@aral@mastodon.ar.al2026-04-25 08:53:20
So I need a new headshot for a conference I’m speaking at in June and I’m short on time so I fooled around with my camera last night (ooh-err, missus) and narrowed it down to three options…
@hex@kolektiva.social2026-05-25 10:09:12
So one of the authors is Nicholas Carlini, who works for Anthropic. This is basically an ad for the three letter agencies to use Claude. It massively over-promises compared to what the actual paper says.
But, it is important. First, this is really about silencing people. The threat of identification is designed to make people afraid to talk online. There's a massive asymmetry between the fascists and the people. The fascists are weird racists and pedophiles who are obsessed with control. No one likes them. No one likes their ideas, because their ideas are creepy and bad.
When they talk about their ideas, that people should be murdered or kidnaped based on their skin color, that there should be a national dress code, that people's sex lives should be monitored, that children should be treated like objects that are owned by the parent (specifically, one parent), that people with different skin color or uteri should be considered as livestock, people fucking hate it because it's awful. When we talk about our ideas, that everyone should be able to eat and take care of themselves, that people who can't take care of themselves should be taken care of, that we should live in a society that values life, that we should live in harmony with nature, people like those ideas. When fascists out us for talking about those ideas, people support us. When we out people who are working as fascist goons those people have to face social consequences.
Everyone hates these people. The US government is currently less popular than it has ever been. The only way they can keep power is by making everyone think that they aren't extraordinarily unpopular. The only way to do that, the way authoritarian have always done it, is to make everyone afraid to talk.
But, yes, what this paper is saying is actually kind of bad. It looks like people who don't take any precautions at all in separating identities can be identified about 30% of the time (based on the results). It's unclear how this will actually work in the real world. Larger corpses will probably have more data, making connecting things easier.
This isn't as good as a human trying to dox someone. It's not going to work as well. It may only work in a small number of cases. There will be false positives (just like there are with people doing the work). It's probably not cheaper than hiring people. But it does mean that you can just dump money into a machine that has no ethical framework and get data out. That's the point. It's hard to find humans who will do evil shit like help dictatorships target human rights activists, but if a machine can do it for twice the price then it's a better deal for the dictatorship.
For most people, you just shouldn't care. This isn't for you. As long as you keep doing what you're doing, and you can keep everyone else doing what they're doing, then there aren't enough resources to actually target you. Even if they know who you are, there are just too many people who hate them and too few goons.
For people who might actually be targeted, there are a lot of things. First, keep in mind what you're putting into anonymous accounts. Any feature that's connected to your real life is a feature that can be extracted to identify you. This has always been true, it just may be easier to find now. Your identities should be totally siloed. It's also harder to identify you if you're writing anonymously as a collective. Collectives are better anyway because they can help check your thinking. When you write as a collective, you can help clean up each other's personal details and language. A collective develops its own voice, which is distinct from individual contributors. If you do this, and you also present your work as being from one "person," then it becomes even harder for anyone (systems or individuals) to really figure it out.
I'm not going to do a full deep dive on this because I just don't have time, but your existing threat model should *already cover these threats* if you need to make sure your writing remains anonymous.
This paper doesn't present any novel methodologies. It just extracts a bunch of features, which a human would extract as notes, and tries to correlate those between identities, which is how human researchers work. Linguistic forensics were mentioned (not by name) in the paper, but the actual methodology doesn't actually seem to use them.
So a thing with less ethics can do a worse job for more money (when adjusted for the real, not investor deflated, price of tokens). It's worth knowing. It's not the end of the world, but it is a good reminder to check your threat model and make sure it's up to date.
@cdarwin@c.im2026-03-25 22:11:41
In Trump’s war messaging, veterans see something new — and disturbing
“They’re completely diminishing what they’re asking the nation to do in Iran,”
retired Army colonel Joe Buccino said in an interview.
“It seems almost obscene relative to the actual violence and suffering that’s involved with this.”
@heiseonline@social.heise.de2026-04-24 12:14:00
@inthehands@hachyderm.io2026-03-26 15:52:13
Does this all just come down to Tim Cook? I’m congenitally skeptical of “great leader” sorts of theories of success, and now skeptical of myself as I see myself forming one, so huge grain of salt, but:
It’s hard to look at Tim Cook tongue-washing Trump’s shoes with that fake design award, just utterly unable to say no when “no” is the •only• correct response, and then not wonder about his failure to say no to a failed new design direction for his company’s most visible product.
@scott@carfree.city2026-03-26 02:57:28
two weekends ago, I pruned and staked this blueblossom ceanothus pretty aggressively. so far, it’s handling it fine! also collecting far less trash than it was before I did this. shoutout @…’s “cues to care”
@aral@mastodon.ar.al2026-02-26 07:47:43
“So you have TikTok just smashing our young people’s brains all day long with video of carnage in Gaza … And this is why so many of us can’t have a sane conversation with younger Jews because anything that we try to say to them, they are hearing it through this wall of carnage. So I want to give data and information and facts and arguments and they are just seeing in their minds carnage and I sound obscene.”
– Former Obama speechwriter Sarah Hurwitz
“They trust their own eyes and…
@cdarwin@c.im2026-03-25 14:53:52
On a hazy afternoon in the Persian Gulf nearly 40 years ago,
the captain of a U.S. Navy frigate summoned Lt. Gordan Van Hook to the bridge and handed him a pair of binoculars.
Through them, Lieutenant Van Hook, the ship’s chief engineer, saw the danger that lay ahead
— three Iranian mines.
The frigate, part of an American force sent to escort oil tankers, came to a stop well ahead of the mines.
But some 10 minutes later, an undetected mine exploded under the shi…
@cdarwin@c.im2026-03-25 22:04:44
On Tuesday famed climate scientist Kate Marvel joined the more than 10,000 people with PhDs in science, engineering and mathematics who, according to Science, are reported to have left the U.S. federal workforce since
Donald Trump took office in January.
Marvel resigned from NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Sciences (GISS), where she studied climate change and its effects on Earth’s systems. In her resignation letter, she wrote that “the decision to leave was not an easy one.”…
@cdarwin@c.im2026-05-25 02:57:42
Senate Republicans cast doubt on the viability of a potential peace deal between the United States and Iran over the weekend
as Donald Trump doubled down in support of his administration’s negotiations to end the nearly three-month-old war.
U.S. and Iranian officials have described an emerging framework that would reopen the Strait of Hormuz and in which, U.S. officials say, Iran would commit to disposing of its highly enriched uranium.
Iranian officials have also said that…
