ButlerianJihad

I don't understand this article. In fact I even read the entire whitepaper and I don't understand it.

You didn't use "a MUD"; you used a very limited "MUD-style environment". This is not a MUD. Your headline, your article, your whitepaper is a lie. Your "MUD" didn't originate in the 1970s; you coulnd't even be arsed to include its source code!

I was at first mystified when you couldn't be clear about what genre or species of MUD software you're using. There are many types of MUDs out there, and you used exactly none of them. You used some sort of bespoke, vibe-coded, constrained environment that is not a MUD.

Shame on you and your research. Shame on you for falsely capitalizing on the "MUD" term. Flagging this post.

You're begging the question that secret messages necessarily require "targets" to work or to be passed along. That is not true.

If your pastime involved trading envelopes with other collectors of envelopes, and you started passing along a bunch of sealed envelopes with unknown contents, how would you feel? Or if you enjoyed well-constructed cartons, and you found yourself trafficking in sealed cartons with unknown contents? That would basically make you a shipping, receiving, and logistics provider. Anything at all could be in those parcels. Why do it? Why open up to risk?

The main point here is that there was no point to my trading in memes. It was recreation; it was optional; it was totally a lark with my boomer mom and her audience. I had no reason to look at these memes and I had no reason to forward them on. Sure, the risk was very, very low that anyone "evil" was encoding "secret messages" or "targeting" anyone I knew. But since I had no reason to engage in this activity in the first place, why not quit? Why not just distance myself? Thereby removing 100% of the risk.

And that's really bad!

No, it’s fair, and probably federally regulated.

You wanna run a business? Then get a business license, pay your business taxes, and sign up for a business Internet connection. That’s what they’re made for. Then run your servers to your heart’s content.

https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/sysadmin/YubikeyMos...

You know, I owned several revisions of Yubikeys, and I eagerly set them up on every site that would support them. Sadly, unfortunately, they were "not compatible enough" and in fact, it seemed that sites weren't interested in adding or even maintaining existing support, and they fell out of favor with many of us.

I really tried! I even went through extraordinary measures to set them up nicely on Ubuntu and Fedora Linux systems! I had ssh keys with mandatory Yubikey auth! It was nearly cybersecurity heaven!

I eventually de-registered them everywhere possible, and I got rid of them entirely. In fact I purchased a couple Google Titan keys, and even before registering them, I simply returned them unused.

The most secure auth I use now is Microsoft Authenticator, and Google Authenticator for the TOTP stuff. I really don't mind.

My general impression is that Yubikeys are "too secure" for consumers to be using. TPTB do not like Yubikeys because of their intrinsically hardened security. TPTB would rather that consumers use security that has some NOBUS breakability in it. I really don't mind, okay?

Oh yes they can. If I'm a consumer, I pay for my connection that is sold to me and held in my name. I have no right to "resell" or "sublet" part of that. It is usually spelled out in the Terms of Service or Acceptable Use Policy.

At the very least, consumer connections explicitly disallow "Commercial Use". That means that you can't use them to run a business. You can't use them to turn a profit. You can't use them to generate revenue. That means no running servers, and that means no "reselling 2% of your bandwidth" for a few pennies because some Euro-Trash-Stranger wants to borrow it!

It didn't matter; once I found out even the possibilities for steganography across a large catalog of JPEG images, it was game over for me. It doesn't matter if there were zero or five dozen secret messages in the files I forwarded. I didn't want to be a conduit for that possibility.

The risk, of becoming a mule, an unwitting accessory to some evil cause, was just far outweighing the rewards of sharing dumb crap with my mother, you know?

“Don’t Touch That Dial! It Has KOME On It!!”

In certain ways, A.I. has been welcomed because cost of content had become a true obstacle.

Ask any teacher who’s designed a PowerPoint lecture, or any marketer who just needed some anodyne ad copy and stock photography. They were procuring licenses at $$$ cost, and this licensing takes a lot of effort and a lot of legal counsel to get it right.

It is far more expedient to simple AI-generate the stuff you need, guaranteed royalty-free, unencumbered.

Ordinary computer users can just get a nice wallpaper, or icons we like, without signing up to a sleazy “Free Clipart” site.

This new normal is not born from a hatred of the human element, but I would say it’s because of the naked greed and unforgiving legal pitfalls of intellectual property today.

There once was a time when I'd be on Facebook all day, subscribed to many groups and pages that published really dank memes. And I would enjoy laughing at these memes, and the dankest memes I would duly collect and forward to my mother who is a boomer.

