Contents
- Mark Cuban on His Online Pharmacy: 'Our KPI is How Much We Can Reduce the Stress of Our Patients'
- Peloton Should Put Itself Up for Sale and Fire Its CEO, Activist Investor Demands
- New MoonBounce UEFI Bootkit Can't Be Removed by Replacing the Hard Drive
- An OpenSea Bug Let Attackers Snatch NFTs from Owners at Six-figure Discounts
- Apple Fined $5.6M After Dutch Dating App Antitrust Order
- Julian Assange Wins Right To Seek Appeal Against Extradition To the US
- Facebook Promised Free Internet Access, but Users Got Charged Anyway
- $130 Billion Wiped Off Crypto Markets in 24 Hours
- Australia PM Morrison Loses Control of WeChat Chinese Account as Election Looms
- The Next Huawei? US Threatens to Inflict 'Export Control' on Russia if It Invades Ukraine
- James Cameron Warns of 'The Dangers of Deepfakes'
- Developer Who Intentionally Corrupted His Libraries Wants NPM To Restore His Publishing Rights
- Israel Says Fourth Vaccine Dose Brings 2X Protection Against Omicron Infection, 3X Against Serious Illness - For Those Over 60
- Vice Mocks GIFs as 'For Boomers Now, Sorry'. (And For Low-Effort Millennials)
- This 22-Year-Old Builds Semiconductors in His Parents' Garage
Peloton Should Put Itself Up for Sale and Fire Its CEO, Activist Investor Demands
Color me shocked
Look, their core customer are serious cyclists
New MoonBounce UEFI Bootkit Can't Be Removed by Replacing the Hard Drive
Re:There should be a physical switch
Security or convenience. Pick one.
what was once considered unachievable
Pretty foolish to think that, beyond the advertising realm anyway.
Trusted computing... designed to protect Microsoft from competition
Ironically...
Reflashing your BIOS used to be a simple process, it's only a trouble because they built-in protection against malware...
Remember when they introduced UEFI?
Does anyone else remember the discussion around EFI and the introduction of UEFI? I specifically remember a lot of people calling UEFI dangerously complex and that it would be infected by a sophisticated virus in the future. Seems like that day has come.
For those not keeping track of "this is a bad idea" instances:
* DMCA - check
* Clippy - check
* UEFI - check
* Intel Management Engine - check
* AMD PSP - check
* Intel SGX - check
* Bringing Back Clippy - pending
An OpenSea Bug Let Attackers Snatch NFTs from Owners at Six-figure Discounts
"It's a subjective thing whether you consider this to be a loophole or a bug, but the fact is that people are being forced into sales at a price they wouldn't otherwise have accepted right now," said Tom Robinson, chief scientist and co-founder of Elliptic. According to a Twitter thread by software developer Rotem Yakir, the bug is caused by a mismatch between the information available in NFT smart contracts and the information presented by OpenSea's user interface. Essentially, the attackers are taking advantage of old contracts that persist on the blockchain but are no longer present in the view provided by the OpenSea application.
Oh no!
Somebody stole my nothing!
I sliped up and rtfa
I wanted to know what was actually happening and the summery doesn't actually say, so I went and read the actual article which does. It seems to me that the problem is with the people the summary claims are being stolen from. Here's how it works, at least as as much as anything nft related can be described as working.
Bob owns an NFT of Natlie Portman covered in hot grits looking at the goatse picture. He lists the NFT for sale for $10 because he can't imagine anyone will pay much for a goatse picture. He then changes his mind and thinks people like looking at hot grits and decides he should up the price. Bob has agreed he must pay a fee if he wishes to withdraw a contract, and doesn't want to do that so he moves it to the back of the bulletin board announcing all nft's for sale thinking noone will see it there. He then posts a new listing on the front of the board offering the nft for sale for $100,000. Alice comes along and realizes there are contracts stapled to the back of the board that aren't publicly visible. She takes bob's original contract, which he did not cancel, only hid from low effort public view, and executes it, buying the nft for $10. Bob is now angry and has been defrauded for $100,000?
Rare NFT?
