on online auctions, and their accompanying hardware is being thrown into dumpsters because theres no immediately correlated market for this hardware. For the first time in about 10 years I saw two VCRs at a thrift store (a Quasar VHQ-40M and some lesser generic garbage). This was the first time I had seen a VCR for sale IRL since going to a pawn shop that has since been demolished; the man running the store said I could keep it for free because the person who pawned it was a crackhead and he didn't even know if it worked, but if it did, he wanted me to come back and pay him $10 for it. Lo and behold it worked perfectly, so I went back and did.

I've noticed just this week that both of the thrift store companies I frequent have stopped stocking VHS tapes; I don't know if this is because they have decided they're to be thrown out, sold online, or refused as donations. The last VHS tapes I've bought were Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace and Austin Powers in Goldmember.

> Can someone tell me whether I am being a fool by actually being a bit relieved it's going this way?

You're being a fool by actually being a bit relieved it's going this way.

These bills are meant to nudge the overton window[0] of digital politics in the direction of mandating realtime identity verification for all forms of computing. Advertisers want it, governments want it, _bad people and bad governments want it_. By pushing a very small and "weak" legally-required form of user identification on everything under the guise of "saving the kids", all involved parties can point at those who disagree and say "Look, if you disagree you must want to hurt children!" And so the bills pass, and a weak form of identity verification passes and is enforced. Then it'll be shown it doesn't work, and the proposed solution will be to make these identity verification laws more intrusive and more restrictive. Repeat ad-nauseum.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window

"Now" is when this level and depth of mass identification and surveilance has become technologically feasible, financially valuable, and politically possible.

The political planets have aligned in many nations for private industry to lobby for this power, sating their own goals as advertisers and the state's goals as authoritarians. This is an open conspiracy between every tech giant and every government to perpetually identify every action that every person ever makes online for the sakes of advertising, propagandizing, surveiling, persecuting, and imprisoning people.

It is not a coincidence that this is occurring in all western nations at the same time; these economies are incredibly large and active, and these governments have been under attack from the far-right for decades.

This sounds like a platform that has no appeal to the average person, and an incredible appeal to people wishing to launder money or use money to run an influence campaign. Deliberately determining popularity proportionally to the amount of money spent is little different than advertising, but this would be under the false premise of "someone thought this was important/valuable enough to pay money to suggest I see it".

If this were to exist today, I know I would be incredibly critical of it.

This issue (human attestation) is the product of these AI companies. They are poisoning the well, only to sell the cure. This may not have initially been the plan of many of these companies, but it is the eventual end goal of all of them. Very similar to war profiteers, selling both the problem and the solution simultaneously has yet to be illegalized, but has long been masterfully capitalized, and will be vigourously because nobody will stop it.

Years ago (around 2020, when GPT-2 and 3 became publicly available) I noticed and was incredibly critical of how prevalent LLM-generated content was on reddit. I was permanently banned for "abusing reports" for reporting AI-generated comments as spam. Before that, I had posted about how I believed that the the fight against bots was over because the uncanny valley of text generation had been crossed; prior to the public availability of LLMs, most spam/bot comments were either shotgunned scripts that are easily blockable by the most rudimentary of spam filters, generated gibberish created by markov chains, or simply old scraped comments being reposted. The landscape of bot operation at the time largely relied on gaming human interaction, which required carefuly gaming temporal-relevance of text content, coherence of text content (in relation to comment chains), and the most basic attempt at appearing to be organic.

After LLMs became publicly available, text content that was temporally, contextually, and coherently relevant could be generated instantly for free. This removed practically every non-platform-imposed friction for a bot to be successful on reddit (and to generalize, anywhere that people interact). Now the onus of determining what is and isn't organic interaction is squarely on the platform, which is a difficult problem because now bot operators have had much of their work freed up, and can solely focus on gaming platform heuristics instead of also having to game human perception.