And my mother would duly sift through these forwarded meme images for the dankest of the dank, and then she would eagerly forward them to her friend from church, who also had a large distribution list, and so that is how I became a conduit for the dankest GenZ Facebook memes to the boomer generations in another state.

And then I became a Cybersecurity educator, and our curriculum contained a module on steganography, and we all had the students do a proof-of-concept where they cryptographically embedded secret messages in innocent-looking photograph files.

And that is where my meme-sharing came to a screeching halt, and I deleted every meme I ever collected, and I unsubbed from every possible source, and I began completely ignoring memes, and my mother's distribution dried up. Good god that was absolutely shocking. I have no idea what sort, if any, secret messages I was responsible for, and I hope that we never ever find out!

Are you saying that your drug has an adverse side effect that has troubled you for a long time? I know!

For what it's worth, it's the pharmacists who have deep knowledge about drug side effects, interactions, and the rest. When your pharmacy offers you a "new drug consult", seize the opportunity. Grill your pharmacist. You can keep coming back. Pharmacists, believe it or not, do not even bill for their consults with customers! You can ask them about drugs literally any time! A very experienced and seasoned pharmacist is your ace in the hole: a valuable asset in the spectrum of health care. This seems like an open secret.

And yes, I can relate: once I filled in a spreadsheet of all the most common drugs I had been prescribed in the past 12 years, along with their most notable adverse effects. And it turned out that many were magnifying, or synergistically enhancing, those adverse effects together. And many effects I did not even want, for starters, and some symptoms that were already present from actual underlying conditions that had gone undiagnosed because the drugs were masking them.

Physicians and prescribers do not care about your side effects. If you complain to your PCP or prescriber about side effects, all they can do is switch you to a different type of drug! That is not productive! The idea is to get educated and to stay informed, and the best route to that is open communication with your pharmacist.

Wow you just came in here eager to expose all the wrongthink in my comment, and in the process, to comprehensively quote nearly everything that I wrote. I am sorry if a singular comment does not do justice to the nuances of the issues of the American Civil War and the Civil Rights movement after it. I am sorry that it made you think that I am an ignorant bigot.

But no, you have come to some very hasty and incorrect conclusions about my beliefs. I do not believe that "people cannot be trusted to make their own decisions". In the hierarchy of needs, when a person's food, clothing, and shelter are already provided and they do not need to worry about these utterly basic needs, then they are going to function better. A freed worker must not only pay for all of these basic needs out of their own wages, but must also make all the relevant household decisions, trips to the store, and maintenance, that is a crazy mental and physical load, just to provide for their basic needs. Yes, that is the cost of freedom. I am just saying, that freedom's costs should be acknowledged, along with its responsibilities.

And you say that I'm naïvely ignorant for reaching "conclusions". I don't think I've reached any conclusions. I've simply contemplated the situation more deeply than I previously did. Is that wrongthink? I should not need to apologize for discerning and discussing more nuance than most people are willing to do.

Not merely DNS names, but in IP routing, announcing a route is known as "advertising" it. You and your ISP are literally advertising a path for others to find your site via TCP/IP.

https://youtu.be/g7tII_3WXqo?is=MagnO5GswnVJJltM

Mother Shares How Video Games Radicalized Her Son to Run Around and Pick up Coins

So, I had a chat with my landlady about this. I rent an apartment that can't be substantially modified, and we really can't put anything outside that is noticeable.

Something that has driven me rather crazy is that I cannot see my doorstep. I cannot really see it from the front window; I definitely can't see it from the peephole in the front door; I definitely can't see it if I'm not home. The only way to see if an object is sitting at my door, is if I go and open the door.

So that set up a quandary for me, as receiving package deliveries, or groceries or whatever, can be troublesome, because those delivery services just aren't into notifying someone that delivery is complete (the further away they are, the noisier the notifications!)

It would've been great to monitor my doorstep remotely, and know if someone put something there. So I looked into Ring and into Nest/Google Home. They literally have nothing except the cameras. A compatible, under-mat sensor is simply not a thing for consumers (was discontinued at best.) For some reason, we consumers are not allowed to have a weight-sensing mat for outdoor use.

Since I live in high-density housing, a motion-sensing camera would be stupid. It'd be triggering dozens of time every day. Also looking directly into the pool area, and I'm not excited to "surveil" my neighbors: I just wanna know about deliveries!

