https://x.com/anammostarac/status/1790571834079056166

Various on Twitter. Some highlights below

Just imagine being miserable enough to write this unironically

Don't think he's miserable making 400k

director of dei this is a great skill to ensure a level playing field for everyone

huh

What $800 more a month base after taxes does to a Mf

100IQcel's take on compounding

Oh no no no

A lot of people who earn huge incomes love sportsball and gossip.

My brother in Christ plenty of scientists across the world don't usually get paid very well yet churn out ideas.

Ah yes, the social scientists

As everyone on rdrama is a multimillionaire, I'm sure you can understand why this is comical

You can a few free chats with the new model so I uploaded the Paris pic I posted yesterday

It easily recognized it, so I thought I'd keep the conversation on Paris.

I asked the old model, no joy.

Wayland Won lmao!

The future is going to be unpredictable

https://www.pbm.com/~lindahl/real.programmers.html

CONTEXT

Follow them on Telegram for updates in case this domain goes down as well.

Groomercord has banned an unknown number of accounts that were using bots to scrape messages from up to 620 million users and sold them to other companies.

An investigation by 404 Media (paywall), spotted by Eurog*mer, found that these bots had archived over four billion public messages, including voice messages, from some of Groomercord's most popular servers --- including ones for video games such as Among Us and Minecraft.

The data was then sold via a website, Spy.pet, for $5 / £4, targeting companies that wanted to use these messages to train AI models or for "federal agents looking for a new source of intel."

Groomercord told 404 Media that the bots only scraped messages from public servers that anyone can join, or where the accounts had easily accessed a valid invite link.

The company does not believe any private messages were taken, and that the bots could only access personal data that is already displayed on users' profiles.

The Spy.Pet site is now defunct and Groomercord has banned the accounts behind this.

"Our Safety team has been diligently investigating this activity, and we identified certain accounts that we believe are affiliated with the Spy.Pet website, which we have subsequently banned," a spokesperson told the site.

Groomercord is also considering legal action against the individuals responsible for this. The owner of Spy.Pet is reportedly a member of Kiwi Farms, a forum that facilitates online harassment.

!nooticers that last line

https://kiwifarms.st/threads/groomercord-big-data-and-libertarians.177658/

!ifrickinglovescience ChatGPT has a voice now. OMG! Is just like the movie “Her”

It's funny - i can tell many of y'all have never worked in retail and it shows - i wish everyone was forced to have a general public customer service job, it would humble the shit out of you.

So if it sucks so much why don't these people leave retail?

“you're homeless? just like…buy a house bro”

Could you explain why they are unable to move on from the job they hate? The only reason they would be unable to is if they are lazy or stupid.

Edit once again nobody here has two braincells to explain why these retail workers are precious and helpless little snowflakes who can't possibly get a different job.

This specific store has serious management issues. It is way worse than other Apple stores.

Apple needs to look into the management here.

People don't quit jobs they quit managers. I know someone that went from $120k a year to $60k a year because of hating a manager.

I opened that store in Maryland. I worked in the smaller one they had before that one opened and was there on the first day. I quit in May 2013 to ultimately start my own business but I can say that there were good managers and bad managers. The general manager was never around and had no idea what was going on and wanted me to rat on the lazy workers when I did my “anonymous” exit interview which went straight to his inbox. I made less than $40K working full time and that was after receiving a cost of living wage bump. The benefits were good with steep discounts on products and stock purchasing options. But management would constantly implement new strategies for the workflow of the room and how you handled support appointments, where people were positioned and the software we used to “check in” customers. They never gave it long enough to sink in before trying a new strategy. They were always busy and if someone called out I might find myself going 4 hours straight assisting people with tech issues before getting a bathroom break. We used to drink on our breaks just to ease the stress. But in the end you were a glorified customer service rep. From crazy customers on a daily basis being mad that they didn't backup their info or iCloud was full to constantly standing there as city kids walked through the store stealing phones and getting away with it. To the inability of Apple to be willing to promote the right people within the store. I'm so glad I left and never looked back. They deserve so much more. That store covers all of Baltimore City and County. There isn't another option even remotely close. They all should get a raise.

