fact check: they actually don’t always do that, it’s just sometimes

big oof.

We can conclude: that photo isn’t AI-generated. You can’t get an AI system to generate photos of an existing location; it’s just not possible given the current state of the art.

the author of this substack is woefully misinformed about the state of technology 🤦

it has, in fact, been possible for several years already for anyone to quickly generate convincing images (not to mention videos) of fictional scenes in real locations with very little effort.

The photograph—which appeared on the Associated Press feed, I think—was simply taken from a higher vantage point.

Wow, it keeps getting worse. They’re going full CSI on this photo, drawing a circle around a building on google street view where they think the photographer might have been, but they aren’t even going to bother to try to confirm their vague memory of having seen AP publishing it? wtf?

Fwiw, I also thought the image looked a little neural network-y (something about the slightly less-straight-than-they-used-to-be lines of some of the vehicles) so i spent a few seconds doing a reverse image search and found this snopes page from which i am convinced that that particular pileup of cars really did happen as it was also photographed by multiple other people.

RedHat was a major military contractor with job postings like this current one [archive] long before they were bought by another older and larger military contractor.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_World_War_II

https://web.archive.org/web/20240530005438/https://www.redhat.com/en/resources/israeli-defense-forces-case-study (original is 404 for some reason)

them: fedora is the lesser evil

me: but why do they have job listings like this [archive] with requirements like “This position requires daily on-site work at Fort Meade and an active Top Secret/SCI clearance with Polygraph” ? 🤔

they aren’t the only animal that does it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kleptoplasty#Animals

only hobbyists and artisans still use the standalone carrot.py that depends on peeler.

in enterprise environments everyone uses the pymixedveggies package (created using pip freeze of course) which helpfully vendors the latest peeled carrot along with many other things. just unpack it into a clean container and go on your way.

The canonical documentation is https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/filesystems/proc.rst (ctrl-f oom) but if you search a bit you’ll find various guides that might be easier to digest.

https://www.baeldung.com/linux/memory-overcommitment-oom-killer looks like an informative recent article on the subject, and reminds me that my knowledge is a bit outdated. (TIL about the choom(1) command which was added to util-linux in 2018 as an alternative to manipulating things in /proc directly…)

https://dev.to/rrampage/surviving-the-linux-oom-killer-2ki9 from 2018 might also be worth reading.

How to make your adjustments persist for a given desktop application is left as an exercise to the reader :)

I’m not sure what this comic is trying to say but in my recent experience a single misbehaving website can still consume all available swap at which point Linux will sometimes completely lock up for many minutes before the out-of-memory killer decides what to kill - and then sometimes it still kills the desktop environment instead of the browser.

(I do know how to use oom_adj; I’m talking about the default configuration on popular desktop distros.)

404 Media neglected to link to her website, which is https://ada-ada-ada.art/

I think it depends which side of the debate one is on?

$ systemd-analyze calendar tomorrow
Failed to parse calendar specification 'tomorrow': Invalid argument
Hint: this expression is a valid timestamp. Use 'systemd-analyze timestamp "tomorrow"' instead?
$ systemd-analyze timestamp tuesday
Failed to parse "tuesday": Invalid argument
Hint: this expression is a valid calendar specification. Use 'systemd-analyze calendar "tuesday"' instead?

ಠ_ಠ

$ for day in Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat Sun; do TZ=UTC systemd-analyze calendar "$day 02-29"|tail -2; done
    Next elapse: Mon 2044-02-29 00:00:00 UTC
       From now: 19 years 4 months left
    Next elapse: Tue 2028-02-29 00:00:00 UTC
       From now: 3 years 4 months left
    Next elapse: Wed 2040-02-29 00:00:00 UTC
       From now: 15 years 4 months left
    Next elapse: Thu 2052-02-29 00:00:00 UTC
       From now: 27 years 4 months left
    Next elapse: Fri 2036-02-29 00:00:00 UTC
       From now: 11 years 4 months left
    Next elapse: Sat 2048-02-29 00:00:00 UTC
       From now: 23 years 4 months left
    Next elapse: Sun 2032-02-29 00:00:00 UTC
       From now: 7 years 4 months left

(It checks out.)

