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InitialsDiceBearhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearhttps://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/„Initials” (https://github.com/dicebear/dicebear) by „DiceBear”, licensed under „CC0 1.0” (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)A

apparia

@ apparia @discuss.tchncs.de

Posts
2
Comments
29
Joined
4 mo. ago

  • Trump's naval blockade crumbles after Iran-linked vessels breach barricade: report

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  • The gif shows no data (dimmed icon) from 08:49 UTC to 11:10 UTC so I had my maths wrong and it's 2 hours 21 minutes, apologies. Still a lot more than 30 minutes. The AIS data also generally comes in less frequently than every minute so there's some unreliability there.

    As I said, according to the current data the ship definitely kept going back up towards the Strait since I posted, so what's more likely, it kept going on its current course and spoofed its AIS for nearly 12 hours, or that it turned around?

  • Trump's naval blockade crumbles after Iran-linked vessels breach barricade: report

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  • My source is marinetraffic.com. Other AIS trackers also corroborate it.

    From the sounds of it the OP and most other articles are based on similar armchair research looking at trackers so I think it's about as reliable as we're going to get.

  • Trump's naval blockade crumbles after Iran-linked vessels breach barricade: report

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  • I don't know where you're getting any of that from. It was travelling at 8 knots before and after the turnaround. The bit in the animation where it slows and drifts almost due south is actually marinetraffic not having AIS data for that period so it just interpolates between the two known positions. Maybe I should have made that clearer.

    That turnaround period is also close to 3.5 (edit: 2.5) hours, not 30 minutes.

    According to the same data the ship is now close to the Strait of Hormuz that it passed through yesterday; it seems pretty clear it did not get where it wanted to go.

  • Trump's naval blockade crumbles after Iran-linked vessels breach barricade: report

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  • Everyone is reporting on these ships making it through the strait which is still under Iranian control. Few seem to mention the part in the Gulf of Oman where the US is actually implementing its blockade. The poster child, Rich Starry, mentioned in the article, did this a few hours after clearing the strait, still far from the Arabian Sea:

    That sure doesn't look like a ship breaching a blockade without incident.

    It's too early to say how this will play out on a larger scale but for these specific ships a lot of reporting is really fucking misleading at the moment.

  • Locked

    Bulletins and International News Discussion from April 8th to Whenever We Reach About 3000 Comments - Blockade²

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  • Osint613 pulled their quote of it.

    All I’m saying is that this is unverified.

    It is possible something like this was said, but in a non official capacity.

  • More likely than not you're using bubble wrap wrong

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  • Not convinced?

    Below, what Perplexity Pro had to say.

    If you think your own blog post is going to be less compelling than a screenshot of a fucking chatbot, why are you writing anything at all? This is pitiful.

  • Taiwan reports large-scale Chinese military aircraft presence near island

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  • It's not super clear from the article but it sounds like they're saying the "increase" in military activity is just a return to previous levels after a lull? Bit sensationalist if that's the case.

  • The banality of surveillance | On an internet where everything is tracked, our privacy is maintained mainly because our data is too boring and time consuming to sort through. But AIs don't get bored.

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  • I think this comment is based on an extremely optimistic -- bordering on fantastical -- outlook.

    The complexity of dealing with such large amounts of information will keep increasing forever as the amount of information also grows

    The capacity and capability to handle the data will grow too.

    AI struggles with conflicting information and mistakes, which happen a lot especially when humans are involved, so eventually you will have lots of “garbage in garbage out” issues causing problems

    This is what data analysis is though. Extracting patterns from noisy data. Ignoring outliers. I don't think anybody is suggesting they'll just dump a CSV of your web history into ChatGPT and ask it if you're probably going to a protest this weekend (although does it sound so far fetched that that might actually work?), it'll be used in combination with existing and constantly improving data mining techniques.

