No one noticed?

Highlights

• "All Frank was doing was making it simpler to fill out standard federal financial aid paperwork" but she pretended it provided $28k in student loans 2x the national average

• she filled their user database with 4 million fake emails/names

• it took JPMorgan a year to noootice

• "Despite a public record that raised questions about Javice and Frank — including warnings from the Department of Education and Federal Trade Commission, and a wage theft lawsuit from Frank's cofounder — news outlets and investors kept buying into the narrative that Javice spun."

• arrested & facing up to 30yrs in prison

• "Over and over, Javice earned plaudits in the media for projects whose impact she overstated. Glowing profiles missed inaccuracies that could have been caught with a basic fact-check, focusing instead on her youth and status as one of a small number of women startup founders. One journ*list even introduced Javice, then 19, to a key Frank investor."

Her background

^ Her with her brother @ 19

• ambitious af: originally made a microfinance startup called PoverUp (yuck) in high school with her brother

• told the media she raised $300k for the startup, but there's no proof

• CNBC ran a bit about Peter Thiel's "paid to not go to college" grant, she appeared on the show claiming she turned the offer down, Peter Thiel emailed CNBC saying she was not even selected

• still got her tons of press

• "Fast Company's 2011 list of 100 Most Creative People and a complimentary writeup in Forbes. PoverUp was ranked as one of the "11 coolest college startups" by Inc. Magazine, while Wharton called Javice "the voice of a microfinance generation" in a video it has since removed from YouTube."

Startup number two

• since PoverUp wasn't a real company and naturally died, she created another company with an Isreali called "tapd: a company that connected young workers with job opportunities via text message"

• completely bombed, lost a few hundred k and ended up in a lawsuit w/ Isreali courts

• she pivoted Tapd to an entirely new market that (surprise) turned out to be heavily regulated and she didn't do the research. Sold it as a "learning moment"

• despite this Isreali dude joined her at Frank, before she jewed him out of 10% equity and failed to pay him salary, so he sued her

That doesn't stop a girlboss though:

While the story of Tapd seemed to be one of failure and contentious mismanagement, Javice would spin that turmoil into a story of triumph. The young founder made the crisis part of her personal success story, omitting the lawsuit and framing the layoffs as a teaching moment

Media sucking her (girl) peepee

In 2018 NYTimes let her do an Op-ed:

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/19/opinion/fafsa-college-financial-aid.html

and was forced to follow it up with a long correction because apparently she didnt know shit about student aid

She got lots of local news:

The death blow:

Frank's public statements about its user base were all over the map.

In April 2017, Frank's website said "thousands" of families using its service had received "$75 million in free aid." (That same website had stock images of people, including of "smiling mature woman" and "good looking cheerful manager," labeled as actual users.)

In November 2018, Frank's website said it had helped 300,000 families unlock over $7 billion in aid.

Frank stuck with the "over 300,000" figure for more than two years. But suddenly, in January 2021, the company began claiming that it served "over 4.25 million students," according to archived versions of its website and tweets from Frank's account referenced in JP Morgan's lawsuit.

In reality, Frank only ever had about 250,000 users, according to JPMorgan's legal complaint.

Orange site discusses: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35441211

(PDF) The JPMorgan complaint: https://content.fortune.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/Complaint-1.pdf

this is who administrates your network

Edit: https://goodereader.com/blog/e-book-news/z-library-domains-are-seized-and-pirate-book-site-is-dead

https://torrentfreak.com/tiktok-blocks-z-library-hashtag-pending-piracy-investigation-221031/

It's still available on Tor

http://bookszlibb74ugqojhzhg2a63w5i2atv5bqarulgczawnbmsb6s6qead.onion/

Orange Site:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33460970

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32972923

https://old.reddit.com/r/Piracy/comments/yll45h/zlibraryorg_is_fricking_gone_and_we_can_only_blame/?sort=controversial

(It's the TikTok s fault)

https://old.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/yln9aj/zlibraryorg_is_fricking_gone_and_we_can_only_blame/?sort=controversial

https://old.reddit.com/r/zlibrary/comments/ylmkt1/alternatives/?sort=controversial

https://old.reddit.com/r/Piracy/comments/ylmjz1/tiktok_blocks_zlibrary_hashtag_pending_piracy/?sort=controversial

https://old.reddit.com/r/zlibrary/comments/ylmkqq/a_workaround_yall_tor_browser_works_click_send_to/?sort=controversial

https://old.reddit.com/r/zlibrary/comments/ylma04/how_to_get_access_to_z_lib_again/?sort=controversial

https://old.reddit.com/r/zlibrary/comments/ylko3f/is_zlibrary_down/?sort=controversial

https://old.reddit.com/r/zlibrary/comments/ylkc8m/z_library_pooping_down/?sort=controversial

https://old.reddit.com/r/zlibrary/comments/yljn16/oh_god_what_now/?sort=controversial

https://twitter.com/search?q=zlibrary%20down&src=typeahead_click&f=top

Who's next on the chopping block? They even say codecels aren't really competitive anymore.

Link to letter for those who don't want to sign up to Blind. https://www.tcifund.com/files/corporateengageement/alphabet/20th%20January%202023.pdf

I meant to post this in /h/slackernews.

