samleecole shares a report from 404 Media, a new independent media company founded by technology journalists Jason Koebler, Emanuel Maiberg, Samantha Cole, and Joseph Cox: On the Discord server for Mage Space, a popular platform for creating AI-generated images, is a list of channels where members share adult content. There are channels for furries, hardcore and softcore porn, and anime. At the bottom of the list is a channel named "other-nsfw" which includes a few distinct erotic genres that don't fit neatly into any of the others. Mostly, it's gore, violence, and bizarre, in hyperrealistic erotic imagery entirely generated by AI. The images people create, and the long, meandering prompts they write, are a rich text that could offer a glimpse into where sexuality in the internet age is taking us next, and how we're steering it.

There's no shortage of fetish content on the internet, which might make the above statement sound ridiculous and unbelievable. Online, fetishists find their people and set to work making more of what they like, whether it's elaborate role-playing cosplays of themselves as sexy airplanes, blueberries, or slime monsters. Sometimes it pushes the bounds of the sane and legal: crush, fart, and scat porn all thrive online, and snuff films have been popular since before the internet existed. But with the rise in popularity of generative AI, and wildly popular sites like Mage.Space that let users generate anything they set their minds to, the limits are literally our own imaginations. With that power, people are wrangling images out of the AI that are on the edge of what's popular, let alone possible in the porn world. "This conversation we're having is literally on the edge of knowledge, nobody's writing about this in academia right now," Thomas Brooks, assistant professor of psychology at New Mexico Highlands University, told me. "Everybody's still kind of caught up in deepfakes. And they haven't quite grappled with generative AI yet." "You, as the individual porn consumer, can now create your own special little fantasy and your own technological, disembodied sexuality," said Brooks, in what he refers to as gamified pornography. "There's an internal motivation to solve the puzzle and get the prize. But then there's an external motivation of, 'can I come up with this crazy thing to show my anonymous internet friends.'"

"We're letting technology become mediators of our different psychosocial expressions," Brooks added.

Far from being an abstract mathematical curiosity, knot theory has driven many findings in math and beyond. Quanta magazine: Knot theory began as an attempt to understand the fundamental makeup of the universe. In 1867, when scientists were eagerly trying to figure out what could possibly account for all the different kinds of matter, the Scottish mathematician and physicist Peter Guthrie Tait showed his friend and compatriot Sir William Thomson his device for generating smoke rings. Thomson -- later to become Lord Kelvin (namesake of the temperature scale) -- was captivated by the rings' beguiling shapes, their stability and their interactions. His inspiration led him in a surprising direction: Perhaps, he thought, just as the smoke rings were vortices in the air, atoms were knotted vortex rings in the luminiferous ether, an invisible medium through which, physicists believed, light propagated.

Although this Victorian-era idea may now sound ridiculous, it was not a frivolous investigation. This vortex theory had a lot to recommend it: The sheer diversity of knots, each slightly different, seemed to mirror the different properties of the many chemical elements. The stability of vortex rings might also provide the permanence that atoms required. Vortex theory gained traction in the scientific community and inspired Tait to begin tabulating all knots, creating what he hoped would be equivalent to a table of elements. Of course, atoms are not knots, and there is no ether. By the late 1880s Thomson was gradually abandoning his vortex theory, but by then Tait was captivated by the mathematical elegance of his knots, and he continued his tabulation project. In the process, he established the mathematical field of knot theory.

We are all familiar with knots -- they keep shoes on our feet, boats secured to docks, and mountain climbers off the rocks below. But those knots are not exactly what mathematicians (including Tait) would call a knot. Although a tangled extension cord may appear knotted, it's always possible to disentangle it. To get a mathematical knot, you must plug together the free ends of the cord to form a closed loop. Because the strands of a knot are flexible like string, mathematicians view knot theory as a subfield of topology, the study of malleable shapes. Sometimes it is possible to untangle a knot so it becomes a simple circle, which we call the "unknot." But more often, untangling a knot is impossible.

