We have reached an agreement in principle for Sam Altman to return to OpenAI as CEO with a new initial board of Bret Taylor (Chair), Larry Summers, and Adam D'Angelo.

We are collaborating to figure out the details. Thank you so much for your patience through this.

— OpenAI (@OpenAI) November 22, 2023

We have reached an agreement in principle for Sam Altman to return to OpenAI as CEO with a new initial board of Bret Taylor (Chair), Larry Summers, and Adam D'Angelo.

We are collaborating to figure out the details. Thank you so much for your patience through this.

https://twitter.com/sama/status/1727207458324848883

i love openai, and everything i've done over the past few days has been in service of keeping this team and its mission together. when i decided to join msft on sun evening, it was clear that was the best path for me and the team. with the new board and w satya's support, i'm looking forward to returning to openai, and building on our strong partnership with msft.

https://twitter.com/satyanadella/status/1727207661547233721

We are encouraged by the changes to the OpenAI board. We believe this is a first essential step on a path to more stable, well-informed, and effective governance. Sam, Greg, and I have talked and agreed they have a key role to play along with the OAI leadership team in ensuring OAI continues to thrive and build on its mission. We look forward to building on our strong partnership and delivering the value of this next generation of AI to our customers and partners.

Tard reactions, still early and it's late at night, so not much happening.

https://old.reddit.com/r/OpenAI/comments/1812faf/sam_altman_back_as_openai_ceo?sort=controversial

https://old.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/1812fco/same_altman_is_ceo_of_openai_again?sort=controversial

https://old.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/1812f4j/sam_altman_to_return_as_ceo_of_openai_with_a_new?sort=controversial

Australia’s censorship industrial complex:

“The problem that you’ve got here with this eSafety Commissioner, she’s an activist.

She will continue to expand her role to police the internet, to censor debate in a way that’s consistent with her own ideological views.

You have… pic.twitter.com/GZosiBHAcb

— Ana Mostarac (@anammostarac) April 20, 2024

It's another Bong L today due to the passing of the National Security Act 2023 that requires companies to clear messaging apps with The Home Office first (presumably so they can crack/backdoor them). Those peepeepics won't steal themselves.

The act is an expansion of The Investigatory Powers Act 2016, which famously required ISPs to keep a plaintext record of all of its customers' browsing history, but not if they were Members of Parliament. Too important eh!

Apple says:

It would not make changes to security features specifically for one country that would weaken a product for all users.

Some changes would require issuing a software update so could not be made secretly

The proposals "constitute a serious and direct threat to data security and information privacy" that would affect people outside the UK.

!britbongs, look at us ruining it for everyone else again!

Of course, this will go nowhere in two weeks, nothing will happen, iMessage will stay up as it is and the UK Government won't do shit (Apple is unironically richer than them), such is life.

> “I’m convinced there’s influencer money going into this one”

> the influencer money pic.twitter.com/iw2EvU1g9E

— Rizzo (@0xRizzo) October 14, 2023

When do you think the chadmins will finally buckbreak the remaining protesting subreddits?

https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=pokepim

you can read the full article here

https://old.reddit.com/r/science/comments/195kv2j/men_who_identify_as_incels_have_fundamental?sort=controversial

https://old.reddit.com/r/IncelTears/comments/195nlih/study_finds_that_incels_need_mental_health?sort=controversial

history is where the deep memes are stored

the deep memes are pulled out and wielded by the historian class

strong historian tells a strong story about a man called Oppenheimer

so that we can remember what it was like to feel the fear

that the Germans might soon have the bomb

like the film or hate it, it is a necromancy-of-the-light. so the memes become the form of the living dead. praise be to the lord.

I am here to tell a history, a recent one. I'll tell it in stages, and at intervals. Today I want to begin with

G O O G L E

nowadays one takes for granted the anti-corporate politics. it took leftists to tell the truth which simply became known. the right would prefer not to know. even now the right lives in denial rather than purpose. this is a problem. they must be rallied.

but for those of us who grew up in the 90s, the Millennials, there was a time when people sided with corporations! serious people! who were taken seriously!

to some extent we must all be those people, because we are so aware that there are only people in those corporations. this can be true, and it can also be true that people who act on behalf of money become meat suits for that money.