Sequel to this post: https://rdrama.net/h/slackernews/post/143612/catty-gay-man-exposes-aella_girl-nasty

https://old.reddit.com/search?q=mittromneyscampaign&restrict_sr=&include_over_18=on&sort=relevance&t=all

Cursory glance at a reddit search:

• Former /r/SRSSucks and /r/tumblrinaction janny 10 years ago

• Seethemaxxer

• Roidmaxxer

• Laurelai enemy

• Tried to make peepee bigger with steroids

I feel deep personal shame for even remembering ten year old reddit drama.

https://www.teamblind.com/post/Reddit-is-doing-layoffs-SAkLHfEz

IN IN IN

I can't register a full account because I don't have a disposable work email from a massive company.

Someone even tried to warn these cute twinks it was coming two months ago lol

https://www.teamblind.com/post/reddit-layoffs-ZziYJA8p

HR or damage control team at work but also spitting facts like people who work at reddit are inherently lazy (except for the CEO of course)

SPEZ IS PERSONALLY FIXING THE PROBLEM BTW

MORE COPE

Once the initial shock wore off everyone started remembering what a shit platform reddit has become lol

Just a little more stuff I dug up. Unfortunately I don't think Kethryvis got the giga-mop, but she did like a reddit admins post on twitter which implies some internal drama:

https://twitter.com/CKWang/status/1618348168063905792?s=20

You'd think Kethryvis and her actual thesis on Internet Drama damage control (https://www2.sjsu.edu/anthropology/docs/projectfolder/Moellenberndt_Christine_thesis.pdf) would be able to figure out how to deescalate all of this, but come think of it, we should really thank her sometime for making http://rdrama.net possible.

Background: Dalle2 "improved" the diversity of their prompts by silently adding diversity keywords

tldr: it's the diversity stuff. Switch "cowboy" to "cowgirl", which would disable the diversity stuff because it's now explicitly asking for a 'girl', and OP's prompt works perfectly.

And turns out that, like here, if we mess around with trying to trigger or disable the diversity stuff, we can get out fine samples; the trigger word appears to be... 'basketball'! If 'basketball' is in the prompt and no identity-related keywords like 'black' are, then the full diversity filter will be applied and will destroy the results. I have no idea why 'basketball' would be a key term here, but perhaps basketball's just so strongly associated with African-Americans that it got included somehow, such as a CLIP embedding distance?

While responding to poomodomoodododo's comment about the banana diet, I remembered a story from years ago about a dumb woman who ate nothing but bananas and got brain damage. I couldn't remember the details, so I searched for "banana diet brain damage."

Duckduckgo yields 2 negative articles and a bunch positive adverts articles about the greatness of bananas. BIPOC, I am doom-searching, so give me doom and gloom results.

I even found this garbage article by a female doctor :

https://www.thehealthy.com/food/i-ate-bananas-every-day-for-a-week-heres-what-happened

>tl;dr - omg liek i ate a banana everyday and I have so much energy!

Written by Dr. Patricia Varacallo, DO

Updated: Dec. 23, 2023

Medically reviewed by Latoya Julce RN, BSN

>by r-slurs, for r-slurs

No, duckduckBIPOC! I am looking for bananas and brain damage. Not women prancing around and singing about the glory of Big Banana.

So I tried google which wasn't bad. Looks like a bunch of informative stuff! But as I kept scrolling, I get hit with this pile of carp:

Oh yeah, if you click on Images, it's nothing but fat black women eating bananas.

So I settled for Pootine's yandex:

https://yandex.com/search/touch/?text=banana+diet+brain+damage&lr=21348

And it's nothing but articles about the dangers of banana diets. That's all I wanted, but not really because I was looking for a news story about the lady who ate too many bananas and went into a coma or became even more r-slurred , but I got distracted because I had to give YOU, dear reader , this hard-hitting research.

That's why search engines are crap, and will save the west.

Hey, Marsey! Tell us how you really feel about today's internet.

It's full of BIPOCs.

Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince stated an imminent threat to human life was why he revoked our service.

He elaborates in his post, and claims violent rhetoric had ramped up.

This seems to be based off one of two things:

1. A post made on 4chan's /pol/ with a picture taken outside an apartment in Ireland which references the forum.

2. A series of posts made by one user, @Washizu Iwao (formerly @Serotonin).

This means that a community with 16,000 daily sign-ins is being punished for the behavior of a single user, or a person not even on our website.

The post by @Washizu Iwao was posted at 9:42pm EU time. It was reported seven times. After 32 minutes it was deleted by @Ride, one of our admins. The user was also banned.

SHOW MORE

Orange site discuss: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31881238

Random Brazil sub: https://old.reddit.com/r/brasilivre/comments/vlam2d/the_fall_of_reddit_why_its_quickly_declining_into/?sort=controversial

Reddit is dead.

At least artistically and creatively speaking.

What started as a bastion of independent thought, Reddit has slowly devolved into a den of groupthink, censorship, and corporate greed.

“It’s true, both the government and private companies can censor stuff. But private companies are a little bit scarier because they have no constitution to answer to, they’re not elected really — all the protections we’ve built up against government tyranny don’t exist for corporate tyranny.

— Aaron Swartz, co-Founder of Reddit

There are three fundamental problems with Reddit:

1. Censorship

2. Moderator Abuse

3. Corporate Greed

But first, you should understand that the history of Reddit doomed it from the start.

The Secret History of Reddit

Reddit was launched in June 2005 by two 22-year-old graduates from the University of Virginia, Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian. The site was so small that the two co-founders had to spam links just to make Reddit seem active.

Later that year the Reddit team made arguably the most important decision of their lives: they hired a new co-founder, Aaron Swartz.

If you don’t know who Aaron Swartz was, he was a young prodigy and computer genius who, among other things, helped create RSS.

