Day 2 in Oxford for medical trial fun and games. Today was the infusion, 50% chance of ketamine vs placebo. After doing a variety of questionnaires and having blood and urine samples taken it was time to be infused. It was fairly relaxing. Maybe a bit boring. I idly let my mind wander. I think I either didn’t get ketamine or I did and it had nearly no effect on me. I felt maybe slightly lightheaded at one point, and now feel a bit weird, but nothing especially noteworthy.
After that there were more questionnaires and computer tasks. Rather cruelly one of these asked me to remember things from another task, which they hadn’t warned me about. Testing memory when you’ve not been asked to remember stuff is a valuable thing to do.
Tomorrow afternoon is an MRI session where I remember various things while in the machine and they look at what bits of my head light up.
A story I like telling is how I ran the AV at a place and when I deployed adblock the detections fell off a cliff. I wish more people had this visceral "holy shit" moment. "It was this easy the whole time?" ~2012. I recently deployed uBlock Origin to an F500, on my insistence.
At previous employer, "Security" got the thankless job of "securing" new DNS servers (after minor incident revealed owners of 'old' servers weren't maintaining them)
We implemented reputation based DNS +ad blocking w/ new servers
After change: 90% of all new malware infections were either people who ran sketchy email attachments (because: 'fail open') or laptops connected to untrusted internet (because 'off-site' connections didn't use our DNS)
It's something I'd love to do at my work but the marketing department would shit a brick the moment they couldn't see their own ads. They have enough power to reverse any attempt at it the moment it, especially who our CIO reports to came from marketing. @catsalad
It's just very unfortunate that MV3 is killing uBO although there's now uBO Lite. Probably good enough for security purposes, but still sucks.
I actually /like/ the initiative of MV3 to reduce code exec in extensions (duh), but I'm convinced one could've found a solution that would have allowed to keep the power of uBO at similar levels. This would've also been a good spot for Mozilla to step in and propose a better MV3+...
god, it really is like the face mask of antivirus protection. every time i set up a computer for my dad or one of his friends (in their 60s) i will install ublock immediately. i think the amount of viruses since the install is basically nonexistent, even months later
Antivirus Vendors are already one of the richest sources of aggressive malware.
What if the false dichotomy was simply scrapped?
“Improve your corporate security with Phageware!” “Self deploying” “Eradicates all other malware undetectably” “Attacks and cryptographically detains hostile actors on your network” “Make the C&C seat YOUR seat for a change!”
DISCLAIMER: This is a fucking awful idea and under no circumstances should it be allowed to happen (as if we had any say in it)
This from Wikipedia made me giggle. "[New Zealand] Inland Revenue continues to spell its Māori name Te Tari Taake instead of Te Tari Tāke, mainly to reduce the resemblance of tāke to the English word 'take'"
How odd. This Portuguese listening comprehension exercise has a person in who's invented a folk etymology for the English word "vintage". They've decided that rather than being < French vendage and ultimately Latin vinum + demo, it is related to the word for twenty (vinte in Portuguese, vingt in French, viginti in Latin) and thus vintage clothes are ones which are 20 years old.
My "we will not hyperfinancialize the social experience through tokens, crypto trading or NFTs" t-shirt has people asking a lot of questions already answered by my t-shirt.
Everyone who read this post and responded with, "This is just FUD, the press release CLEARLY said they would NOT do hyperfinancialization, you are overreacting, here is a link to primary journalistic sources, I am very smart" --
for the peanut gallery, on my fresh new 10000-char-limit masto account, i wrote up in a bit more technical detail how BlueSky is not decentralized, even if ATProtocol is, which it also isn't
for the peanut gallery, on my fresh new 10000-char-limit masto account, i wrote up in a bit more technical detail how BlueSky is not decentralized, even if ATProtocol is, which it also isn't
So, you know how Facebook is a corporation with a lot of spread-out servers that talk to a centralized database and algorithm that controls and manages all your posts, opaquely, for profit.
