snailmailman

I’ve heard anecdotes of people using an entirely internal domain like “plex.example.com” even if it’s never exposed to the public internet, google might flag it as impersonating plex. Google will sometimes block it based only on name, if they think the name is impersonating another service.

Its unclear exactly what conditions cause a site to get blocked by safe browsing. My nextcloud.something.tld domain has never been flagged, but I’ve seen support threads of other people having issues and the domain name is the best guess.

these AI services also won't really distinguish between "user input" and "malicious input that the user is asking about".

Obviously the input here was only designed to be run in a terminal, but if it was some sort of prompt injection attack instead, the AI might not simply decode the base64, it might do something else.

While his durability test seemed quite extreme, including things like holding a lighter to the display, the test that made it explode was basically “bend it past 180 degrees like a 2-in-1 laptop”

I haven’t personally used a folding phone, but he was able to break it with his bare hands. I’d expect that from a laptop, but less so from a phone. I put my laptop in a padded laptop bag. I put my phone in my pocket, and sometimes sit on it without issues. JerryRigEverything mentioned the previous pixel folds all broke in the same test in the same spot, along the antenna.

It’s a crazy contrast to Apple, considering how much Apple advertised “titanium” in their phones.

I’ve had multiple friends who are not tech savvy ask me about steam os. Because they basically only use their gaming PC for gaming, and they are frustrated with windows.

None have actually switched yet, but also 10 is still supported, and steam os isnt quite ready from what i understand; (nvidia driver issues?) although I assume that’s changing quite quickly. I haven’t looked super recently.

Personally I run bazzite on a machine I’ve got hooked to a tv. It’s basically steamOS and works great for gaming. I can’t speak to the desktop mode, but as long as it’s passable, windows sets the bar pretty low. Main issue is that some multiplayer games intentionally don’t support Linux for anti-cheat reasons. :(

She uses a super cheap Chromebook. Unfortunately I don’t think Firefox can be easily installed on it? I don’t think it’s even x86. It’s a very limited device, but all it needs to be capable of is loading Facebook and a few other specific sites- so it “works”

When google switched off uBlock origin, it took less than a week for my grandmother to call me in a panic because she clicked on a malicious Facebook ad.

Google disabled the Adblock, Facebook let the ad run on their site, and Microsoft hosted the malicious site on their cloud provider. Shoutout to Microsoft for taking the site down within the hour after I reported it- more than I can say for any of the blatantly illegal or scam ads I’ve seen on YouTube. but still, 3 big tech companies that could have definitely stopped this is they really wanted to.

As much as i like the idea of these split keyboards that are more ergonomic, I can’t get over the idea of missing keys and having to use chords or new combinations of hotkeys. I use nearly every key of my 104 key keyboard. Literally pause/break and scroll lock are the only ones I don’t use; and I’ve remapped those to be volume controls. If anything, i’d like even more keys for macros and dedicated shortcuts.

But so many keyboards cut that number down so drastically. I use home, end, delete, page up/down, all the time not to mention the number pad as a whole, and all the Fkeys.

I don’t have prime, but will occasionally make a purchase on Amazon. Any time I do, I have to both click past a “no, I don’t want to start a prime trial, I just want to purchase something” and down in shipping options, mixed in with the shipping options is a “tomorrow+start a prime trial” option that will sign you up for a subscription. There’s also sometimes a “sign up for an Amazon credit card” promo mixed in, so you have to click past several unwanted things to get to the cart.

Although the default shipping is so bad sometimes I’m tempted to start the trial. I have something in my cart right now that has a shipping window a full month out. But if I start my prime trial they claim it gets here tomorrow? That has to just straight up be a lie right? With shipping that late I assume they don’t have the product locally- Or do non-prime members actually get that screwed on shipping?

The book has a non-binary character. The course also acknowledges the existence of transgender people.

This is part of a much broader crackdown in Texas on the LGBT community. The only “threat” here is that students might learn about the existence of trans and non-binary people. If they do that, they might have issues with how the current government of Texas is trying very hard to take away the rights of those people.

The video going viral brought the matter to the attention of texas government officials. The government officials strongly disagree with the content of the course.

It is a publicly funded school, and the government has some power to influence it, mainly control of funding. They likely could put up a fight, but government officials were threatening to fire various school administrators. They likely can’t actually do that directly, it would require a few steps, but the school doesn’t want to put up the fight I guess.

It’s the government censoring what gets taught at universities. Texas has been doing similar things at public schools too, but this is a university, which usually has more freedom in what gets taught.

A student filmed the class, and asked the professor if it was legal to teach the class content. Class content that mentions the existence of gender.

The video went viral, and the professor and multiple school administrators have been fired as a result.