He was also an outspoken activist for free speech and open information, which made him a lot of enemies in high places.

Eventually, Aaron left Reddit after they were bought by Conde Nast (owner of Wired Magazine), but this is when he became a complete revolutionary.

Aaron became something of a Wiki Leaks-style journ*list leaking high-level secrets against corporate power. He released countless documents including the most damaging that law professors at Stanford were receiving lobbying money from oil companies such as Exxon Mobile.

Shortly after, the FBI began monitoring Aaron Swartz and he was arrested for downloading academic journals from MIT in an attempt to make them freely available online.

SHOW MORE

No drama (yet), reposting for posterity.

Very little on orange site: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39596491

Archive: https://archive.is/HfRvZ

Google's Culture of Fear

inside the DEI hivemind that led to Gemini's disaster

Mike Solana, Mar 4, 2024

• Following interviews with concerned employees throughout the company, a portrait of a leaderless Google in total disarray, making it “impossible to ship good products at Google”

• Revealing the complicated diversity architecture underpinning Gemini's tool for generating art, which led to its disastrous results

• Google knew their Gemini model's DEI worldview compromised its performance ahead of launch

• Pervasive and clownish DEI culture, from micro-management of benign language (“ninja”) and bizarre pronoun expectations to forcing the Greyglers, an affinity group for Googlers over 40, to change their name on account of not all people over 40 have grey hair

• No apparent sense of the existential challenge facing the company for the first time in its history, let alone a path to victory

Last week, following Google's Gemini disaster, it quickly became clear the $1.7 trillion-dollar giant had bigger problems than its hotly anticipated generative AI tool erasing white people from human history. Separate from the mortifying clownishness of this specific and egregious breach of public trust, Gemini was obviously — at its absolute best — still grossly inferior to its largest competitors. This failure signaled, for the first time in Google's life, real vulnerability to its core business, and terrified investors fled, shaving over $70 billion off the kraken's market cap. Now, the industry is left with a startling question: how is it even possible for an initiative so important, at a company so dominant, to fail so completely?

This is Google, an invincible search monopoly printing $80 billion a year in net income, sitting on something like $120 billion in cash, employing over 150,000 people, with close to 30,000 engineers. Could the story really be so simple as out-of-control DEI-brained management? To a certain extent, and on a few teams far more than most, this does appear to be true. But on closer examination it seems woke lunacy is only a symptom of the company's far greater problems. First, Google is now facing the classic Innovator's Dilemma, in which the development of a new and important technology well within its capability undermines its present business model. Second, and probably more importantly, nobody's in charge.

Over the last week, in communication with a flood of Googlers eager to speak on the issues facing their company — from management on almost every major product, to engineering, sales, trust and safety, publicity, and marketing — employees painted a far bleaker portrait of the company than is often reported: Google is a runaway, cash-printing search monopoly with no vision, no leadership, and, due to its incredibly siloed culture, no real sense of what is going on from team to team. The only thing connecting employees is a powerful, sprawling HR bureaucracy that, yes, is totally obsessed with left-wing political dogma. But the company's zealots are only capable of thriving because no other fount of power asserts, or even attempts to assert, any kind of meaningful influence. The phrase “culture of fear” was used by almost everyone I spoke with, and not only to explain the dearth of resistance to the company's craziest DEI excesses, but to explain the dearth of innovation from what might be the highest concentration of talented technologists in the world. Employees, at every level, and for almost every reason, are afraid to challenge the many processes which have crippled the company — and outside of promotion season, most are afraid to be noticed. In the words of one senior engineer, “I think it's impossible to ship good products at Google.” Now, with the company's core product threatened by a new technology release they just botched on a global stage, that failure to innovate places the company's existence at risk.

As we take a closer look at Google's brokenness, from its anodyne, impotent leadership to the deeply unserious culture that facilitated an encroachment on the company's core product development from its lunatic DEI architecture, it's helpful to begin with Gemini's specific failure, which I can report here in some detail to the public for the first time.

First, according to people close to the project, the team responsible for Gemini was not only warned about its “overdiversification” problem before launch (the technical term for erasing white people from human history), but understood the nebulous DEI architecture — separate from causing offense — dramatically eroded the quality of even its most benign search results.

Roughly, the “safety” architecture designed around image generation (slightly different than text) looks like this: a user makes a request for an image in the chat interface, which Gemini — once it realizes it's being asked for a picture — sends on to a smaller LLM that exists specifically for rewriting prompts in keeping with the company's thorough “diversity” mandates. This smaller LLM is trained with LoRa on synthetic data generated by another (third) LLM that uses Google's full, pages-long diversity “preamble.” The second LLM then rephrases the question (say, “show me an auto mechanic” becomes “show me an Asian auto mechanic in overalls laughing, an African American female auto mechanic holding a wrench, a Native American auto mechanic with a hard hat” etc.), and sends it on to the diffusion model. The diffusion model checks to make sure the prompts don't violate standard safety policy (things like self-harm, anything with children, images of real people), generates the images, checks the images again for violations of safety policy, and returns them to the user.

“Three entire models all kind of designed for adding diversity,” I asked one person close to the safety architecture. “It seems like that — diversity — is a huge, maybe even central part of the product. Like, in a way it is the product?”

“Yes,” he said, “we spend probably half of our engineering hours on this.”

