(my contribution to lemmy’s beans arc)

big oof.

We can conclude: that photo isn’t AI-generated. You can’t get an AI system to generate photos of an existing location; it’s just not possible given the current state of the art.

the author of this substack is woefully misinformed about the state of technology 🤦

it has, in fact, been possible for several years already for anyone to quickly generate convincing images (not to mention videos) of fictional scenes in real locations with very little effort.

The photograph—which appeared on the Associated Press feed, I think—was simply taken from a higher vantage point.

Wow, it keeps getting worse. They’re going full CSI on this photo, drawing a circle around a building on google street view where they think the photographer might have been, but they aren’t even going to bother to try to confirm their vague memory of having seen AP publishing it? wtf?

Fwiw, I also thought the image looked a little neural network-y (something about the slightly less-straight-than-they-used-to-be lines of some of the vehicles) so i spent a few seconds doing a reverse image search and found this snopes page from which i am convinced that that particular pileup of cars really did happen as it was also photographed by multiple other people.

RedHat was a major military contractor with job postings like this current one [archive] long before they were bought by another older and larger military contractor.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_World_War_II

https://web.archive.org/web/20240530005438/https://www.redhat.com/en/resources/israeli-defense-forces-case-study (original is 404 for some reason)

them: fedora is the lesser evil

me: but why do they have job listings like this [archive] with requirements like “This position requires daily on-site work at Fort Meade and an active Top Secret/SCI clearance with Polygraph” ? 🤔

Lets Enhance is a pretty great supercut, but nothing beats the original Blade Runner scene.

enhance 224 to 176

enhance, stop

move in, stop

pull out, track right, stop

center and pull back, stop

track 45 right, stop

center and stop

enhance 34 to 36

pan right and pull back, stop

enhance 34 to 46

pull back, wait a minute, go right, stop

enhance 57 to 19

track 45 left, stop

enhance 15 to 23

give me a hardcopy right there

The canonical documentation is https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/filesystems/proc.rst (ctrl-f oom) but if you search a bit you’ll find various guides that might be easier to digest.

https://www.baeldung.com/linux/memory-overcommitment-oom-killer looks like an informative recent article on the subject, and reminds me that my knowledge is a bit outdated. (TIL about the choom(1) command which was added to util-linux in 2018 as an alternative to manipulating things in /proc directly…)

https://dev.to/rrampage/surviving-the-linux-oom-killer-2ki9 from 2018 might also be worth reading.

How to make your adjustments persist for a given desktop application is left as an exercise to the reader :)

I’m not sure what this comic is trying to say but in my recent experience a single misbehaving website can still consume all available swap at which point Linux will sometimes completely lock up for many minutes before the out-of-memory killer decides what to kill - and then sometimes it still kills the desktop environment instead of the browser.

(I do know how to use oom_adj; I’m talking about the default configuration on popular desktop distros.)

404 Media neglected to link to her website, which is https://ada-ada-ada.art/

I think it depends which side of the debate one is on?

$ systemd-analyze calendar tomorrow
Failed to parse calendar specification 'tomorrow': Invalid argument
Hint: this expression is a valid timestamp. Use 'systemd-analyze timestamp "tomorrow"' instead?
$ systemd-analyze timestamp tuesday
Failed to parse "tuesday": Invalid argument
Hint: this expression is a valid calendar specification. Use 'systemd-analyze calendar "tuesday"' instead?

ಠ_ಠ

$ for day in Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat Sun; do TZ=UTC systemd-analyze calendar "$day 02-29"|tail -2; done
    Next elapse: Mon 2044-02-29 00:00:00 UTC
       From now: 19 years 4 months left
    Next elapse: Tue 2028-02-29 00:00:00 UTC
       From now: 3 years 4 months left
    Next elapse: Wed 2040-02-29 00:00:00 UTC
       From now: 15 years 4 months left
    Next elapse: Thu 2052-02-29 00:00:00 UTC
       From now: 27 years 4 months left
    Next elapse: Fri 2036-02-29 00:00:00 UTC
       From now: 11 years 4 months left
    Next elapse: Sat 2048-02-29 00:00:00 UTC
       From now: 23 years 4 months left
    Next elapse: Sun 2032-02-29 00:00:00 UTC
       From now: 7 years 4 months left

(It checks out.)