Apple Fined $5.6M After Dutch Dating App Antitrust Order
What Apple says when...
1. they give law enforcement/authoritarian regimes users' private info:
We abide by the laws of the countries in which we operate.
2. things don't go their way and they have to pay up:
Julian Assange Wins Right To Seek Appeal Against Extradition To the US
Who?
Re:What is really at issue with Julian's extraditi
The short answer is because it was an act of war, conducted against combatants carrying arms.
Except they weren't carrying arms (cameras aren't arms), and some were providing medical care, so intentionally firing on them was a war crime.
Also, the government repeatedly lied about the existence of the recording, which was also a crime.
Re:What is really at issue with Julian's extraditi
How many of these charges would apply to a non-US Citizen or a resident.
Re:What is really at issue with Julian's extraditi
He's not being charged with journalism, he's being charged with assisted hacking of a government computer.
Liar.
17 of the 18 counts against him are for journalism, and 1 count is for supposed "hacking" ... YOU FUCKING LIAR
Trillion Dollar Tax Cut for the Rich is REAL.
Facebook Promised Free Internet Access, but Users Got Charged Anyway
In internal documents, employees of Facebook parent Meta Platforms acknowledge this is a problem. Charging people for services Facebook says are free "breaches our transparency principle," an employee wrote in an October memo. In the year ended July 2021, charges made by the cellular carriers to users of Facebook's free-data products grew to an estimated total of $7.8 million a month, when purchasing power adjustments were made, from about $1.3 million a year earlier, according to a Facebook document. Facebook calls the problem "leakage," since paid services are leaking into the free apps and services. It defines leakage in internal documents as, "When users are in Free Mode and believe that the data they are using is being covered by their carrier networks, even though these users are actually paying for the data themselves."
You mean Meta?
If you are going to put all the good stuff as Meta then you should also be putting all the bad stuff as Meta too.
Words
Not doing what you said you're going to do is called lack of integrity.
Not clearly indicating to users of the free app that what they're about to do is going to use paid data is called lack of transparency.
Making paid features available without consent prompts in an app specifically marketed as free to poor people is called a scam.
Third-party cell carriers
The issue is that third-party cellular carriers in India charged the users, not Facebook. That Facebook knew about the problem but failed to correct it reflects badly on Facebook, but its the cell carriers that profited, not Facebook.
$130 Billion Wiped Off Crypto Markets in 24 Hours
Cryptocurrency reminds me of 90s baseball cards
Cryptocurrency reminds me of the 1990s baseball card market. It’s highly speculative and its value is based on what people think it’s worth.
For example, in the 1990s, collectors and investors alike jumped on the baseball card bandwagon because they saw dollar signs everywhere. Vintage cards, like the infamous 1909 T206 Honus Wagner, became the holy grail for collectors. New cards of rising stars and prospects likewise commanded high values in price guides like Beckett’s and Tuff Stuff.
Then, the bottom fell out. Card companies like Topps, Donruss, Upper Deck, Fleer, and Score flooded the market with cards. Higher-priced card packs — which promised to contain a valuable card or autograph — priced out the casual collectors and hobbyists from the 1980s and earlier. What remained were people stuck with a bunch of worthless Todd Van Poppel rookie cards.
Cryptocurrency is popular, but the market is becoming flooded with all sorts of different digital currencies with different values. Sure, Bitcoin is limited by the amount of available coins (i.e. you won’t see the market flooded with lots of Bitcoin), but when you lump it in with the rest of the crypto market, it comes across as yet another fad. It appears more people are realizing this.
(Unrelated: Hey, my first post in nearly 20 years!)
Re:Somebody on Ars Technica explained it
So the problem is Bitcoin absolutely cannot fall below $30,000. The reason is there's several large players including Elon Musk who bought hundreds of millions at that price and are sitting on it. If it falls below 30,000 that's going to trigger those whales to sell off which is then going to Cascade into a mass sell-off across the entire cryptocurrency market.
So the argument is that Bitcoin can't fall below $30,000 because if it does bad things happen?