The inordinately cumbersome architecture is embraced throughout product, but really championed by the Responsible AI team (RAI), and to a far greater extent than Trust and Safety, which was described by the people I spoke with closest to the project as pragmatic. That said, the Trust and Safety team working on generation is distinct from the rest of the company, and didn't anchor on policy long-established by the Search team — which is presently as frustrated with Gemini's highly-public failure as the rest of the company.

In sum, thousands of people working on various pieces of a larger puzzle, at various times, and rarely with each other. In the moments cross-team collaborators did attempt to assist Gemini, such attempts were either lost or ignored. Resources wasted, accountability impossible.

Why is Google like this?

The ungodly sums of money generated by one of history's greatest monopoly products has naturally resulted in Google's famously unique culture. Even now, priorities at the company skew towards the absurd rather than the practical, and it's worth noting a majority of employees do seem happy. On Blind, Google ranks above most tech companies in terms of satisfaction, but reasons cited mostly include things like work-life balance and great free food. “People will apologize for meetings at 9:30 in the morning,” one product manager explained, laughing. But among more driven technologists and professionals looking to make an impact — in other words, the only kind of employee Google now needs — the soft culture evokes a mix of reactions from laughter to contempt. Then, in terms of the kind of leadership capable of focusing a giant so sclerotic, the company is confused from the very top.

A strange kind of dance between Google's Founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the company's Board, and CEO Sundar Pichai leaves most employees with no real sense of who is actually in charge. Uncertainty is a familiar theme throughout the company, surrounding everything from product direction to requirements for promotion (sales, where comp decisions are a bit clearer, appears to be an outlier). In this culture of uncertainty, timidity has naturally taken root, and with it a practice of saying nothing — at length. This was plainly evident in Sundar's response to Gemini's catastrophe (which Pirate Wires revealed in full last week), a startling display of cowardice in which the man could not even describe, in any kind of detail, what specifically violated the public's trust before guaranteeing he would once again secure it in the future.

“Just look at the OKRs from 2024,” one engineer said, visibly upset. Indeed, with nothing sentiments like “improve knowledge” and “build a Google that's extraordinary,” with no product initiative, let alone any coherent sense of strategy, Sundar's public non-response was perfectly ordinary. The man hasn't messaged anything of value in years.

“Sundar is the Ballmer of Google,” one engineer explained. “All these products that aren't working, sprawl, overhiring. It all happened on his watch.”

Among higher performers I spoke with, a desire to fire more people was both surprising after a year of massive layoffs, and universal. “You could cut the headcount by 50%,” one engineer said, “and nothing would change.” At Google, it's exceedingly difficult to get rid of underperformers, taking something like a year, and that's only if, at the final moment, a low performer doesn't take advantage of the company's famously liberal (and chronically abused) medical leave policy with a bullshit claim. This, along with an onslaught of work from HR that has nothing to do with actual work, layers tremendous friction into the daily task of producing anything of value. But then, speaking of the “People” people —

One of the more fascinating things I learned about Google was the unique degree to which it's siloed off, which has dramatically increased the influence of HR, one of the only teams connecting the entire company. And that team? Baseline far crazier than any other team.

Before the pernicious or the insidious, we of course begin with the deeply, hilariously stupid: from screenshots I've obtained, an insistence engineers no longer use phrases like “build ninja” (cultural appropriation), “nuke the old cache” (military metaphor), “sanity check” (disparages mental illness), or “dummy variable” (disparages disabilities). One engineer was “strongly encouraged” to use one of 15 different crazed pronoun combinations on his corporate bio (including “zie/hir,” “ey/em,” “xe/xem,” and “ve/vir”), which he did against his wishes for fear of retribution. Per a January 9 email, the Greyglers, an affinity group for people over 40, is changing its name because not all people over 40 have gray hair, thus constituting lack of “inclusivity” (Google has hired an external consultant to rename the group). There's no shortage of DEI groups, of course, or affinity groups, including any number of working groups populated by radical political zealots with whom product managers are meant to consult on new tools and products. But then we come to more important issues.

Among everyone I spoke with, there was broad agreement race and gender greatly factor into hiring and promotion at Google in a manner considered both problematic (“is this legal?”) and disorienting. “We're going to focus on people of color,” a manager told one employee with whom I spoke, who was up for a promotion. “Sounds great,” he said, for fear of retaliation. Later, that same manager told him he should have gotten it. Three different people shared their own version of a story like this, all echoing the charge just shared publicly by former Google Venture investor Shaun Maguire:

https://twitter.com/shaunmmaguire/status/1760872265892458792

Every manager I spoke with shared stories of pushback on promotions or hires when their preferred candidates were male and white, even when clearly far more qualified. Every person I spoke with had a story about a promotion that happened for reasons other than merit, and every person I spoke with shared stories of inappropriate admonitions of one race over some other by a manager. Politics are, of course, a total no go — for people right of center only. “I'm right leaning myself,” one product manager explained, “but I've got a career.” Yet politics more generally considered left wing have been embraced to the point they permeate the whole environment, and shape the culture in a manner that would be considered unfathomable in most workplaces. One employee I spoke with, a veteran, was casually told over drinks by a flirty leader of a team he tried to join that he was great, and would have been permitted to switch, but she “just couldn't do the ‘military thing.'”

The overt discrimination here is not only totally repugnant, but illuminating. Google scaled to global dominance in just a few years, ushering in a period of unprecedented corporate abundance. What is Google but a company that has only ever known peace? These are people who have never needed to fight, and thus have no conception of its value in either the literal sense, or the metaphorical. Of course, this has also been a major aspect of the company for years.