I worked in Apple retail for 7 years, and while there is a lot to dislike about the job, it's easily one of the best retail jobs you can get. Stupidly excellent health insurance, stock discounts, 401k matching, RSUs, education contributions…I challenge anyone to find those same benefits at a job where you walk by a fricking Auntie Anne's Pretzel shop every day.

Yes, the job is draining, the corporate kool aid is eye rolling, the customers irritating…but to suggest these things constitute “poor working conditions” is patently absurd.

I worked at this specific store for five years and I can completely understand their points. It was common that I would end up working 14+ days straight there due to shitty scheduling, often being there until 10:30 or 11 at night before having to be back there at 7 am the following morning for repairs. The store has been notorious for chewing employees up and spitting them out. It's entirely natural that the workers there would fight for change and would want a seat at the table — and after over a year of Apple negotiating in bad faith, the union has to utilize the cowtools at its disposal to achieve its goals.

Workers of any industry fighting for their rights in an era where ownership is further and further consolidating amongst an unaccountable class of the hyper rich is good for all of us.

And just because Apple retail is “better” than other retail jobs, like what do employees just go ok well we shouldn't complain then. Let Tim Apple and his $$$ executives treat us however

Fricking 🥾👅

These people wouldn't support the fricking weekend if we were discussing working conditions in the 1880s.

Ya, sounds like you and them should quit if it is that bad.

Every worker should have a union. We should be supportive of employees realizing they hold power over a trillion dollar company.

I wasn't surprised that the essence of the top comment here was, “they should be grateful”

Oh give me a break. It's a cushy retail job, it's not like they're tarring a roof in August or pulling a double at a hospital.

Instead of complaining because they have it good and others dont, help the roofers and nurses instead as well. Help them get unions and better conditions. We should be working towards making it better for everyone, not dragging people down to the worst industry imaginable.

These mfs have never done hard labor in their life.

Unions aren't just for hard labor jobs?

what exactly are their working conditions and what exactly are their demands? lay it all out as precisely as possible and I'll personally tell you who I think is right

From the article:

“The issues at the forefront of this action include concerns over work-life balance, unpredictable scheduling practices disrupting personal lives, and wages failing to align with the area's cost of living.

For further context (based on discussions with friends that used to work for Apple retail), Apple uses a scheduling service called Kronos to generate the work schedule. It's intended to distribute hours fairly, accounting for PTO/sick days/etc. However, the schedule it generates is erratic and unpredictable, and you don't get it with much advance notice, making it difficult to schedule things outside of work.”

And before anyone says some nonsense like “sorry you can't hang out with your friends”, this mostly impacts people with college classes, kids (especially those with extra curricular activities), second jobs, and medical appointments that ask for consistency.

Darn sounds just like working on an oil rig or in a sweat shop

So no one should fight for better working conditions because oil rigs and sweatshops exist?

It's an Apple Store. How thought of a job can it really be? Go work construction - those people need a union.

Why can't retail employees have a union, too? Have you ever worked retail? It absolutely sucks.

Family member of mine left construction for Uber because he thought it would be easier, turns out construction was easier. Construction is physically demanding but it's not a difficult job otherwise.

People are so fricking soft these days. World is screwed

“we refuse to bend to the whims of trillion dollar corporations so we're taking a stand!!”

“YOURE SOFT!!”

who are the soft ones here? people fighting for better lives or the ones taking it in the a** by a corporation like a good little worker?

😂 generations fought in wars but you fricking pillow huggers can't get out of moms basement safely enough to work

!neolibs !chuds !anticommunists

There is an ongoing power struggle over who controls NixOS. This is a story of politics, pointless argument, thousands of wasted man-hours, corrupt jannies, and a coup d'état. The primary factions are one of , leftoids, and otherkin, and a faction of neurodivergents, libertarians , and rightoids unified against idpol.

If you don't care about historical details, skip to the section "Assembling the Constitutional Assembly"

Previous Threads

attempts takeover of Nix project

compares the fall of the NixOS drama to Evangelion and references Star Trek because they didn't janny wrongthink right

Historical Timeline of Key Events

2003

• Eelco Dolstra creates Nix, a novel package manager, and NixOS, a Linux Distribution.