It certainly doesn't help you didn't link to the article or comments, so here it is. But reading the comments is no more insightful. The closest is this:
Most of the talk around $30,000 is because Michael Saylor's MicroStrategy holds around 121,000 Bitcoin at an average purchase price of $30,000. The thinking is that if the price goes below $30,000 MicroStrategy will be forced to liquidate those holdings causing a further collapse of the price.
Which is hardly an explanation. More like wishful thinking or an imagined threat.
Re:Somebody on Ars Technica explained it
And replying to myself here:
Most of the talk around $30,000 is because Michael Saylor's MicroStrategy holds around 121,000 Bitcoin at an average purchase price of $30,000. The thinking is that if the price goes below $30,000 MicroStrategy will be forced to liquidate those holdings causing a further collapse of the price.
Which he says he will never do: Bitcoin Hodler Saylor Says MicroStrategy Will Never Sell Stash.
Re:Somebody on Ars Technica explained it
Note that it is of course in his best interest to say he wouldn't exacerbate a collapse in the value of an asset he holds for financial purposes.
If he would *never* give it up, why bother even having it? It doesn't even in theory do anything for them just sitting there. They must be desiring to exchange it for actual money or goods/services at some point. It's crazy to believe that they would hold a huge chunk of coins 'just because'.
Re: Not entirely correct.
Australia PM Morrison Loses Control of WeChat Chinese Account as Election Looms
The account was renamed 'Australia China New Life' in January by its new Chinese owner, Fuzhou 985 Technology, based in Fujian province, which notified followers the account would instead promote Chinese life in Australia. An employee from Fuzhou 985 Technology, who only gave his surname as Huang, told Reuters by telephone was not aware the account was previously connected to Morrison. He said the transfer of ownership was conducted with a Chinese male national living in Fuzhou, whose identity he declined to disclose. "We thought this account had a large fanbase, so we decided to buy it," said Huang, adding that the company was looking for an account whose target audience was the Chinese community in Australia. He declined to say how much his company had paid to take over the account.
Car analogy.
An employee from Fuzhou 985 Technology, who only gave his surname as Huang, told Reuters by telephone was not aware the account was previously connected to Morrison.
Like a car, all identification stripped, and serial numbers filed off.
Re: Car analogy.
Reason to not use WeChat
Seems like a solid reason to never use WeChat. Some Chinese company will just buy it and you can't do anything about it.
Hmmm.
If it is possible to "buy an account because it has a large fanbase", and even legitimate or respectable to do so, then we have a serious problem with accountability and authorization. Those users authorized the owner at the time of signing up to send them messages, that's part of the sign-up process. Unless there is something explicit in that sign-up process that authorizes the sale of their information to others AND the bulk sending of messages by those not explicitly authorized to do so, then at best selling an active account is ethically highly dubious and, at worst, just possibly in violation of the TOS of the service provider or the EU's GDPR (the users don't get asked about the sale, so there is no transparency, right to object or disclosure of sharing data with third parties).
The Next Huawei? US Threatens to Inflict 'Export Control' on Russia if It Invades Ukraine
The attraction of using the foreign direct product rule derives from the fact that virtually anything electronic these days includes semiconductors, the tiny components on which all modern technology depends, from smartphones to jets to quantum computers — and that there is hardly a semiconductor on the planet that is not made with U.S. tools or designed with U.S. software. And the administration could try to force companies in other countries to stop exporting these types of goods to Russia through this rule. "This is a slow strangulation by the U.S. government," technology analyst Dan Wang of Gavekal Dragonomics, a research firm in Shanghai, said of Huawei. The rule cut the firm's supply of needed microchips, which were made outside the United States but with U.S. software or tools.
Now officials in Washington say they are working with European and Asian allies to craft a version of the rule that would aim to stop flows of crucial components to industries for which Russian President Vladimir Putin has high ambitions, such as civil aviation, maritime and high technology.... But the effort could face head winds from American and European business interests that fear using export controls could lead to Russian retaliation in other spheres — and eventually cause foreign companies to seek to design U.S. technology out of their products. That's because the extension of the rule beyond a single company like Huawei to an entire country or entire sectors of a country is unprecedented.