And so is Xwitter. And so is LinkedIn. And so is TikTok.
And so is BlueSky. 😲
BlueSky's big claim is that they're "decentralized" with "no algorithm". And yeah, technically, ironically, everything's an algorithm, but I'm not well-actuallying that word. Their current default feed algorithm is not The Algorithm; it lets you see all the posts from all your friends and that's great. It also lets you block at will, and won't shove spam on your feed, or shadow-ban your friends' political posts. It's not evil (yet). It's fine.
But. It's not decentralized. BlueSky is a centralized corporate app, running a theoretically-decentralized network protocol that currently has only one (1) active node on the network: BlueSky. The other minor members of the ATP network are just piggybacking on BlueSky's 13 million captive users for auth and reach.
It (allegedly?) uses ATProtocol to pass messages between its edge nodes. But all its central features are still centralized, and the protocol allows "reach" to be centrally managed separately from "speech" (to enable centralized blocking, and goosing and filtering in various feeds), and the protocol isn't even fully implemented as designed.
For example, ATProtocol allows for "DID"s for identity portability, so if you later want to switch to a hypothetical GreenSky competitor, you won't lose your followers and blocklist and post history.
But the actual BlueSky app does not implement DIDs. It's called "did-placeholder" on their github. It's a stub. It's TBD. It's not a feature, it's a feature request.
And guess who just bought a seat on BlueSky's board with a $15M Series A round? That's right, a crypto company named Blockchain Capital.
Their general partner Kinjal Shah -- whose cryptocurrency-fueled career has careened from Bitcoin to NFTs to DAOs to VC -- is now on the BlueSky board, and methinks the press release doth protest too much when it defensively claims, with just a pinky promise, "the Bluesky app and the AT Protocol do not use blockchains or cryptocurrency, and we will not hyperfinancialize the social experience (through tokens, crypto trading, NFTs, etc.)."
Go ahead and enjoy BlueSky. It's better than Facebook. It's easier than Mastodon. It's sassier than TikTok. But it's not decentralized.
Bluesky now exceeds 13 million users, the AT Protocol developer ecosystem continues to grow, and we’ve shipped highly requested features like direct messages and video.
New regulations set out circumstances in which the Secretary of State can intervene in the running of internet domain registries for UK-related domains
This somewhat lengthy blogpost about The Internet Domain Registry (Prescribed Practices and Prescribed Requirements) Regulations 2024 is probably of most interest to people running domain registries, and domain registrars, for .uk, .scot, .wales., .cymru, and .london.
To be honest, until yesterday, I had no idea that the Secretary of State had these kind of powers...
@Neil Brown Idly wondering if .io is "UK-related" under s.124O(8) of CA2003 - "the last element of its name is likely to cause users of the internet, or a class of such users, to believe that the domain and its sub-domains are connected with the United Kingdom"
Wondering how this applies to registries that provide / manage UK domains but are themselves outside the UK (or do they *have* to have a UK subsidiary to trade?). Those powers seem unlikely to work with say Microsoft or Amazon!
Just getting started on the OU Contract Law module. It's talked about some software terms and conditions being contractual. I wonder how EULAs work as contracts for software you bought in a box from a shop. How is there consideration? Is it "reused" from the purchase contract with the retailer somehow?
If you see this post... Quote post a bridge. (If you can be bothered emulating a quote post). This is the Bridge of Sighs in Oxford, presumably so called in despair at how much less good it is than Cambridge’s queer.party/@sparrowsion/11335…
Sounds similar nuisance to that suffered by residents around Whalley's quarry waste site in Staffordshire. Turns out the monitoring equipment wasn't working properly so the amount of nuisance was under estimated too.
The revolving door between regulators and regulated needs to be addressed. It is too easy for corporations to parachute loyal lobbyists into 'regulators' and reward them with promotion when they return to the fold.
