Tootfinder

[Driving down the street in the IoT-detector van]
Tech Trainee: [Viewing a screen showing dozens of blue triangles] Wow, look at all the Bluetooth stubs.
Service Tech: Yep, all those appliances that no one has hooked into the internet yet.
Trainee: So we're going to use the factory presets to hook them up for their owners?
Service: God, no. We check to see if they're out of warranty and brick 'em.
Trainee: That's awful.
Service: Yeah, it is. If they had hooked them into the WiFi like we told them, we wouldn't have to drive around to do this.
Trainee: We're punishing them for not connecting their appliances?
Service: No, I mean we could brick them remotely.
#ShortFiction #IoT #Brick

What LLMs and the Turing test¹ tell us: most of us not only are² stochastic parrots³ but are also fine with that – otherwise we would not happily use LLMs to produce all the output we communicate to others.
One could frame this as “insult to humanity” but I prefer to call it telling.
__
¹the Turing test does _not_ measure “intelligence”. I recommend to read the original paper:

I.—COMPUTING MACHINERY AND INTELLIGENCE : A.M Turing : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive
I.—COMPUTING MACHINERY ANDINTELLIGENCE1. The Imitation Game.I PROPOSE to consider the question, ' Can machines think ? 'This should begin with definitions of...

This made it through multiple levels and multiple rounds of design and marketing approval.
At no point did anyone stop and think?
Really? This is the design we're going with?
Not one person who had any rudimentary internet skills.
Not one hero in one meeting had even the one ounce of temerity or one gram of courage to stand up and say
HEY - THE HAND ON THE LEFT IS SUPPOSED TO BE WEARING A RING.

RE: https://hachyderm.io/@thomasfuchs/116144776295217687
Well tomorrow will be the absolutely last resort to fix that iMac Pro, trying to install macOS from thumb drive
Internet recovery is failing, possibly because the SSD isn’t partitioned right (which is hinted at that while it boots into target disk mode I don’t see any disk when connected to it).
We shall see…

What will people do when AI can handle most current white-collar tasks?
I don't know.
And that's the whole point.
Nobody knew what displaced agricultural workers would do, either,
-- until they did it.
The absence of a visible next chapter isn't evidence that there won't be one.
It's evidence that we're bad at predicting what humans will invent when constraints shift.

Everything is awesome (why I'm an optimist)
February is the month the internet decided we're all going to die. In the span of about two weeks, Matt Shumer's Something Big is Happening racked up over 80 million views on X with its breathless comparison of AI to the early days of COVID, telling his non-tech friends and

Deanonimizzazione online su larga scala con LLM
Gli LLM possono essere utilizzati per eseguire una deanonimizzazione su larga scala. Con un accesso completo a Internet, il nostro agente può reidentificare gli utenti di Hacker News e i partecipanti ad Anthropic Interviewer con elevata precisione, dati solo profili e conversazioni online pseudonimi, un'operazione che richiederebbe ore a un investigatore umano dedicato. Progettiamo quindi attacchi per l'ambiente chiuso. Dati due d…

RE: https://mastodon.social/@GroupNebula563/116128481311158144
we are officially at the “getting drawn as a gigachad” stage of my internet fame :P

We're gathering momentum for slipmux, a transport of #CoAP over serial ports. That specification allows #embedded developers on simple boards that just have a UART to use the same tools with it as for talking to devices across the Internet. This includes security: I guess I just sent the first encrypted…

RE: https://mastodon.social/@sundogplanets/116015417391480927
The sad part is we don’t even need all these satellites. All we need is the FCC to direct internet companies to build fiber networks (because the internet has become an undeniable commons)…

We're halfway through the post-Thanksgiving week, and the cyber news machine is cranking back up again, so check out today's Metacurity for the critical infosec developments you should know, including
--Indian government retreats from spy app mandate,
--US DOJ seizes Myanmar scam center website,
--Coupang execs sold company stock before breach was announced,
--Coupang is reviewing compensation for breach victims,
--Korea's Gmarket hit by string of una…

Indian government retreats from spy app mandate
US DOJ seizes Myanmar scam center website, Coupang execs sold company stock before breach was announced, Coupang is reviewing compensation for breach victims, Korea's Gmarket hit by string of unauthorized payments, Japan's Askul internet service resumes one month post-breach, much more

RE: https://mastodon.social/@gamingonlinux/116041309989733171
Good thing we're destroying the Internet for entirely performative "for the children" bullshit while there's child rapists in the highest ranks of government and business.
This fucking timeline.

Good Morning #Canada
Last weekend our granddaughter visited to help decorate our tree and we watched Elf, a movie about #Christmas spirit, because we were feeling Christmassy. I think the majority of Canadians believe in the spirit of this season. We're a little bit more polite and kinder, if that's even possible, and underneath the snark, the passive aggressiveness, the ##ElbowsUp, is a pack of big cuddly beavers. You don't have to take my word for it because places like Quebec City, Banff, and Vancouver regularly end up on lists for best places to sit on Santa's knee. He lives in Canada so not a surprise. Did you know that in 2018, Canada was ranked as #1 most Christmassy country in the world. They can't put it on the internet if it isn't true.
#CanadaIsAwesome #MerryChristmas
https://dailyhive.com/mapped/canada-ranked-1-most-christmassy-country-in-the-world