"It's like a magic power — you can only use it so many times before it starts to degrade," said Robert D. Atkinson, president of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, a think tank. "Other countries will say, 'Oh, man, the U.S. has total control over us. We'd better find alternatives.'"
The newspaper also spoke to Paul Triolo, chief of technology policy at a global political risk research and consulting firm called Eurasia Group. His opinion "this would be weaponizing the U.S. semiconductor supply chain against an entire country."
And in more ways than one: Targeted use of the foreign direct product rule could be a blow to Russia's military, which relies on a type of chip called Elbrus that is designed in Russia but manufactured in Taiwan at a chip foundry called TSMC, according to Kostas Tigkos, an electronics expert at Janes Group, a U.K.-based provider of defense intelligence. If the United States barred TSMC from supplying those chips to Russia, as it successfully barred TSMC from supplying Huawei, that would have a "devastating effect," Tigkos said.
In a statement, TSMC said it "complies with all applicable laws and regulations" and that it has a "rigorous export control system in place ... to ensure export control restrictions are followed."Analysts say that Western multinational firms probably would comply with the export controls. All U.S. chipmakers include clauses in their contracts requiring customers to abide by U.S. export rules.
The article also explores a scenario where businesses in China step in to supply Russia (citing estimates from the Peterson Institute for International Economics that China already builds 70% of the computers and smartphones that Russia imports).
"If Chinese firms wound up supplying Russia in violation of the rule, that would leave Washington with a major diplomatic dilemma: whether to sanction them, even if they make ordinary — not military — goods."
Weirdest simile ever
"It's like a magic power — you can only use it so many times before it starts to degrade," said Robert D. Atkinson, president of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, a think tank.
Weirdest simile ever.
"Hmm... how to describe something that degrades when repeatedly used? Surely there is nothing in our mundane physical world which matches such a description. To the eldritch grimoires!"
Re:Minsk Accord?
It is Russia that is making this a problem not Russia.
Oh that's good, I thought it was Russia.
Re:again
I think it's more of a when at this point. The Trump administration put us in such a weak position with regards to Russia that they can easily invade the Ukraine, put up with the sanctions for a little bit while using Bitcoin and cryptocurrency to launder money and while Europe and Asia by gas under the table, and then it all blow over. I'm guessing they're waiting until winter is over both because it's easier to fight a war when it's not winter and because they'll have gotten there years worth of sales on gas. By the time the next winter comes along we'll have moved on and lifted the sanctions quietly. Democracy is just plain dying globally and locally. There's just too many people who no longer believe in democracy. You'd be amazed how many people I talk to you online and offline who don't believe it should be easy to vote in America. They don't understand that it's a people they don't like can't easily vote that's not a democracy, it's just oligarchy with more steps. Furthermore, they don't understand that those laws that make it hard to vote will be used against them if and when they disagree with the people in power.
If Russia wants to overrun Ukraine they had better do it quickly. They don't have the logistical base to supply a major offensive for any length of time. Any sanctions on military critical chips and high tech components they can't build themselves is going to hit them in two places. Firstly their ability to sustain any war in the Ukraine after their munitions stockpiles run out and secondly it will devastate their arms sales since such a shortage would brick enormous amounts of military hardware they have sold to other countries. Finally there is hardly any country which would choose Russia when given the choice of trading with Russia or trading with the west and that includes China. Ukraine doesn't have to win, Ukraine just has to bog the Russians down long enough for their oversized force, driven by an undersized military logistical system and reliant on imported chips for high tech weapons to run out of ammo and supplies. Then there is the ever present danger that some helicopter landing-pad sized cap wearing Russian general with a chest covered in shiny medals sends some shells over the wrong border and drags NATO into the shooting war.
Re:Minsk Accord?
It is already done. In part.
I heard a SU-35 fighter deal between Russia and Egypt failed because the Russians were unable to manufacture the radars for lack of electronic components. And the Russians are already reacting to be less dependent on western electronics.
Also, many EU states are very dependent on Russian gas so i don't expect them to do much. The French did the plan Messmer to avoid precisely this kind of situations but it is only France. And the Europeans are not so keen on following the U..S on sanctions. That why they sometimes develop ITAR free aerospace products. The ITAR are a set of rules restricting the use and exportation of US made components.