An anonymous reader shares a report : Ms. Carter is part of a wave of executives and engineers leaving cushy jobs at Google, Amazon, Apple and other large tech companies -- some of which pay millions of dollars in annual compensation -- to chase what they see as a once-in-a-generation opportunity. That next big thing is crypto, they said, a catchall designation that includes digital currencies like Bitcoin and products like nonfungible tokens, or NFTs, that rely on the blockchain. Silicon Valley is now awash with stories of people riding seemingly ridiculous crypto investments like Dogecoin, a digital coin based on a dog meme, to life-changing wealth. Bitcoin has soared around 60 percent this year, while Ether, the cryptocurrency tied to the Ethereum blockchain, has increased more than fivefold in value.

But beyond that speculative mania, a growing contingent of the tech industry's best and brightest sees a transformational moment that comes along once every few decades and rewards those who spot the seismic shift before the rest of the world. With crypto, they see historical parallels to how the personal computer and the internet were once ridiculed, only to upend the status quo and mint a new generation of billionaires. Investors, too, have flooded in. They have poured more than $28 billion into global crypto and blockchain start-ups this year, four times the total in 2020, according to PitchBook, a firm that tracks private investments. More than $3 billion has gone into NFT companies alone. "There is a giant sucking sound coming from crypto," said Sridhar Ramaswamy, chief executive of search engine start-up Neeva and a former Google executive, who competes with crypto companies for talent. "It feels a bit like the 1990s and the birth of the internet all over again. It's that early, that chaotic and that much full of opportunity."

[...] The growing ranks of true believers say crypto can change the world by creating a more decentralized internet that is not controlled by a handful of companies. While such possibilities have existed since Bitcoin emerged in 2009, crypto products such as NFTs broke through to the mainstream only this year. That has accelerated the exodus from Big Tech companies into the crypto world. This month, Brian Roberts, the chief financial officer of Lyft, left the ride-hailing company to join OpenSea, a popular crypto start-up."I've seen enough cycles and paradigm shifts to be cognizant when something this big is just emerging," he said in an email. "We are Day 1 in terms of NFTs and their impact."

Bloomberg identifies a variety of cryptocurrency scams, including a "rug pull," where the creators of a new cryptocurrency suddenly cut and run.

"Old-fashioned Ponzi schemes, newly cryptodenominated, have swindled people out of billions too," Bloomberg adds. And a 35-year-old crypto trader living with his parents ("trading meme coins as a full-time job") also tells them about "honey pots," where a coin's creators see a spike in value — and then temporarily disable selling for other holders: It might sound like a joke, given the crypto meltdowns of late, but serious money is at stake here. Billions — real billions — are getting pilfered annually through a variety of cryptocurrency scams. The way things are going, this will only get worse. Back in the Wall Street Dark Ages — six, 12, 18 months ago — these sorts of shenanigans were mostly associated with shlocky brokerages like the one depicted in the 2013 movie The Wolf of Wall Street. In those halcyon days before GameStop, Dogecoin and the rest, schlubs on Long Island might pitch ridiculous over-the-counter stocks to the gullible...

Tokensniffer, aptly named for Shit Coins, claims to have tracked 42,071 tokens and 2,250 scams or hacks. That was as of June 16. More than 200 supposed stings were logged by users during the first two weeks of June alone... His website scrapes data about new meme tokens from popular social media channels and scans the source code... A "smell test" program searches for vulnerabilities. Clones of existing meme tokens are often a red flag. Most recent scams — the site flagged 450 in in one recent 30-day period — were honeypots. Those tend to be easier to spot because of their code, Tokensniffer's creator says. Rug pulls are more complicated.

Such supposed safeguards aside, people are getting scammed in growing numbers. So far this year, over $2.6 billion has been grabbed, according to Chainalysis, a New York-based blockchain researcher. That figure doesn't include a giant Ponzi scheme that just came to light in South Africa. Local authorities put the haul at $3.6 billion worth of Bitcoin. Gob-smacking as all of this might sound, these numbers in fact represent a marked decline from 2019, when fraudsters walked away with an estimated $9 billion. But here's a key difference: the sheer number of people getting hoodwinked. With a few outsize exceptions, most crypto scams seem to be getting smaller. That's the good news. The bad news is that there are more of them, and more people are getting stung. From 2019 to 2020, the number of victims has jumped 48% to an estimated 7.3 million, a figure approaching the official population of Hong Kong. Between the last three months of 2020 and the first three months of 2021, the number of unique scams rose nearly 18%, to 1,335, according to Chainalysis...

