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Blackmist

@Blackmist@feddit.uk

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Blackmist ,

And don't even get started with Danish.

This Hacker Tool Extracts All the Data Collected by Windows’ New Recall AI (www.wired.com)

When Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella revealed the new Windows AI tool that can answer questions about your web browsing and laptop use, he said one of the “magical” things about it was that the data doesn’t leave your laptop; the Windows Recall system takes screenshots of your activity every five seconds and saves them...

Blackmist ,

It barely matters if the database is encrypted or not. If the user has access to it, they have the keys to it, and so would anybody else with access.

The real danger is that intruders will have access to your entire history from before they had access to your machine, and it's all in one place.

Blackmist ,

Every banking site I've been on jumps through all sorts of hoops to make sure the browser doesn't save the password, usually with some 2FA thrown into the mix.

But I'd imagine that a lot of older people have a helpful passwords.txt file sat smack bang in the middle of their desktop, or just use the same one for everything. I mean, we're in an age where you need a username and password to update your graphics drivers for some godforsaken reason. It's not going to be hard to find that The One True Password with access to this.

Blackmist ,

Backporting the ads?

Blackmist ,

SNES ROMs were actually around 4MB. People always spoke about them being 32 Meg or whatever, but they meant megabits.

I did like Animal Well, but gave up after looking at one of the bunny solutions and deciding I didn't have the patience for that.

I think most of the size of games is just graphics and audio. I think the code for most games is pretty small, but for some godforsaken reason it's really important that they include incredibly detailed doorknobs and 50 hours of high quality speech for a dozen languages in raw format.

Blackmist ,

Every video I've ever tried to watch on Twitter took ages to buffer, and then looked like something from RealPlayer for the duration of it.

At least porn sites actually manage video streaming successfully.

Blackmist ,

"What do you mean Coca-Cola doesn't want their ads next to a video of three men fisting each other?"

Blackmist ,

Resources are cheap and getting cheaper all the time.

Developers are expensive and getting more expensive all the time.

It's no wonder everything is a sprawling mess.

Blackmist ,

https://feddit.uk/pictrs/image/56328d40-5369-46e1-b075-30f6267b04a4.webp

Blackmist ,

Try and register something on Razer's website so you can get support for it. Until a few weeks back, PSN locked the browser up completely when signing in.

I use FF for day to day use, but prepare to swap to Chrome when things go wrong just because most sites aren't tested on it.

Blackmist ,

In retrospect maybe having the worlds most popular browser and the world's biggest advertiser be the same person, was a bad idea.

Blackmist ,

PayPal. All the authority of a bank. None of the responsibility.

Blackmist ,

I'll be more concerned when Visa and Mastercard get wind of this idea.

Blackmist ,

By showing you an annoying popup every time you use PayPal, and eventually you'll accidentally click OK and it will mysteriously remember this and never ask you again.

Blackmist , (edited )

For items or just the shop? Because I write EPOS systems for a living, and as far as I can tell, we pass no item data to the credit card merchants.

The shop is obviously passed to them. So maybe don't buy from Dave's Enormous Dildo Emporium.

Blackmist ,

Throw enough investor money at lawyers and anything is legal for an amount of time.

"Oh, I'm sowwy, did we bweak the law? Well here's 5,000 boxes of paper that say we didn't, see you in 18 months."

Blackmist ,

That's per store though, presumably when they sign up with a payment provider (because there's a lot of rules about e.g. using credit cards to gamble with).

If I buy sex toys from Tesco, it's still showing up as "groceries". If I buy from a sex shop, it's going to be more clear cut.

I can see from my emails that PayPal send out itemised receipts on behalf of their customers, so they're definitely collecting more data than the big two.

Blackmist ,

Even if we believe them and all the data stays local to your machine, what's to stop your average bit of malware accessing it?

So now not only is any data compromised going forward, but all your data going back as well.

CEO of Google Says It Has No Solution for Its AI Providing Wildly Incorrect Information (futurism.com)

You know how Google's new feature called AI Overviews is prone to spitting out wildly incorrect answers to search queries? In one instance, AI Overviews told a user to use glue on pizza to make sure the cheese won't slide off (pssst...please don't do this.)...

Blackmist ,

Whichever brings in the most shareholder value.

Blackmist ,

I don't think that's how most programmers expect it to work at all.

However most people would also expect 0.1+0.2==0.3 to return true, so what do I know.

Floating point is something most of us ignore until it bites us in the ass. And then we never trust it again.

Blackmist ,

I'm not sure where the 17 comes from. It's 15.

Blackmist ,

The issue is a lot of people use floating point numbers, but don't even know it.

How many programmers right now are using JS, the most popular language in the world? How many of them do you think understand floating point numbers and their theoretical levels of accuracy? How many of them are unknowingly using floating points to store currency values?

How many of them could accurately predict the result of the following?

  • 2.99+1.52==4.51
  • 2.99+1.53==4.52
  • 2.99+1.54==4.53

Now imagine that as code to make sure you've paid the right amount in an online store. I guarantee you there is code out there right now that won't let you finish a sale if the total of the basket adds up a certain way.

Blackmist ,

TIL ICQ was still going.

Blackmist ,

I must have used all of them over the years. Can't remember why, they were all pretty much the same.

ChatGPT Answers Programming Questions Incorrectly 52% of the Time: Study (gizmodo.com)

The research from Purdue University, first spotted by news outlet Futurism, was presented earlier this month at the Computer-Human Interaction Conference in Hawaii and looked at 517 programming questions on Stack Overflow that were then fed to ChatGPT....

