cultural reviewer and dabbler in stylistic premonitions
Are forks like Librewolf also affected?
Yes
And have they been updated?
Librewolf is in the process of updating; perhaps some distributions of it have released new binaries already but the flathub release is still 139.0.1. In git you can see they bumped the version to get 139.0.4 (the version with the fix) here, 18 hours ago; presumably flathub will get that in the near future.
This article buries the lede so much that many readers probably miss it completely: the important takeaway here, which is clearer in The Register’s version of the story, is that ChatGPT cannot actually play chess:
“Despite being given a baseline board layout to identify pieces, ChatGPT confused rooks for bishops, missed pawn forks, and repeatedly lost track of where pieces were."
To actually use an LLM as a chess engine without the kind of manual intervention that this person did, you would need to combine it with some other software to automate continuing to ask it for a different next move every time it suggests an invalid one. And, if you did that, it would still mostly lose, even to much older chess engines than Atari’s Video Chess.
edit: i see now that numerous people have done this; you can find many websites where you can “play chess against chatgpt” (which actually means: with chatgpt and also some other mechanism to enforce the rules). and if you know how to play chess you should easily win :)
this is a tweet from 2020: https://xcancel.com/CianMW/status/1267890378276876288
but, the organization which operates that hotline is still active: https://girightshotline.org/
you wouldn’t need any AI to fake a video that “proves that Epstein was the only person who came in or out of his cell on the night he died” 😂
quote from https://web.archive.org/web/20010201204600/http://www.nyfairuse.org/sony.xhtml
via https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootkit_scandal
it’s among the many OSes you can run in an emulator in your web browser at https://copy.sh/v86/
sometimes a footprint represents humanity
sometimes, but in GNOME’s case i think it is not intended to be a human foot but rather the foot of a mythological creature (a gnome). note that it has a squashed aspect ratio compared to a human foot, and also has only four toes.
apparently it’s also problematic in some cultures: https://wiki.gnome.org/Engagement/FootAndCulturalIssue
Is this a spam campaign?
Five of the eleven comments so far (including one from OP) are all recommending the same service; all five are from accounts less than 2 months old with a one or two digit number of comments 🤔
Do tech journalists at the New York Times have any idea what they’re talking about? (spoiler)
The author of this latest advertorial, Kevin Roose, has a podcast called “Hard Fork”.
Here he and his co-host attempt to answer the question “What’s a Hard Fork?”:
kevin roose: Casey, we should probably explain why our podcast is called “Hard Fork.”
casey newton: Oh, yeah. So our other names didn’t get approved by “The New York Times” lawyers.
kevin roose: True.
casey newton: And B, it’s actually a good name for what we’re going to be talking about. A “hard fork” is a programming term for when you’re building something, but it gets really screwed up. So you take the entire thing, break it, and start over.
kevin roose: Right.
casey newton: And that’s a little bit what it feels like right now in the tech industry. These companies that you and I have been writing about for the past decade, like Facebook, and Google, and Amazon, they’re all kind of struggling to stay relevant.
kevin roose: Yeah. We’ve noticed a lot of the energy and money in Silicon Valley is shifting to totally new ideas — crypto, the metaverse, AI. It feels like a real turning point when the old things are going away and interesting new ones are coming in to replace them.
casey newton: And all this is happening so fast, and some of it’s so strange. I just feel like I’m texting you constantly, “What is happening? What is this story? Explain this to me. Talk with me about this, because I feel like I’m going insane.”
kevin roose: And so we’re going to try to help each other feel a little bit less insane. We’re going to talk about these stories. We’re going to bring in other journalists, newsmakers, whoever else is involved in building this future, to explain to us what’s changing and why it all matters.
casey newton: So listen to Hard Fork. It comes out every Friday starting October 7.
kevin roose: Wherever you get your podcasts.
This is simply not accurate.
Today the term “hard fork” is probably most often used to refer to blockchain forks, which I assume is where these guys (almost) learned it, but the blockchain people borrowed the term from forks in software development.
In both cases it means to diverge in such a way that re-converging is not expected. In neither case does it mean anything is screwed up, nor does it mean anything about starting over.
These people who’s job it is to cover technology at one of the most respected newspapers in the United States are actually so clueless that they have an entirely wrong definition for the phrase which they chose to be the title of their podcast.
“Talk with me about this, because I feel like I’m going insane.”
But, who cares, right? “Hard fork” sounds cool and the times is ON IT.
Why memorize a different command? I assume sudoedit just looks up the system’s EDITOR environment variable and uses that. Is there any other benefit?
I don’t use it, but, sudoedit is a little more complicated than that.
from man sudo:
When invoked as sudoedit, the -e option (described below), is implied.
-e, --edit
Edit one or more files instead of running a command. In lieu
of a path name, the string "sudoedit" is used when consulting
the security policy. If the user is authorized by the policy,
the following steps are taken:
1. Temporary copies are made of the files to be edited with
the owner set to the invoking user.
2. The editor specified by the policy is run to edit the tem‐
porary files. The sudoers policy uses the SUDO_EDITOR,
VISUAL and EDITOR environment variables (in that order).
If none of SUDO_EDITOR, VISUAL or EDITOR are set, the
first program listed in the editor sudoers(5) option is
used.
3. If they have been modified, the temporary files are copied
back to their original location and the temporary versions
are removed.
To help prevent the editing of unauthorized files, the follow‐
ing restrictions are enforced unless explicitly allowed by the
security policy:
• Symbolic links may not be edited (version 1.8.15 and
higher).
• Symbolic links along the path to be edited are not followed
when the parent directory is writable by the invoking user
unless that user is root (version 1.8.16 and higher).
• Files located in a directory that is writable by the invok‐
ing user may not be edited unless that user is root (ver‐
sion 1.8.16 and higher).
Users are never allowed to edit device special files.
If the specified file does not exist, it will be created. Un‐
like most commands run by sudo, the editor is run with the in‐
voking user's environment unmodified. If the temporary file
becomes empty after editing, the user will be prompted before
it is installed. If, for some reason, sudo is unable to update
a file with its edited version, the user will receive a warning
and the edited copy will remain in a temporary file.
tldr: it makes a copy of the file-to-be-edited in a temp directory, owned by you, and then runs your $EDITOR as your normal user (so, with your normal editor config)
note that sudo also includes a similar command which is specifically for editing /etc/sudoers, called visudo 🤪
By “solar power in operation” (in GW) i think they mean maximum output capacity rather than actual production, since these numbers add up to 923 GW while wikipedia says in 2024 there was 2.13 petawatt-hours (243 GW on average) actually produced by solar.
These articles were stolen, by the paywall operators. Elbakyan rescued them from the thieves. 🎉
poe’s law exemplar 😬
what surprises me more is that Netanyahu seems to be fine with it?
see also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herzl’s_Mauschel_and_Zionist_antisemitism and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zionist_antisemitism
Russian propaganda
ah yes it’s that notoriously pro-russia website hrw.org 😂
i figured this was likely astroturfing by one of the many shitty companies it is advertising, so i went looking for the source. somewhat to my surprise this image was apparently created by reddit user u/theFallenWalnut who’s actually been posting there for over 10 years 🤔
if you check their account you’ll see they’ve actually updated their recommendations to remove several companies (including proton and spotify) which are included in the older version of it posted here.
but, they’re still suggesting lots of garbage.
see also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethical_consumerism#Criticism
I guess an LLM wrote this:
🙄