I think the best I can do is some sort of "corner mirror" mounted near my front window. That won't permit remote monitoring, though.

What a coincidence! In France, all hats are called chapeaux!

Yeah, that old canard is ridiculous!

I mean, if there were any truth to it, surely our nation would have seen an uptick, in the past 30–40 years, of new generations picking up guns and just mercilessly mowing down soft targets as if playing GTA.

Thankfully, that is all confined to fantasy in cyberspace!

If I save 15 minutes of household chores, then that is 15 minutes worth of reclaimed labor to rearrange my Windows desktop, review all security settings, tweak my router and switch's network settings and configuration, clean up & organize my cloud storage, organize several hundred credential records in my password managers, read some changelogs: you know, the usual kind of DevOps shit I shouldn't need to care about, as an end-user.

In the age of LLMs and A.I., the real travesty is that computers must be manually controlled at all times, and we must invest manual labor into configuring them, as monkeys at the keyboard, and we must be denied any sort of orchestration or automation that would be available at the enterprise level.

I grew up understanding that the institution of chattel slavery was fundamentally unjust and cruel in denying human dignity and equality of people.

A few years ago, I began to see the "labor supply" issues of slavery, and how the South was basically an economic powerhouse fueled chiefly by the labor of its enslaved people--so how do you reconcile that after the fact? How does a Union of freemen compete with that?

And this year, around Juneteenth, contemplating it even more deeply, I began to consider slavery as an institution that compels "employers" to provide all practical necessities for "employees". That is, room and board and clothing are all provided to the workers, in perpetuity, and this in fact granted a lot of stability and assurance.

Now free the slaves. Wonderful! Hurrah for equality and justice! Now, however, every employee, every worker, is totally on their own for those basic necessities of life. They buy their own clothing, they find their own housing, they're paying for all their own food, and that of their families, especially their dependents. I mean, that's a huge, huge difference. How is that even possible? Sometimes it's not. Is it any wonder we've had homelessness, and the rise of the welfare state, and slavery by imprisonment? It's no surprise.

So yes, freeing the slaves was the right thing to do. Let's never forget that! But we should also consider the economic "downsides" and the other side of the coin, so to speak, when it comes to the labor of free citizens, and what the average worker needs to do, just to survive, outside the confines of those vanished institutions.

I don't know what the policies are around faking/'shopping/enhancing photos for US Passport use, but I do know that there is no "official Passport Photo" service. Generally they will expect you to take and print your own snaps, and attach them on your application. There are a lot of rules around the type and format of photographs that are accepted for this purpose. However, the US Postal Service will take photographs, as an additional service for in-store passport applicants.

I had a strange case for my passport renewal, where they were asking for an updated photo, and I got nicely dressed for my photo and the USPS clerk took it for me, but for some reason the Passport Office rejected it, on quite vague criteria. Then I resubmitted the whole thing verbatim, and it was accepted on the second go. I feel like they just wanted to add some friction to the process.

We only need to look at the Oracle of Delphi to see that people have been seeking personal spiritual advice for millennia. And how has that been working out for us?

Even today, going to a therapist and having 1:1 sessions is a rational activity, and even covered by insurance. What do we hope to derive from therapy sessions but some personal insight and improvement?

You know, I go to church, and from my perspective, sometimes the most difficult discernment for an individual is between "The Holy Spirit's message to us in general" or "the general messaging to everyone around us" vs. "what I receive and my personal interpretation of things".

When preachers and oracles and leaders are speaking in generalities and trying to get big followings and trying to appeal to the widest audiences, that's when it's most difficult for us to determine what God is really saying to us, in our own hearts; that special instruction for our own lives. We can't actually get that from an oracle, psychic, or any 3rd party. It really needs to come from our own well-formed conscience.

And it's the same with a chatbot or LLM conversation. We can pose questions, make prompts, and get spammed with tokens and walls of text. No matter how personalized, it's still up to us to interpret that, and extract nuggets of news that we can use. It always has been.

There is lately a lot of buzz about hiring "TENEX Engineers" so if you've got some old-school experience in TENEX, probably time to add it back in your CV!

https://youtu.be/6h6dhevlb0w?si=Z9RE-HHl3ovrPy8n

The joke is on you! I’m not wearing any attire! Hahaha!

I'm sorry but what in bloody hell is a "physical eSIM"?

Since I picked up a Pixel phone, I've been doing some amateur astrophotgraphy, and mostly from the balcony at my apartment.