Surprisingly its calendar specification parser actually allows for 31 days in every month:

$ TZ=UTC systemd-analyze calendar '02-29' && echo OK || echo not OK
  Original form: 02-29
Normalized form: *-02-29 00:00:00
    Next elapse: Tue 2028-02-29 00:00:00 UTC
       From now: 3 years 4 months left
OK
$ TZ=UTC systemd-analyze calendar '02-30' && echo OK || echo not OK
  Original form: 02-30
Normalized form: *-02-30 00:00:00
    Next elapse: never           
OK
$ TZ=UTC systemd-analyze calendar '02-31' && echo OK || echo not OK
  Original form: 02-31
Normalized form: *-02-31 00:00:00
    Next elapse: never           
OK
$ TZ=UTC systemd-analyze calendar '02-32' && echo OK || echo not OK
Failed to parse calendar specification '02-32': Invalid argument
not OK

headline was more exciting before i read the last four words of it

Like… okay… I know this is me in the new brain, I’ll shut down the other one.

the other one: i’m pretty sure you’ve got it backwards, pal

I was referring to the “This is actually a good sign for self driving” part of their comment.

The captcha circumvention arms race has been going on for over two decades, and every new type of captcha has and will continue to be broken as soon as it’s widely deployed enough that someone is motivated to spend the time to.

So, the notion that an academic paper about breaking the current generation of traffic-related captchas (something which the captcha solving industry has been doing for years with a pretty high success rate already) is “good news” for the autonomous vehicle industry (who has also been able to identify such objects well enough to continue existing and getting more regulatory approval for years now) is…

i hope you’re joking. please, tell me you’re joking?

Copy left is very much not communist. Get out of here with that tankie rhetoric

i don’t actually think copyleft is communist per se, but i dig that you’re somehow mad about my joke - the intended butt of which was people who (typically disparagingly) insist that it is 😂

yep, since it’s under a “copyleft” (communist) software license that’s how it has to be.

I wish we’d stop calling them “exploding batteries”. The battery isn’t the explosive, it’s the explosives that were hidden in the device.

Do you want to stop calling them exploding pagers too? How about other exploding things? And what should https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_Lebanon_pager_explosions be renamed to? Maybe 2024 Lebanon explosions of explosives inside of pagers? 🙄

Right, so why are you editorializing the title to say something that the article in fact does not say?

The title is a copy+paste of the first sentence of the third paragraph, and it is not misleading unless you infer “exploding batteries” to mean “exploding unmodified batteries”. But, the way the English language works, when you put explosives inside an XYZ, or do something else which causes an XYZ to explode, it becomes an “exploding XYZ”. For example:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exploding_animal
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exploding_cigar
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exploding_pagers
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exploding_trousers
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exploding_watermelon
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exploding_whale

The fact that bombs are explosive is not revolutionary or all that interesting.

That fact also is not what the article is about.

sometimes a cigar is just a cigar

(@Ilovethebomb@lemm.ee:) Just to be clear, the pager thing wasn’t exploding batteries, they had apparently been modified at the production level to have explosives in them, which could be triggered by the pager system itself.

(me:) Did you read the article? It sounds like you didn’t.

(you:) The article literally talks about inserting an explosive layer inside the battery at production. Just like the comment said.

I am really curious: can you tell me, do you actually think the first commenter in fact read the article and was agreeing with its suggestion that the batteries could have been manufactured with explosives inside of them?

(you): It isn’t “any batteries can explode”.

Nobody claimed that, but in retrospect I guess I can see how, read alone, the pull quote I selected from the article to be the title of this post could be interpreted that way.