    The data one might be able to track will continuously be challenged or removed on legal/compliance bases over time, reducing its availability

    Are you implying data protection laws will not only not be inexorably eroded year upon year by increasingly surveillance-hungry governments, but will actually get a significantly better than their current milquetoast state? I've gotta say, that's seeming increasingly unlikely to me; right now we're seeing mandatory identity verification being legislated on more and more things by more and more governments.

    Yes the NSA might want our chatbot logs, but after enough people realize they might be/are getting them, people will stop feeding it as much, or introduce noise on purpose

    This has to be a sarcastic reference to Snowden, right? The thing where the entire world found out about the how NSA absolutely is -- not "might be" -- monitoring your internet and conversation logs, and basically nobody did a fucking thing to change? That was 12 years ago.

    And the sheer volume of information relative to the computing power necessary to process everything will also become a problem if they keep trying to process every single thing.

    Good thing they're not doing anything crazy to get more computing power, like buying up practically the entire global supply of RAM or building data centres at an exponentially increasing rate.

  • On the unfortunate need for an "age verification" API for legal compliance reasons in some U.S. states

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  • Is it really not as easy for them as saying "hey btw don't use this distro if you're in California" and fully expecting nobody to comply? I'm not sure if Ubuntu is based in Cali in which case I can see it being more difficult.

    Also this "age bracket" thing seems to have an obvious flaw in that any application that's running semi-regularly can just poll the API every day and find out the user's DOB by checking when they roll into the next bracket. It's actually leaking more data about children than about adults in that case. Brilliant.

  • Is GPS private?

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  • My first answer is "WTF is RTK?"; my answer after consulting Wikipedia is "no, they're separate things".

    RTK doesn't sound like it broadcasts any data out but I barely understood what I just read. The Wikipedia coverage on this whole topic seems rather poor quality, I don't think it's just because I'm dumb.

  • Is GPS private?

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  • It's not as clear-cut as most people here are saying.

    In short, GPS itself is just listening to satellites, and nothing is leaked that way, but most modern phones use "Assisted GPS" of some sort. The most common (I believe) AGPS is SUPL, which seems to be used by most phones. This involves sending your approximate location to an Internet server, which returns satellite data based on that approximate location.

    To nobody's surprise, in Android this is a Google server. I'm pretty sure most Android distros don't give you any control over when it's used, or which servers it uses. Anecdotally, my phone without Google Play services has a horrible time obtaining a GPS fix, so I suspect without GPlay it's only using raw GPS, but I've not bothered to actually dig into it.

    As I understand it, SUPL means even if you're in aeroplane mode, if you have an Internet connection over WiFi you might still be leaking (approximate) location data when using GPS.

    I learned about this from this excellent series of blog posts, which is a very thorough comparison of various Android ROMs' privacy. It has a background section (search for "Assisted GPS") in each of the ROM-specific posts which explains it better than I can.

  • Removed

    nothing is out of the ordinary, citizen

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  • It's the wall on the right -- in the wide version (from felesteen.news) it's all the same blue colour, and a corner, whereas in the Reddit version it's a white concrete pillar with no corner.

    At the very least, someone's done some infilling on one of them. My most charitable guess was that someone at the news site decided to "punch up" the image for an article header, but the third version and its timing make me think Occam's razor is the way to go here.

  • Removed

    nothing is out of the ordinary, citizen

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  • Your version was posted within 3 minutes of this post someone linked in the comments of the Reddit version. So yeah, all credibility lost as far as I'm concerned.

    What I don't get is why, if this is some sort of coordinated campaign, you wouldn't just generate entirely new images, rather than AI-daydream variants of the exact same one, which makes it obvious they're manipulated.

  • Removed

    nothing is out of the ordinary, citizen

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  • Nice find, kind of damning. That version has a totally different wall on the right side to the version posted here, it also seems to be from a slightly different angle. This screams AI manipulation -- if not outright fabrication -- of at least one of those images. Doesn't necessarily mean they're both fake, but a pretty big red flag.

