smurda

I only received this same email a few hours ago, Oct 30. Why not tell all customers at once, especially if payment information was involved?

And they posted about a security incident on their blog on Oct 1. https://support.scribd.com/hc/en-us/articles/53787421531284-...

I have very few holiday traditions, but one is I listen to his one man show reading of a Christmas Carol. It's a great 1 hr and 45 min spent during the holidays: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B000JCE3CU

"Until recently, oh, maybe still now… libraries have been boring and uncool place for most Japanese people."

This is the perception of libraries in many places. Libraries are a tremendous public good that is underutilized. If we can make them "cool" people would take advantage of this resource.

This is even a challenge for bookstores. In the UK, James Daunt successfully built Daunt Books, an independent bookshop in the age of Amazon by making it "cool" and personalized. Most recently, he became the CEO of Barnes and Noble to make that large chain bookstore a place people want to be. https://www.modernretail.co/operations/barnes-noble-ceo-jame...

I very much want libraries and bookstores to be a part of our society, so I'm a huge fan of "making them cool" so that more people will use them and they will continue to exist, and thrive, in our society.

" The text is AI-generated. Here's how we know: Contains em-dash. Since the dawn of written language, no genuine human text has ever contained an em-dash. The evaluated text contains at least one, so you can be 100% sure that it was generated by AI."

I used to love an em-dash. Now it gets categorized as AI slop, sadly.

“Exploitation started three days before the public advisory”

I think bug bounty programs are completely overwhelmed right now. Idk how people keep up with them.

Crows can remember a dangerous person and tell their friends about it. From "Social learning spreads knowledge about dangerous humans among American crows" (https://faculty.washington.edu/wirsinga/Cornell2011.pdf)

We exposed wild crows to a novel ‘dangerous face’ by wearing a unique mask as we trapped, banded and released 7 –15 birds at five study sites near Seattle, WA, USA. An immediate scolding response to the dangerous mask after trapping by previously captured crows demonstrates individual learning, while an immediate response by crows that were not captured probably represents conditioning to the trapping scene by the mob of birds that assembled during the capture. Later recognition of dangerous masks by lone crows that were never captured is consistent with horizontal social learning. Independent scolding by young crows, whose parents had conditioned them to scold the dangerous mask, demonstrates vertical social learning.

The UK already has so much CCTV. Some believe it reduces drug-related, vehicle, and property crime, but most agree is has virtually no effect on violent crime (https://www.college.police.uk/research/crime-reduction-toolk...).

Even if this initiative is effective at reducing crime, I don't want to lose privacy or see a chilling effect in society where people are afraid because they know they're being watched.

It was a high-quality bootleg video shot within a cinema

good feedback. updated.

Or the early days of video uploads, YouTube's most watched videos were "pirated" clips from popular shows (e.g. SpongeBob, The Daily Show) and part of the reason I went to YouTube instead of other video hosting sites (e.g. DailyMotion).

Viacom sued YouTube, while CBS and Universal ended up licensing their content.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2007/03/viacom-v-google-invest...

I love last.fm but never understood the URL structure naming convention. Why use a "+" instead of a "-" for every band page (e.g. https://www.last.fm/music/The+Beatles).

I thought Kebab-case is usually the norm, and I don't think I've seen the "+" in any other URL paths that aren't query strings. Any ideas why they formatted it like this?

The "Don't be evil" Google feels long gone

How much time is required to spend with someone to become friends with them?

If you assume 20 hours, that's 5-10 hangout sessions with someone. During a working life, that might take over a year. University life offers large windows of disposable time to forge those friendships. In work life, we don't have as much disposable time to spend building friendships.

Blackboard, the Canvas predecessor, was so unstable that we called it BlackOutBoard

This is actually super useful! I find much more useful current and tactical information at BSides than I do at RSA/BlackHat.

In “Why We Sleep” by Harvard sleep researcher Matthew Walker, he says that during REM sleep your brain revisits emotional experiences but in a chemically safe environment. Stress-related chemicals like noradrenaline are greatly reduced so you can replay difficult or painful memories but without the full emotional intensity you felt at the time. The brain can process and “defuse” those emotions.

