The other issue , which isn't so much a prob in 2024 (and frankly SS7 isnt quite as widespread now), was that software defined radio setups (like those TV decoder USB sticks that under the hood had a full SDR decoder and could be repurposed for such uses. I used one to build a hydrogen line radio telescope once, good times) could get into phone towers with the right softare and give direct access to the network for chaotic purposes. Though that was more a via gsm indirect route , you could still abuse the trusting nature of the tech to let you get away with absolute nonsene.

Even liberal Democrats are against putting pornographic materials in the kids library sections.

Except thats not what we are talking about at all. Lets look at the breakdown of these bans. There will be books here that fit into multiple ones of these categories

41% LGBQT themes or major characters.
40% Minority/Black themes or major characters.
22% Sexual themes
21% Titles with themes of race or racim.
10% Titles with themes about rights or activism.
9% Biographies
4% Religious minorities.

Only 1 in 5 of those books have anything that could dubbed "pornography" although even thats a stretch because pornographic books where already banned, so these are books about sex education, a topic thats always been considered a proper theme for education. (We had sex ed in our school when I was there, 50 years ago, and my father says they had it when he was in school, 75 years ago).

And while the most commonly challenged books are usually about young folks coming to terms with being sexual or racial minorities, there are also a number of books that have long been part of the high-literature canon, things like To Kill a Mockingbird, Flowers for Algenon, Catch 22 and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Ironically, also on the list of frequently banned books is Farenheit 451 and Brave new world.

And dont think this just applies to school libraries. Lawmakers are trying to reinforce these bans by going after online sites that sell or lend them. Meaning even if you arent in these backwards-ass book-buner southern states, they are still coming after you and your kids right to read too.

Sources:

https://pen.org/report/banned-...

https://www.washingtonpost.com...

https://bannedbooks.library.cm...

Nice. I've always wanted to try my hand at beekeeping (As a beer brewer, I've wanted to try doing my own mead, but a lot of commercial honey in my location has additives incompatible with brewers yeast. Plus, its interesting! Unfortunately I live inner-city with a micro backyard that I suspect is rather incompatible with the artform.

If this stupid economy ever lets me retire to the country, beekeeping is likely to be the first thing I try however.

To be clear, its a 4 year old remaster. Heres another one. Dwarf Fortress, a game thats almost as old as D&D, written by one guy (with some creative contributions by his brother) has 1200 ingame.

Thats one guy, self funded (Until a few years ago when the steam release made him independently wealthy, few are more deserving), outperforming a multinational company with thousands (tens to perhaps even hundreds of thousands if you count the entire warner brothers machine) of employees.

A friend of mine who teaches at a local uni noticed a few other lecturers trying this approach with "AI detectors". Knowing that they are somewhat unreliable he intervened and they came up with a fairly good approach.

Essentially, using a pair of them, and if BOTH claim its a plagarized or AI written essay, then the student is invited to do a "defence" of the essay. Essentially they are interogated on the subject of the essay. If they understood and can demonstate they have the knowledge to write that essay, its probably human written. If they can't, they have to resubmit.

This seems like a fair protocol, and theres an understanding that the lecturer will try and apply a little bit of empathy and people-sense, and if its obvious the machine is victimizing people, the plan is to just drop the protocol altogether and get rid of the detectors.

Personally I think the detectors are snake oil and it might be time to think up a new approach to grading for an era in which computer assisted writing isn't necessarily going to go away any time soon.

I had a weird variation that wasnt fraud that there was a guy with my *exact name* , same age, and a whole bunch of details living around the corner from me, and I was constantly running into issues with the tax dept, debt collectors, you name it, and it was a compete fucking mystery to me , until one day the guys ex girlfriend tracy phoned me insisting I was her ex boyfriend until she realised my voice didnt match, and found out about him. I went around there with him, and gobsmackingly he even looked a bit like me, taller and skinnier but basically not far off.

Also I tried to ask the guys ex out for a date lol, "too weird" she replied. Fair call.