As far as I can tell, it is probably legal, and also aligns with school policy. The current government of Texas is trying very hard to change that.

I have ad targeting turned off on my google account. As a result, probably >90% of the ads I see on YouTube are scams, almost-nsfw content, deepfakes, more scams, illegal products, and more scams. I’ve been tempted to take notes and keep track of how many are scams. It’s awful. I cannot remember the last legitimate product I saw an ad for on YouTube.

Yesterday I saw an ad on YouTube that was literally just porn. Very NSFW, not “almost” NSFW like a lot of the ads are. After reporting it, I tried to pull up the ad transparency page for the company running the ad. I was hoping I could somehow report the company itself, in addition to the ad. I had to be logged in to do this. Because when logged out, you can’t see “age restricted” ad campaigns. This completely blew my mind. I didn’t think they allowed nsfw ads, but if they knew enough to age-restrict the ad campaign, maybe they do?

From what I understand, if I turn on targeted ads, I can opt out of ad categories, and maybe google will stop showing me the scams. Instead, I simply use Adblock, and avoid YouTube on iOS as much as possible. The experience is completely unusable with the advertising.

I’m not going to pay for premium to avoid ads that are blatantly violating YouTube’s TOS anyway. At least, I hope they are violating it. “Report” never does anything so they might just allow anything in ads.

I have used various AI models. They often aren't good at fact checking. They hallucinate mistakes all the time and often even insist that they are correct when they are not. Some models are better at this, but the ones used in "ai summaries" on various search engines aren't in my experience.

I want the answer that is actually correct. I dont want the ai generated "answer" that has the most SEO, or has appeared often in results, but was entirely made up. When i say "the most common answer" can be incorrect - there are often recent topics where reliable sources don't exist yet. As an example, I've been playing through silksong recently, and had some questions about some late-game content. The official wiki is extremely incomplete, as the game is brand new. I had several questions, and asked a few AI's and search engines. I got completely wrong information a few days ago, but trying the the questions again today, some AI's are only now giving me the right answer. But the correct information simply doesn't appear online enough or in the right places.

(To avoid game spoilers - I wanted to know the quantity of an item, because i wanted to know if i found them all. the answer is "at least 4" because i found 4 of this item while playing. Nearly every AI said "3" a few days ago, and many still do.)

is this specific page supposed to show as revoked? its not showing as revoked for me in firefox, but https://revoked.badssl.com/ does so i know my browser is doing revocation checking. I'm curious whats happening here.

This isn’t surprising to me at all. These services put too much trust in “the most common answer” when that might not be the correct answer. Just because people think one thing doesn’t make it true. It’s super easy to spread misinformation online. And if you can SEO to the top, the AI will think your site is correct.

I see factually incorrect “ai summaries” in search results all the time and see that it cites ai-generated slop blogposts that SEO-hacked themselves into taking up the entire first page of search results. This is most common for recent stuff where the answer simply isn’t certain but these AI services will assert something random with confidence.

Not even for news stuff specifically, I’ve been searching about a new video game that I’ve been playing and keep getting misleading obviously incorrect information. Detailed, accurate game walkthroughs and wiki pages dont exist yet so the ai will hallucinate anything, and so will the blogspam articles trying to get SEO ad revenue.

If you are doing that,

- what if some site has weird password requirements and the derived password doesn’t work

- what if a site gets hacked and you need to rotate one password.

If you have to store data per-site anyway because of those cases, may as well just store passwords. You can (and should) still generate extremely high entropy passwords.

Steam has pretty good built in parental controls imo. You can allow-list or block-list games, and block viewing various content on the store, or even entirely disable the store. There are tiers to filtering such as “frequent violence” “any nudity” “frequent nudity” and “adult only”. You can also separately disable the viewing of user-generated content, which I think disables the steam workshop. And even set playtime limits.

Steam’s parental controls are pretty good if used properly.

It was certainly heavily implied to be intentional. With the title referencing "Nintendo’s greed"[0] and in the first minute they call it “locking down a product, not for a good reason, but just because [nintendo] can, or […] because <bleep> you”

It’s not until much further in the video that they backtrack a bit and call it “tactical laziness” by Nintendo. Honestly, I did not get that far on my first watch.

[0] YouTube now confusingly shows different titles randomly. I’m seeing “Nintendo’s Greed could Change the Tech Industry” but that may not be its real title for all I know.

Interesting. I saw some of their video about this the other day. The video gives the impression that Nintendo is intentionally not supporting external monitors that aren’t the official switch dock.

But the conclusion on this article seems to lean more towards that it could be a mistake or bug. I guess that might be the case - didn’t they screw up USB-C on the switch 1? I know it’s an incredibly complex standard.