James Cameron Warns of 'The Dangers of Deepfakes'
"Almost everything we create seems to go wrong at some point," James Cameron says... James Cameron: Almost everything we create seems to go wrong at some point. I've worked at the cutting edge of visual effects, and our goal has been progressively to get more and more photo-real. And so every time we improve these tools, we're actually in a sense building a toolset to create fake media — and we're seeing it happening now. Right now the tools are — the people just playing around on apps aren't that great. But over time, those limitations will go away. Things that you see and fully believe you're seeing could be faked.
This is the great problem with us relying on video. The news cycles happen so fast, and people respond so quickly, you could have a major incident take place between the interval between when the deepfake drops and when it's exposed as a fake. We've seen situations — you know, Arab Spring being a classic example — where with social media, the uprising was practically overnight.
You have to really emphasize critical thinking. Where did you hear that? You know, we have all these search tools available, but people don't use them. Understand your source. Investigate your source. Is your source credible?
But we also shouldn't be prone to this ridiculous conspiracy paranoia. People in the science community don't just go, 'Oh that's great!' when some scientist, you know, publishes their results. No, you go in for this big period of peer review. It's got to be vetted and checked. And the more radical a finding, the more peer review there is. So good peer-reviewed science can't lie. But people's minds, for some reason, will go to the sexier, more thriller-movie interpretation of reality than the obvious one.
I always use Occam's razor — you know, Occam's razor's a great philosophical tool. It says the simplest explanation is the likeliest. And conspiracy theories are all too complicated. People aren't that good, human systems aren't that good, people can't keep a secret to save their lives, and most people in positions of power are bumbling stooges. The fact that we think that they could realistically pull off these — these complex plots? I don't buy any of that crap! Bill Gates is not really trying to microchip you with the flu vaccine! [Laughs]
You know, look, I'm always skeptical of new technology, and we all should be. Every single advancement in technology that's ever been created has been weaponized. I say this to AI scientists all the time, and they go, 'No, no, no, we've got this under control.' You know, 'We just give the AIs the right goals...' So who's deciding what those goals are? The people that put up the money for the research, right? Which are all either big business or defense. So you're going to teach these new sentient entities to be either greedy or murderous.
If Skynet wanted to take over and wipe us out, it would actually look a lot like what's going on right now. It's not going to have to — like, wipe out the entire, you know, biosphere and environment with nuclear weapons to do it. It's going to be so much easier and less energy required to just turn our minds against ourselves. All Skynet would have to do is just deepfake a bunch of people, pit them against each other, stir up a lot of foment, and just run this giant deepfake on humanity.
I mean, I could be a projection of an AI right now.
No big change
Journalism is dead, now we just have outrage bait
Re: No big change
Easy remedy
The Twilight Zone addressed this in 1960
So the Titanic didn't sink?
Developer Who Intentionally Corrupted His Libraries Wants NPM To Restore His Publishing Rights
That was January 6th, and within about a week GitHub had restored his access, while one of his two libraries (faker-js) was forked by its community to create a community-driven project. But Thursday the developer announced on his Twitter account: What's up @Github? Ten days since you removed my ability to publish to NPM and fix the Infinity Zalgo bug in colors.js
Never responded to my support emails.
I have 100s of packages I need to maintain.
Everyone makes programming mistakes from time to time. Nobody is perfect.
It hasn't been confirmed that NPM has actually blocked his ability to publish — but the tweet already appears to be attracting reactions from other developers on social media.
Just tell this asshole "No".
He's been shown to abuse his privileges and betray user trust.
That sort of thing is a knife in the heart of trust.
He's demonstrated he cannot be trusted.
Re:"Programming mistakes"?
Remember - open source software is provided for use purely at your own risk - those other projects damaged themselves.
such agreements are not as ironclad as you might think. If I offer a man a free drink, but say that I do not guarantee anything about the contents, and deliberately put poison in it, in almost any jurisdiction I will still be held liable for murder regardless of the lack of guarantees I offered.