2014

Project Dartlang

It's west coast time in California as Lars Bak and Kasper Lund decide to make a name for themselves as fools and inflict the world with another programming language. These two people never seemed to adequately understand why people did not in fact want Google to embed its own vm in its browser for its own language in one of many naked attempts to grab power on the web. Many have sought to conquer the web. But the web lives on.

Lars Bak: It's just that Javascript sucks so much.

Kasper Lung: And Dart has features!

This went on for a long time. The chrome team won that political battle and the dart vm was never put into the browser. The value proposition for dart was always dubious.

This didn't stop people from falling for it. Thus was the hatred of Javascript.

Today Javascript is safely locked away. Below the surface. You can barely hear it, but it's there.

Waiting.

2023

Another developer has decided that it is time to give the users what they do not want in the name of Google.

https://realtimecolors.com/?colors=000000-ffffff-4685ff-f2f2f2-ffb084

No more screen calibration nonsense

As part of its latest attempt to combat scalpers, a popular Japanese retail store is now requiring ID from customers to prove that they're NOT of legal age.

Usually, when a retail store or any kind of establishment asks you for a form of identification, it's to help prove that you're a consenting adult. But, in this particular and rare case, a Japanese Pokemon card seller is doing the same exact opposite - asking customers to prove that they're not adults to get a chance to buy one of the latest and hottest-selling sets.

As pointed out by Kotaku, the self-proclaimed biggest Pokemon TCG specialty store in the world, is selling the Clay Burst and Snow Hazard sets to children who are still attending junior high school or younger.

The Loot Drop

A Japanese Pokemon card seller is requiring customers to prove they're not adults to prevent scalping and hoarding.

The reverse age check procedure means a customer has to be young enough to buy the packs displayed in its dedication section. The store has also barred parents and guardians from buying the said packs on behalf of the kids. Finally, to further prevent scalping and hoarding, the store is limiting the boosters to 10 packs a day. It's only after these packs have sold out that they'll sell any pack that remains to other customers.

Hareruya 2's new scheme is part of a larger TCG industry problem of scalping and hoarding. Most recently, thousands of people around the world queued outside retailers to get a chance to grab Clay Burst and Snow Hazard ahead of everyone else. Some do it genuinely because they want to be one of the first to own the cards. But, most have more capitalistic and less ethical reasons, namely selling the booster boxes for a quick profit.

Case in point, The Pokemon Company in Japan announced just days after its launch that the fervent demand meant that they'd run out of packs already. A quick search online will tell you that most of the packs had fallen in the hands of scalpers who sold the booster boxes for thousands of dollars.

As more and more rare cards sell for hundreds of thousands of dollars at auctions, these instances will continue to happen.

Having said that, Hareruya 2's policy actually makes a ton of sense. It guarantees that the younger generation, who are into Pokemon because they enjoy it, have a shot at buying booster packs without worrying about making money off of it or not. Of course, this isn't 100% effective. Adults can always work their way around it by asking younger kids to buy the packs for them. It's kind of like how some kids ask adults to buy beer and cigarettes for them, except, it's the adults asking kids to buy Pokemon cards.

On a more positive note, scalpers and resellers are a sign that an industry is profitable enough to attract such individuals.

It remains to be seen if this will work to help combat the issue with resellers and scalpers in the Pokemon TCG scene.

Scalpers and resellers are a nuisance in any industry. In video games, for example, Sony struggled with getting enough PS5 consoles on store shelves as scalpers almost always got their hands on them first. It wasn't until recently Sony said it had solved the stock shortage. In the TCG scene's case, manufacturers just can't simply flood the market with cards, lest they risk devaluing them. In a sense, the TCG and sneaker industry can learn from each other.

https://twitter.com/zachxbt/status/1735292040986886648

https://twitter.com/paoloardoino/status/1735315976827101274

Abridged summary from Ledger themselves:

• This morning CET, a former Ledger Employee fell victim to a phishing attack that gained access to their NPMJS account.

• The attacker published a malicious version of the Ledger Connect Kit (affecting versions 1.1.5, 1.1.6, and 1.1.7). The malicious code used a rogue WalletConnect project to reroute funds to a hacker wallet.