This is where AI companies come in to monetize the disaster they have created; by offering fingerprinting services for content they generate, detection services for content made by themselves and others, and estimations of human authenticity for content of any form. All while they continue to sell their services that contradict these objectives, and after having stolen literally everything that has ever been on the internet to accomplish this.

These people are evil. Not these companies - they are legal constructions that don't think or feel or act. These people are evil.

>It used to feel fun but now it's miserable.

It's not their job to entertain you.

The issue with creating some hidden maturity heuristic for accounts is that it will be gamed just the same as any other, except that using age alone is the simplest heuristic to game. You can simply do nothing for incrimental periods of time and then begin testing aged accounts to roughly determine what the minimum age an account must reach to become "trusted".

Bot prevention is a very difficult constant game of cat and mouse, and a lot of bot operators have become very skilled at determining the hidden metrics used by platforms to bless accounts; that's their job, after all. I've become a big fan of lobste.rs' invitation tree approach, where the reputation of new accounts rides on the reputation of older accounts, and risks consequence up the chain. It also creates a very useful graph of account origin, allowing for scorched earth approaches to moderation that would otherwise require a serious (and often one-off) machine learning approach to connect accounts.

> Not adding the domain to Google Search Console immediately. I don't need their analytics and wasn't really planning on having any content on the domain, so I thought, why bother? Big, big mistake.

I'm not particularly familiar with SEO or the massive black box that is Google Search - is this really as critical as the author makes it seem? I have both .lol and .party domains, both through porkbun (and the TLDs seem to be administrated by Uniregistry and Famous Four Media, respectively), and both are able to be found on Google Search. It seems like this preemtive blacklisting would be the result of some heuristics on Google's end; is .online just one of the "cursed" TLDs like .tk?

Similarly to pixel sorting, effects like these fall under New Aesthetic[0], which primarily communicates "digitalness" in some avstract sense. It's cool, but definitely not Glitch. Emulation of some intuitive perception of "this is something computeresque and it's broken or acting how it shouldn't" has tons of applications in media, particularly in commercial creative workflows where actually getting down and dirty with file formats or hardware is either cost or application prohibitive, but will often draw strong criticism from glitch artists. There is a philosophical parallel between this "hard glitch" versus "glitch aesthetic" constrast to criticisms of AI generated images and manmade art, largely centered around the ethos of the work. There's also the undeniable differences in the compositions of hard glitches and new aesthetic media - most hard glitches are ugly, as they're not generally designed to be visually appealing or communicative in the way that new aesthetic deliberately is. The deliberate composition and curation (or complete lack thereof) of hard glitch elements that makes up much glitch art is arguably just as important to its ethos as the hard glitches themselves, IMO.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Aesthetic

Lots of the AIisms with letters remind me of tom7's SIGBOVIC video Uppestcase and Lowestcase Letters [advances in derp learning]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HLRdruqQfRk

Honestly; I don't know. I don't think there really is a viable solution that preserves consumer computation. Most of the young people I know don't really know or care about computers. Actually, most people at large that I know don't know or care about computers. They're devices that play videos, access web storesfronts, run browsers, do email, save pictures, and play games for them. Mobile phones are an even worse wasteland of "I don't know and I don't care". The average person doesn't give a shit about this being a problem. Coupled with the capital interests of making computing a subscription-only activity (leading to market activity that prices out consumers and lobbying actions that illegalize it), this spells out a very dire, terrible future for the world where computers require government and corporate permission to operate on the internet, and potentially in ones home.

Things are bad and I don't know what can be done about it because the balance of power and influence is so lopsided in favor of parties who want to do bad.

This is the result of the long-planned desire for consumer computing to be subscription computing. Ultimately, there is only so much that can be done in software to "encourage" (read: coerce) vendor-locked, always-online, account-based computer usage; there are viable options for people to escape these ecosystems via the ever growing plethora of web-based productivity software and linux distributions which are genuinely good, user friendly enough, and 100% daily-drivable, but these software options require hardware.

