This reminds me of "port knocking", but using small financial transactions instead of socket connection requests to various ports. Send a transaction of $1.23, then a transaction of $3.95 within 60 seconds, and that means a specific thing, etc. The cool thing about this is you can merely scan the transactions database looking for the pattern any time after the fact to see if the message had been sent.

If they can also include reversals, and can use up to, say, $9,999 transactions, then they can encode a decent amount of information.

Another cool thing about this is they can test their algorithm - that is the specific formula / numeric pattern that indicates a message - against many years of transaction history to make sure it is unique enough to avoid collisions that could happen randomly with the real-world data. Their trigger could be as naive as just using two specific transaction dollar amounts happening within so many seconds, or something far more advanced where two transaction amounts combined in some mathematical way. Think of a public / private key encryption just with much smaller numbers. For example two transactions happening within 30 seconds that are bitwise NOT (bitwise complement ~ operator in languages like C++ and java) of one another.

I came to a similar conclusion about a year ago. I have an app that, among other things, lists news headlines for local communities. Some news sources provide a short summary of the article as well, but many do not. If no summary is provided then I'm relegated to using the first sentence or so from an article.

I'd hoped to use AI to generate that summary when given the body of the article, but no matter how I prompted it would fabricate "facts" into the summary far too often for me to actually feel comfortable using it. 90% of the time it was great, but the utter failure the other 10% of the time made it unusable.

I think the way this is addressed now is just throwing more processing at it (and more energy expenditure) by having an additional arbiter AI role that checks the output to see if it is factual.

In a lot of apartment complexes, the physical proximity of tenants make sharing internet trivially easy. Just ask a neighboring unit (or one directly above / below) if they want to split internet costs with you, and you split the bill. Or if you're really smart, have two neighbors "split" the bill with you 50/50 each and they are paying for the internet.

If everyone's internet cost is already included in their rent then obviously this isn't an option. Or folks who just use the internet on their phone over cellular and don't even need WiFi at all.

I must be really out of touch. I have never heard of this guy, or his channel name, until now. And I'm on YouTube and TikTok daily...

Ford should just fucking fire Jim Farley. He's been an absolute disaster for the company because he's a fucking incompetent inbred.

To make something that small requires a level of integration that is not conducive to repair. Using connectors, cases that can somehow open or come apart (but not coming apart too easily so they aren't actually prone to breaking more often), etc, is not something that is practical in the first place.

My grandfather used to repair CBs and amateur radio equipment back in the 70s. Then everything was comprised of discrete components (IE each component, like a transistor, capacitor, diode, etc was a separate thing), and they were soldered onto a circuit board and each component could be replaced. However you would never repair an individual component, like somehow opening a transistor and fixing it internally - you had to replace it. At some level you have that tiniest discrete part that is either good or bad, and gets replaced when it fails.

Then when ICs came into existence, and allowed the insane miniaturization we enjoy today, multiples of those discrete components were packaged together into one "black box" that was impossible to repair. So then instead of replacing an off-the-shelf transistor easily and cheaply, you had to obtain the correct IC, which was proprietary and cost a fortune.

Anyway my point is that incredible miniaturization, which the iPods are certain a pinnacle of and state-of-the-art, come with a price, which is they get engineered as a discrete component that cannot be replaced or repaired.

I'm not defending Apple here, and I don't even own a pair of Airpods. I'm just saying that it's zero surprise that something that tightly integrated and miniaturized can't be repaired.

Meta has been banning people for posting links to the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust - the official charity established and funded by the UK Government to promote and support Holocaust Memorial Day (HMD) in the UK.

The only moral thing to do with every Meta entity - Facebook, Instagram, etc. - is to ignore it. Let your account go fallow or better yet, disable.

Mark Zuckerberg is a disgusting fucking Nazi, and all his companies are 100% tainted.

so we get the nonbinary blue/green/pink-haired

It's called aposematism, and it's there to ward off predators. No doubt if it's repelling you, you're a fucking childraper.

Aww, how cute. You're a retarded fucking Shit Nazi who lies a lot. Go fuck yourself you 60-IQ Inbred Klan Shitbag. Or better yet, fellate a shotgun while it's loaded. One less 60-IQ Inbred Nazi like you in the world would make it a better place.

If we want to talk about habitats changing that affects birds, climate change is absolutely trivial compared to the deforestation that occurred in the late 1800s. The impact that had on birds was incredible. Even now, though large areas of forest lands have grown back, they are not the same kinds of trees, and have forever impacted the bird habitation regions across the US.

So I imagine there were many other new hybridizations that happened then because of human activity, where various species of birds began to overlap that hadn't before.

Keep on lying Randseed the Kidraper Fuck. You've never "saved a life" in your entire existence you Inhuman Kidraping Bitchboy.

Definition: "Fascism is an authoritarian, ultranationalist political ideology that emphasizes a dictatorial leader, the suppression of opposition, and strict societal and economic control."

China is in fact a fascist dictatorship, not a "communist" anything.

Treason Shitbag Nazi Trump is taking the USA closer to a fascist authoritarian dictatorship every day, and his Shitrag Nazi MAGAturds are applauding it because they're anitsemitic fucking garbage.

So you're saying you're historically illiterate.

OPEC (and now "OPEC+") have been trying to take over economic dominance since the 1970s. One of the DUMBEST fucking things that America Hating Senile Bitchtraitor Reagan did was get in bed with OPEC and the Iranians so that they would help him win the 1980 election by holding hostages and keeping their oil embargo going

The Repukelikan Klan Party have been America-betraying Shitbags ever since Nixon went behind Johnson's back to keep Vietnam going, so this dumb behavior wasn't really surprising.

I lost family in Vietnam thanks to Nixon and the Treason Shitbag Repukelikan Party. Every member of the GOP should be arrested and jailed till they fucking die for their fucking America Hating Treason. The MAGA Terrorist shitbags should all just get a summary firing squad for theirs.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/a...

https://www.auntminnie.com/ima...

https://www.sciencedirect.com/...

On and on.

We're not talking about 2025, but the last decade. What's your source and what was the trend over that period of time?