Michael Burry, of "The Big Short"-fame, has been warning all of this could all go horribly wrong. An estimated 10,000 new coins have been minted this year. Who can say how many will turn out to be shams? So many Shit Coins are flying around out there, and prices can be so volatile, that many people can't even tell if they've been scammed... This much is sure: no one complains when they're making money. It's when people start losing money — and lately, many have been — that they scream they've been taken.
"A decade after Bitcoin was created, regulators are still grappling with how to police cryptocurrencies," Bloomberg adds, "when the whole point is that they operate without governments or central banks."

Linus Torvalds gave a long new email interview to Jeremy Andrews, founding partner/CEO of Tag1 (a global technology consulting firm and the second all-time leading contributor to Drupal). Torvalds discusses everything from the creation of Git, licenses, Apple's ARM64 chips, and Rust drivers, to his own Fedora-based home work environment — and how proud he is of the pathname lookup in Linux's virtual filesystem. ("Nothing else out there comes even close.")

But with all that, early on Torvalds also reflects that Linux began as a personal project at the age of 21, "not out of some big dream to create a new operating system." Instead it "literally grew kind of haphazardly from me initially just trying to learn the in-and-outs of my new PC hardware.

"So when I released the very first version, it was really more of a 'look at what I did', and sure, I was hoping that others would find it interesting, but it wasn't a real serious and usable OS. It was more of a proof of concept, and just a personal project I had worked on for several months at that time..."

This year, in August, Linux will celebrate its 30th anniversary! That's amazing, congratulations! At what point during this journey did you realize what you'd done, that Linux was so much more than "just a hobby"?

Linus Torvalds: This may sound a bit ridiculous, but that actually happened very early. Already by late '91 (and certainly by early '92) Linux had already become much bigger than I had expected.

And yeah, considering that by that point, there were probably just a few hundred users (and even "users" may be too strong — people were tinkering with it), it probably sounds odd considering how Linux then later ended up growing much bigger. But in many ways for me personally, the big inflection point was when I realized that other people are actually using it, and interested in it, and it started to have a life of its own. People started sending patches, and the system was actually starting to do much more than I had initially really envisioned....

That "anybody can maintain their own version" worried some people about the GPLv2, but I really think it's a strength, not a weakness. Somewhat unintuitively, I think it's actually what has caused Linux to avoid fragmenting: everybody can make their own fork of the project, and that's OK. In fact, that was one of the core design principles of "Git" — every clone of the repository is its own little fork, and people (and companies) forking off their own version is how all development really gets done.

So forking isn't a problem, as long as you can then merge back the good parts. And that's where the GPLv2 comes in. The right to fork and do your own thing is important, but the other side of the coin is equally important — the right to then always join back together when a fork was shown to be successful...

I very much don't regret the choice of license, because I really do think the GPLv2 is a huge part of why Linux has been successful.

Money really isn't that great of a motivator. It doesn't pull people together. Having a common project, and really feeling that you really can be a full partner in that project, that motivates people, I think.

As any seasoned TV watcher will tell you, firework displays don't translate well to television. From a report: In fact, they look terrible. The colors are washed out, the concussive boom of the explosion is dulled into a ridiculous pop, and they have an uncanny knack of looking like CGI. "It's a great torture test of the whole system," says Jeff Yurek of Nanosys, a manufacturer of quantum dot television displays. "There are two problems," explains Tim Brooksbank, a veteran of the audio-visual industry who studies how television displays and transmission work. "The fundamental problem is the dynamic range," says Brooksbank. Dynamic range is the ratio between the largest and smallest levels of colour, light and sound -- as well as time -- that recording, transmission and display equipment are expected to attain. Fireworks test all dynamic ranges to their limits. They're bright, colourful, fast, loud explosions on a black background -- which causes havoc with technology.