I guess the only way to know if it’s intentional or a bug, is if Nintendo updates the switch to fix it. As Linus said in his video, the Nintendo USB isn’t very “universal”.

I tried to download something from Netflix recently. The download wouldn’t process. It got stuck partway. Not an issue, I’ll just delete it and redownload.

Nope. There’s a limit to the number of downloads on some content. I wasted mine trying to get the download to even work.

I don’t know how possible that is anymore. Youtube is letting creators A/B test thumbnails and titles now. So the thumbnail and title isn’t consistent between users or page visits.

It’s tripped me up several times. Although it’s unclear how much it’s the new feature or creators manually trying to game the algorithm by shuffling the title and thumbnail around.

I’ve been learning a new language, and I’m constantly encountering language-learning videos that get translated entirely into my native language, effectively useless until I revert the audio track.

Annoyingly, there’s not a native way to revert the translated description and title as far as I know. And this seems to be done without the knowledge of the creator!

I watched a language-learning YouTube short today that was entirely not in English. But YouTube was automatically dubbing it into English. A commenter replied with “but why the bad ai voice?” And the creator replied “it’s not, that’s my voice”

I’m curious if YouTube tracks the phone angle/motion through the gyroscope. I swear I always get the hour-long ads when my phone is not in my hand, and I’m not able to skip it immediately.

I doubt they actually do that, but I’m sure it would increase ad view times. Im probably just only remembering the ads I don’t immediately skip.

I have all ad targeting features turned off on my account - which I assume means i unfortunately get the bottom-of-the-barrel ads.

The still frame ads are always NSFW games or ads for viagra-like products. In shorts, the ads are always scams of some kind. Usually deepfakes of elon musk “giving investment advice” but also “medical experts” recommending likely dangerous scams, or “free money the government isnt telling you about” if you give them all your information, or weird ai generated videos advertising mystery products that certainly don’t actually exist.

In front of (and in the middle of) actual videos, it’s a mix of the all the scams, plus the occasional ad for a legitimate product, but rarely in my native language. Usually Spectrum internet ads exclusively in spanish.

I got a gun ad a few times several months ago. Advertising features such as “no license required” and “easy to sneak through security”. As blatantly illegal as it was, the ad ran for at least a full month. I reported it every time I saw it, but I’m convinced those reports aren’t ever viewed by anyone.

I continue blocking these ads on my desktop without remorse. I only encounter the ads on my iPhone.

It’s not extremely often, but still happens occasionally - when I click the League of Legends shortcut, rather than getting to play, I get presented with a blue screen, and a kernel exception of some kind.

But riot continues to push this narrative that Vanguard works flawlessly. It doesn’t break computers. Nobody has issues. Cheaters are being prevented.

And yet - sometimes I can’t get into a game because it crashes. And then the client complains that vanguard is unhappy and I have to reboot and so I’m late to the game and my team starts way behind.

That bug hasn’t happened in a while at least- lately the blue screens occur before getting into a match. I guess I don’t get temp banned anymore but any blue screens are unacceptable.

I'm very curious how they are managing "no screens". I thought all vehicles in the U.S. were required to have rear-view cameras for safety. I'm curious how they are getting around that.

Edit: I now see that the article speculates that maybe there's a screen in the rear-view window for this. But I can't find anything concrete.

The ability of pure placebo to actually work quite often is crazy to me.

Youtube so badly wants me to pay for premium. But the ads they show me are almost entirely scams and questionably legal content. Ads for guns. Ads for viagra knockoffs. Ads for “stock market tips” that use AI generated celebrity impersonations. Ads for “free money the government isn’t telling you about”.

It’s constant and ever-increasing. I stopped watching a 30 minute video recently after the 5th ad break just over 10 minutes in.

On desktop uBlock still works in Firefox at least. But I’ve basically given up YouTube on iOS.

I had a physics class in my high school. 2014? 2015? Around then.

The teacher had us using a stopwatch on our phones. We would repeat the experiment several times and average the result, because manually doing a stopwatch was terrible- multiple samples kinda helped.

My group figured out we could get things way more accurate if we videoed the experiment in slow-motion with a phone, keeping a digital stopwatch in frame. It took an extra step of math, subtracting out the start time, but in slow motion we could be accurate to 1/120th of a second. Our results were easily the most precise in the class. Equipment can make a huge difference, and slow motion video was considerably more accurate than “Mike trying to time it right”

Lockdown mode does this. Preventing weird attachment types entirely. Preventing most of the “edge case” things. Like you also can’t be added to an icloud album, or install new configuration profiles.

Although it’s a bit extreme. It disables almost all web-fonts which breaks a lot of websites. (It’s easy to toggle this, but you have to do so per-site) It’s really not designed for the average user.