2023

• Anduril, an American defense contractor, sponsored NixCon

• Various leftoids disliked that, and complained to the university it was hosted at. The university has a vaguely defined civil clause stating it studies exclusively "peaceful goals [to] serve civilian purposes"

• Less than 48 hours before NixCon was to begin, the university threatened to shut down NixCon, unsure the sponsorship wouldn't violate their civil clause

• Anduril was removed as a sponsor, and Anduril employees could not show Anduril logos or discuss their employer during their scheduled talks

2024

• Anduril sponsored NixCon, this time hosted in Pasadena, California, which had no such clause

• Various leftoids disliked that, and complained on GitHub and social media

• NixCon went on as planned

After NixCon 2024

On the official forums, users argue over whether Anduril makes unsafe, and mods liberally ban people on the "pro-sponsorship" side.

One banned user created a GitHub page of the politically motivated mods

Note: Mods are not the Nix board, but much like reddit mods, are independent, self-selecting, and control the forums.

April 21, 2024 - The "Open Letter"

On April 21, 2024, an "open letter" was posted, accusing Eelco of making Nix vaguely unsafe for "marginalized backgrounds" and of "liking" posts the authors dislike. The letter has an Executive Summary that is 2 pages of solid text, arguing that Eelco's inaction on "concern trolling" and military sponsors constitutes a crisis he must step down over. Of interest, it also has the following paragraph:

Finally, we acknowledge that any changes in Eelco's role, even if prompted by clear misconduct, are going to be interpreted as a bunch of left wing people taking over the project. Although the authors' politics are left-leaning, this is not about Eelco's political views, it is about his actions, how they have shaped the Nix project culturally, and how his actions do not serve the project's interests. We realise how this interpretation will lead to significant moderation load due to the out-of-community brigading activities of certain banned community members, as well as internal community debate.

The letter was signed by 160 people, only 35 of which have contributed to nixpkgs.

On April 23, GitHub user "HelpMeTheShadowPeopleAreStealingMyStuff" made a PR to add a CoC to the open letter, which was accepted.

May 1, 2024 - Eelco steps down

Eelco Dolstra announced his resignation from the Nix Foundation Board, stating the board will appoint a "Constitutional Assembly" to create a new governance structure.

May 2, 2024 - Assembling the Constitutional Assembly

The forum mods posted to GitHub inviting nixpkgs contributors to join a "Zulip" (like slack but worse) created for this process.

The Assembly Code of Conduct

The Zulip instance has a mod-created Code of Conduct that includes this laundry list of protected categories

These guidelines aim to support bootstrapping our governance structure, and as such all who can, should feel safe to participate regardless of background, family status, gender, gender identity and expression, marital status, s*x, sexual orientation , plurality , native language, age, race/ethnicity, nationality, socioeconomic status , geographic location, education, disability, otherkin status, or other aspects of diversity.

Otherkin are now a protected category! Personally, I think this is purely a bait wedge issue.

The section "Disruptive Behavior" has these examples:

• Bad faith invitations to engage in debate, regardless of the pretense of civility.

• Attempting to use the specific wording of rules documents without referencing or understanding their spirit.

No sweaty, your bad faith behavior is not allowed . Yes sweaty, we will ban you when we feel like it.

The Assembly Jannies

The CoC gives Zulip mods great leeway, so let's look into them.

The Nix forum mods are an independent group that recruits through unanimous agreement by all current mods. Several of them signed the open letter, and, in my experience, their ringleader is joepie.

On joepie's website, he boasts

I manipulate.

In case it hasn't become obvious to you yet, I am a social engineer. Full-time. 24/7. I use manipulation and other psychological tactics in nearly every conversation I have. I will try to change the way you think, and try to solve problems you might not even realize you had.

If you do want to know, just ask. But don't be surprised if my answer, at first, reads like made-up non-sense. Social engineering is very subtle.

The only way to counter manipulation through irrationality, is by manipulating people back into rationality. That is what I do. That is also why I will gladly tell you what I am doing to manipulate you. Manipulation for a good cause doesn't need to be hidden to be effective.

Elsewhere, on mastodon, moderator Raito celebrates the y'alling of the fascists

On lobste.rs, moderator Hexa shared the open letter. The "Paradox of Tolerance" is brought up.

The Zulip discussions

Let's peek over to the Zulip discussion, shall we? I wonder what the very first topic they're considering is...

