cultural reviewer and dabbler in stylistic premonitions

  • 19 Posts
  • 21 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: January 17th, 2022

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  • big oof.

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

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

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

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

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

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








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

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






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

    ಠ_ಠ

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

    still image from "Zach Galifianakis Math" gif, with Zach looking contemplative with math notation floating in front of his face

    (It checks out.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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





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

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

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

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