Re:"Programming mistakes"?
There very clearly are. Thousands of them, at the very least.
It's how we've been teaching kids to "code". Just include anything and everything an let the tools keep everything up-to-date. It's why software is so awful these days. What once fit on a floppy is now multiple-gigabytes in size and requires more RAM than my computer had 15 years ago.
People actually defend this practice. It's madness. It's like we actively discourage people from writing their own code.
CTAN and CPAN trained too many of us old-timers to trust repositories. For the kids, it might have been app stores.
Whatever it was, things really need to change. Maybe we could all try writing our own code now and then? Wouldn't that be nice?
Re:"Programming mistakes"?
Yes that did. Otherwise they suffer reputational damage. You can try and dice this down any way you want. Regardless of whatever justification you use Github had to do *something* and that something resulted in some form of undue expense.
They are not obligated to serve a damaging customer, especially one that takes a shit in the middle of their restaurant. There's no obligation to be neutral, not as a company, not as a community.
The guy needs to own his malicious acts.
It's just not the sort of mistake that goes away by saying oops. Especially when it impacts the actual lives of people. Actions have consequences, corrupting the libraries had consequences for a lot of very real people. Thousands of libraries might easily equate to millions of people having services disrupted.
Major services have always stuck gimmicks into web pages (remember the CGI scripted webpage counters?), so something that seems incidental could easily have taken out access to something essential. In this case, the programmer got lucky and the consequences don't seem to have been devastating. He couldn't have known that in advance, that was something he found out afterwards. And, yes, as programmer he's ultimately responsible, for all the lack of warranty.
I am not seeing any kind of real apology here for the reckless disregard of those people. I'm seeing an "oh well, maybe I shouldn't have got caught inflicting misery" but not a whole lot of "and I really shouldn't have been causing misery to others to begin with". I'm also seeing a "I sabotaged a software component over here, why am I banned from sabotaging other software components the next time I get stroppy?"
I'm beginning to think that we should have some sort of voluntary system of either certifying or self-certifying that a given standard is reached, where the most basic standard would be that the maintainer hasn't knowingly sabotaged the code, along with short, clear, simple guidelines on who is responsible for what and when, instead of making users responsible for absolutely everything (and therefore nobody is really responsible for anything).
It needn't be complicated, it needn't be unfair on anyone, and it needn't require anyone to have magic knowledge, magic abilities or access to a TARDIS.
Israel Says Fourth Vaccine Dose Brings 2X Protection Against Omicron Infection, 3X Against Serious Illness - For Those Over 60
And now the Times of Israel reports that the country's Health Ministry "said on Sunday that the fourth vaccine dose for those aged 60 and up offers a threefold protection against serious illness and twofold protection against infection in the current wave driven by the Omicron variant." The ministry said the figures are the result of initial analysis by experts from various leading academic and health institutions, and compares the fourth vaccine with those who received three doses at least four months ago.
The figures are based on 400,000 Israelis who received the fourth vaccine and 600,000 who received three doses, with the ministry stressing that the methodology is similar to previous papers the experts have published in the peer-reviewed New England Journal of Medicine.
Vax little to no help against Omricon
Queensland Australia had a zero covid policy until the beginning of this year.
This means no community immunity, only vaccination for prevention. About 88% of 12+ double vaccinated reasonably recently + boosters underway.
The ultimate test is death rate, so what are the results.
Of the 73% of the total population at least double vaccinated, 2,3 times vaccinated individuals were involved in 74% of deaths.
With 300,000 reported cases (estimates put actual infections at up to 3 times that), 11 people under 60 have died. That's 1 in 27,000 risk.
I've compiled the data here https://docs.google.com/spread...
which references the source information.
I don't really see any point in vaccination or restriction for Omricon.
100 doses
Just imagine what 100 doses will do!!
Re: Natural immunity
You keep being scared for as long as you like, I have been
You're scared of a fucking vaccine with the best safety record of any vaccine in history.
You can't whine about how scared you are of needles and also be a Macho Man at the same time, dipshit.
You're a scared child, who is projecting your fear onto others.