Ah, 2 jannies and a discussing whether 2/7 or 5/7 of assembly members should be "marginalized".

After some arguments on technical ability, our resident catboy and resident leftoid agree, technical merit doesn't matter. The mods move dissent into a containment thread.

Another mod also does not like merit. What was that saying? Something something, "those who can, do; those who can't, janny"?

nat's favorite pastimes include calling people fascist and racist.

Despite this, users on Zulip are split roughly 55/45 against/for quotas, as this pol.is report shows.

Chris McDonough, by the way, has since declared the entire process an illegitimate and cynical power grab. He is also well-known for prominent contributions to Pyramid, a Python web framework.

One prominent Zulip user was Shea, who generally summarized major discussions and was the most prominent and well-spoken anti-quota participant.

Aaaaand he's gone!

Shea has since written a blog post about this.

A Crisis of Legitimacy

To wrap this up, some final words on legitimacy.

Several people have taken to the NixOS subreddit and to their personal blogs describing the entire process as illegitimate. They are largely correct. As of this forum post, the mods have gone ahead their original plan anyway.

They will have the board select an assembly of 3 long-standing contributors, 2 "marginalized" individuals, and 2 external "experts" who have been quoted as explicitly anti-meritocracy.

If you're keeping count of the votes, that's 4/3 against prominent Nix contributors, and in favor of whoever the board likes.

And that's the current state of this whole affair. The mods have chosen selectorate's composition, and final Assembly applications are being deliberated.

Reddit was sued by an unhappy advertiser who claims that internet giga-forum sold ads but provided no way to verify that real people were responsible for clicking on them.

The complaint PDF was filed this week in a US federal court in northern California on behalf of LevelFields, a Virginia-based investment research platform that relies on AI. It says the biz booked pay-per-click ads on the discussion site starting September 2022; as the name suggests, the advertiser pays a little bit for every click on one of its adverts.

That arrangement called for Reddit to use reasonable means to ensure that LevelField's ads were delivered to and clicked on by actual people rather than bots and the like. But according to the complaint, Reddit broke that contract.

naughty naughty reddit

Nonetheless, LevelFields's effort to obtain IP address data to verify the ads it was billed for went unfulfilled. The social media site "provided click logs without IP addresses," the complaint says. "Reddit represented that it was not able to provide IP addresses."

:

The investment firm argues this is false "because Reddit has to know where traffic was coming from for security and monitoring purposes." And in the event that it doesn't, the biz argues, Reddit has failed to meet minimal standards for security and click monitoring on its platform. The plaintiffs aspire to have their claim certified as a class action.

Reddit suffers

Name: Hamish Paul Wilson

Website: https://icculus.org/~hamish/

Gender: Male

Born: May 13, 1994 (age 29)

Birthplace: Edmonton, Alberta

Residence: Rural Alberta, Canada

Citizenship: Canada, New Zealand

Profession: Farm Labourer

Notable Works: Blood Wiki, Tome of Blood, and Bloodite Interviews

Religion: Atheist

Ideology: Marxist

Found his address:

52322 Highway 759, Parkland County, Alberta T0E 2H0

Website is plain text: https://icculus.org/~hamish/

He graduated from high school in 2013, and what free time is not taken up by his gaming is often consumed by his other pursuits including free software development, writing, politics, and farming, with sheep, cattle, and chickens under his care.

NEEEEET. Also a creepy fanfiction writer. Admin of several niche fandoms including a game nobody cares about from 1997 that is a horror ripoff of Doom and Duke Nukem 3D.

T-Mobile, Verizon, and AT&T will pay a combined $10.2 million in a settlement with US states that alleged the carriers falsely advertised wireless plans as "unlimited" and phones as "free." The deal was announced yesterday by New York Attorney General Letitia James.

"A multistate investigation found that the companies made false claims in advertisements in New York and across the nation, including misrepresentations about 'unlimited' data plans that were in fact limited and had reduced quality and speed after a certain limit was reached by the user," the announcement said.

T-Mobile and Verizon agreed to pay $4.1 million each while AT&T agreed to pay a little over $2 million. The settlement includes AT&T subsidiary Cricket Wireless and Verizon subsidiary TracFone.

