spit_evil_olive_tips @ spit_evil_olive_tips @beehaw.org

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The family — a mom, Jackie Merlos, and her four children, 9-year-old triplets and a 7-year-old son — were detained June 28 at the U.S.-Canadian border at Peace Arch Park. Merlos was meeting her sister, a Canadian citizen, in that well-known neutral area where Americans can see their family and friends.

children under 10, held in captivity for 2 weeks. all US citizens (not that it should matter, no one should be treated this way, but it's a reminder that no one is immune)

Washington Congressman Rick Larsen said his team is working with Dexter and the local Department of Homeland Security to uncover more facts on the family's detention, stating, "I respect federal law enforcement, and they must respect the constitutional rights of the people they detain."

Rick Larsen is one of the most senior Democrats in the Congressional Spineless Caucus. instead of any sort of outrage, he's throwing out this weasel-worded "I respect federal law enforcement..." shit.

at the risk of being "guy who pretty much only plays Factorio recommends you play Factorio..."

you can easily put 50+ hours into a single savefile, especially with the Space Age expansion

direct link to the paper, rather than this Gazeon clickbait: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adt3813

We study vocabulary changes in more than 15 million biomedical abstracts from 2010 to 2024 indexed by PubMed and show how the appearance of LLMs led to an abrupt increase in the frequency of certain style words. This excess word analysis suggests that at least 13.5% of 2024 abstracts were processed with LLMs. This lower bound differed across disciplines, countries, and journals, reaching 40% for some subcorpora.

99% of users on Lemmy instances are extremely fearful of AI and lack the courage to accept reality

hi. I see you registered your account here 2 days ago. welcome to Beehaw.

posting comments that boil down to "99% of you are stupid but luckily I'm here to educate you" is probably going to wear out your welcome pretty fast.

here's an article from the AP: What to know after judge keeps Kilmar Abrego Garcia in jail over deportation fears

If things went as planned, Abrego Garcia would be staying with his brother in Maryland while court proceedings continue. But he’s still locked up over fears that U.S. immigration officials will try to deport him again.

A federal judge in Tennessee agreed Monday to keep Abrego Garcia behind bars at the request of his own attorneys. They had raised concerns over what they say were “contradictory statements” by the Trump administration over plans to remove Abrego Garcia from the country.

"at the request of his own attorneys" is the key thing here. he is eligible to be released pending the trial, but he is requesting to stay in jail because of fears that the gestapo will kidnap him again if he's released.

useful or at least neutral rather than being a negative on the society?

I would recommend reading about the Protestant work ethic

there is an assumption that is deeply embedded in our society, including in your question, that someone's worth as a human is linked to the job they perform, how much money they make at that job, etc.

it is so deeply ingrained that it's one of those "fish don't realize they're wet" things - you probably never had a class in school where the teacher explicitly said "today we're going to learn about why rich people are better than poor people, and employed people are better than unemployed people".

if you're looking for a concrete idea for what can be done, read about universal basic income.

but breaking out of that "not having a job means you're a drain on society" mindset needs to come first. if you skip that step, UBI will seem to you like a "handout" given to people who don't "deserve" it (I would also recommend reading about the concept of "deserving poor" vs "undeserving poor")

haha Streisand Effect go brrrrr

https://www.iceblock.app/

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/iceblock/id6741939020

(currently no Android version, unfortunately)

there's also a weird cognitive dissonance when it comes to talking about "free" public transit compared to other kinds of transportation.

the vast, vast majority of roads are "free" in the sense that they're completely paid for with tax revenue, rather than collecting a toll from each road user. roads with tolls are an extremely small percentage of the overall amount of road-miles that exist.

so the "default" mindset of a road is that it's "free" at the time of use, and charging per-use is seen as a rare exception.

but for public transit, we somehow have the opposite mindset - the "default" is that it must collect a per-usage fee. and a transit system that does not is seen as the exception, bordering on an aberration.

With NHS mental health waitlists at record highs, are chatbots a possible solution?

taking Betteridge's Law one step further - not only is the answer "no", the fucking article itself explains why the answer is no:

People around the world have shared their private thoughts and experiences with AI chatbots, even though they are widely acknowledged as inferior to seeking professional advice.

as with so many other things, "maybe AI can fix it?" is being used as a catch-all for every systemic problem in society:

In April 2024 alone, nearly 426,000 mental health referrals were made in England - a rise of 40% in five years. An estimated one million people are also waiting to access mental health services, and private therapy can be prohibitively expensive.

fucking fund the National Health Service properly, in order to take care of the people who need it.

but instead, they want to continue cutting its budget, and use "oh there's an AI chatbot that you can use that is totally just as good as talking to a human, trust us" as a way of sweeping the real-world harm caused by those budget cuts under the rug.

