The Bowery Presents
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untitled
titsay
Color Me Curious
Cosmic Funnies
Not today Justin
Doug Jones
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$LAYYYTER
The Bright Sessions
oozey mess
Fai_Ryy
I'd rather be in outer space 🛸
Origami Around
PUT YOUR BEARD IN MY MOUTH
Love Begins
sheepfilms
ellievsbear
🩵 avery cochrane 🩵
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@roseqaz
Holy fuck you illegally downloaded a cardigan
Dang. The skill needed to know how to use all of those machines, the vision, the planning. Wowzers.
Got a hole in your cardigan? The fix is simple! First, bust out your portable Jacquard loom ...
You wouldn't download a jumper
horsie
it's so gentle
Recall uses AI features "to take images of your active screen every few seconds."
I think every computer user needs to read this because holy fucking shit this is fucking horrible.
So Windows has a new feature incoming called Recall where your computer will first, monitor everything you do with screenshots every couple of seconds and "process that" with an AI.
Hey, errrr, fuck no? This isn't merely because AI is really energy intensive to the point that it causes environmental damage. This is because it's basically surveilling what you are doing on your fucking desktop.
This AI is not going to be on your desktop, like all AI, it's going to be done on another server, "in the cloud" to be precise, so all those data and screenshot? They're going to go off to Microsoft. Microsoft are going to be monitoring what you do on your own computer.
Now of course Microsoft are going to be all "oooh, it's okay, we'll keep your data safe". They won't. Let me just remind you that evidence given over from Facebook has been used to prosecute a mother and daughter for an "illegal abortion", Microsoft will likely do the same.
And before someone goes "durrr, nuthin' to fear, nuthin to hide", let me remind you that you can be doing completely legal and righteous acts and still have the police on your arse. Are you an activist? Don't even need to be a hackivist, you can just be very vocal about something concerning and have the fucking police on your arse. They did this with environmental protesters in the UK. The culture war against transgender people looks likely to be heading in a direction wherein people looking for information on transgender people or help transitioning will be tracked down too. You have plenty to hide from the government, including your opinions and ideas.
Again, look into backing up your shit and switching to Linux Mint or Ubuntu to get away from Microsoft doing this shit.
Steps to Disable or Uninstall 'Recall' in Windows 11 24H2
there are multiple options here depending on how comfortable you are digging into your computer's registry. You can either simply disable it surface level through settings or excise it entirely from the system registry
reblogging again as a cautionary tale to please PLEASE fucking make a system restore point before you do anything. i consider myself tech savvy and still nearly bricked my computer. and make sure you know how to access safe mode
Okay so a guy in my solid state physics class was telling us about this muon scanning startup he worked at, GScan, and I'm going insane. I don't work there and I have no stake in the company, financial or otherwise, I just need to tell you about it.
Muons are short-lived subatomic particles, same charge as an electron but ~200 times more massive. On Earth, they're produced by cosmic rays colliding with the upper atmosphere, and they hit the ground at a rate of about ten thousand per minute per square meter.
They're moving extremely fast at ground level, like 0.99 c. So they careen right through matter, deflecting only very slightly around heavy atomic nuclei – they'll penetrate like a hundred meters into solid rock.
What do you do with this continuous shower of deep-penetrating charged particles, constantly blanketing every square inch of the Earth's surface?
(source)
The classic thing is use them to image the inside of massive structures, like we use x-rays to look inside living tissue – except instead of generating them yourself, you just use atmospheric muons. Muon archeology is a whole thing, they've used it to find hidden chambers in pyramids and stuff. Neat!
But this one Estonian company is doing some crazy bullshit and I love it.
Sandwich anything between a pair of portable muon detectors and get full 3D imaging of the interior, with sub-millimeter accuracy, by tracking the minute deflection of muons between them. Samples that are WAY too thick for x-rays, made of literally anything. Just put some muon detectors on some two by fours in a warehouse and call it a day.
You can just. Image anything??? Anything you want?? Completely passively!! Just detectors! No particle source! Put them anywhere. The detectors themselves are a mature technology, the company's tech is in the algorithms they use to get this level of spatial and elemental resolution.