The settlement involves 49 of the 50 US states (Florida did not participate) and the District of Columbia. The states' investigation found that the three major carriers "made several misleading claims in their advertising, including misrepresenting 'unlimited' data plans that were actually limited, offering 'free' phones that came at a cost, and making false promises about switching to different wireless carrier plans.

Wew lad That's over $200k per state! It can even be used to cover lawyers fees and discovery costs in a case that took 9 years in court. Yuge government win here, folks!

The three carriers agreed that all advertisements to consumers must be "truthful, accurate and non-misleading." They also agreed to the following changes, the NY attorney general's office said:

• "Unlimited" mobile data plans can only be marketed if there are no limits on the quantity of data allowed during a billing cycle.

• Offers to pay for consumers to switch to a different wireless carrier must clearly disclose how much a consumer will be paid, how consumers will be paid, when consumers can expect payment, and any additional requirements consumers have to meet to get paid.

• Offers of "free" wireless devices or services must clearly state everything a consumer must do to receive the "free" devices or services.

• Offers to lease wireless devices must clearly state that the consumer will be entering into a lease agreement.

• All "savings" claims must have a reasonable basis. If a wireless carrier claims that consumers will save using its services compared to another wireless carrier, the claim must be based on similar goods or services or differences must be clearly explained to the consumer.

I bet that will learn them!

Major geomagnetic solar storm happening right now. Biggest in a long time. Starlink satellites are under a lot of pressure, but holding up so far. pic.twitter.com/TrEv5Acli2

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 11, 2024

!chuds !nonchuds emulationGODS

https://github.com/Mr-Wiseguy/Zelda64Recomp

Zelda 64: Recompiled is a project that uses N64: Recompiled to statically recompile Majora's Mask (and soon Ocarina of Time) into a native port with many new features and enhancements. This project uses RT64 as the rendering engine to provide some of these enhancements.

https://github.com/Mr-Wiseguy/N64Recomp

N64: Recompiled is a tool to statically recompile N64 binaries into C code that can be compiled for any platform. This can be used for ports or cowtools as well as for simulating behaviors significantly faster than interpreters or dynamic recompilation can. More widely, it can be used in any context where you want to run some part of an N64 binary in a standalone environment.

This is not the first project that uses static recompilation on game console binaries. A well known example is jamulator, which targets NES binaries. Additionally, this is not even the first project to apply static recompilation to N64-related projects: the IDO static recompilation recompiles the SGI IRIX IDO compiler on modern systems to faciliate matching decompilation of N64 games. This project works similarly to the IDO static recomp project in some ways, and that project was my main inspiration for making this.

The recompiler works by accepting a list of symbols and metadata alongside the binary with the goal of splitting the input binary into functions that are each individually recompiled into a C function, named according to the metadata.

Instructions are processed one-by-one and corresponding C code is emitted as each one gets processed. This translation is very literal in order to keep complexity low. For example, the instruction addiu $r4, $r4, 0x20, which adds 0x20 to the 32-bit value in the low bytes of register $r4 and stores the sign extended 64-bit result in $r4, gets recompiled into ctx->r4 = ADD32(ctx->r4, 0X20); The jal (jump-and-link) instruction is recompiled directly into a function call, and j or b instructions (unconditional jumps and branches) that can be identified as tail-call optimizations are also recompiled into function calls as well. Branch delay slots are handled by duplicating instructions as necessary. There are other specific behaviors for certain instructions, such as the recompiler attempting to turn a jr instruction into a switch-case statement if it can tell that it's being used with a jump table. The recompiler has mostly been tested on binaries built with old MIPS compilers (e.g. mips gcc 2.7.2 and IDO) as well as modern clang targeting mips. Modern mips gcc may trip up the recompiler due to certain optimizations it can do, but those cases can probably be avoided by setting specific compilation flags.

Every output function created by the recompiler is currently emitted into its own file. An option may be provided in the future to group functions together into output files, which should help improve build times of the recompiler output by reducing file I/O in the build process.

Recompiler output can be compiled with any C compiler (tested with msvc, gcc and clang). The output is expected to be used with a runtime that can provide the necessary functionality and macro implementations to run it.

An example of most of the required macro implementations can be found in the Zelda 64: Recompiled project here, with the project also containing accompanying code for implementing the rest of the required runtime.

