Few comments, but already some dumb redditor takes in 41 minutes since it's been posted.

Generated by TLDR This:

Microsoft Corp. won’t label social media posts that appear to be false in order to avoid the appearance that the company is trying to censor speech online, President Brad Smith said in an interview with Bloomberg News, hinting that the company is taking a different approach than other technology firms in dealing with disinformation.

And I don’t think they’re really interested in having tech companies tell them either.”

“We’ll be investigating how can we do that in the context of influence operations,” said Tom Burt, corporate vice president for customer security and trust.

Much like it already does with its cybersecurity incident reports, Microsoft’s policy team will share its propaganda-related findings with international governments, with the aim of lobbying politicians to agree on a set of rules for nation-state conduct in cyberspace.

Smith said Microsoft wanted to provide the public with more information about who is speaking, what they are saying and allow them to come to their own judgment about whether content was true.

“Our whole approach needs to be to provide people with more information, not less and we cannot trip over and use what others might consider censorship as a tactic.”

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-09-21/microsoft-won-t-say-what-s-false-when-labeling-propaganda-online

StackOverflow is bleeding money and for some reason has over 500 employees, a big number for a Q&A forum with an interface that's barely changed in a decade.

AI has cut into their profits so they're attempting to integrate it into their own search (ask a bot a question and get an answer). Sadly this hasn't helped much and so they've just fired 28% of their staff, only a few months after firing 10%.

Included in the layoffs are community managers (aka paid jannies), who are surely happy to be freed from what must be the worst job in the world (interacting with the insufferable unpaid jannies who hate every decision that their overlords make).

The announcement of the firings is on -197, let's see what the unpaid jannies think:

"The community isn't going anywhere." Well, they might go somewhere else if you keep firing all their beloved community managers and other Q&A teams... everyone left on the Community team now has, what, 3 years of experience with this community or less?

Oh no how can anyone be expected to moderate a Q&A forum with less than 3 years experience?

My favourite SO user Zoe is on strike (before you ask, yes they are) has a lot to say even though they're still meant to be on strike:

why, over the past two firings (and previous rounds), have you eliminated the CMs and other employees who were among the largest advocates for the community and who, in some of the worse periods, were the only communication channel with the company?

All these CMs do is get shit on by people like Zoe, arguing over pointless metadrama that doesn't impact any of the site's actual users in any way.

Someone thinks the world is ending:

It's worth considering that the biggest project that's set back is trust. Trust built over years - lost, points of contact we were familiar with no longer exist.

The practical effects are very much loss, sorrow and frankly a loss in confidence

From our vantage point, things look bleak. Really bleak. This dystopian view is not just a view, it's how we are living this relationship with SO. And this is very real, it's not simply a fleeting moment.

What will become of the development projects that Catija and other devs were involved in? There were some initiatives (such as mod tooling) she was acting as liaison on in the SO mod room.

How can I do it for free without tools?

Stack Overflow became what it is today because it was able to attract top-tier talent across all areas, both as employees and as volunteer content creators on the site. Top talent is choosy about where they work, and will choose to work where they feel respected and working on things they love. I hope that the company treated all laid off employees with the respect and compassion they deserve, and this is one important measure of that.

lol "top-tier" unpaid jannies, sure sure.

Meanwhile millions of people are Googling "how to sort list python" every day and copying the top answer from SO, unaffected by all of this meta-nonsense.

I hate SO jannies so so much, I can't believe SO hasn't realised that it would be easier to get rid of them and hire a small number of paid jannies. The site moderates itself with flags + downvotes, unpaid jannies are irrelevant.

From yesterday's exhibits in US v. Sam Bankman-Fried:

The prosecution shows that the "insurance fund" that FTX bragged about was fake, and just calculated by multiplying daily trading volume by a random number around 7500 pic.twitter.com/EDiVPOHODP

— Molly White (@molly0xFFF) October 7, 2023

orange site sneeds: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37804493

I was informed this was a talk on a programming conference and it was "important", it opens with land acknowledgements. It has 0 lines of code. It reads like HR flayer.

A study found that anti-piracy messages work on women but actually make men MORE likely to pirate (because dudes rock ).

One brave slashdotter has to remind everyone that this is because women get punished for rebelling ( )

Meanwhile the rest of the comments have entirely too many people fully admitting that they don't pirate because they "have too much to lose" and apparently don't know what a fricking VPN is, which is a truly darning indictment of what used to be one of the best tech-literate forums on the interwebs.