You can detect failures inside cable-reinforced concrete bridges without cutting open the bridges.
Decommissioned Soviet nuclear submarine filled with concrete, with no drawings or documentation, that may or may not have spent fuel canisters in it? And you need to cut it up for storage? Just look at the muons.
One of the wackiest ideas is to put one detector under your bed and one on the ceiling, so you get a full 3D scan of your body every night, passively. I want one.
Cosmic-ray based solutions for 3D imaging. GScan redefines the boundaries of 3D scanning with Muon Flux Technology (MFT) detectors. Unparall
I just started grad school this fall after a few years away from school and man I did not realize how dire the AI/LLM situation is in universities now. In the past few weeks:
I chatted with a classmate about how it was going to be a tight timeline on a project for a programming class. He responded "Yeah, at least if we run short on time, we can just ask chatGPT to finish it for us"
One of my professors pulled up chatGPT on the screen to show us how it can sometimes do our homework problems for us and showed how she thanks it after asking it questions "in case it takes over some day."
I asked one of my TAs in a math class to explain how a piece of code he had written worked in an assignment. He looked at it for about 15 seconds then went "I don't know, ask chatGPT"
A student in my math group insisted he was right on an answer to a problem. When I asked where he got that info, he sent me a screenshot of Google gemini giving just blatantly wrong info. He still insisted he was right when I pointed this out and refused to click into any of the actual web pages.
A different student in my math class told me he pays $20 per month for the "computational" version of chatGPT, which he uses for all of his classes and PhD research. The computational version is worth it, he says, because it is wrong "less often". He uses chatGPT for all his homework and can't figure out why he's struggling on exams.
There's a lot more, but it's really making me feel crazy. Even if it was right 100% of the time, why are you paying thousands of dollars to go to school and learn if you're just going to plug everything into a computer whenever you're asked to think??
That last question is what drives me insane. You are paying that money to learn. Using ChatGPT prevents you from learning. By using it you are essentially setting your tuition money on fire.
You might not grasp that because you think that the important thing about going to college is to get the credential so you can get hired and make more money. OK. You have a credential but you don't have the skills it's supposed to stand for. At some point, you will need the actual skills; and you will not have them. Then what?
Also: the tech industry is not benevolent. If you become dependent on AI to do your thinking for you then whoever designs the AI gets to determine what you can and can't think. You really trust big tech to do that? You want to be in a position where you can only write what AI will enable you to write, and only think what AI will enable you to think? You think that's going to be good for your career or your life or your fucking...soul?
here's the story. i know expressvpn has been recommended in some 🏴☠️ how-to posts but it is not trustworthy. the parent company, kape technologies, not only used to distribute malate but has ties to multiple state surveillance agencies. and be careful where you look for info about good vpns, because kape technologies owns a bunch of "vpn review" sites too
In case anyone can’t read the article for whatever reasons, the VPNs acquired are:
ExpressVPN
Private Internet Access
Zenmate
CyberGhost
And the VPN review sites they purchased are:
vpnMentor
Wizcase
So if you use any of those, time to look for other options.
Chrome now directly tracks users, generates a "topic" list it shares with advertisers.
Don’t let Chrome’s big redesign distract you from the fact that Chrome’s invasive new ad platform, ridiculously branded the “Privacy Sandbox,” is also getting a widespread rollout in Chrome today. If you haven’t been following this, this feature will track the web pages you visit and generate a list of advertising topics that it will share with web pages whenever they ask, and it’s built directly into the Chrome browser. It’s been in the news previously as “FLoC” and then the “Topics API,” and despite widespread opposition from just about every non-advertiser in the world, Google owns Chrome and is one of the world’s biggest advertising companies, so this is being railroaded into the production builds.
Use Firefox.
This is a response to the laws that eliminate or severely limit third party tracking cookies. Since Google makes so much money on advertising, it had to figure out other ways to get your data. It’s already been tracking people who use the web while logged into Google, but now they’re baking it into Chrome.
As someone who works in advertising, the reason I new use Firefox is because I heard the industry rumblings about this for the last 3 years. It’s finally here, so if you care about making it harder to be tracked/advertised to, switch to Firefox.