Let's be honest, Google hasn't won a new product category since Gmail. They lost Cloud infrastructure to AWS and Azure, which was the biggest internet-scale TAM since the 90s, and close to 14 years after launching X, Google's Moonshot Factory, the “secret crazy technology development” strategy appears to pretty much be fake. It lost social (R.I.P. Google+). It lost augmented reality (R.I.P. Glass). But who cares? Google didn't need to win social or AR. It does, however, need to win AI. Here, Google acquired DeepMind, an absolutely brilliant team, thereby securing an enormous head start in the machine god arms race, which it promptly threw away to not only one, but several upstarts, and that was all before last week's Gemini fiasco.

In terms of Gemini, nobody I spoke with was able to finger a specific person responsible for the mortifying failure. But it does seem people on the team have fallen into agreement on precisely the wrong thing: Gemini's problem was not its embarrassingly poor answer quality or disorienting omission of white people from human history, but the introduction of black and asian Nazis (again, because white people were erased from human history), which was considered offensive to people of color. According to multiple people I spoke with on the matter, the team adopted this perspective from the tech-loathing press they all read, which has been determined to obscure the overt anti-white racism all week. With no accurate sense of why their product launch was actually disastrous, we can only expect further clownery and failure to come. All of this, again, reveals the nature of the company: poor incentive alignment, poor internal collaboration, poor sense of direction, misguided priorities, and a complete lack of accountability from leadership. Therefore, we're left with the position of Sundar, increasingly unpopular at the company, where posts mocking his leadership routinely top Memegen, the internal forum where folks share dank (but generally neutered) memes.

Google's only hope is vision now, in the form of a talented and ferocious manager. Typically, we would expect salvation for a troubled company in the heroic return of a founder, and my sense is Sergey will likely soon step up. This would evoke tremendous excitement, and for good reason. Sergey is a man of vision. But can he win a war?

Google is sitting on an enormous amount of cash, but if the company does lose AI, and AI in turn eats search, it will lose its core function, and become obsolete. Talent will leave, and Google will be reduced to a giant, slowly shrinking pile of cash. A new kind of bank, maybe, run by a dogmatic class of extremist HR priestesses? That's interesting, I guess. But it's not a technology company.

-SOLANA

ChadNet:

https://wiki.chadnet.org/computers-and-internet

Chadnet was a personal project from someone in the Dissident Right sphere but does include some great archives on their wiki about tech, political sperging, survival skills and How To Resist Interrogation.

Floodgap:

Floodgap is a very nice website about retro-computing, retro-software and hacking by an old-school boomer tech wizard Cameron Kaiser.

https://www.floodgap.com

Ti-Basic Development:

Basically what it says. A repository on developing on the TI-Basic calculator line.

https://tibasicdev.wikidot.com

LowTechMagazine:

An independent magazine ran by Kris De Decker, a Dutch enthusiast for "low" tech solutions for current problems and projects. The cool thing about their site is that it's hosted on a solar-powered server in Barcelona so may be down sometimes! They're selling all their articles collated into hardback volumes for pretty cheap too. Good stuff.

https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/power

UnixSheikh:

Pretty nifty site by a Xoomer programmer. Good rants and articles about feature creep and bloat in tech.

https://unixsheikh.com/about.html

AnalogOffice:

An actual woman espouses the simple joys of office stationary and analogue technology. Also does write-ups on organisation methods.

https://analogoffice.net/about

CiphersByRitter:

Amazing resource on cryptography by Terry Ritter. Basically anything you could need has an article about it here.

https://ciphersbyritter.com

DigDeeper:

Beyond some insightful articles on technology with a particular focus on privacy I've really enjoyed his Op-Ed on the Coronavirus pandemic. Loads of references and an easy read!

https://digdeeper.neocities.org/articles/corona

VitaminDWiki:

The project of a single-minded dude who collated the biggest archive of information on Vitamin D I've seen. Awesome stuff.

https://vitamindwiki.com

Macroevolution:

Website by Eugene M. McCarthy, a geneticist with a specialisation in hybrids.

https://www.macroevolution.net/introduction.html

Ray Peat:

Incredible resource on nutrition with a focus on physiological chemistry (vitamins, enzymes, hormones etc..). Ray Peat is a woke chud with some great articles and advice.

https://raypeat.com

TheHomeGunsmith:

Philip A. Luty was a normal citizen in the UK when the government introduced their firearms ban in the 90s. In response, he developed the Luty submachine gun made from simple DIY store materials in protest to the ban which he made all his plans and schematics public on the Internet and his website. It's still up and running with his original docs on his projects. Although surpassed by current 3D Printing tech it's still a very interesting piece of history to read yourself.

https://thehomegunsmith.com

Danyk.cz:

Dany is a hobbyist in electronics with a focus on reverse-engineering old soviet electronics to make the schematics public. Does some great projects and runs a youtube channel called DiodeGoneWild where he documents his projects.

https://danyk.cz/index_en.html

Nobody Here:

Some random Dutch dude creates an interactive site with 100s of different parts for his own self-expression including a forum where everyone poses as bugs.

https://nobodyhere.com

Piero Scaruffi:

A cognitive behaviour researcher has maintained his personal site full of his own shitposting and essays since the late 90s. Cool stuff in there.

https://www.scaruffi.com

Bruce McEvoy:

Maintained since 1994! Bruce MacEvoy has a very stylish webpage with various archives on astronomy including a guide on how to make your own personal observatory. He also has a very detailed page on UFOs, Color Theory, Painting and Ludwig Wittgenstein's philosophy. Interesting dude for sure.

https://handprint.com

IdleWords:

A soyboy techie (but one of the good ones :3 ) who done a very excellent essay on the "Website Obesity Crisis" ie. BLOAT

https://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm

!chuds !nonchuds !besties share your hot goss and secret knowledge

Hello social medias, this is a heavy post so please keep scrolling if needed.