  • Removed

    nothing is out of the ordinary, citizen

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  • I was gonna say it on the last thread but, before we start appropriating this image as a political symbol as you've done here, should someone... maybe... source it slightly better than "Reddit"? There's plenty of evidence that the school was blown up, but this specific image -- conveniently well-framed and poignant -- cropped up very quickly on a few random social media accounts, with no photographer attributed, and as far as I know hasn't actually been verified at all.

  • Blaring sirens on smartphones to warn Australians of major disasters under emergency alerts overhaul

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  • The system is designed to work for most phones released since 2019.

    So most phones since 2019 have builtin functionality to blare alarms, show messages on the home screen, and... fuck knows what else... at the sole discretion of the telco?

    Curious if anyone here knows more about the mechanism that allows this, presumably it's some kind of standard? Will custom ROMs work with it or is this another in a long series of fuck yous to anyone daring not to patronise the Bay Area Douche Nexus?

    Edit: I see, it's Cell Broadcast, part of 3G, 4G, 5G, etc. standards. I still wonder about the "un-opt-outable" part; is it just that most phone OSes don't provide an opt out or is it implemented in firmware somehow? Warning tones I can imagine being wired straight to the drivers, but a visual message seems like it'd have to have OS cooperation.

  • Show HN: Respectify – a comment moderator that teaches people to argue better

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  • TMSJ;BI (Too Much Shitty Javascript; Barely Interacted):

    Is there some kind of award for "most irredeemably 'HN' HN post"? Just spam a bunch of LLM comments to drive the numbers like everyone else, no need to add the whole extra step of making sure anyone trying to actually engage knows exactly how much contempt you have for their opinion.

    Also, the website is so vibecoded that the logo has the wrong number of fingers. Can't make this shit up.

  • I am a 15-year-old girl. Let me show you the vile misogyny that confronts me on social media every day | Anonymous

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  • This definition of social media is new to me as well, thanks for sharing it. This sort of clarifies a term I really dislike, and which you've used: "the algorithm". It's always seemed a little murky to me which algorithms it refers to. It's like saying "don't eat food with chemicals in it".

    Lemmy does have "an algorithm", it's just a relatively simple one based on communities one is subscribed to plus some vote/comment data for the various sort orderings.

    Lemmy also absolutely implements a social graph -- the data about who has interacted with whom is all stored by the system. It's not explicitly stored as a graph structure, but then we're arguing database schemas.

    As I understand it, however, you're saying "social media" arises when the "social graph" data structure is used as an input to "the algorithm". That seems like a pretty robust definition to me.

    One bit of pedantry: user blocks on Lemmy are, by a general definition, a form of social graph, and they do affect what content people see. So Lemmy could technically qualify as social media by the definition I've written here. I'm not sure what a more precise definition could be that avoids this technicality.

  • Removed

    the one where ross says a slur

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  • I'm surprised how many people seem offended by this comic. I found it pretty relatable. That doesn't mean I "don't understand context", or think the writers were bad people, or that the shows aren't worth watching. It just means I find it personally unpleasant to find these jokes in a work I'm otherwise enjoying.

    When kids study older literature and media in school, generally when there's a slur or racist reference or joke, the teacher will stop and explain the context and get the kids to reflect on it and why it's probably not acceptable today. Even though I understand this and know it going in, I'm still kind of doing an abridged version of that in my head when something like this comes up in a show -- I've been following along, laughing with the writers, and then suddenly I'm backing up and distancing myself from one joke or idea. It's jarring, it pulls me out of the show, and it's just not fun.

    In some cases it also comes across as incredibly lazy and unoriginal. So many sitcoms from that era have "the trans episode", "the gay episode", "the lecherous character" -- and they all make the same unfunny jokes, and it's a reminder than a lot of these shows, even in their time, were just not that creative. Plenty of modern shows have the same problem, but they don't draw attention to it by having large classes of "stock jokes" that simply do not land today.

  • Privacy @lemmy.ml
    apparia @discuss.tchncs.de

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