Surprisingly its calendar specification parser actually allows for 31 days in every month:

$ TZ=UTC systemd-analyze calendar '02-29' && echo OK || echo not OK
  Original form: 02-29
Normalized form: *-02-29 00:00:00
    Next elapse: Tue 2028-02-29 00:00:00 UTC
       From now: 3 years 4 months left
OK
$ TZ=UTC systemd-analyze calendar '02-30' && echo OK || echo not OK
  Original form: 02-30
Normalized form: *-02-30 00:00:00
    Next elapse: never           
OK
$ TZ=UTC systemd-analyze calendar '02-31' && echo OK || echo not OK
  Original form: 02-31
Normalized form: *-02-31 00:00:00
    Next elapse: never           
OK
$ TZ=UTC systemd-analyze calendar '02-32' && echo OK || echo not OK
Failed to parse calendar specification '02-32': Invalid argument
not OK

Funny that blog calls it a “failed attempt at a backdoor” while neglecting to mention that the grsec post (which it does link to and acknowledges is the source of the story) had been updated months prior to explicitly refute that characterization:

5/22/2020 Update: This kind of update should not have been necessary, but due to irresponsible journalists and the nature of social media, it is important to make some things perfectly clear:

Nowhere did we claim this was anything more than a trivially exploitable vulnerability. It is not a backdoor or an attempted backdoor, the term does not appear elsewhere in this blog at all; any suggestion of the sort was fabricated by irresponsible journalists who did not contact us and do not speak for us.

There is no chance this code would have passed review and be merged. No one can push or force code upstream.

This code is not characteristic of the quality of other code contributed upstream by Huawei. Contrary to baseless assertions from some journalists, this is not Huawei’s first attempt at contributing to the kernel, in fact they’ve been a frequent contributor for some time.

Wasn’t Huawei trying to put a Backdoor into linux?

as far as i know, that has not happened.

what makes you think it did?

After a minute of research I’m inclined to believe Godzilla egg-laying only happened in Roland Emmerich’s 1998 film.

Here is some contemporary reporting about it: https://www.chicagotribune.com/1998/05/19/godzilla-lays-an-egg-does-this-surprise-you/

Big, buff and bodacious, he’s so cool he can even reproduce himself–or herself. Turns out, Godzilla’s a hermaphrodite.

Consistent with the mythology, this giant lizard is a mutant by-product of nuclear radiation. As the only member of its species to have survived a bomb test in French Polynesia, Godzilla must assume male and female reproductive functions to maintain the lineage.

Why Godzilla feels compelled to travel all the way to Manhattan to lay its eggs is a mystery not clearly explained in the script, but, like any Sinatra fan, the monster probably thought, “If I can make it there, I’ll make it anywhere.” So, it was off to New York, New York, where–like the Knicks–the creature lays a lot of eggs in Madison Square Garden.

see also: https://fictionhorizon.com/how-does-godzilla-reproduce/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G7F5KM2sICM

fremdscham++ 😬

Marmite was first

The headline should mention that they’re breaking 22-bit RSA, but then it would get a lot less clicks.

A different group of Chinese researchers set what I think is the current record when they factored a 48-bit number with a quantum computer two years ago: https://arxiv.org/abs/2212.12372

I guess the news here is that now they’ve reached 22 bits using the quantum annealing technique which works on D-Wave’s commercially-available quantum computers? That approach was previously able to factor an 18-bit number in 2018.

🥂 to the researchers, but 👎 to the clickbait headline writers. This is still nowhere near being a CRQC (cryptanalytically-relevant quantum computer).

in the same vein