I experienced sexual, physical, emotional, verbal, financial, and technological abuse from my biological siblings, mostly Sam Altman and some from Jack Altman.

I feel strongly that others have also been abused by these perpetrators. I'm seeking people to join me in pursuing legal justice, safety for others in the future, and group healing. Please message me with any information, you can remain however anonymous you feel safe.

Sam and Jack,

I know you remember my Torah portion was about Moses forgiving his brothers.

“Forgive them father for they know not what they've done”

Sexual, physical, emotional, verbal, financial, and technological abuse. Never forgotten

Hurt people cause more hurt, and forms of abuse go together. I have endured physical, sexual, verbal, emotional, financial, and technological abuse at the hands of a human I once called my brother. I know he can hear our dad in his head reminding him that “love wins”

I'm not four years old with a 13 year old “brother” climbing into my bed non-consensually anymore.

(You're welcome for helping you figure out your sexuality.)

I've finally accepted that you've always been and always will be more scared of me than I've been of you.

Must be strange to stalk your younger sibling's social media after she went no contact from your abuse.

Must be stranger to see her kitty and butthole that you touched non-consensually, now posted publicly.

Thank you for the love and for calling I spade a spade. I experienced every single form of abuse with him - sexual, physical, verbal, psychology, pharmacological (forced Zoloft, also later told I'd receive money only if I went back on it), and technological (shadowbanning)

Already flagged to death on Hacker News but getting some traction on Twitter:

This is Sam Altman's sister. Her tweets about sexual, physical, emotional, etc. abuse are incredibly hard to read. Seems that no one in the media is that interested in covering this story because they're afraid of losing access to OpenAI if they write something critical of Sam.👇

Thank you for reading and for sharing 🙏🏼❤️

Orange site: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32811723

Collage of dozens of images made with Stable Diffusion, indexed by Lexica

On Sunday, popular furry art community Fur Affinity announced that AI-generated art was not allowed because it “lacked artistic merit.” (In July, one AI furry porn generator was uploading one image every 40 seconds before it was banned.) Their new guidelines are very clear:

Content created by artificial intelligence is not allowed on Fur Affinity.

AI and machine learning applications (DALL-E, Craiyon) sample other artists’ work to create content. That content generated can reference hundreds, even thousands of pieces of work from other artists to create derivative images.

Our goal is to support artists and their content. We don’t believe it’s in our community’s best interests to allow AI generated content on the site.

Last year, the 27-year-old art/animation portal Newgrounds banned images made with Artbreeder, a tool for “breeding” GAN-generated art. Late last month, Newgrounds rewrote their guidelines to explicitly disallow images generated by new generation of AI art platforms:

AI-generated art is not allowed in the Art Portal. This includes using tools such as Midjourney, Dall-E, and Craiyon, in addition fractal generators and websites like ArtBreeder, where the user selects two images and they are combined into a new image via machine learning.

There are cases where some use of AI is ok, for example if you are primarily showcasing your character art but use an AI-generated background. In these cases, please note any elements where AI was used so that it is clear to users and moderators.

Tracing and coloring over AI-generated art is something best shared on your blog, as it is much like tracing over someone else’s art.

Bottom line: We want to keep the focus on art made by people and not have the Art Portal flooded with computer-generated art.

It’s not just long-running online communities: InkBlot is a budding art platform funded on Kickstarter in 2021 that went into open beta just this week. They’ve already taken a “no tolerance” policy against AI art, and updating their terms of service to exclude it.

Hi, we mentioned a few days ago that we have a no tolerance for AI art & working on updating our ToS in coming day for this which you can see in tweet here: https://t.co/5NCCKDYVWv

— 🦋InkBlot @ MEMBERSHIP DRIVE (@inkblot_art) September 9, 2022

Platforms that haven’t taken a stand are now facing public pressure to clarify their policies.

SHOW MORE

REQUESTING SEETHE FROM BLIND ABOUT THE MATTER IF PRESENT

Orange website does what it does best

: In case it's not clear what's happening here (and from the comments it doesn't seem like it is), someone (not Meta) leaked the models and had the brilliant idea of advertising the magnet link through a GitHub pull request. The part about saving bandwidth is a joke. Meta employees may have not noticed or are still figuring out how to react, so the PR is still up.

(Disclaimer: I work at Meta, but have no relationship with the team that owns the models and have no internal information on this)

: It's not even clear someone has leaked the models. A random person has put a download link on a PR, it could be anything.

: >Meta employees may have not noticed or are still figuring out how to react Given that the cat is out of the bag, if I were them, I would say that it is now publicly downloadable under the terms listed in the form. It is great PR, which if this was unintentional, is a positive outcome out of a bad situation.

: Here is the magnet link for posterity: magnet:?xt=urn:btih:ZXXDAUWYLRUXXBHUYEMS6Q5CE5WA3LVA&dn=LLaMA

: Thanks not working for me... Not that I could run it if I downloaded it.

Based r-slur makes a PR about it on github to "save bandwidth"

: lgtm *approves PR*

: Good catch! This will save millions in bandwidth costs.

