Meta Removed 2 Million Accounts Linked to Organized Crime ‘Pig Butching’ Scams
An anonymous reader shared this report from CNET:

Meta says it’s taken down more than 2 million accounts this year linked to overseas criminal gangs behind scam operations that human rights activists say forced hundreds of thousands of people to work as scammers and cost victims worldwide billions of dollars.

In a Thurs … ⌘ Read more

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Been forcing myself to use vim more often, just because it honestly does run better on my machines. The mode-based UX still hasn’t grown on me, but I’m getting used to it.

On the positive side, I’m using vimwiki again, and it definitely fits my needs better than zim-desktop, or running a full-blown wiki on a webserver.

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Bluesky Says It Won’t Train AI On Your Posts
Bluesky, the social network surging in popularity, says it has “no intention” of training AI tools on users content. “The social network made the announcement on the same day that X (formerly Twitter) is implementing its new terms of service that allow the platform to use public posts to train AI,” notes TechCrunch. From the report: “A number of artists and creators have made their home … ⌘ Read more

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🔥 ATTENTION: I have really bad news folks 😢

Today, (just this morning in AEST) I accidentally nuke my pod (twtxt.net). I keep backups, but unfortunately the recovery point objective (RTP) is at worst a month! 🤦‍♂️ 😱 (the recovery time objective is around ~30m or so, restoring can take a while due to the size of the archive and index) – For those that are unfamiliar with these terms, they essentially relate to “how much data loss can occur” (RPO) and “how quickly you can restore the system” (RTO).

This pod (twtxt.net) is back up and online. However we’ve last the last ~5 days worth of posts y’all may have made on your feeds (for those that use this pod).

I’m so sorry 😞

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OpenAI and Others Seek New Path To Smarter AI as Current Methods Hit Limitations
AI companies like OpenAI are seeking to overcome unexpected delays and challenges in the pursuit of ever-large language models by developing training techniques that use more human-like ways for algorithms to “think.” From a report: A dozenAI scientists, researchers and investors told Reuters they believe that these … ⌘ Read more

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Generative AI Doesn’t Have a Coherent Understanding of the World, MIT Researchers Find
Long-time Slashdot reader Geoffrey.landis writes: Despite its impressive output, a recent study from MIT suggests generative AI doesn’t have a coherent understanding of the world. While the best-performing large language models have surprising capabilities that make it seem like the models are implicitly learn … ⌘ Read more

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Jack Dorsey’s Block Scraps ‘Web5’ Project
Block will abandon development of its Web5 decentralized internet project and reduce investment in music streaming service Tidal to focus on bitcoin mining hardware and self-custody wallets, the payments company announced in its third-quarter letter to shareholders. The Jack Dorsey-led firm cited strong market demand for its bitcoin mining products and Bitkey wallet as key drivers behind the st … ⌘ Read more

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One of my quirks—don’t ask me why—is collecting backpacks, bags, patches, and watches, especially those related to aviation and the military. Just yesterday, I added a Direct Action Messenger bag and a 5.11 backpack to my collection.

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I feel exhausted, burned out. The workload just keeps piling up, and there’s less and less time to rest. What keeps me going are these little escapes to the smolweb.

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Lawsuit Accuses PowerSchool of Selling Student Data To 3rd Parties
A former teacher has filed a federal lawsuit against PowerSchool, alleging the education technology giant illegally sells student data to third parties without proper consent. Emily Cherkin, lead plaintiff in the class action suit filed in San Francisco, claims PowerSchool has amassed 345 terabytes of data from 440 school districts, including … ⌘ Read more

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Been curious to see if can filter out my access.log file and output a list of my twtxt followers just in case I’ve missed someone … I came up with this awk -F '\"' '/twtxt/ {print $(NF-1)}' /var/log/user.log | grep -v 'twtxt\.net' | sort -u | awk '{print $(NF-1) $NF}' | awk '/^\(/' spaghetti monster of a command and I’m wondering if there’s a more elegant way for achieving the same thing.

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Kremlin Says It Hopes $20.6 Decillion Fine Got Google’s Attention
An enormous fine levied by a Russian court on Google caught the attention of the Kremlin – which hopes Google will notice in turn. From a report: President Vladimir Putin’s spokesman, Dmitri Peskov, commented on the sum on Thursday. It came after a court demanded payment equivalent of $20.6 decillion – an almost incomprehensible figure that exce … ⌘ Read more

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Tried migrating to jenny… So seems it not suitable for my phone. Fetch command fetched archived feeds so i have 37k+ entries and mutt hangs for several seconds for loading this. Also i don’t like hardcoded paths for config and follow file

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Just throwing this out there, but does the edit, delete and reply feature work for any of you, through the website? I can only Yarn. Trying to do those other actions, generates a popup, asking me if I trust some # URL thing. Confirming it refreshes the site, without doing the thing.

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So, we need a computer for house (that is, wife and I) usage. We have none, we rely on our pocket computers. I would like to fill the void with the recently announced Mac mini. What technique could I use with an already stressed out wife, to accomplish this goal? 😅

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The last week I’ve been playing around with https://github.com/comfyanonymous/ComfyUI , dang good tool for testing ai models and such. I really like the node based workflow.
And makes it super easy to test any AI model.
Only thing I miss now - is one of those image to video setup’s, that’s what I’m working on fixing now. So that I can generate images, and then automatically make them into short videos as well.
Fun to play around with.

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AI Slop Is Flooding Medium
AI slop is flowing onto every major platform where people post online – and Medium is no exception. Wired: The 12-year-old publishing platform has undertaken a dizzying number of pivots over the years. It’s finally on a financial upswing, having turned a monthly profit for the first time this summer. Medium CEO Tony Stubblebine and other executives at the company have described the platform as “a home for human writing.” But … ⌘ Read more

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Roses are red, violets are blue,
Why devs hate Google, and so should you?

Google ☠️ The cloud

Google Drive vs their own API: Many of us developers, go out of our way to support Google Drive in our apps, programs and websites, to make things easier for users, but over the years, Google keeps making it harder and in some cases demanding “solutions”, that conveniently involve us paying their partners:
$Our Android app is frozen in carbonite
$End of the road for Google Drive and Transmit

Google ☠️ The Internet

Google OAuth vs the Canidae browser: Users interested in testing my CEF (Chromium Embedding Framework) browser, back when the project still existed, were prohibited from passing Google OAuth in my and any other CEF browser, unless they changed their user agent string. I managed to contact Google and was told this was a necessary protection against bad actors. As we all know, no bad actor would ever add two lines of code, to change the user agent of their malware.

Google vs the point of SSL: Google Chrome presents all sites access over HTTPS as secure and all sites accessed over HTTP as dangerous. This is very misleading to less educated Internet users, falling for “secure” phishing sites with SSL certificates and avoiding “dangerous” static webpages, that never needed one.

Google ☠️ Android apps

Googles friends vs FOSS
developers:
X and other big social media platforms running their own servers, are allowed to host seemingly any user generated content, while Google forces us, developers helping to maintain XMPP clients for Android, to exclude features, that allow our users to discover chatrooms, that anyone can host on their servers. We are thus not only held responsible for what we publish, what we host, but also for the whole XMPP network. I offer my version of the client, unrestricted, on my website, others choose their repo or F-droid.

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