You know who is less scared than you? People who got vaccinated and boosted and are wearing masks.
That's some bs
We all got Omicron in the family, identical symptoms regardless of number and timing of shots - basically like a cold, lots of congestion and fatigue but no fever. Everyone in schools also got it, same deal. This is a heavily vaccinated county. Severity reduction - quite possible, impossible to tell what each individual case would have been like without vaccination. But nothing really stops this bug. Maybe the trials completed just a few weeks after booster was administered or participants were super cautious, staying home and wearing N95s everywhere? Not going to hold up in a real world where we can't keep getting boosters every two weeks or living in bubblewrap.
Re: Pwn the libs by dying of covid.
Have you ever heard of doing your own research?
Don't tell them that! They think "research" involves looking at facebook memes and scouring mommy blogs for horse paste recipes.
The people chanting "do your own research" are the same ones drinking their own urine between bouts of industrial bleach while waiting for dead politicians to rise from the grave. Their "research" lead them to believe that the military executed the Clintons, Bill Gates, and Obama on TFG's orders and the only reason we see them alive is because the "deep state" replaced therm with body doubles.
No, of course it doesn't make sense. But this is what happens when you tell people to "do their own research" when they're not educated enough to actually do so.
Vice Mocks GIFs as 'For Boomers Now, Sorry'. (And For Low-Effort Millennials)
You don't have to look far to find other tweets or TikToks mocking GIFs as the preserve of old people — which, yes, now means millennials. How exactly did GIFs become so embarrassing? Will they soon disappear forever, like Homer Simpson backing up into a hedge...?
Gen Z might think GIFs are beloved by millennials, but at the same time, many millennials are starting to see GIFs as a boomer plaything. And this is the first and easiest explanation as to why GIFs are losing their cultural cachet. Whitney Phillips, an assistant professor of communication at Syracuse University and author of multiple books on internet culture, says that early adopters have always grumbled when new (read: old) people start to encroach on their digital space. Memes, for example, were once subcultural and niche. When Facebook came along and made them more widespread, Redditors and 4Chan users were genuinely annoyed that people capitalised on the fruits of their posting without putting in the cultural work. "That democratisation creates a sense of disgust with people who consider themselves insiders," Phillips explains. "That's been central to the process of cultural production online for decades at this point...."
In 2016, Twitter launched its GIF search function, as did WhatsApp and iMessage. A year later, Facebook introduced its own GIF button in the comment section on the site. GIFs became not only centralised but highly commercialised, culminating in Facebook buying GIPHY for $400 million in 2020. "The more GIFs there are, maybe the less they're regarded as being special treasures or gifts that you're giving people," Phillips says. "Rather than looking far and wide to find a GIF to send you, it's clicking the search button and typing a word. The gift economy around GIFs has shifted...."
Linda Kaye, a cyberpsychology professor at Edge Hill University, hasn't done direct research in this area but theorises that the ever-growing popularity of video-sharing on TikTok means younger generations are more used to "personalised content creation", and GIFs can seem comparatively lazy.
The GIF was invented in 1987 "and it's important to note the format has already fallen out of favour and had a comeback multiple times before," the article points out. It cites Jason Eppink, an independent artist and curator who curated an exhibition on GIFs for the Museum of the Moving Image in New York in 2014, who highlighted how GIFs were popular with GeoCities users in the 90s, "so when Facebook launched, they didn't support GIFs.... They were like, 'We don't want this ugly symbol of amateur web to clutter our neat and uniform cool new website." But then GIFs had a resurgence on Tumblr.
Vice concludes that while even Eppink no longer uses GIFs any more, "Perhaps the waxing and waning popularity of the GIF is an ironic mirror of the format itself — destined to repeat endlessly, looping over and over again."
Re:Increasingly Alien
>but people often want to look things up based on different attributes
I remember a file system designer suggesting the file system should support this natively.
Then he killed his wife.
Be careful - File system opinions have consequences.