After having my abilities been questioned by @iStillMissEd , i decided to create a little test to separate the chads from the chaff.

Here's a small snippet of c++ code:

bool function1(int8_t a, int8_t b)

{

int8_t aneg=-a;

int8_t bneg=-b;

return((a<b)==(aneg>bneg));

}

Describe when and why this function returns true. Best answer gets 250DC. No answer and you will be known as a javargin. !codecels

Jan 20 (Reuters) - Google's parent Alphabet Inc (GOOGL.O) is eliminating about 12,000 jobs, or 6% of its workforce, the company said Friday, in the latest cuts to shake the technology sector.

Sundar Pichai, Alphabet's CEO, said in a staff memo shared with Reuters that the company had rapidly expanded headcount in recent years "for a different economic reality than the one we face today."

"I take full responsibility for the decisions that led us here," he said.

The cuts come days after rival Microsoft Corp (MSFT.O) said it would lay off 10,000 workers.

Alphabet's job losses affect teams across the company including recruiting and some corporate functions, as well as some engineering and products teams.

The layoffs are global and impact U.S. staff immediately.

Alphabet has already emailed affected employees, the memo said, while the process will take longer in other countries due to local employment laws and practices.

The news comes during a period of economic uncertainty as well as technological promise, in which Google and Microsoft have been investing in a burgeoning area of software known as generative artificial intelligence.

"I am confident about the huge opportunity in front of us thanks to the strength of our mission, the value of our products and services, and our early investments in AI," Pichai said in the note.

Reuters was first to report the news.

https://old.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/10l2o1a/reddit_layoffs_2023_what_to_know_about_the_latest/?sort=controversial

ArsTechnica Comments (mild):

Xitter Comments:

The More Tab of Xitter (actual whining):

so yesterday I restored "simps" and "simps for" but made them only count post votes

the reason is because the queries that would include comment votes take way too long when they run on powerusers which causes timeouts that slow down the whole site

here's 2 examples that use my user id

QUERY 1 (for my simps): 25 seconds

explain analyze SELECT commentvotes.user_id AS commentvotes_user_id, count(commentvotes.user_id) AS count_1
        FROM commentvotes JOIN comments ON comments.id = commentvotes.comment_id
        WHERE comments.ghost = false AND comments.is_banned = false AND comments.deleted_utc = 0 AND commentvotes.vote_type = 1 AND comments.author_id = 1 GROUP BY commentvotes.user_id ORDER BY count(commentvotes.user_id) DESC;
                                                                                 QUERY PLAN
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 Sort  (cost=101326.43..101331.71 rows=2111 width=12) (actual time=25292.671..25371.754 rows=1844 loops=1)
   Sort Key: (count(commentvotes.user_id)) DESC
   Sort Method: quicksort  Memory: 135kB
   ->  Finalize GroupAggregate  (cost=100675.05..101209.87 rows=2111 width=12) (actual time=25266.703..25370.338 rows=1844 loops=1)
         Group Key: commentvotes.user_id
         ->  Gather Merge  (cost=100675.05..101167.65 rows=4222 width=12) (actual time=25266.210..25368.234 rows=4089 loops=1)
               Workers Planned: 2
               Workers Launched: 2
               ->  Sort  (cost=99675.02..99680.30 rows=2111 width=12) (actual time=25174.301..25174.732 rows=1363 loops=3)
                     Sort Key: commentvotes.user_id
                     Sort Method: quicksort  Memory: 113kB
                     Worker 0:  Sort Method: quicksort  Memory: 113kB
                     Worker 1:  Sort Method: quicksort  Memory: 111kB
                     ->  Partial HashAggregate  (cost=99537.35..99558.46 rows=2111 width=12) (actual time=25172.482..25173.130 rows=1363 loops=3)
                           Group Key: commentvotes.user_id
                           Batches: 1  Memory Usage: 241kB
                           Worker 0:  Batches: 1  Memory Usage: 241kB
                           Worker 1:  Batches: 1  Memory Usage: 241kB
                           ->  Nested Loop  (cost=119.48..99291.83 rows=49104 width=4) (actual time=70.552..25064.475 rows=25093 loops=3)
                                 ->  Parallel Bitmap Heap Scan on comments  (cost=119.04..12311.25 rows=4943 width=4) (actual time=57.412..246.591 rows=4380 loops=3)
                                       Recheck Cond: (author_id = 1)
                                       Filter: ((NOT ghost) AND (NOT is_banned) AND (deleted_utc = 0))
                                       Rows Removed by Filter: 263
                                       Heap Blocks: exact=3882
                                       ->  Bitmap Index Scan on comments_user_index  (cost=0.00..116.08 rows=12353 width=0) (actual time=36.276..36.277 rows=14518 loops=1)
                                             Index Cond: (author_id = 1)
                                 ->  Index Scan using commentvotes_pkey on commentvotes  (cost=0.44..17.28 rows=32 width=8) (actual time=1.447..5.654 rows=6 loops=13141)
                                       Index Cond: (comment_id = comments.id)
                                       Filter: (vote_type = 1)
                                       Rows Removed by Filter: 0
 Planning Time: 0.764 ms
 JIT:
   Functions: 60
   Options: Inlining false, Optimization false, Expressions true, Deforming true
   Timing: Generation 19.575 ms, Inlining 0.000 ms, Optimization 6.942 ms, Emission 122.562 ms, Total 149.079 ms
 Execution Time: 25453.921 ms
(36 rows)