It's no coincidence that Microsoft decided to take such a massive stake in OpenAI - leveraging the opportunity to get in on a new front for vendor locking by force-multiplying their own market share by inserting it into everything they provide is an obvious choice, but also leveraging the insane amount of capital being thrown into the cesspit that is AI to make consumer hardware unaffordable (and eventually unusable due to remote attestation schemes) further enforces their position. OEM computers that meet the hardware requirements of their locked OS and software suite being the only computers that are a) affordable and b) "trusted" is the end goal.

I don't want to throw around buzzwords or be doomeristic, but this is digital corporatism in its endgame. Playing markets to price out every consumer globally for essential hardware is evil and something that a just world would punish relentlessly and swiftly, yet there aren't even crickets. This is happening unopposed.

Complex manufacturing of improvised firearms has been practically made obsolete by the commodification of both steel tubing and cartridges. "Pipe guns" are incredibly easy to make, and require little more than a pipe, a cap, and a drill (which can sometimes be omitted as well). Many common cartridge diameters very closely or exactly match commercially available pipe diameters, and the hardware to make a single-shot firearm is ubiquitous in any store that sells plumbing supplies. Pipe guns are simple and cheap enough to make that some people abuse gun buy-back programs by deliberately manufacturing pipe guns for pennies and pocketing the money these programs offer [0]. These are real, functional guns, and I promise they're simpler, faster, and cheaper to manufacture than any 3d printed gun.

0: https://www.thefirearmblog.com/blog/2014/11/17/handing-zip-g...

They certainly didn't have mills as we know them in the 1700s, but lathes, drills, and subtractive manufacturing had been in practice for millenia. You could say they were "machined by hand". Most early firearms (barring large-bore guns like cannons) were made from forged steel or iron, which is significantly stronger than cast iron due to its lower carbon content and regular grain structure. These forged parts were then worked on by gunspiths with cutters and abrasives to produce parts in tolerance for their mechanism. Cast iron (or more typically in early warfare, bronze) was suitable for cannons and large-bore guns due to the mass of the finished gun; more metal meant that the gun could withstand more shock, but even then they could fail catastrophically due to material fatigue or failure.

>I can't help but feel this is just Google trying to pull the ladder up behind then and make it more difficult for other companies to collect training data.

I can very easily see this as being Google's reasoning for these actions, but let's not pretend that clandestine residential proxies aren't used for nefarious things. The vast majority of social media networks will ban - or more generally and insiously - shadow ban accounts/IPs that use known proxy IPs. This means that they are gating access to their platforms behind residential IPs (on top of their other various blackboxes and heuristics like fingerprinting). Operators of bot networks thus rely on residential proxy services to engage in their work, which ranges from mundane things like engagement farming to outright dangerous things like political astroturfing, sentiment manipulation, and propaganda dissemination.

LLMs and generative image and video models have made the creation of biased and convincing content trivial and cheap, if not free. The days of "troll farms" is over, and now the greatest expense for a bad actor wishing to influence the world with fake engagement and biased opinions is their access to platforms, which means accounts and internet connections that aren't blacklisted or shadow banned. Account maturity and reputation farming is also feeling a massive boon due to these tools, but as an independent market it also similarly requires internet connections that aren't blacklisted or shadow banned. Residential proxies are the bottleneck for the vast majority of bad actors.

What is the endgame here? Obviously "heightened security" in some kind of sense, but to what end and what mechanisms? What is the scope of the work? Is this work meant to secure forges and upstream development processes via more rigid identity verification, or package manager and userspace-level runtime restrictions like code signing? Will there be a push to integrate this work into distributions, organizations, or the kernel itself? Is hardware within the scope of this work, and to what degree?

The website itself is rather vague in its stated goals and mechanisms.

I'd imagine that infrastructure costs are rather significant for Tailwind, and that there are non-neglibible organizational costs as well.

pets.com also failed to make it through the "carcinization" of online retail, but wasnt nearly as notable a failure because it was attempting to start an online retail business from the ground up, versus Sears' failure to adopt online retail to their already-successful B&M model. I think the Sears mode of failure is much more spectacular because it had previously thrived on a business model that's almost analgous to Amazon's, threw it away, and failed to recognize it could be effective again.