Blackmist ,

I actually had the opposite the other day where the code only broke on my machine...

In the end I just commented it out. I don't see why everybody else should have working code and not me.

Blackmist ,

Oh, I'm way ahead of them there, with 44 years of shitty diet and lifestyle choices.

Blackmist ,

I could never get on with either of them. I was always a Paint Shop Pro man.

Have to use Paint.NET these days.

Blackmist ,

I'd temper those expectations tbh. I've still got customers on Windows XP.

Out of support does not mean "can't be used".

Blackmist ,

  1. The browser is the failure point and they get updated for a long time after the OS falls out of support. Chrome was supported for 8 years after Windows 7 stopped being officially supported.

  2. All their Windows software they need to run their business isn't going to run reliably enough on any version of Linux. They don't want to touch anything that's working or pay for anything. You have to understand the world is not filled with OS enthusiasts. It's just a platform to run other things. If it's working and it's making you money, you do not touch it, unless you really want to find out what OS they use at the Job Centre.

Blackmist ,

If they really wanted people to upgrade to Windows 11, they'd take out the TPM and SecureBoot requirements.

Truly the Kinect of Windows 11.

Blackmist ,

I actually bought an Xbox 360 Kinect for a grand total of £6 the other month.

Turns out you can use software called Amethyst for cheap full body tracking in PC VR games.

Blackmist ,

The ones from CEX came with it, it's an odd adapter that needs power as well.

The adapter is worth more than the camera...

Blackmist ,

One of these things is not like the other

Blackmist ,

I honestly do not understand why anyone would want to watch TV on their fridge.

I was sat in the optician's waiting room the other day, and there was some cheap gameshow on the TV, where people would win like £20.

I couldn't believe that people would even film it, let alone broadcast it.

Watching broadcast TV is the equivalent of going to a restaurant, not wanting to choose and just asking the waiter to pour any old slop down your gob.

Blackmist ,

Watch the existing one become even more insufferable to push you into paying for the upgrade.

Blackmist ,

No, it's only theft when it's poor people doing it.

When it's rich people, it's fair use of a publicly available resource.

Blackmist ,

You just have to fold it really small to poke it down the wires.

Blackmist ,

The issue isn't that people want dumb phones, like a Nokia 3310.

They want a smartphone that prevents all the the things they don't like, while still letting them do all the things they do still need their smart phone to do. And in 2024, that's quite a lot. Some places you can't even park your car without a phone.

Apparently they just don't have the willpower to not install the things they don't like.

Blackmist ,

And email. And whatsapp. And banking. And NFC payments. And...

Blackmist ,

They've still got things that haven't changed since about Windows 3.1, like that ODBC dialog window.

Blackmist ,

And Tiananmen Square looks lovely.

Blackmist ,

Once I saw this guy on a bridge about to jump. I said, "Don't do it!" He said, "Nobody loves me." I said, "God loves you. Do you believe in God?"

He said, "Yes." I said, "Are you a Christian or a Jew?" He said, "A Christian." I said, "Me, too! Protestant or Catholic?" He said, "Protestant." I said, "Me, too! What franchise?" He said, "Baptist." I said, "Me, too! Northern Baptist or Southern Baptist?" He said, "Northern Baptist." I said, "Me, too! Northern Conservative Baptist or Northern Liberal Baptist?"

He said, "Northern Conservative Baptist." I said, "Me, too! Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region, or Northern Conservative Baptist Eastern Region?" He said, "Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region." I said, "Me, too!"

Northern Conservative†Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1879, or Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1912?" He said, "Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1912." I said, "Die, heretic!" And I pushed him over.

--Emo Philips.

Blackmist ,

Privatisation can only work if the end consumers have genuine choice.

In the UK electricity is privatised and I can pick from dozens of companies. This honestly works pretty well, and you can pick the cheapest depending on when you use electricity and how much. It's the same infrastructure no matter who you pick, but that seems handled fairly well. Same with internet providers.

We also privatised water, and we just get given a company to rule over each area of the country. Unsurprisingly, given the consumer has no recourse other than "have no water" this is an absolute fucking shit-show. They've not invested in enough reservoirs, nor sewage handling, and instead lobby the government to make it legal to just put it in the rivers instead. It's the same story with trains.

Blackmist ,

And that's only because everyone has already defederated from lemmygrad and hexbear.

Blackmist ,

I think a lot of stuff got adjusted when mobile became a thing.

Instant message apps just got replaced with Whatsapp, Signal, etc.

Monetisation is a huge problem. Nobody ever expected to make money off a wonky old webpage they made in HoTMetaL, or a MySpace page. Now everyone is on homogenised platforms, they're quite happy to accept bucketloads of money to project whatever you have to say to the masses, and none of it is good. All the hate you see out there isn't society. It's money.

Blackmist ,

Honestly, it's the most human you'll ever see it act.

It's got upper management written all over it.

Blackmist ,

What's the point? Most people I see on Tiktok have so little attention span that everything gets skipped after the first 5 seconds.

Blackmist ,

My missus used to post drawings on there about 10-15 years ago.

Think all the actual art is on Twitter these days (although some have gone to Mastodon).

Just seems a bit of a niche social network when bigger ones exist with bigger audiences and more chance of people actually wanting something drawn. Even if it's mostly really weird smut.

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