Rowley @Rowley@social.cleverlibre.org

You know, I *really* dislike ad blockers from the security perspective. They need exceptionally broad permissions that make the extension a juicy target for attacks. Pop one of the maintainers' Google or Github account and own hundreds of millions of people overnight - their email, bank accounts, social media identities, and all that.

The consequences of simple coding errors are similarly disastrous - and I bet that there are some good UXSS bugs lurking in all that JavaScript.

For these reasons, I resisted ad blockers for 20+ years, and I endured countless cookie prompts, subscription interstitials, "sponsored results", and unskippable ads. But around 2020, the anti-user patterns on the web have gotten unbearable. And I say this as a person who grew up in the era of auto-playing Flash-based pop-under ads.

I'm not a security absolutist. It's all about trade-offs: the convenience of using a modern web browser, for example, generally outweighs the risks of living its massive attack surface. But in this case, you gotta take a hit just to continue to browse in peace. It blows.

67 years ago on October 15, 1956, The programming language FORTRAN, short for "Formula Translation," was introduced to the public.

It was the first general-purpose, compiled imperative programming language, originally developed by IBM in the 1950s for scientific and engineering applications. FORTRAN gained popularity and became a vital tool in scientific and engineering applications

#Tech #RetroTech #Retro #RetroTechnology #TechHistory #Fortran #IBM

‘

“Every seed company is facing these problems, but they probably wouldn’t want to tell you that,” said Alan Sparks, an industry veteran who consults for Baker Creek Seeds. “‘We’ve got everything in control! Everything’s gonna be OK!’ But it’s not OK.”

‘

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/oct/16/seed-farmers-climate-change

I think this might actually be the first time in my life I've been more horrified by the left than the right. The Ukraine war came close-ish, with some factions of the left siding with Russia due to distrust of the US (which, fair enough), and then tankies apparently being confused as to whether Russia is still socialist or not. But all of that was balanced out by the right trying to undermine Ukraine funding in favor of the most stupid shit ever.

But this week a lot of leftists who support Palestine somehow stumbled past the point and went straight for glorifying one of the most horrific massacres in recent history, openly supporting Hamas, and even straight up calling for the elimination of Israel. I always thought the right had a monopoly on overt racism and unjust violence, but apparently if you substitute in words like "decolonization" you can get some of the left to go full Nazi too.

Sure, Friday the 13th is scary…

But nothing is as haunting as Tuesday, November 8th, 2016.

The construct and the instrument seem to have converged in education; “performance on the test” is the goal, but there is no agreement that the goal is worthy or measuring what it is designed to measure. This makes “data-driven decision-making” inherently unscientific.

@guncelawits @StillIRise1963

This is true, but the precision of it misses the why.

Republicans are a cult. All cults use loyalty tests, arguably this marks a cult more than anything. From the maga hats to eschewing masks, loyalty tests have been running rampant from the GOP as they continue to solidify their cult.

Congress members are cult members too. They have to publicly declare outrageous things as a matter of loyalty tests. They know they're untrue and "crazy". Doesn't matter. Cult.

@SwiftOnSecurity @malwaretech I don't know if it's helpful at all, but it may be worth considering if Twitter is providing whatever it is you are looking for by using it. There are no metrics about that service that can be trusted. You cannot trust follower count. You cannot trust engagement. You cannot know that doing anything over there accomplishes anything at all. Twitter will lie about everything if that's what it takes for that service to continue.

So in addition to cluttering up low earth orbit, wrecking terrestrial astronomy, creating the potential for a Kessler Syndrome cascade which could close access to space, and creating a national security nightmare, Starlink internet access is a climate catastrophe using up to 30 times the carbon footprint per internet subscriber of land based internet.

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2394949-starlink-carbon-footprint-up-to-30-times-size-of-land-based-internet/

I’m shocked…

Once again I have no idea who originally created this, but I salute you.

One thing that's already hard to communicate to young people is that the world didn't used to seem like a never-ending parade of sociopathic, gaslighting assholes. Oh, they were there, but they were happy to do their evil work behind the scenes. Now they require pop-star levels of adoration too.

46% of 🇳🇴 Norwegians and 42% of the 🇳🇱 Dutch said they are not very worried or not at all worried about climate change.

Only 38% in both countries think climate change will harm future generations a great deal and only 32% in both countries think climate change will harm them personally a moderate amount or more.

https://climatecommunication.yale.edu/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/international-public-opinion-on-climate-change-2022b.pdf

#ClimateChange #ClimateCrisis #Norway #Netherlands

Did you know about PromptFont?

This is a special font that I made, which includes glyphs for all sorts of button prompts on all sorts of different gamepads and devices. Since it's a font, you can easily include it as part of text and scale it or colour it however you want.

You can find the font available for free here: https://shinmera.github.io/promptfont

#gamedev #indiedev #opensource

"Microsoft's data centers in West Des Moines, Iowa guzzled massive amounts of water last year to keep cool while training OpenAI's ChatGPT-4. [...] This happened in the midst of a more than three-year drought, further taxing a stressed water system that's been so dry this summer that nature lovers couldn't even paddle canoes in local rivers." #AI https://futurism.com/critics-microsoft-water-train-ai-drought?utm_source=werd.io&utm_campaign=mastodon&utm_channel=mastodon

The carbon in my DNA was forged in the heart of a star. The iron in my blood was made in a supernova explosion. The microplastics in my brain are from used condoms made out of ancient plankton corpse goop. Everything is one.

For #SpacetoberChallenge prompt galaxy, my #linocut of #astronomer Vera Rubin (neé Cooper, ‘28-‘16) & her discovery: angular motion of galaxies deviates from predictions, 1st evidence for dark matter, now known as 5x as common as matter & the stuff which dictates dynamics of galaxies & evolution of our universe! Nobel committee waited 3 years after she died to reward another for the theory of dark matter.

🧵1/n

#printmaking #sciart #womenInSTEM #histsci #MastoArt

Weekly #emissions summary for 2023/9/25-2023/10/1 #CO2emissions #billgates #jeffbezos #elonmusk #markzuckerberg #markbenioff

I think the thing that bugs me about the LLM/AGI/GPT/BBQ craze is that it used to be kinda tricky to make computers do what you wanted them to do, but once you did it was absolutely completely reliable, and when they didn't do what you wanted, you could figure out why and fix it.

The new AI stuff throws away everything that computers used to excel at and just tries to give us faster shittier human minds.

The reliability, predictability, and understandability of conventional computation is the great strength of computers, and a marvelous complement to the way that the human mind works. Throwing that out in the service of going faster is just depressing.