It's so tiring how everything around us is being engineered to make us miserable for the sake of profit. That in itself creates misery, almost seemingly for the sake of misery. A just world would punish this behavior.

I agree with the author in that there are such things as "fuck off" contact pages; I deal with them often looking for hardware and software and professional services. The gating of contact behind a sales department is one method of "fucking off" a person, but so is omitting necessary contact information, gating it behind some absolutely hostile AI chat agent, or just burying the page entirely. Certain large American ISPs are very guilty of this behavior, even going so far as to make the entire process of contacting them one giant, deliberately engineered "fuck off and die" experience across literally every medium of contact (web, mail, phone call, etc.).

Though to be fair, this is a bit rich coming from a blog that I'd describe as a "fuck off blog". This was incredibly difficult to read. I'm all for people doing whatever they want with their site (I'm guilty of doing ornery things on my site because I enjoy it and the aesthetic), but I find the irony palpable.

Regarding the communicative iterations where you desperately (read: hopelessly) try to convince a client otherwise as they demand something unreasonable; 100% on-point. In my consultations with a close friend I've found that it's not only hard, but interpersonally challenging to say "no" to someone when you're either being compensated by them or in some personal relationship with them that you don't want to jeopardize. The best advice I've recieved regarding business operations is "don't do business with friends", and I imagine this kind of situation is one of the biiggest reasons why. Someone being set on a terrible idea and relying on you to implement it is not pleasant. My experience with this to date has been informal, but I'd imagine that once legal contracts are involved it becomes hair loss-tier stressful to deal with.

Very cool project. I love the detail the poster went into in their linked video post about working with the sensor and their implementation.

> Optical computer mice work by detecting movement with a photoelectric cell (or sensor) and a light. The light is emitted downward, striking a desk or mousepad, and then reflecting to the sensor. The sensor has a lens to help direct the reflected light, enabling the mouse to convert precise physical movement into an input for the computer’s on-screen cursor. The way the reflected changes in response to movement is translated into cursor movement values.

I can't tell if this grammatical error is a result of nonchalant editing and a lack of proofreading or a person touching-up LLM content.

> It’s a clever solution for a fundamental computer problem: how to control the cursor. For most computer users, that’s fine, and they can happily use their mouse and go about their day. But when Dycus came across a PCB from an old optical mouse, which they had saved because they knew it was possible to read images from an optical mouse sensor, the itch to build a mouse-based camera was too much to ignore.

Ah, it's an LLM. Dogshit grifter article. Honestly, the HN link should be changed to the reddit post.

I'd posit a potential reason that these fields are currently hiring is a combination of that it destroys your body without recourse and many of these positions require certifications that take a long time to achieve (either through apprenticeships or training programs). You will also generally not get any kind of meaningful benefits from these jobs, and your body will disintigreate before your very eyes as you work yourself to bone for a pittance. The compensation for these roles is poor in comparison to white collar work despite the perceived demand for them, there is no safety net in many cases (401k, pension, reasonable health insurance, etc. outside of union shops, which are rare outside of say welders and pipefitters (and getting rarer every day!)).

And frankly the work is miserable. I've crawled through suspended ductwork to run conduit and wiring in antifreeze recycling plants that were filled with god-knows-what reagents covering everything in dust thick enough to paint a clown. PPE be damned, my skin burned for days. It was hot, loud, cramped, wet with chemicals, uncomfortable, dangerous, and unpleasant. These jobsites are the bread and butter of blue collar anything; awful and dangerous conditions outside of your control, but required by your contract because not doing it means not getting paid.

Sure, an agent isn't going to be replacing the poor bastard who has to do that, but is our only response the the deliberate and systematic murder of the white collar job market "you can suffer for less money so you'll be fine"? That's a pathetic whimpering way to just accept the very loud and public murder of class mobility.

absolutely unhinged llm bot