"Fireworks need a large dynamic range that exists in nature and -- within reason -- exists in our eyesight," says Brooksbank. "But the whole system within television isn't designed to cope with that range." Take light, for instance. Until recently, digital stills and video cameras have struggled to take decent night time footage, because you're asking a lens to capture intensely dark and intensely bright images in the same frame. So the source footage struggles to accurately represent the brightness and the full colour of a firework. "They're too colourful, they're very bright, and they're very contrasty," explains Yurek. The chemical compounds most commonly used in fireworks emit wavelengths that aren't within the physical possibility of being seen by many TVs.

RoccamOccam writes: WebRender, an experimental GPU-based renderer for web content, written in Rust, is now enabled by default for Firefox Nightly users on desktop Windows 10 with Nvidia GPUs. The announcement was made on the mailing list.

Lin Clark provides an excellent overview of WebRender and, states, "with WebRender, we want apps to run at a silky smooth 60 frames per second (FPS) or better no matter how big the display is or how much of the page is changing from frame to frame. And it works. Pages that chug along at 15 FPS in Chrome or today's Firefox run at 60 FPS with WebRender.

In describing the WebRender approach Clark, asks, "what if we removed this boundary between painting and compositing and just went back to painting every pixel on every frame? This may sound like a ridiculous idea, but it actually has some precedent. Modern day video games repaint every pixel, and they maintain 60 frames per second more reliably than browsers do. And they do it in an unexpected way instead of creating these invalidation rectangles and layers to minimize what they need to paint, they just repaint the whole screen."

TechCrunch reports on a new Alexa skill called "Away Mode". Instead of lights and noises, you can keep your home safe from unwanted visitors by playing lengthy audio tracks that sound like real -- and completely ridiculous -- conversations. When you launch Away Mode, Alexa will play one of seven audio tracks penned by comedy writers from SNL, It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, and UCB... These include gems like "Couple Has Breakup While Also Trying to Watch TV," "Two Average Guys Brainstorm What's Unique About Themselves So They Can Start a Podcast About It," "Emergency PTA Meeting To Discuss Memes, Fidget Spinners, and Other Teen Fads," and more. There are conversations from a book club where no one discusses the book, a mom walking her daughter through IKEA assembly over the phone, a stay-at-home mom losing her s***, and argument over a board game....

After enabling the skill on your Alexa device, you can cycle through the various conversations by saying "Next"... The tracks themselves are around an hour or so long... There are other "burglar deterrent" skills for Alexa if you're interested in the general concept, like that play fake house alarms or sound like guard dogs. But Away Mode is just a little more fun.
It's the brainchild of San Francisco-based Hippo Insurance, whose brand manager hopes to get people thinking about home security (though she says it isn't meant to be a serious security tool). Yet, "Theoretically it's a good idea," adds former California police chief Jim Bueermann (now the head of the nonprofit Police Foundation). "If this thing mimics real conversation, it's much more likely to trick the burglar into believing somebody is home."

In one fake argument, a board game player shouts "Hand me the rulebook! The other rulebook! That's the rules reference.... No, it's in the learn-to-play guide. That's the quick reference!"

Charlie Sorrel, writing for FastCoExist: Next time you're having a fight with somebody who doesn't like the idea of a universal basic income, you might employ some of these arguments from Yanis Varoufakis, Greece's former finance minister. In an interview with the Swiss newspaper Tages Anzeiger, he not only refutes the usual arguments against the concept that the government should give everyone a minimum check every month, but he makes them sound quite ridiculous. The interview was published ahead of the Switzerland's vote on a universal basic income (or UBI) in June. If successful, all Swiss adults would get $2,500 per month, and kids around $625 per month, whether or not they have a job. Here are some of Varoufakis's best answers.

First, on the need for a UBI: "For the first time in the history of technology more jobs are destroyed than created. Technical progress means that more and more high-paying jobs will disappear and thus shrink the middle class. This will in turn cause a further concentration of income and wealth in the upper classes. That's why I fight like a basic income for sociopolitical reforms. The robotization [of work] has long been underway, but robots don't buy products. Therefore, a basic income is needed to offset this change and stabilize a society which has an increasing wealth inequality." Then, on why you need a UBI if you already have a good job: "What good is a well-paying job, if you are afraid to lose it? This constant fear paralyzes."Good luck convincing many citizens to do actual work.