However, I live in a built-up urban area, and my home is absurdly light-polluted. Like, you wouldn't believe it! The parking lot here is ringed with flood lamps that are aimed into our windows. So every hundred feet or so, there is a bright-as-the-Sun lamp in my face, and with a clear view, I can spot about five of them.

So from my balcony, my only hope to get some darkness for the camera is to get into shadows. The railings provide a band of shadows that I can use to block the floods from getting on my lens. So if I position the camera juuust right, it kinda feels darker than it is, and I've got to say I've captured some impressive starfields, down to magnitude 9 or dimmer, including bodies such as Uranus and 4 Vesta.

I also found that the ballcourts in the rear of my property provide this unique "cave" situation with lots of shadows where I can capture the sky directly overhead, and to the west. This is how I photographed the last lunar eclipse.

Now that's my view to the west and 225° (due southwest). If I go on the other side of the property to look east, I've got the same crazy situation with flood lamps, but there's basically no way to hide in shadows. I literally cannot photograph anything rising in the east if it is dimmer than the Moon.

So really, my astronomy hobby mostly consists of doing some great editing, curation, identification, and mostly simulation from the comfort of the air-conditioned indoors. I enjoy what sightings I can while outdoors, and that's included some meteors, the ISS, Tiangong, and a few Vandenberg launches. We're still hanging in there!

Road closures and accidents are crowdsourced things, so ordinary users can contribute intel live from the scene.

Google is able to estimate crowd sizes in a business or on a public transit vehicle. This seems to be based on the number of Android devices reporting their location in a cluster. Maps could obviously make inferences if there were large crowds of people, not moving in vehicles.

The circumstances in which you actually need to physically present your Social Security card are quite rare indeed. In fact, that is the first thing I was told by the ssa dot gov site, when I applied to receive a new card.

It is very unlikely that you will be asked, even by a prospective employer, for your actual card, because let's face it: it doesn't even have a photo, or anything but that unique number on it. Anyone trying to authenticate your number should be satisfied if you can give them the correct number.

And just for review: SSNs are not a "national ID" and you're typically not required to divulge it to private parties, and they can make up some other unique ID for you in their database. It's usually just a shortcut for them to do a background or credit check on you. And that's not something for which they would need your physical card.

That being said, I've replaced my card about 3 times now, and it was comparatively difficult this time around. The first time, I did it all through the mail (the process of building up from no ID to get birth certificate from out-of-state, to the SSA card, to the in-state driver license.) and the second time it arrived by mail, no hassle.

But this time around, even though I applied online, I was directed to make an appointment at the field office and physically walk in there, to prove my humanity. I had never been to an SSA Field Office in my life! The experience was very chill, and there were a dozen windows serving people, while about 4 of us waited in the lobby, and I was in-and-out half an hour early. The civil servant was a lady in good spirits who was a military veteran. Big props to them!

I am an emergency physician living in the U.S., and we had one of the top commercial health insurance plans.

You see, dear, your critical error was in believing that psychiatry is “medicine”, and that mental health treatment is “health care”.

Oh for sure, they present you “doctors” and “nurses” with the same credentials, wearing white lab coats, ties, scrubs, and even stethoscopes. They can prescribe “drugs” and run “hospitals”.

From the outside, they are indistinguishable from physicians who treat the physical body, but it is all a satiric cosplay. It is done this way for reasons, chiefly not to scare people too much.

Mental health should be considered more of the “Pre-Crime Division” or Department of Corrections For Stuff That’s Not Your Fault.

Don’t ever believe they’re in “Health Care”. This is a fatal category error.

Well, you can try for sure to default on medical debts without suffering a hit to your credit, but goood luck obtaining future care from any provider that you’ve stiffed.

How many big medical systems/districts in your region can you run up a balance until none will serve you, except through the E.D.?

single troop dies

Really, now? What national news do you watch? I have literally never seen current/breaking news stories about the death of American troops in action. It seems literally the most silent thing going on. I really don't know--are casualty numbers reported on a regular basis, from the "front"?

I would sometimes, after the fact, learn of repatriation flights or interment ceremonies for fallen soldiers. But only on a sporadic basis. Literally, I think I would be familiar with them by now, since Operation Desert Storm or so. This is not something they put on the news. I think that a comparison of casualties from allied and belligerent troops would be something to report, but if they do, it's just sort of being slotted into some Wikipedia article somewhere, I guess.

Yeah, and "Filled"... with paintings and inscriptions: isn't exactly full of anything, then, is it.