rook @ rook @awful.systems

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Not sure where there’s a good summary of the drama, but it started (I think) back in February with some serious concerns about transphobic moderation on tumblr. Openly trans user predstrogen posted

I hope photomatt dies forever a painful death involving a car covered in hammers that explodes more than a few times and hammers go flying everywhere

and he took it a bit too seriously, including banning them for dubious reasons then looking them up on twitter and listing all their old alt account names to their followers, because he’s totally not a transphobic stalker y’all and this is a reasonable thing to do when you’re worth half a billion.

The trackpad and trackpoint of my aging linux laptop stop working if the thing gets its lid shut. The touchscreen continues to work just fine, however. It turns out that while two stupid things can’t make a good thing, they can sometimes cancel each other out.

Guess he’s still pretty shaken by the car-covered-in-hammers incident.

To the surprise of no-one: the robots were just mechanical turks.

https://jalopnik.com/teslas-beer-serving-optimus-robot-was-controlled-by-a-h-1851670923

Ahh, looks like the important stuff was already there. I could have sworn I checked, but apparently not!

Today's entry in the wordpress saga: seizing plugins from devs. The author of this one appears to be affiliated with wpengine, which possibly signals more events like this in the future.

We have been made aware that the Advanced Custom Fields plugin on the WordPress directory has been taken over by WordPress dot org.

A plugin under active development has never been unilaterally and forcibly taken away from its creator without consent in the 21 year history of WordPress.

More details here: https://furry.engineer/@cendyne/113296240801713427

And speaking of electronic ass-monitoring, I’m reminded of this gem from 10 years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DJklHwoYgBQ

So little has changed since then!

she’s calling a“baby handler”—picture an exoskeleton crossed with a car seat. It’s a late-night soothing machine that rocks, supplies pre-pumped breast milk, and maybe offers a bidet-like “cleaning and drying situation.”For your children, perhaps, this is their first experience of being close to a machine.

Ah yes, famously the worst part of having children: touching them. Urgh. At least we can be pretty certain that this sort of thing will have no negative psychological impacts on babies and young children, who are famously disinterested in their parents, and neglect isn’t a thing!

Or, once the baby arrives, in nipple stickers that nursing parents could apply to track biofluid exchange. If the baby has trouble latching, maybe the sticker’s capacitive touch sensors could help the parent find a better position.

Do you know what the worst thing about breast feeding is? It is hard to monetise! Women just excrete milk! For free! Anyway, what if we could interpose a disposable data-harvesting device into the process, maybe on a subscription basis?

Reduce your time-to-insight

I do not think that word means what they think it means.

And on the subject of AI: strava is adding ai analytics. The press release is pretty waffly, as it would appear that they’d decided to add ai before actually working out what they’d do with it so, uh, it’ll help analyse the reams of fairly useless statistics that strava computes about you and, um, help celebrate your milestones?

https://press.strava.com/articles/stravas-athlete-intelligence-translates-workout-data-into-simple-and

Another upcoming train wreck to add to your busy schedule: O’Reilly (the tech book publisher) is apparently going to be doing ai-translated versions of past works. Not everyone is entirely happy about this. I wonder how much human oversight will be involved in the process.

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/parisba_publications-activity-7249244992496361472-4pLj

https://mastodon.social/@Meyerweb/113267932851356871

It’s shit like this that discourages from ever running any sort of service that interacts with the general public. I’m already exhausted by the sheer grinding tedium of the amount of visible tone policing on the internet, and it somehow never occurred to me that it was just the tip of some vast beige fatberg clogging up all the pipes.

Anyway, thank you for hiding the awful realities from the rest of us o7

They’re rebranding American Christian milenaranism. Much like the second coming and/or the rapture, the AGI god will be here Real Soon Now, so please pay your tithes and trust that the church fathers are doing the right thing.

Much like the older cults it mirrors, it isn’t capable of delivering on its promises, but it is capable of doing substantial amounts of regular damage in the meantime, and that’s the only thing worth freaking out about.

Proton continuing to do pointlessly stupid and self-destructive things:

https://infosec.exchange/@malwaretech/113257047424000919

They're basically admitting they didn't pay an influencer to spread misinformation about public wifi in order to sell VPN products, they just stole her likeness, used her photo, and attributed completely made up quote to her.

But it was a joke guys! We did a satire! I’m totally certain I know what satire is!

Um, actually it’s called a typestate.

There’s nothing confused about his ideology. Anything to do with porn or sex work will get kicked to the curb without a second thought, but fascists and bigots will be defended up to the point where they try to restart sectarian violence in Ireland (which was the final act of kiwi farms, from recollection. Presumably even the ceo couldn’t defend them at that point, though I bet he tried).

Dude doesn’t give a shit about free speech, or lament the power he’s ended up with. He just really loves fascism.

Turns out trump really does understand cryptocurrency perfectly. Who’d have thought? Some folk seems surprisingly unhappy about this, though.

Maybe we’ll pay off the $35 trillion US debt in Crypto. I’ll write on a little piece of paper ‘$35T crypto we have no debt.’ That’s what I like.

https://xcancel.com/mattyglesias/status/1838331688931266694

Somehow I managed to mention the wordpress lawsuit on last week’s thread instead of this one, so let’s try again.

Matt Mullenweg, the wordpress(.)com guy and current owner of tumblr, tried to shakedown competing blog product WP engine (which builds on the same open source software that his company does) for 8% of their revenue (https://goblin.band/notes/9yjrc2logimd1tr3 h/t to froztbyte who was also on the old thread for some mysterious reason) or he’d say mean things about them at a conference where they were one of the sponsors. And they didn’t pay up, so he compared them to cancer.

And now they’re suing him.

https://notes.ghed.in/posts/2024/matt-mullenweg-wp-engine-debacle/

Exciting times in wordpress/automattic land. Mullenweg and co are being sued by WP Engine, who apparently have a wordpress commercial offering which is awful and evil, unlike his own commercial wordpress offering which is just fine, and you can tell because he can use the wordpress(.)org blog which is the mouthpiece of the FOSS project he builds upon to tell you that people who don’t pay him lots of money are cancer.

https://notes.ghed.in/posts/2024/matt-mullenweg-wp-engine-debacle/

We already have ghostwriters. Should be straightforward to conjure up an AI generated face who will look nicer than regular human authors and never say anything awkward, then have a textual genai system where you feed a few cheap ghostwritten works into one end and it regurgitates a franchise of arbitrary length, mimicking the style of someone who will have difficulty challenging the publisher in court. Bring in a new human ghostwriter every now and then to freshen up the training data if needs be. You might need to still employ some editors, but rebrand them as “prompt refiners” and give them shittier contracts.

Honestly, stuff like the MCU could be run like this already for all I know, and if it isn’t, I wonder how long it would take for someone to notice if they switched to this model?