Source
Update: Article
I had to write YEARS of posts about British Clownfall and South Korea just straight up speed ran theirs a mere seven minutes longer than it takes to watch Wicked
I literally just got back from seeing Wicked what's going on??
Oh, well, so as the pre-movie ads were playing, Korea's desperately unpopular president decided he didn't like his fellow party creeps getting impeached for crimes and his shitty budget not being approved, so he threw a spectacular temper tantrum, accused all opposition party politicians of being North Korea sympathisers trying to overthrow democracy, and DECLARED MARTIAL LAW.
<nobody-liked-that.jpeg>
Even his own party opposed him doing this, which tells you a lot about the staggering stupidity of this move.
NOW! Martial law can be annulled by a majority vote in the National Assembly, but part of the terms of martial law mean that political activities are banned to prevent such a vote taking place. The minimum number for a majority is 190. So, the stage becomes set - all parties are now desperate to get 190 total members into the Assembly, while President Yoon Suk-Yeol is now desperate to keep them out.
About an hour into you watching the film Wicked, the military tried to lock down the National Assembly building and disperse protesters who gathered in front of it. Soldiers tried to gain entry, but were humiliatingly blocked by party officials who sprayed them with fire extinguishers. Instead they decided to therefore block entry into the building, to keep 190 (or more) people from voting.
As you watched the film Wicked move into its third act, soldiers tried to move into the crowd of protesters, and were politely but firmly denied. Here is footage of an embarassed soldier being rotated and repelled by the crowd.
Meanwhile, Democratic Party members Lee Jae-myung and Lee Seong-yoon, blocked by the army, literally climbed over a five foot fence to get into the National Assembly so they could go and vote.
Finally, as you watched the credits of the film Wicked roll, the 190th necessary member brushed off twigs and staggered into the chamber, and so the vote was immediately called rather than waiting a single minute longer. The vote to annul martial law took place and was passed 190-0. It was completely unanimous, including members of the ruling People Power Party.
Martial law ended 2 hours and 48 minutes after it began.
Protesters are now calling for the impeachment of Yoon Suk-yeol. Military generals are milling about going "Whaaat? Martial law? Oh dear me no, I knew nothing about that at all, I have no idea how three military helicopters and a troop of soldiers got to the National Assembly so fast..." We shall see how soon the clowns fall.
So. That happened.
I'm. Wow. I think that whole thing went down faster than I've been about to get a goddamn tow off the side of this road. I'm impressed.
actually you know what it's been two hours and 17 minutes. we got time to beat them. CMON TOW MAN
Manifesting good vibes and your successful desertion of the road faster than South Korea took to overthrow martial law 🤞
Props to the South Korean legislators for not skipping leg day.
I think the folks who support the use of AI in education are missing the point of essay assignments.
Like you are not trying to educate the teacher. You are not trying to demonstrate your ability to produce an essay.
The ENTIRE POINT of Essays is to demonstrate that you understand the material. And you cannot do that if you are not writing the essay yourself.
As a teacher, I would also say, the entire point of the essay is to prove you know how to craft an argument. You can find data, confirm that data is correct, and organize it in a way to show that you know you understand the data you found. If it's really good: you've proven you can be convincing.
These skills help you discuss, debate, and understand things (both facts AND misinformation) far more.
They help you become familiar with crafting an argument, practicing the physical skill of writing, and using formal language that you might need when talking to someone in a position of authority in the future.
At the end of the day, I never cared if my students could remember a historical fact or figure. I cared if they understood the concepts and the practical skills that they could then use in their future careers.
AI will never help with that. Because it keeps the student from ever understanding how to understand in the first place.
The trend marks the latest example of tech development outpacing governance.
At the California Institute of the Arts, it all started with a videoconference between the registrar’s office and a nonprofit.
One of the nonprofit’s representatives had enabled an AI note-taking tool from Read AI. At the end of the meeting, it emailed a summary to all attendees, said Allan Chen, the institute’s chief technology officer. They could have a copy of the notes, if they wanted — they just needed to create their own account.
Next thing Chen knew, Read AI’s bot had popped up inabout a dozen of his meetings over a one-week span. It was in one-on-one check-ins. Project meetings. “Everything.”
