You guys are making pastries without me?

They’re testing to see what happens when their filter fails to catch something.

They don’t know how to simulate an email that would get through the filters. If they knew how to do that, they’d just update the filters.

Instead, they say “hypothetically, if something did make it through our filters, would people fall for the phishing attempt?”

Sure, there’s some CYA behaviour here, and trying to look busy. But, just because they’re using a trick to get past the spam filters doesn’t mean the test is invalid. They’re not testing the spam filters, they’re testing the users.

Yeah, at one point he posted that fail2ban was only able to ban about 20 IPs/second, but he was getting 200 requests per second, and the bans weren’t having a meaningful impact on that (i.e. the requests were all coming from different IPs). From what I remember, his system load was over 1000.

Even that isn’t enough if they respond to that by just throwing more crawlers at your site.

AFAIK it was a glue trap / tarpit that one guy I know tried. Sure, it did result in the scraper getting a lot of useless data. OTOH, they dedicated massive resources to trying to get those non-existent documents, so his website was effectively DDOSed as a result. That’s why he’s now blocking entire countries.

Trying to prevent bits from being copied is always going to be futile.

In the long-ago times, websites that didn’t want crawlers to scrape them had a /robots.txt file that described what was and wasn’t allowed to be scraped.

But, the AI companies completely ignore that file. In fact, if anything, they may use it to find the “juicier” stuff to scrape. I know plenty of people who have decades of experience in running web servers who are going to extreme lengths (like banning entire countries, or huge IP ranges) to prevent what amounts to a DDOS on their servers from AI-company scrapers, because anything less extreme than that doesn’t work. For some of these people, more than 90% of the traffic they get is from AI scrapers. In fact, it seems like if you try to do something to discourage scrapers from AI companies, they think there’s something even juicier there and work even harder to get at it.

If they can find it, they’ll ingest it. And, these companies have spent literal billions on working around any attempt to prevent them from ingesting things, because they believe that whichever company manages to ingest the most content will come up with the best model.

If you have some kind of moral exception to your work ever ending up in an LLM, then you’re really out of luck. You better take up oil painting and never allow pictures of your art to be taken. The slop machines are hungry, and anything that becomes bits and ends up online will eventually be scraped.

As for making money as an artist, that’s another matter. It has always been hard, now it’s even harder. I don’t think you’ll make it easier for yourself by trying to prevent your stuff from being scraped. That just adds extra headaches you don’t need.

and not much different from the movie Her

Did you misunderstand that movie? A relationship with an AI is never seen as normal in the movie. The protagonist is a pathetic, lonely man who is going through a divorce. He buys an operating system with an AI component who he then falls for. When he admits to his ex-wife that he’s involved with his operating system, his ex-wife laughs at him for it. And, at the end of the movie, the AIs have evolved so that they’re no longer interested in humans and leave humanity behind to do their own thing.

There’s never a time, even in that movie, where AI relationships are something you’d want to admit to in public.

1999:

(https://www.pinterest.com/pin/804174077258541617/)

2005:

(https://www.deviantart.com/lorenviz/art/Mona-lisa-low-poly-598373457)

What’s wild is how many photons miss. 10E45 photons being emitted per second by a star, and the vast majority of them go out in a direction where there’s nothing to hit.

By the end even the commentators weren’t able to keep their composure. They were trying to dig up historical precedents and couldn’t find anything.

I never quite understood why Arsenal wanted him. Someone who’s primarily an attacking player who prefers to play centrally. That sounds a lot like Eze, like Rice, like Odegaard, like Ethan Nwaneri, and possibly also even like MLS or Mikel Merino.

It seems like what we need is more a #9, or a left winger. And, if we’re focusing on midfield, it should really be a defensive midfielder to share the burden with Zubimendi and/or free up Rice to attack more.

Or, since Saliba is possibly going to be out months, and White and Timber might not be available, someone who can play as a RB and/or RCB.

We’re not quite at the Arsene Wenger point where every player is actually a #10 playing out of position. But, we do have a lot of players who are attack-focused but are not wingers or strikers.

So, let’s see here.

France wins every World Cup game they play until the match against Spain. What happened in that match? William Saliba came off, and France had 0 Arsenal players. They lost. How many Arsenal players did Spain have on at the end of the match? 1. Now, you might think that Merino coming on 20 minutes after Spain’s second goal means he didn’t cause them to win, but to that I say shaddapa yo face.

England wins every World Cup game they played (other than a draw against Ghana) until they faced Argentina when they lost. In fact, they were leading against Argentina until minute 85. What was different? At 83 minutes, they had just taken off Declan Rice and suddenly they had no Arsenal players anymore.

Yesterday/Two days ago England played a Saliba-less France. Who played for England? Right from the start it was Rice as captain, Saka on the right wing, and Eze as an attacking midfielder. What was the result? A 4-0 England lead at halftime, comprising a goal and an assist for Rice and two goals for Saka. In the end if was a 6-4 win for England.

