kbal

Personally I enjoy seeing the numbers go up. Looking at the current top ten by ratio according to my torrent client most of them are obscure things that I’m probably the only one seeding — but the number one spot, at a ratio of 565, goes to “Shrek (2001) [1080p]”.

There was that one opinion poll where they went around asking everyone if they approve of keeping children safe.

foreign piracy in the United States

For a moment there I thought they were talking about actual pirate ships sailing across from Liberia to raid the east coast.

Follow-up question: Can someone explain it in a goofy pirate accent?

Windscribe, although unless you pay an extra $2/month they time out and need to be reconfigured after one week.

they’re just manipulating the DOM

Imagine trying to explain that in court. Yes, your honour, it’s a sort of object-based model representing the document. No, it’s not really a model of an object exactly. Yes, it’s made of bits and bytes, the same kind as you would use in a computer program, but it has that in common with… no, it does not actually object to anything…

Probably some kind of translation error. They must mean “privacy”.

Bear in mind that the people coming up with this stuff are not completely stupid. Completely corrupt and ignorant perhaps, but not so inept that if they write legislation that strongly encourages practically everyone to use a VPN to avoid the bullshit it isn’t a good possibility that their aim (or the aim of those manipulating them) is to generate excuses to eventually make easy-to-use commercial VPN services illegal. Obviously many of us could get around such a ban with ease, but the more difficult they make it the fewer people will do it. There are reasons why not every kid on your average street is an I2P user. What they can’t effectively ban they’ll suppress by other means.

Instead of zero as a comparison base, the report uses a pseudo count of one, concluding that the risk is 65 times higher

How delightfully nonsensical. I hope the authors were well-paid for their efforts.

Paid and freeware but either way non-free, unfortunately.

I wouldn’t be willing to disable my vpn for the nyt so thanks for confirming that it wouldn’t have made a difference. It appears that they now block everyone who doesn’t let javascript freely do whatever it wants to fingerprint you or whatever. I’ll not miss them too much.

I’m shocked! — shocked to find that LLMs aren’t superhuman intelligences that will soon enslave us all. Other things they’re not good at:

• Summarizing news articles. Instead of an actual summary they’ll shorten the text by just leaving things out, without any understanding of which parts are important.
• Answering questions about anything controversial. Based on subtle hints in the wording of your question they’ll reflect your own biases back at you.
• Answering questions about well-known facts. Seemingly at random when your question isn’t phrased exactly the right way they’ll start hallucinating and make up plausible bullshit in place of actual answers.
• Writing a letter. They’ll use the wrong tone, use language that is bland and generic to a degree that makes it almost offensive, and if you care about quality the whole thing will need so much re-writing that it’s quicker to do it yourself from the start.
• Telling jokes. They don’t really get humour. Their jokes tend to have things that superficially look as if they should be punchlines but aren’t funny at all.
• Writing computer code. Correcting their mistakes is even more laborious in computer languages. Most of the time they’re almost as bad at it as they are at playing chess.

Still they are amazingly clever in some ways and pretty good for coming up with random ideas when you’ve got writer’s block or something.

Makes sense to me. AI bullshit generators may be worse than useless for most of the things people try to do with them, but they might just be the perfect tool for rationalizing the systematic looting of formerly productive companies by private equity.

It looks about as cursed as the average Disney remake

The trick is to use a text editor with a fixed-width font.

This shift allows us to shape the next era of the internet – with tools like vertical tabs

T  o  I
h  f  n
e     t
   t  e
F  h  r
u  e  n
t     e
u     t
r
e

Sucks if you’re in France. For the rest of us it should be interesting to see which of these VPN providers choose to comply by geo-blocking France, which choose to cut any ties they have with France and otherwise ignore the order, and which to abandon their mission and become agents of censorship on behalf of France.

People still care about Starfield in 2025? I thought everyone went back to Skyrim a year ago.

I like my women the way I like my passwords: Long, cryptic, and full of entropy.

It might. If some day they don’t control the browser, whoever does control it might be hesitant to build in features that are only there to spy on users for Google. Cookies do at least have some other uses.