The spread “was very aggressive,” recalled Chen, who also serves as vice president for institute technology. And it “took us by surprise.”
The scenariounderscores a growing challenge for colleges: Tech adoption and experimentation among students, faculty, and staff — especially as it pertains to AI — are outpacing institutions’ governance of these technologies and may even violate their data-privacy and security policies.
That has been the case with note-taking tools from companies including Read AI, Otter.ai, and Fireflies.ai.They can integrate with platforms like Zoom, Google Meet, and Microsoft Teamsto provide live transcriptions, meeting summaries, audio and video recordings, and other services.
Higher-ed interest in these products isn’t surprising.For those bogged down with virtual rendezvouses, a tool that can ingest long, winding conversations and spit outkey takeaways and action items is alluring. These services can also aid people with disabilities, including those who are deaf.
But the tools can quickly propagate unchecked across a university. They can auto-join any virtual meetings on a user’s calendar — even if that person is not in attendance. And that’s a concern, administrators say, if it means third-party productsthat an institution hasn’t reviewedmay be capturing and analyzing personal information, proprietary material, or confidential communications.
“What keeps me up at night is the ability for individual users to do things that are very powerful, but they don’t realize what they’re doing,” Chen said. “You may not realize you’re opening a can of worms.“
The Chronicle documented both individual and universitywide instances of this trend. At Tidewater Community College, in Virginia, Heather Brown, an instructional designer, unwittingly gave Otter.ai’s tool access to her calendar, and it joined a Faculty Senate meeting she didn’t end up attending. “One of our [associate vice presidents] reached out to inform me,” she wrote in a message. “I was mortified!”
THIS HAPPENED AT WORK!!!
One of the parties in a grievance mediation had Otter.ai installed on his computer for a previous meeting. He thought (and, honestly, had been led to believe by the company) that he was the one triggering when it was used, and had wanted it to provide captions and a transcription for another meeting. He intended to use it once. Unbeknownst to him, it activated on EVERY MEETING. The worst part is no one noticed, so it is actually unclear how many meetings he'd been in that the AI had been activated on, but for this particular meeting, it sent the meeting host (my colleague) an email saying that it was RECORDING (which is illegal in this line of work, highly illegal, there's hearings in Congress right now on someone recording a negotiations meeting) the proceedings.
The goal of the email was for her to see how "helpful" of a tool that it was so that she could download it as well and enable it in her meetings. It sent her 1) an attendance summary (private); 2) a transcript of the meeting so far (illegal) and 3) a snippet of audio from the meeting (highly illegal). They had to stop the mediation entirely, switch to old school phones to see where the issue was and who had this enabled on their computer. The man was horribly embarrassed, and had to get help from his IT department to get the program uninstalled from his computer.
Genuinely, these AI tools are viruses. Because of this, we've been asking external people at the start of meetings if anyone else is present off-screen (a different story) or if anyone has AI programs installed on their computer. But most people don't KNOW because Copilot is now installed behind their backs, and it's being sneakier than other programs (like Microsoft isn't going to email someone and say "Hey, by the way, we've been listening into your meetings"), but that doesn't mean it isn't doing the same things.
If you are downloading and using these programs, please be aware of this and please fucking uninstall them.
I don't know I'm not done talking about it. It's insane that I can't just uninstall Edge or Copilot. That websites require my phone number to sign up. That people share their contacts to find their friends on social media.
I wouldn't use an adblocker if ads were just banners on the side funding a website I enjoy using and want to support. Ads pop up invasively and fill my whole screen, I misclick and get warped away to another page just for trying to read an article or get a recipe.
Every app shouldn't be like every other app. Instagram didn't need reels and a shop. TikTok doesn't need a store. Instagram doesn't need to be connected to Facebook. I don't want my apps to do everything, I want a hub for a specific thing, and I'll go to that place accordingly.
I love discord, but so much information gets lost to it. I don't want to join to view things. I want to lurk on forums. I want to be a user who can log in and join a conversation by replying to a thread, even if that conversation was two days ago. I know discord has threads, it's not the same. I don't want to have to verify my account with a phone number. I understand safety and digital concerns, but I'm concerned about information like that with leaks everywhere, even with password managers.