• Ledger's technology and security teams were alerted and a fix was deployed within 40 minutes of Ledger becoming aware. The malicious file was live for around 5 hours, however we believe the window where funds were drained was limited to a period of less than two hours.

• The genuine and verified Ledger Connect Kit version 1.1.8 is now propagating and is safe to use.

• For builders who are developing and interacting with the Ledger Connect Kit code: connect-kit development team on the NPM project are now read-only and can't directly push the NPM package for safety reasons.

• We have internally rotated the secrets to publish on Ledger's GitHub.

• Ledger, along with Walletconnect and our partners, have reported the bad actor's wallet address. The address is now visible on chainalysis

• Tether_to has frozen the bad actor's USDT.

• We are actively talking with customers whose funds might have been affected, and working proactively to help those individuals at this time.

• We are filing a complaint and working with law enforcement on the investigation to find the attacker.

• We're studying the exploit in order to avoid further attacks. We believe the attacker's address where the funds were drained is here: 0x658729879fca881d9526480b82ae00efc54b5c2d

https://twitter.com/Ledger/status/1735326240658100414

I was thinking about having several bots, but didnt want to hammer the rdrama API so I split the api querying part of my application off.

Its designed to publish events to redis maintaining an nosqlish database of the retrieved items set to time out in 1 hour.

You could subscribe pretty much as many apps as you want to it and that way only one thing is hitting rdrama at a time

Its also leveraging bottleneck, so if you use bottleneck in your API calls back to rdrama and configure it to use the redis instance, you wont exceed rate limiting, and all your applications will share bandwith nicely

I might grab posts or other things, for now Its just focused on comments.

Bike chads stay winning

Discussion question for all of the carcels here: how are cars supposed to be promoting "freedom" again?

Between August 23, 1999, and October 27, 1999, James committed a series of intrusions into various systems, including those of BellSouth and the Miami-Dade school system.[4] What brought him to the attention of federal authorities, however, was his intrusion into the computers of the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA), a division of the United States Department of Defense, the primary function of which is to analyze potential threats to the United States of America, both at home and abroad. James later admitted to authorities that he had installed an unauthorized backdoor in a computer server in Dulles, Virginia, which he used to install a sniffer that allowed him to intercept over three thousand messages passing to and from DTRA employees, along with numerous usernames and passwords of other DTRA employees, including at least 10 on official military computers.[1]

It was later revealed that the precise software obtained was the International Space Station's source code controlling critical life-sustaining elements. According to NASA, "the software supported the International Space Station's physical environment, including control of the temperature and humidity within the living space."[5]

On January 17, 2008, department store chain TJX was the victim of a massive computer systems intrusion that compromised the personal and credit information of millions of customers. The same ring of hackers also committed intrusions on BJ's Wholesale Club, Boston Market, Barnes & Noble, Sports Authority, Forever 21, DSW, OfficeMax, and Dave & Buster's, and reportedly made a millionaire out of the group's ringleader, Albert Gonzalez. Though he denied having done anything, James—who was friends with some of the hackers involved—was investigated by the Secret Service, who raided James', his brother's, and his girlfriend's houses. Although they apparently discovered no connection to the intrusion, they did discover a legally owned firearm, which they did not take, and notes indicating he had considered killing himself; James' father would later say that his son had been prone to depression. The criminal complaint filed against the TJX hackers mention an additional, unnamed conspirator who was not indicted, who is identified only by the initials "J.J.". In 2004, this co-conspirator assisted one of the hackers in stealing credit card numbers, account numbers, and encrypted PINs from an OfficeMax store via Wi-Fi. These numbers were later allegedly provided to Albert Gonzalez, for whom "J.J." also opened a mail drop. James's father believes "J.J." to have been his son.[3] However, it is plausible that the initials "J.J." may in fact have been referring to "Jim Jones", a (hacker) alias believed to be used by Stephen Watt who was a close friend of computer hacker and criminal Albert Gonzalez.[8]

On May 18, 2008, Jonathan James was found dead in his shower with a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head. His suicide was allegedly motivated by the belief that he would be prosecuted for crimes he had not committed. "I honestly, honestly had nothing to do with TJX," James wrote in his suicide note, "I have no faith in the 'justice' system. Perhaps my actions today, and this letter, will send a stronger message to the public. Either way, I have lost control over this situation, and this is my only way to regain control."[3]