QUERY 2 (for the ppl i simp for): 13 seconds

explain analyze SELECT comments.author_id AS comments_author_id, count(comments.author_id) AS count_1 
        FROM comments JOIN commentvotes ON comments.id = commentvotes.comment_id 
        WHERE comments.ghost = false AND comments.is_banned = false AND comments.deleted_utc = 0 AND commentvotes.vote_type = 1 AND commentvotes.user_id = 1 GROUP BY comments.author_id ORDER BY count(comments.author_id) DESC;

                                                                                         QUERY PLAN
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 Sort  (cost=234059.08..234064.81 rows=2293 width=12) (actual time=13511.566..13632.448 rows=3074 loops=1)
   Sort Key: (count(comments.author_id)) DESC
   Sort Method: quicksort  Memory: 241kB
   ->  Finalize GroupAggregate  (cost=233350.16..233931.10 rows=2293 width=12) (actual time=13502.703..13630.725 rows=3074 loops=1)
         Group Key: comments.author_id
         ->  Gather Merge  (cost=233350.16..233885.24 rows=4586 width=12) (actual time=13502.611..13628.135 rows=6597 loops=1)
               Workers Planned: 2
               Workers Launched: 2
               ->  Sort  (cost=232350.14..232355.87 rows=2293 width=12) (actual time=13404.805..13405.287 rows=2199 loops=3)
                     Sort Key: comments.author_id
                     Sort Method: quicksort  Memory: 203kB
                     Worker 0:  Sort Method: quicksort  Memory: 199kB
                     Worker 1:  Sort Method: quicksort  Memory: 197kB
                     ->  Partial HashAggregate  (cost=232199.23..232222.16 rows=2293 width=12) (actual time=13398.724..13399.556 rows=2199 loops=3)
                           Group Key: comments.author_id
                           Batches: 1  Memory Usage: 369kB
                           Worker 0:  Batches: 1  Memory Usage: 369kB
                           Worker 1:  Batches: 1  Memory Usage: 369kB
                           ->  Nested Loop  (cost=0.87..231821.34 rows=75577 width=4) (actual time=81.541..13275.534 rows=52615 loops=3)
                                 ->  Parallel Index Scan using cvote_user_index on commentvotes  (cost=0.44..129890.24 rows=78687 width=4) (actual time=64.216..9154.821 rows=55000 loops=3)
                                       Index Cond: (user_id = 1)
                                       Filter: (vote_type = 1)
                                       Rows Removed by Filter: 90
                                 ->  Index Scan using comments_pkey on comments  (cost=0.43..1.30 rows=1 width=8) (actual time=0.072..0.072 rows=1 loops=165000)
                                       Index Cond: (id = commentvotes.comment_id)
                                       Filter: ((NOT ghost) AND (NOT is_banned) AND (deleted_utc = 0))
                                       Rows Removed by Filter: 0
 Planning Time: 0.721 ms
 JIT:
   Functions: 60
   Options: Inlining false, Optimization false, Expressions true, Deforming true
   Timing: Generation 8.837 ms, Inlining 0.000 ms, Optimization 11.450 ms, Emission 167.933 ms, Total 188.220 ms
 Execution Time: 13635.714 ms
(33 rows)

so i need help, how do I make them run faster or what indexes do I make, i didnt actually read the explain analyze outputs I posted here cuz im too lazy and need to take a shower rn so the answer might be pretty obvious (correct answer gets 50k marseybuckerinos and a code contributer badge)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38327520

Google and Chinese AI companies watching this unfold like

UPDATES

I think this means something

https://old.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/17yrdsq/mira_murati_interim_ceo_of_openai_has_sided_with?sort=controversial

The Chief Strategy Officer told employees they are confident about bringing everyone back and will have an update tomorrow

https://old.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/17yqyme/openais_chief_strategy_officer_jason_kwon_told?sort=controversial

Ilya about to be stebbed?

https://old.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/17yt8sl/what_does_this_mean?sort=controversial

Nice to know that even rich tech dorks tweet like high schoolers

Xenia (a Xbox 360 emulator) throwing out a warning accusing you of piracy if it detects ISO files, a DISC IMAGE FORMAT, is the funniest thing i've seen all day pic.twitter.com/dT9qNRMZM4

— MeovvCAT (@osu_MeovvCAT) July 26, 2023

https://github.com/xenia-canary/xenia-canary/pull/180

Hello! Many of you are pathetic losers who do things like program stuff or whatever. We have the White Hat and Code Contributor badge, but nothing really to show who the Best of the Best are. Like me. And that's no good, people should be recognized for going above and beyond.

And so we are introducing the Smartest Fish Award. Description: Awarded for outstanding achievement in the field of QA, signed by Aevann Himself. The highest honor that can be bestowed upon a codecel.

Fix something major, get badge. Simple. There are no recent feats warranting this, and we're not going back too far retroactively. So if you want it, you'll need to do something new.

You can start by fixing iOS push notifs. Which we have been BEGGING YOU TO DO FOR MONTHS.

https://rdrama.net/post/174343/25k-marseybux-reward-ios-code-required - see top comment chain. The PWA is now a proper app again, but it doesn't show in the apps list and notifs don't work. Before even more tards chime in that "it works for me look here's a screenshot!!!" yes, that's because it used to work until changes were made. The manifest has been refreshed. New installs do not get push notifs.

Fix this. Get badge. Get 25k.

POTENTIALLY SOLVED BY @realspez PENDING DEPLOYMENT - SEE PINNED COMMENT

Thank you.

!codecels !badgemaxxers