Today/Yesterday Spain played Argentina, the only team of the final 4 that doesn’t have a current Arsenal player. Spain outplayed Argentina, and Argentina didn’t have a single shot, but despite that, they didn’t manage to score… until at minute 75 Mikel Merino came on, and in extra time Zubimendi replaced Rodri. What happened once Spain had 2 Arsenal players on the pitch? They won.

Arsenal Players = World Cup Wins, QED.

That’s not what that phrase means.

Not sure why this is in the “pics” community. Yes, technically it’s a picture of something, but it’s not a good picture, or an original picture, or a well composed picture.

The problem most preppers experience is that the apocalypse is gradual, not sudden. Or, they prepared for the wrong apocalypse. Or, other people are not treating the apocalypse the way they expected / should.

If things get so bad that urban / suburban dwellers are concerned with growing food, things are already pretty messed up. If supermarkets and/or emergency food relief aren’t keeping people fed, then people are going to get desperate. At that point, the people who are OK aren’t the ones who have solar panels, food stores, weapons, and so-on. The people who are OK are the ones who are willing and able to use violence against other people to take their solar panels, food stores, weapons, and so-on. IMO even preppers who own guns and train to use them will often not have the ruthlessness to actually kill someone when push comes to shove, not unless they’ve been trained / brainwashed / traumatized into being able to do that.

So, for me, I keep enough food and drink for a few days. If there’s a situation that lasts longer than that, I also have friends, and will go stay with them if things are better for them. I want enough power so I can keep from getting bored for a few days. I don’t need to be able to run heavy appliances. If civilization collapses, I’m not fooling myself into thinking I can survive that. I’m not a warlord, I don’t know anybody who would become a warlord, I don’t think I could make myself useful to a warlord, and I don’t think I could fight off a warlord and their gang.

buying peace of mind when it comes to self sufficient power generation has no price tag

$10,000? $100,000? 75% of your salary for the rest of your life?

It obviously does have a price tag at some point. If someone wanted true self-sufficiency they’d have to get a full solar setup plus a generator in case the grid went down at a time when solar power wasn’t covering the needs. (That’s likely if, for example, your power is knocked out due to wildfires, and the wildfire smoke is making the solar setup unable to produce power.)

And, you can’t really consider yourself fully self-sufficient when it comes to electrical power unless you have a n+1 setup, so you have a backup generator in case the primary one fails and needs to be repaired.

It makes me wonder if politicians, celebrities, etc. have their plate numbers already entered into Flock as a whitelist of people not to pull over.

The story makes it pretty clear that the cops are, as usual, not doing any independent thinking. The system says to pull that car over, so they do what the system wants. They don’t double-check to see if what the system is telling them to do is reasonable. If someone fat-fingers some data entry and the plate for the governor of California gets added to the system, the cops might charge up and box him in and jump out with their guns drawn. That might result in someone with actual power getting mad about Flock. So, maybe they prevent that by pre-loading the system with a whitelist of plates that are assumed to be in the clear.

four cop cars came flying out of nowhere and boxed us in. The officers jumped out and started shouting.

So, 4 cars, who knows how many cops.

Really, this is a story about how absurd cops are in the USA.

At no point in this tale was there ever a car reported stolen. It was only a set of license plates that went missing. So, at no point was there a car thief, you can’t have a car thief if there’s no stolen car. Obviously, if there’s no car thief, there can’t be any reason to assume that the person in the “stolen car” will be violent. Yet, somehow the police charged up aggressively, boxing him in using 4 cars, jumping out and shouting, hands on their guns.

The cops even claimed that their reaction was “lucky” for the guy:

“You’re lucky we’re in Plymouth. If you were in Minneapolis, they definitely would’ve come at you with guns drawn.”

And the guy considers himself lucky too:

And the more I’ve sat with the aftermath, the more I’m thinking about how, with a different set of officers in a different city, or a different unsuspecting driver with 34 ## DTM New Jersey plates who was a little less collected, this could’ve ended so, so much worse. Thank God our kids weren’t with us. I’m not sure if I would’ve been able to react as calmly.

If he hadn’t been as calm, he might have been killed by the cops because he might not have reacted as calmly.

The fact that this is being framed as a “Flock” issue is absurd. It’s like a story about a sensor in front of the orphan crushing machine which sometimes misidentifies normal people as orphans and throws them onto the conveyor belt. Sure, that’s an issue, but let’s focus on this orphan crushing machine first.

Cool, definitely not my slogan though. He might have had it first, or he heard it from someone else like me. I just posted it because I like it.

Reading the decision live to viewers on Friday, a tearful King was resigned to now serving time behind bars … “You got what you wanted, so to all those who were people crying about how we disrupted you, you got it, congratulations,”

Um… thanks?

But, dude. We didn’t come after you. You came after us. You’re not the victim here.