Can't believe PEEPEE OUT didn't make it. RIP Harambe, you were too good for this world.

Of course they did. Powerjannies have no backbone except to powertrip on the only thing they have in their pathetic little lives, Reddit.

Also lmao Reddit won a phyrric victory at best

Lemmytards

Orange Site

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37003134

https://old.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/15ic0td/the_reddit_protest_is_finally_over_reddit_won/?sort=controversial

Follow up to the previous post: https://rdrama.net/h/marsey/post/174770/marsoyhype-its-over-for-artcels-with

Found out on this Github discussion post (quite a but basically a web UI for StableDiffusion wants to emulate what Photoshop's able to do) that the generative fill nonsense can be used on their Firefly site: https://firefly.adobe.com/

This weekend someone told me that you do not really need an Adobe Subscription to use Firefly, and the popular Generative Fill can be used from their website (even without an Adobe account)!

After learning about this, I tested that Firefly Generative Fill with some test images used during the development of ControlNet. The performance of that model is super impressive and the technical architecture is more user-friendly than Stable Diffusion toolsets.

Overall, the behaviors of Adobe Firefly Generative Fill are:

1. if users do not provide any prompts, the inpaint does not fail, and the generating is guided by image contents.

2. if users provide prompts, the generating is guided by both prompts and image contents.

3. Given its results, it is likely that the results with or without prompts are generated by a same model pipeline.

They're right about not needing an Adobe subscription to use it but you still need to have an Adobe account so make a throwaway one or something if you're afraid of the glowies

Just thought it might be interesting if you saw the earlier post but didn't want to install Photoshop from a random Google drive link or something ^{or you're using a Chromebook like me}

The generated images might not be super duper great or anything but it's pretty decent if it's just some simple shenanigans I guess, plus it's free ^{(apart from Adobe collecting your user data )}

Introducing acropalypse: a serious privacy vulnerability in the Google Pixel's inbuilt screenshot editing tool, Markup, enabling partial recovery of the original, unedited image data of a cropped and/or redacted screenshot. Huge thanks to @David3141593 for his help throughout! pic.twitter.com/BXNQomnHbr

— Simon Aarons (@ItsSimonTime) March 17, 2023

tl;dr: For years, Google's screenshot editing tool Markup (ships on all Pixel phones) has had a bug where it overwrites images without truncating the file first. The result is that cropping an image leaves a (large) amount of the original image data in the file, which can be recovered. A simple example would be a screenshot of WhatsApp where a phone number has been cropped out.

If @Aevann was cool he'd search all the images uploaded to rDrama to find who has exposed themselves.

Orange Site discussion

Apple disallowed almost anything related to Covid, especially vaccines or human origins of the virus.

We had to build a list of over 20 terms to not show results for, only on Apple devices.

Apple also later rejected us because users included Pepe images in videos. pic.twitter.com/euw1ppkoKg

— LBRY 🚀 (@LBRYcom) November 28, 2022

https://mstdn.games/@chris/110553477682106144

PSA: #Reddit is restoring deleted and overwritten posts to save what they consider "their data". This is a new low and probably illegal at least in Europe. You can send a GDPR or CPRA request here: https://www.reddit.com/settings/data-request

These are screenshots of my profile on June 14th before and after overwriting and then deleting all my posts with Powerdelete. Today, June 16th all my posts have been restored by Reddit without my knowledge or consent.

Orange Site discussion

Based?

Despite repeated warnings over a decade, a steady flow of email traffic continues to the .ML domain, the country identifier for Mali, as a result of people mistyping .MIL, the suffix to all US military email addresses.

The problem was first identified almost a decade ago by Johannes Zuurbier, a Dutch Internet entrepreneur who has a contract to manage Mali’s country domain.

Zuurbier has been collecting misdirected emails since January in an effort to persuade the US to take the issue seriously. He holds close to 117,000 misdirected messages—almost 1,000 arrived on Wednesday alone. In a letter he sent to the US in early July, Zuurbier wrote: “This risk is real and could be exploited by adversaries of the US.”

Funniest part of the story. They're reporting this one instance, but they have been doing this consistently FOR A DECADE.

Apple will finally allow for sideloading apps in iOS 17 to comply with EU regulations

This would allow users to download apps outside of the App Store and allow developers to avoid the 15% to 30% fees

Source: @markgurman pic.twitter.com/VAjEDeXcLb

— Apple Hub (@theapplehub) April 18, 2023