Re:Increasingly Alien
Replace "files and directories" with "clutch and shifter", and that's exactly what people said about cars when automatic transmissions started to become dominant. It didn't stop people from getting people from A to B, Today, we're down to 32 models of car even available with a stick shift in the US*, it's effectively a non-issue. Except for very narrow cases, it will never matter, and their lives are not screwed up in the least by "never having to know anything".
II the person with the messy desk doesn't know the organization of the filing cabinet they never use gets the same work done as the clean desk person who does, then who cares? There are already tens of millions of people getting by just fine without knowing the inner workings of files and directories.
If they're not in IT, does it really matter? It obviously works well enough for them to function, and doesn't screw up anything, so who cares how those people choose to store and access their files?
*-https://www.caranddriver.com/features/g20734564/manual-transmission-cars/ (28 cars listed, SUV/crossovers are separate article at bottom)
"Low effort"
Re:Increasingly Alien
Replace "files and directories" with "clutch and shifter", and that's exactly what people said about cars when automatic transmissions started to become dominant. It didn't stop people from getting people from A to B, Today, we're down to 32 models of car even available with a stick shift in the US*, it's effectively a non-issue. Except for very narrow cases, it will never matter, and their lives are not screwed up in the least by "never having to know anything".
The appropriate car analogy might be having mapreading/wayfinding/local geography skills for when the GPS goes out. If your understanding of how to get from place to place is based entirely on being fed directions one by one from a device that knows where you are and which direction you're travelling in, you might be in trouble without it.
As far as the file and folder analogy in filesystems, the idea of hierarchical named containers seems to be pretty fundamental to organization and it's dead simple to understand. I'm not sure what to even think about people who are unclear on the concept.
Re:Increasingly Alien
"Organizing" via search is equivalent to assigning keywords to each photo, and dynamically re-organizing all your photos according to how you want to browse them at a particular moment. Google's implementation is a bit flawed (they don't make clear how searches work, have removed direct access to common logical operators, and even occasionally change how it works so a search which worked yesterday suddenly doesn't work today). But the basic premise behind it is much more useful than organizing into folders. The hard part is properly assigning keywords. Google thinks AI should do that for you (and Google should be in control of that AI). But I think a combination of AI-generated and manually assigned keywords is more useful.
This 22-Year-Old Builds Semiconductors in His Parents' Garage
Zeloof now hopes to match the scale of Intel's breakthrough 4004 chip from 1971, the first commercial microprocessor, which had 2,300 transistors and was used in calculators and other business machines. In December, he started work on an interim circuit design that can perform simple addition....
Garage-built chips aren't about to power your PlayStation, but Zeloof says his unusual hobby has convinced him that society would benefit from chipmaking being more accessible to inventors without multimillion-dollar budgets. "That really high barrier to entry will make you super risk-averse, and that's bad for innovation," Zeloof says.
Re:Comparison to FPGA
It's neat. Why isn't that a good enough for you?
I'm guessing jealousy.
Having worked in an 80s wafer fab
Nice. I like it. A lot.
Now that's an all-out classic Nerd hardware hobby if I ever saw one this millenia. Very nice. We need more of this. Imagine building your own Open-RISC Vs in some Microfab in the basement, in 20 years or so. I'd join a local crew doing that.
Re:This is news for nerds,
this article is a bit disingenuous in claiming this young man is doing anything to make building semiconductors more accessible to the "average garage tinkerer".
Bullshit it isn't.
It's a decent progression. Jeri Ellsworth managed some homebrew transistors, this guy took the knowledge and extended it further and can now make whole chips. Those are the first two steps along the way. At the moment he uses a mix of old and cobbled together kit. His photolithography machine is a microscope coupled to a projector. Sure he has a SEM, and curve tracers, but turns out you can build them too if you want. Every time a hobbyist makes an advancement and documents it for other hobbyists, the process becomes easier and simpler for other hobbyists.
It's not going to happen in one step nor overnight, but if I wanted to have a crack at this, it would be substantially easier now given his knowledge than it would be before he did this.
I swear some people won't be happy unless he's all like "build a 3nm, 69GHz core i11 in your basement with this one weird chip that semiconductor engineers don't want you to know".
kids these days
The shit they'll do for a graphics card.
Insulin