Theres a slightly malicious part of me that kind of looks forward to the CEO bots destroying the internet, because honestly, its become a destructive shitshow.

The free and liberating internet of the late 90s and early 2000s died a long long time ago, and its now a hell dimension of corporate social media wrecking kids attention spans and bamboozling their elders with disinformation.

Im actually a bit surprised this is still a thing. I was CTO at a small VOIP telco back about a decade ago and the SS7 thing was a *very* big deal. Its a uselessly insecure protocol from an era when people where just not thinking about this stuff. It was entirely possible to break into it with a laptop and an off the shelf SRD radio setup and scoop all sorts of metadata about nearby phones.

Fun fact: Stingray type tech was a prominent feature in David Simmons The Wire before it was ever officially admitted to. And some people thought it implausible. Nope, like most of the plots people wrote off as implausible in that show, we later learned that indeed it was rooted in real stuff going on in the Baltimore PD. As one Baltimore friend put it;- "That show aint a drama, its a documentary".

The minute chatgpt 4 is for free, I'm out of my 20$ a month plan.

I'd transfer that over to Anthropic. Claude 3 is currently cleaning GPT4s clock in almost every metric. And its a lot smarter in its ethical decision making. It'll still say no from time to time, but it usually gives a pretty damn good reason why, and it can be negotiated with if your case is good (as opposed to GPT4 which just shuts that shit right down).

Seems to write actually pretty decent code too.

Disliking something because its too popular is a teenager move.

Go is something that is laser focused on a very specific usecase, writing servers. Its poorly suited to anything else, but for that one task its brilliantly productive.

What exactly is the reason you left it, or was it literally "its too popular" as you suggest? Because thats a strange reason for anyone who actually wants to make a living in it.

This is why , with the apparent exception of Nick friggin Bostrom, most philosophers have shunned speculative metaphysics since more or less the 1800s. Once Physics split off into its own discipline, its apparent that frankly physicists are better equipped for it. Philosophers generally stick to what philosophy is good at, logic, ethics, phenomenology, and clarifying (but not necessarily solving) problems that arise in other fields that generate "bigger" questions.

Speaking as a philosophy grad, this kind of navel gazing with the simulation hypothesis irritates me. Its not science and smells awfully like religion with a more technological alibi. Instead of trying to prove it, maybe the smarter move is to try and disprove it. Concoct an experiment that would disprove the simulator hypothesis if its untrue. And if you cant do that, then its not science, its just silly speculation that wont tell us anything useful.

There is one thing however that makes CO2 drastically more dangerous than Methane.

Methane lasts in the atmosphere 7 to 12 years. CO2 for centuries or even millenia.

We can get an easy win by reducing Methane. It'll help. But the CO2 is the stuff that cumulates over time and causes the real long term headache.

I'm fairly sure thats why Apple has always been a little vague on its app store terms beyond the obvious rules, and has never distributed its static analysis tool. As much as its a massive pain for devs, it does make it a hell of a lot harder for scammers to carefullly hedge their way around it.

The "snaps" are not the problem. Its the crypto shit.

Just ban the fucking things from the app stores. If people want it, they can download it from github, ./configure && make && make install . Source code distributed apps tend not to last long as scams. Many eyes and shallow problems.

Its surprisingly watchable as an adult. Like, yeah its a kids show, but it seems to treat the audience as intelligent enough to follow a decent storyline, and the plot in the last season was a banger.

It *does* feel a little like its following a similar but slightly updated visual code to clone wars (I was half expecting the villain to pull out a red light sabre) but thats not necessarily a bad thing. Clone wars visual style was quite watchable.

Yeah I think its a winner. Actually between that and Lower Decks, honestly the animation series are probably the most enjoyable treks of the nu-treks (with strange new worlds following close behind, that show is proper trek. Disco was Meh... I didnt hate it , but it wasnt great, and Picard was a hot mess, though the last season was actually kind of fun)