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Cake day: 22 de julio de 2023

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  • This raises the question: whose bots are these? Is she padding her own numbers to pretend she’s still relevant, or has someone else used a bunch of bots to manipulate a vulnerable narcissist into being their own puppet?

    Neither excuse her behavior, but we already know bots are being used to nudge the general consensus, but how far could you manipulate an individual person with an army of targeted bots.

    And just in case anyone is getting the wrong idea, I’m not making excuses for Nicki Minaj, or trying to turn her into a victim. I’m not aware of any evidence that her recent behavior isn’t genuinely who she is. This headline just happened to make me consider that terrifying potential of the reality we find ourselves in.



  • Based on the picture in the article, there’s some redundancy in this model, which makes sense for a product specifically designed to be used in a car, but you can buy an LD-06 lidar sensor for less than $30.

    It’s impossible to tell from the picture, but it does look a bit like two LD-06 sensors in a case with a bit of room for some processing hardware. It depends on what kind/how much processing they’re doing, and I’m in no way an expert, but as a nerd with an Aliexpress account who loves to tinker, this looks more like a success of Chinese manufacturing at scale than some kind of new advancement that MacroVision made.


  • I bought AMD products for Linux support, and even bought one share of their stock back in the 1st gen Ryzen days. I’ve stayed a customer and shareholder because I was happy that they weren’t prioritizing AI. I’ll be honest though lately some of their moves towards AI, and even that deal they made getting in on the OpenAI money circle bubble have left me questioning my continued support. Part of me wants to sell my share in protest, but I know that won’t even be noticed. Another part of me wants to sell my share because it’ll probably lose value when the bubble pops, but even if it went to zero I’d only be out around $30, and at this point, profiting even a couple hundred bucks off the AI bubble feels like taking blood money.


  • Not particularly proud of all this, but as an autistic millenial kid who had access to the internet in the late '90s early 2000s I’ve got a relevant story.

    If you wanted to look at boobs on the internet in the era of waiting a minute for images to load, Playboy was an easy way to avoid some of the more hardcore and kink porn on the internet. You could be pretty sure that regardless of what site you were on, Playboy content would actually contain boobs, and you wouldn’t waste 2 minutes slowly loading a picure of a dude in a gimp mask getting pegged through the bars of a pet cage (not trying to yuck anyone’s yum, but when you’re a dumb teen with absent parents looking for boobs, it wasn’t what I was after). Eventually Playboy content started to be considered “too vanilla” by the majority of porn users at the time, but I still liked vanilla and kinda let my Autism go crazy on occasion over the years to download and organize offline copies of a bunch of photosets.

    Time passes, I get a bit older and become a young adult, the internet gets faster, at some point I revisit the porn archival hyperfixation, and foolishly write a script to scrape and download photosets straight from Playboy’s paid member-only site.

    Obviously one of their web admins notices that my account is a huge chunk of their monthly traffic, and I get an email from their customer service basically saying their admins noticed unusual activity on my account, and to explain myself or face a ban. I made up some excuse that worked on the customer service agent and they let me off with a warning.

    But the next day I got an email from the admin that said he knew what I had done, and that the answer I gave the customer service rep was a lie, and if he ever caught me again he’d send the police after me for possession of CSAM. I replied that the only images I had were from their site, how is that CSAM, and if there is CSAM they would be in more trouble for distributing/selling access to it. He wrote back and said yeah, we’re a company, the rules don’t apply the same as individuals, and that if I kept arguing with him he’d ban me anyway.

    So, yeah, I deleted everything I had downloaded and decided that hyperfixation wasn’t worth it.






  • To add some extra detail to this, she struggled for a second after saying the dow was over 50,000 with what unit that was, started to say dollars, but interrupted herself halfway through the word dollars to accuse Sen Jamie Raskin of being good at stock trading (hinting at the admittedly pretty open trading by congress members and senators that definitely resembles insider trading).

    But the point I was trying to get around to was that the DOW is an index, and unit she should have used was “points” not “dollars.” And then Peter Navarro got on Maria Bartatomo’s Fox News Sunday show and also referred to the DOW being over “50,000 dollars.”

    So, yes, fundamentally Pam Bondi gave a really callous non-answer to something anyone with a functioning heart really cares about, but in her deflection/non-answer she also showed her own ignorance about the subject she was trying to use as a deflection.






  • One big downside to ham radio (as someone with my license) is that you can’t use encryption. Which is fine for some use cases, but does limit the usefulness in the “government shut down the internet” kind of scenario.

    Which, I suppose if you’re already using back-channels to circumvent some broader government censorship, maybe abiding by FCC rules isn’t a priority anymore, but IMO this is an area where large mesh networks of “consumer” devices with encryption very much still has value.


  • It’s a bit niche, and I’m probably one of the few people who daily drove them when they were a thing, but bring back Firefox OS phones - they were a bit ahead of their time, but now that every app is a browser window anyway it’d probably be fine, and people are craving a mobile OS alternative to Android and iOS.

    Sure, I’d personally prefer something a bit more powerful, so maybe a joint project between Mozilla, and a linux phone distro like PostmarketOS would be cool. Or (since I’m already in fantasy land) depending on hardware, considering Valve’s work on ARM for the Steam Frame, maybe a partnership with them.

    Granted, it’s been close to a decade since I daily drove FirefoxOS, there’s always a chance I’m remembering things as better than they were. I should dig my old FirefoxOS Phones out and do a bit of a retrospective look at them.