Nicholas has autism, anxiety, OCD, and says he has always experienced depression. He found face-to-face support dried up once he reached adulthood: "When you turn 18, it's as if support pretty much stops, so I haven't seen an actual human therapist in years."

He tried to take his own life last autumn, and since then he says he has been on a NHS waitlist.

Make Living In A Company Town Where Your Children Die From Measles Great Again

tl;dw is that you should say "please" as basically prompt engineering, I guess?

the theory seems to be that the chatbot will try to match your tone, so if you ask it questions in a tone like it's an all-knowing benevolent information god, it'll respond in kind, and if you treat it politely its responses will tend more towards politeness?

I don't see how this solves any of the fundamental problems with asking a fancy random number generator for authoritative information, but sure, if you want to be polite to the GPUs, have at it.

like, several lawyers have been sanctioned for submitting LLM-generated legal briefs with hallucinated case citations. if you tack on "pretty please, don't make up any fake case citations or I could get disbarred" to a prompt...is that going to solve the problem?

short answer: no, not really

long answer, here's an analogy that might help:

you go to https://yourbank.com/ and log in with your username and password. you click the button to go to Online Bill Pay, and tell it to send ACME Plumbing $150 because they just fixed a leak under your sink.

when you press "Send", your browser does something like send a POST request to https://yourbank.com/send-bill-payment with a JSON blob like {"account_id": 1234567890, "recipient": "ACME Plumbing", "amount": 150.0} (this is heavily oversimplified, no actual online bank would work like this, but it's close enough for the analogy)

and all that happens over TLS. which means it's "secure". but security is not an absolute, things can only be secure with a particular threat model in mind. in the case of TLS, it means that if you were doing this at a coffee shop with an open wifi connection, no one else on the coffeeshop's wifi would be able to eavesdrop and learn your password.

(if your threat model is instead "someone at the coffeeshop looking over your shoulder while you type in your password", no amount of TLS will save you from that)

but with the type of vulnerability Jellyfin has, someone else can simply send their own POST request to https://yourbank.com/send-bill-payment with {"account_id": 1234567890, "recipient": "Bob's Shady Plumbing", "amount": 10000.0}. and your bank account will process that as you sending $10k to Bob's Shady Plumbing.

that request is also over TLS, but that doesn't matter, because that's security for a different level of the stack. the vulnerability is that you are logged in as account 1234567890, so you should be allowed to send those bill payment requests. random people who aren't logged in as you should not be able to send bill payments on behalf of account 1234567890.

I have an admittedly archaic definition of “coverage”: reporting via the written word.

here's an interview with her, from last year in Current Affairs: Kat Abughazaleh on How Right-Wing Propaganda Works

Kat Abughazaleh has watched a lot of Fox News. As an analyst for Media Matters, her job was to monitor the Fox primetime shows, producing videos documenting some of the most deranged stories to appear on the network. Somebody has to keep track of what's going on in the right's media ecosystem, and we're glad that Kat performs this valuable public service.

Examples of her work include videos about Mike Huckabee's indoctrination program, the "right-wing Amazon", Tucker Carlson's post-Fox career, Conservapedia, and her weekly Fox roundups. We can laugh at the right's media, but its effects are alarming. Introducing Fox News to a market turns people more conservative and many people have disturbing stories of how their relatives have had their minds poisoned by the stream of hatred and paranoia that Fox transmits into their brains.

the right-wing media ecosystem she covers is inherently video-based. Fox News has text articles on their website but they probably get next to nothing in views compared to video clips on their website or their actual TV news shows.

and so media criticism of that right-wing ecosystem is also going to be inherently video-heavy. maybe you could have a text article interspersed with video clips, but that's pretty unwieldy.

I honestly had no idea there were people doing serious reporting on there.

I'm also "old man yells at cloud" about TikTok...but you probably remember the original, early-2000s Daily Show with Jon Stewart, right? how they'd show video clips of a politician saying something, and 5 years earlier saying the opposite, etc? and how, for its time, that was a breath of fresh air? that wasn't text-based, but it was still "serious reporting", right? journalism is speaking truth to power. you can do that in any medium.