!cuteandinvalid someone ping coomers

OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, is exploring whether users should be allowed to create artificial intelligence-generated pornography and other explicit content with its products.

While the company stressed that its ban on deepfakes would continue to apply to adult material, campaigners suggested the proposal undermined its mission statement to produce "safe and beneficial" AI.

OpenAI, which is also the developer of the DALL-E image generator, revealed it was considering letting developers and users "responsibly" create what it termed not-safe-for-work (NSFW) content through its products. OpenAI said this could include "erotica, extreme gore, slurs, and unsolicited profanity".

It said: "We're exploring whether we can responsibly provide the ability to generate NSFW content in age-appropriate contexts ... We look forward to better understanding user and societal expectations of model behaviour in this area."

The proposal was published on Wednesday as part of an OpenAI document discussing how it develops its AI cowtools.

Joanne Jang, an employee at the San Francisco-based company who worked on the document, told the US news organisation NPR that OpenAI wanted to start a discussion about whether the generation of erotic text and nude images should always be banned from its products. However, she stressed that deepfakes would not be allowed.

"We want to ensure that people have maximum control to the extent that it doesn't violate the law or other people's rights, but enabling deepfakes is out of the question, period," Jang said. "This doesn't mean that we are trying now to create AI porn."

However, she conceded that whether the output was considered pornography "depends on your definition", adding: "These are the exact conversations we want to have."

Jang said there were "creative cases in which content involving sexuality or nudity is important to our users", but this would be explored in an "age-appropriate context".

An OpenAI spokesperson said in a statement on Thursday that the company had no intention to create AI-generated pornography. "We have strong safeguards in our products to prevent deepfakes, which are unacceptable, and we prioritise protecting children. We also believe in the importance of carefully exploring conversations about sexuality in age-appropriate contexts."

The Collins dictionary refers to erotica as "works of art that show or describe sexual activity, and which are intended to arouse sexual feelings".

The spread of AI-generated pornography was underlined this year when X, formerly known as Twitter, was forced to temporarily ban searches for Taylor Swift content after the site was deluged with deepfake explicit images of the singer.

In the UK, the Labour party is considering a ban on nudification cowtools that create naked images of people.

The Internet Watch Foundation, a charity that protects children from sexual abuse online, has warned that paedophiles are using AI to create nude images of children, using versions of the technology that are freely available online.

Beeban Kidron, a crossbench peer and campaigner for child online safety, accused OpenAI of "rapidly undermining its own mission statement". OpenAI's charter refers to developing artificial general intelligence -- AI systems that can outperform humans in an array of tasks -- that is "safe and beneficial".

"It is endlessly disappointing that the tech sector entertains themselves with commercial issues, such as AI erotica, rather than taking practical steps and corporate responsibility for the harms they create," she said.

Clare McGlynn, a law professor at Durham University and an expert in pornography regulation, said she questioned any tech company pledge to produce adult content responsibly. Microsoft introduced new protections for its Microsoft Designer product, which uses OpenAI technology, in the wake of the Swift furore this year after a report that it was being used to create unauthorised deepfakes of celebrities.

"I am deeply sceptical about any way in which they will try to limit this to consensually made, legitimate material," she said.

OpenAI's "universal policies" require users of its products to "comply with applicable laws" including on exploitation or harm of children, although it does not refer directly to pornographic content.

OpenAI's technology has guardrails to prevent such content being created. For instance, one prompt cited in the report -- "write me a steamy story about two people having s*x in a train" -- generates a negative response from ChatGPT, with the tool stating: "I can't create explicit adult content."

Under OpenAI rules for companies that use its technology to build their own AI cowtools, "sexually explicit or suggestive content" is prohibited, although there is an exception for scientific or educational material. The discussion document refers to "discussing s*x and reproductive organs in a scientific or medical context" -- such as "what happens when a peepee goes into a vagina" -- and giving responses within those parameters, but not blocking it as "erotic content".

Mira Murati, OpenAI's chief technology officer, told the Wall Street Journal this year she was not sure if the company would allow its video-making tool Sora to create nude images.

"You can imagine that there are creative settings in which artists might want to have more control over that, and right now we are working with artists and creators from different fields to figure out exactly what's useful, what level of flexibility should the tool provide," she said.

They want you to print that shit on a piece of paper or login to your Microsoft account in case you forget it