This accidentally fell out of her pocket when I bumped into her. Took me four goes.

Monday, October 14

Geek

Daily News Stuff 14 October 2024

Requiem For A Butterfly Edition

Top Story




Tech News

  • Turns out 23andMe is a genetic robot vacuum cleaner.  (SFGate)

    If you used the service - or if anyone in your family did - you should probably log in and delete your data.

    This won't do anything but it might work in your favour in the resulting class action lawsuits.

    CEO Anne Wojcicki says she's open to takeover offers.  Or people who want to buy the company.  Either one.


  • Unidentified drones swarmed Langley Air Force Base, and the Pentagon is "stumped".  (MSN)

    The drones circled the base for seventeen days.


  • The average LLM (AI) jailbreak attempt takes 42 seconds.  (SC World)

    20% of attacks succeed, and of those, 90% leak confidential information.


  • A detailed review of the Terramaster F8 Plus.  (Liliputing)

    This is an 8 bay M.2 NAS with 10Gb Ethernet and an 8 core CPU.  It's only slightly larger than an external 3.5" hard drive, and can store up to 64TB of data and hold up to 32GB of RAM for running applications (it ships with 16GB as standard, but it uses a regular SO-DIMM slot.)

    There's also cheaper F8 Nonplus, with a 4 core CPU and shipping with 8GB of RAM.  That should be fine if you just need the server functions and don't want to run apps on it.


  • Gotta catch 'em all, but I'm out of disk space: A Game Freak leak has dumped company info and a terabyte of Pokemons.  (Notebook Check)

    Game Freak is the company developing the Pokemon games, though the franchise is owned by the Pokemon Company and Nintendo.  Anyway, the Skitty is definitely out of the bag now.


  • The Beelink SER9 is the fastest mini-PC you can get right now.  (WCCFTech)

    It has more than twice the CPU performance and three to four times the graphics performance of my Beelink SER5.  But I have three of those and the SER9 costs more than three times as much if you already have memory and SSDs you can reuse.

    The Ryzen 370 used in the SER9 only supports LPDDR5X memory, not regular SO-DIMMS, so you can't install your own unless you have a desoldering station and a very steady hand. It does have two M.2 slots though.

    But if you don't need three computers and just want something small and quiet that gets the job done, it does.


Bling Bang Bang Videos of the Day



Bae and Ina.

Ina famously sent Bae the music for this at 2AM and Bae never managed to get back to sleep.



Disclaimer: Corpsman, address your camel!  D-7.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 05:51 PM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 559 words, total size 5 kb.

Sunday, October 13

Geek

Daily News Stuff 13 October 2024

Doubling Down On Dumb Edition

Top Story



Tech News

Disclaimer: Buy me some peanuts and Cracker Jack
Ban my account so I never come back. D-8.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 04:46 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 561 words, total size 5 kb.

Saturday, October 12

Geek

Daily News Stuff 12 October 2024

Fruitcake Edition

Top Story


Tech News



Apropos of Nothing Video of the Day





Apropos of Moo Deng Video of the Day




Disclaimer: Thank you for being a fiend.  D-oops.  Well, it was just a short test, and someone reposted it.  D-9.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 03:34 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 434 words, total size 5 kb.

Friday, October 11

Geek

Daily News Stuff 11 October 2024

Dank And Stary Night Edition

Top Story



Tech News



Disclaimer: Into every life some acid rain must fall.  D-10.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 05:50 PM | Comments (6) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 996 words, total size 10 kb.

Thursday, October 10

Geek

Daily News Stuff 10 October 2024

The Closes Are Walling In Edition

Top Story


Tech News



Disclaimer: It do be like that sometimes.  D-11.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 05:46 PM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 250 words, total size 3 kb.

Wednesday, October 09

Geek

Daily News Stuff 9 October 2024

Lasagna Code Edition

Top Story

Tech News

Not At All Tech News

Project Kawaii, one of the early English-language vtuber agencies along with Tsunderia, Prism Project, and Phase Connect, is closing its doors at the end of November.

As Tsunderia and Prism Project already have.

As with Prism, the company is releasing the virtual models and streaming and social media accounts to the individual talents, who are planning to continue on independently.

Speaking of vtubers, my pre-order of the Murasaki Shion Pop Up Parade figure from Amazon Japan (or rather, their marketplace) got cancelled, and now there aren't any.  But it's still available to pre-order from Amazon US, and the shipping to Australia is dirt cheap (these things don't weigh very much), so I just put the order in again.

Amane Kanata is already shipping in Japan, so I ordered her and the Pop Up Parade Frieren figure, who can hide among all the Hololive girls.

(I'm not collecting Figmas or Nendoroids or the big expensive scale models, just Pop Up Parade.  Though I did grab the Banpresto figure of Yozora Mel, since there won't be any more of those.)
 

Disclaimer: There's a lot of that going about.  D-12.

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Post contains 418 words, total size 4 kb.