I'm not on TikTok, but I've seen enough clips shared on other platforms to know that TikTok has everything. if there wasn't someone doing left-leaning journalism on TikTok, someone would step in to fill the void.

and it's not necessarily all shortform video - here's an hour-long video on her YouTube channel: The Dangerous Reality of White Christian Nationalism

but for better or worse, shortform video seems to be what gets actually watched. the video above has 82k views. meanwhile, 4 minutes on Why Conservatives Hate Being Called "Weird" has 116k (and that's just YouTube, I suspect Instagram and TikTok views of the shorter videos are significantly higher)

I'm picturing a bunch of FBI agents with two side-by-side printouts, the list of Epstein's clients and a list of Trump campaign donors, cross-referencing them in order to make sure "sensitive information" is redacted.

SMART can be used for a couple different things - one is just reading the health values reported by the drive, another is for instructing the drive to run tests of itself and then reporting the results. if you haven't already, I'd recommend having it run the "long" self-test as that inspects the entire drive. it will often prompt the drive to report problems that it may not have noticed otherwise.

a related thing to keep an eye on, especially with an old netbook like that, is the power & data connectors to the drive. buildup of dust, or corrosion on the contacts, or something like that, could cause symptoms that look like a drive failure, even if the drive itself is perfectly healthy.

the purpose of the 2nd Amendment is so you can protect yourself from violent lunatics who wish to harm you and your family

...wait no not like that

oh, this one's pretty easy, actually

a normal AI tells you it's safe to eat one rock per day

an AI agent waits for you to open your mouth, and then throws a rock at your face. but it's smart enough to only do that once a day.

Casey Newton reviewed OpenAI's "agent" back in January

he called it "promising but frustrating"...but this is the type of shit he considers "promising":

My most frustrating experience with Operator was my first one: trying to order groceries. “Help me buy groceries on Instacart,” I said, expecting it to ask me some basic questions. Where do I live? What store do I usually buy groceries from? What kinds of groceries do I want?

It didn’t ask me any of that. Instead, Operator opened Instacart in the browser tab and begin searching for milk in grocery stores located in Des Moines, Iowa.

At that point, I told Operator to buy groceries from my local grocery store in San Francisco. Operator then tried to enter my local grocery store’s address as my delivery address.

After a surreal exchange in which I tried to explain how to use a computer to a computer, Operator asked for help. “It seems the location is still set to Des Moines, and I wasn't able to access the store,” it told me. “Do you have any specific suggestions or preferences for setting the location to San Francisco to find the store?”

they're gonna revolutionize the world, it's gonna evolve into AGI Real Soon Now....but also if you live in San Francisco and tell it to buy you groceries it'll order them from Iowa.

what was the Tesla wearing?

why was it in such a dangerous neighborhood at that time of night?

I'm not saying it was the Tesla's fault, or that it deserved to be set on fire, of course...but maybe it should be a little more careful.

click here to pre-order my upcoming book, published by Harvard Business Review, "Don't Be A Fucking Nazi and Other Secrets To Corporate Success"

definitely good news, although there's a terrifying aspect of it.

from the article, about Kim Davis's attorney:

Staver previously told the Lantern that his team’s goal is for the appeal to reach the U.S. Supreme Court and that, should the appeals panel rule against him, he would appeal to the higher court.

The case would then provide the justices an opportunity to re-evaluate Obergefell v. Hodges, the 2015 decision that guaranteed same-sex couples marriage rights, on the same grounds that the court in 2022 used to overturn the federal right to abortion, Staver said.

...

“This case underscores why the U.S. Supreme Court should overturn Obergefell v. Hodges, because that decision threatens the religious liberty of many Americans who believe that marriage is a sacred institution between one man and one woman. The First Amendment precludes making the choice between your faith and your livelihood.”

SCOTUS can't just randomly issue a press release that says "oh btw Obergefell v. Hodges is overturned". they need a case to be teed up for them in order to do that. with the Dobbs case that overturned Roe v Wade for example, the Supreme Court decision came down in 2022, but it was regarding a Mississippi law that was passed in 2018. that law was a 15-week abortion ban, which clearly violated Roe. the Mississippi legislature had zero reason to pass it other than to provide a case that could work its way up to the Supreme Court and give them an excuse to ban abortion.

Staver is the founder of a group of shitbags who call themselves the "Liberty Counsel". the writing is on the wall that the Christofascists are gunning for marriage equality, and this case is one of several that give them a possible avenue with which to do it.