TLDR, sleeping on it works.

"SpaceX, ChatGPT-maker OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, Nvidia, Amazon Web Services and Reflection". I've never heard of one of these. Looks like Reflection started in 2024.

Things really are moving fast. To win a government contract within two years of founding wouldn't have happened 10 years ago. In the previous generation of startups just getting FedRAMP didn't happen until a few years after founding.

I'm not sure I believe these results. As the study notes: "We need a reliable way to tell AI-generated and AI-assisted text apart from human-written text. AI-generated text detection is itself an open problem..."

There is definitely AI-generated text that's easy to sniff out. Then there's a huge grey area that is misleading - like if you use an em dash. Or write concisely.

What specifically is cumbersome and annoying? It's not the ideal query language for every frontend app, but it's useful for solving a couple of problems that large organizations at scale have like over-fetching and a single network call rather than multiple REST calls.

Bots have always been a problem on these platforms, but it has taken the deluge of AI generated accounts to force platforms to truly wrestle with the problem.

The upside is hopefully there are fewer bots on these platforms, which has many positive second-order effects. The downside is the method of human verification as ID cards will lead to more identity theft, fake IDs, and a new set of problems.

This is one of my favorite movies, yet it won 0 Oscars (nominated for 7) and was a box office flop (cost $25M to make and box office proceeds were $28M). It only gained popularity after the theatres from the VHS rental market.

I firmly believe part of the initial commercial failure was because of the title. With something more descriptive like, "Escape from Shawshank" or just "Prison Break" people would have been more interested to see it.

Tom Kelley and David Kelley, founders of Stanford's Design School and IDEO (the industrial design firm that made things like Apple's first mouse and the standup toothpaste tube) have a great book, Creative Confidence.

Here's their website for the book, along with some tools and useful instructional videos https://www.creativeconfidence.com/tools/

$100 on sushi and I’m still hungry. $10 on a burrito and I’m full for 24 hours

Start selling in the US early. To be the global leader, and not just the regional leader, sell across global markets early to establish the position of best product globally.

“They do not reliably capture what a user was shown or told.”

This adds to the case for middleware providers like Vapi, LiveKit, and Layercode. If you’re building a voice AI application using one of these SST -> LLM -> TTS providers there will be definitive logs to capture what a user was told.

Would you say MCP is a protocol (or standard) similar to how REST is a protocol in that they both define how two parties communicate with each other? Or, in other words, REST is a protocol for web APIs and MCP is a protocol for AI capabilities?

The potential benefits of alcohol are hard to decipher because of the population data:

“A lot of people who don’t currently drink are people who used to drink heavily, or who have health problems that led them to quit...” said Keith Humphreys, PhD, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences and the Esther Ting Memorial Professor. “That skews the data, making moderate drinkers look healthier by comparison.”

https://news.stanford.edu/stories/2025/08/moderate-alcohol-c...

Interesting paper. You might get more adoption if you remove the religious premise as the concepts can stand alone without theological underpinnings.

I'm not sure I agree with the transition to full automation, but Piketty's premise that returns on assets will outperform returns on labor is still at the root of growing income inequality.

If you have a bankroll, investments will yield higher returns than returns on labor (just working your butt off). Without wealth shocks or redistribution the income inequality gap will continue to widen.

When the CCPA launched in 2018 companies had to comply when a consumer requested a Data Subject Access Request (DSAR). Because the consumer had to request a DSAR not all companies felt this compliance pain acutely (e.g. it was mostly big companies with A LOT of users that got more DSARs, so they adopted workflows and tools to alleviate the pain).

The Delete Act has more teeth. Independent compliance audits begin in 2028 with penalties of $200 per day for failing to register or for each consumer deletion request that is not honored. GDPR spurred organizations to compliance, partly because of the steep penalty (up to €20 million or 4% of revenue, whichever is higher), maybe The Delete Act (and its much smaller penalty) will also spark organizations to comply.