Tuesday, October 08

Geek

Daily News Stuff 8 October 2024

Take Me Out At The Ball Game Edition

Top Story

  • Artist* Jason Allen has requested judicial review of the US Copyright Office's decision to deny him copyright on his* piece Théâtre D'opéra Spatial.  (Ars Technica)

    At issue is that Allen did not paint the image, neither in a traditional physical medium, nor in a digital one.  It was generated using Midjourney.
    "Théâtre D'opéra Spatial" is a wholly original image expressing his idea, Allen said, and to produce that human expression, he dedicated more than 100 hours to refining Midjourney text prompts through an iterative process that he estimates took more than 600 prompts. Allen told Ars that through this process, he crafted his own prompt language after determining "which parts of his instructions were effective and which were not," as well as which parts were "not even considered."
    If it took you ten minutes to try each prompt, I would have to wonder what you were doing in between.
    The Copyright Office has said that Allen's prompts are copyrightable, but only Midjourney was responsible for the output derived from the prompts. Walsh told Ars that if Allen had used any non-AI tool to transform the final image a little, even just applying a filter, he would be "good to go" to register his work and sue anyone who "verbatim copies" it.
    Surprisingly, and the EFF concurs, the Copyright Office has this pretty much right.

    * For some value of this term.


Tech News



Buy Me Some Radioactive Peanuts and Cracker Jack Video of the Day



I don't care if I never get back.



Disclaimer: Don't try this at home.  Try this at someone else's home.  D-13.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 05:53 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 554 words, total size 5 kb.

Monday, October 07

Geek

Daily News Stuff 7 October 2024

For Whom The Vacuum Vacuums Edition

Top Story

  • Insecure "Deebot" vacuum cleaners made by Chinese company Ecovacs are recording you and taking pictures and measuring every corner of your house and sending the data back to the manufacturer.  (ABC)  (no, the other one)

    But you agreed to this when you were silly enough to buy one of their products.
    The Chinese home robotics company, which sells a range of popular Deebot models in Australia, said its users are "willingly participating" in a product improvement program.

    When users opt into this program through the Ecovacs smartphone app, they are not told what data will be collected, only that it will "help us strengthen the improvement of product functions and attached quality".

    But I can use the app to delete my data, right?
    It also states that voice recordings, videos and photos that are deleted via the app may continue to be held and used by Ecovacs.
    But at least the data doesn't go any further, right?
    Cybersecurity researcher Dennis Giese reported the problems to the company last year after he found a series of basic errors putting Ecovacs customers' privacy at risk.

    "If their robots are broken like that," he asked, "how does their back-end [server] look?

    "Even if the company's not malicious, they might be the victim themselves of corporate espionage or nation state actors."

    But... Lerian Jihad time.

     



Tech News

Disclaimer: D-14 and counting.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 05:03 PM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 418 words, total size 4 kb.

Sunday, October 06

Geek

Daily News Stuff 6 October 2024

Dexanthanisation Edition

Top Story

  • Back at the dawn of time - which is to say, a few years ago - when an AI didn't know how to answer a question it would say it didn't know how to answer the question.  Either that or tie itself into knots, spit out an entire ream of gibberish, and crash.

    AIs today are much more sophisticated.  Like many humans when they don't know how to answer a question, they lie.  (Ars Technica)

    This is what you get when you reward answers rather than accuracy.  It's the comment spam problem all over again.

    What's worse, the more advance the AI - the larger its training set - the stronger the tendency to lie.

    And the more effort that is put into supervising the AI after the bulk training - a process called alignment - the stronger the tendency to lie and get away with it.

    It's not really lying, of course, since the current crop of commercial AIs have no intentionality.  It's just that they also have no concept of truth, and the way they are trained rewards giving answers, not just giving the right answer.

Tech News


Totally Not Tech News

If you want to make gluten-free fried chicken, the trick is to use tapioca starch rather than general-purpose gluten-free flour.  Tapioca starch would be a major ingredient of the flour, along with cornflour and rice flour, but it also contains xanthan gum to replace the missing gluten and make your bread hold together.

But by the same measure xanthan gum will make the coating on your fried chicken chewy rather than crisp.

Doesn't hurt either that tapioca starch is cheaper than the flour blend.  I tried straight cornflour as well, which was fine, but the tapioca worked better.



Disclaimer: Senzawa is following Dooby3d and all is right with the world.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 04:52 PM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 603 words, total size 5 kb.

Saturday, October 05

Geek

Daily News Stuff 5 October 2024

The Magic Word Is Tapioca Edition

Top Story

Tech News


Pixy Is Reading

Quality Assurance in Another World.

The anime makes it through the end of volume five of the manga, out of thirteen volumes published so far.  It's completely faithful to the material, with only minor changes where the anime could handle things better - where the details of how things moved or sounded were the key to a scene.  The manga had to spell it out, where the anime could show you.

Volume six explains a couple of things that happen earlier, not in the retcon sense, but in the the-author-obviously-had-that-in-mind-all-along sense.

Still solid.  Not Frieren or Apothecary Diaries level, but well worth the time.


Disclaimer: N7 forever.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 03:24 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 631 words, total size 6 kb.

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