I shouldn't have to pay subscriptions to use services and get locked out of old versions. My old disk copy of photoshop should work. I should want to upgrade eventually because I like photoshop and supporting the business. Adobe is a whole other can of worms here.
Streaming is so splintered across everything. Shows release so fast. Things don't get physical releases. I can't stream a movie I own digitally to friends because the share-screen blocks it, even though I own two digital copies, even though I own a physical copy.
I have an iPod, and I had to install a third party OS to easily put my music on it without having to tangle with iTunes. Spotify bricked hardware I purchased because they were unwillingly to upkeep it. They don't pay their artists. iTunes isn't even iTunes anymore and Apple struggles to upkeep it.
My TV shows me ads on the home screen. My dad lost access to eBook he purchased because they were digital and got revoked by the company distributing them. Hitman 1-3 only runs online most of the time. Flash died and is staying alive because people love it and made efforts to keep it up.
I have to click "not now" and can't click "no". I don't just get emails, they want to text me to purchase things online too. My windows start search bar searches online, not just my computer. Everything is blindly called an app now. Everything wants me to upload to the cloud. These are good tools! But why am I forced to use them! Why am I not allowed to own or control them?
No more!!!!! I love my iPod with so much storage and FLAC files. I love having all my fics on my harddrive. I love having USBs and backups. I love running scripts to gut suck stuff out of my Windows computer I don't want that spies on me. I love having forums. I love sending letters. I love neocities and webpages and webrings. I will not be scanning QR codes. Please hand me a physical menu. If I didn't need a smartphone for work I'd get a "dumb" phone so fast. I want things to have buttons. I want to use a mouse. I want replaceable batteries. I want the right to repair. I grew up online and I won't forget how it was!
glad this post is resonating with the local populace fr
Reminder that you can block most ads on Android. yes, including youtube ads.
Steps: Download Firefox -> Install uBlock Origin extension.
That's literally it. Enjoy ad free web browsing while we still (barely) have it!
Note: this works for browsing done in the Firefox app. It won't block ads in, for example, the youtube app. BUT, if you use Firefox to access youtube.com, congrats, no ads!
edit: also you can play youtube videos with the screen off/while using other apps. Just click three-dots -> Extensions -> Extensions Manager -> Video Background Play Fix
If you have the time and flexibility, you can also try out libreoffice.
Download free office suite for Windows, macOS and Linux. Microsoft compatible, based on OpenOffice, and updated regularly.
Just did this on November 14th, 2024, so this is very current!
In case any of you here also use X/Twitter.
i thought my laptop was on its last leg because it was running at six billion degrees and using 100% disk space at all times and then i turned off shadows and some other windows effects and it was immediately cured. i just did the same to my roommate's computer and its performance issues were also immediately cured. okay. i guess.
so i guess if you have creaky freezy windows 10/11 try searching "advanced system settings", go to performance settings, and uncheck "show shadows under windows" and anything else you don't want. hope that helps someone else.
hey this is apparently helping a lot of people! adding that on top of this you can also go to settings > personalization > colors and turn off transparency to also boost performance. this wasn't the Big Fix for me but might as well do that too if you're trying to optimize.
past a certain note threshold on tumblr posts you unlock a bloodborne-esque insight and the strange lives of this site's users become visible to you
(x)
we fucking found them?
Ok I know we joke about this but I just went to the settings and first clicked "adjust for best performance" and then re-checked only 1 box:
"Smooth edges of screen fonts"
My computer was running hot before I turned everything off; the office I'm in is very warm, I could feel the heat of my CPU through the keyboard. The fans were going, not as loud as they usually get, but they were still blasting.
Y'all.
I can barely feel the warmth through the keyboard now. It's been like 2 minutes. The fan is nearly silent.
Click the Windows key and start typing "System settings", and "View Advanced system settings" will pop up. Then click "Settings" under Performance:
Then you'll see this:
TURN IT ALL OFF.
I turned "Show window contents while dragging" and then turned that off again. It's up to you.
FUCKING THANK YOU.