Last week you had a chance to ask Dr. Tarek Loubani about his 3D-printable, 30-cent stethoscope project, and other open source, ultra-low cost medical equipment. Below you'll find his answers to your questions.

A week ago you had the chance to ask Fark Founder Drew Curtis about wasting hours at work reading stories about Florida, and his Kentucky gubernatorial campaign. We'll be checking back with Drew as the race proceeds, but for now you can read his answers to your questions below.

alphadogg writes Three MIT grads this week are celebrating the 10th anniversary of their clever SCIgen program, which randomly generates computer science papers realistic enough to get accepted by sketchy technical conferences and publishers, with a brand new tool designed to poke even more fun at such outfits. Just a bit late for April Fool's Day, the new SCIpher program from the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab alums enables users to hide messages inside randomly-generated calls for papers from phony conferences whose names are so ridiculous that they sound legit. An MIT spokesman says the new tool is really just a way for geeky friends to mess with each other, whereas SCIgen pointed out major flaws in the worlds of scientific journals and conferences.

Last week you had a chance to ask former Republican staffer Derek Khanna about his well publicized firing, copyright law, and the state of the government. Read below to see his answers to your questions.

Hugh Pickens writes "Forbes Magazine reports that employee benefits of Google are among the best in the land—free haircuts, gourmet food, on-site doctors and high-tech "cleansing" toilets are among the most talked-about but the latest perk for Googlers extends into the afterlife. 'This might sound ridiculous,' says Google's Chief People Officer Laszlo Bock, 'But we've announced death benefits at Google.' Should a U.S. Googler pass away while under the employ of the 14-year old search giant, their surviving spouse or domestic partner will receive a check for 50% of their salary every year for the next decade. Even more surprising, a Google spokesperson confirms that there's 'no tenure requirement' for this benefit, meaning most of their 34 thousand Google employees qualify."

Last week, you asked Kevin Mitnick questions about his past, his thoughts on ethics and disclosure, and his computer set-up. He's graciously responded; read on for his answers. (No dice on the computer set-up, though.) Thanks, Kevin.

Frequent Slashdot Contributor Bennett Haselton writes "Last month Facebook had to submit to some ritualistic lashing when New York Attorney General Cuomo accused them of misrepresenting the site's safety features and exposing minors to sexual predators -- thus making it official that "Facebook is the new MySpace". Facebook did agree to make some concessions, mainly responding faster to abuse reports. But would this make any difference, when anyone who loses their account can sign up for a new one instantly? More generally, when politicians beat up on social networking sites, what changes do they want to see made, and why do they think those changes would accomplish anything?" Hit that link below to continue to read what Bennett has to say...

Alien54 writes "Requiring permission to innovate? Feeling entitled to search others' property? Getting the power to act like law enforcement in order to fine or arrest those who are taking part in activities that challenge your business model? Don't these all sound quite familiar? Centuries from now (hopefully much, much sooner), the actions of the RIAA, MPAA and others that match these of the weavers and button-makers of 17th century France will seem just as ridiculous."

Last week I packed my bags and went to Washington to partake in the event known as PAX, The Penny Arcade Expo. That sexy new rising star of video game conferences. Along with thousands of other fans of the comic strip, we filed into the Meydenbauer conference center unclear as to what would greet us inside.

Alex Moskalyuk writes "Philip J. Kaplan's F'd Companies is a compilation of famous and not so well-publicized dot-com flameouts. Most of the companies that are described in the book do not exist today, for some others the domain names are being used for similar businesses, but the original management and business plans are gone. Even though F'd Companies presents several chapters in the table of contents, it's better viewed just as compilation of dot-com mishaps, with about one or two pages dedicated to each company." Read on for more Schadenfreude.

Last week, you posted your questions to SomaFM's General Manger, Rusty, and today he delivers. In this interview: answers about CARP (which was wisely rejected by the Library of Congress, this week), the RIAA, the workings of an internet radio station, and of course, Big URL.