U+FE80 is the unicode hex value of the character Arabic Letter Hamza Isolated Form. Char U+FE80, Encodings, HTML Entitys:ﺀ,ﺀ, UTF-8 (hex), UTF-16 (hex), UTF-32 (hex)
I'm really really really not that upset if Iran tried to assassinate Bibi tbh. Given that preserving his political career and saving his ass from jail has been a not-insignificant part of the horrors unfolding across palestine. And Isreal's own assassinations have involved leveling city blocks...
Israel's longest running paper, Haaretz, just confirmed that Netanyahu actively blocked every hostage deal since 10/7, Netanyahu meanwhile is openly planning to annex Gaza—& the conversation is still "why won't Hamas agree to a deal?"😐
Israel News - Israel News, Analysis and Opinion on Israeli Politics, Business, Culture and Travel. With In-depth Coverage of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem News and All the Latest News From the Israel-Palestinian Conflict and the Jewish World.
'Torpedo the Deal': Israel's Channel 12 News exclusive report features new documents and previously unheard conversations showing Netanyahu's efforts to sabotage any hostage deal
@Ben Evans This then means I have unlawfully consumed alcohol and still have an open container of alcohol. Granted the gin may make me care less at this point whether an empty open container of alcohol is still an open container of alcohol.
@kittylyst I am not a lawyer, but I'd assume that the defining feature of a container of alcohol is that it's got alcohol in it. If it was the printing on the label then it would be legal to drink your gin so long as you put it in a milk bottle or whatever first.
Comet Tsuchinshan-ATLAS from Miradouro da Cordoama near Cape st Vincent, iPhone 16 pro, fusion camera, ProRaw, processed in Adobe Lightroom. 10 second exposure.
This is not surprising at all and I don't understand why anyone had to waste time and resources on demonstrating a self-evident fact that was known before the research even started.
@anderspuck As long as you can define "simple" as it applies to the LLM because some basic stuff it cannot do due to the lack of cognition. When I say that it cannot do these things I mean it needs to be able to do said tasks unaided (as in no further prompts or guiding prompts) with complete accuracy, if it can't do those things then it's not doing the task even if it's partially right.
@jwcph Let’s see how it develops. Ollama is working great for me, but it does require a fairly good computer. So yes, either taht processing power has to be local with the user or somewhere centralized.
@anderspuck Not to mention they are insanely expensive to operate. The cost-to-benefit ratio is not sustainable, even for most of the tasks they *can* do.
@anderspuck because they're expected to solve complex tasks, they're being sold as if they can solve complex tasks, and that they have a fail and error rate enough that they're not safe
They want these things to drive cars and make decisions that involve human lives.
@anderspuck No, it doesn't matter what kind of energy they're consuming, because energy always has a cost to produce, and again the cost-to-benefit ratio isn't there. LLMs are creating scarcity for relatively little actual positive benefit.
It's also not strictly about power; the same arguement applies to water consumption as well.
@anderspuck @dalias LLMs are NOT doing *speech to text* translation -- doing transcripts from audio (podcast). That's a different set of AI technologies.
The industry has been developing "AI" technologies since before I was born. Some are quite useful.
It's the "Generative AI" subset (which includes LLMs, chatbots) that is so misleading, mostly useless, and incredibly wasteful.
@JeffGrigg @dalias True. I kind of bundled ChatGTP and Whisper in that statement. I don’t find generative AI useless, though. There are many tasks for which it is very good, but probably not those flashy ones many people are thinking about. For example an LLM is much better at sentiment analysis than older methods.
The payroll calculation service I use for the pub company is closing down at the end of the tax year.
I'm looking for recommendations for a replacement. It needs to have a decent API that isn't gated behind "become a partner and put your app in our store" (so that rules out Xero).
Pricing that's transparent and would work for a company of ~50 people would also be nice! I'm currently paying about £55/month.
SO many companies in this space seem to be "call us for pricing"! Really puts me off...
I am using Freeagent, who are either free if you use Natwest or pretty decently priced with no fees for the API (which we don't use so I can't say if it works well).
paiyroll® is an automated cloud payroll software powered by artificial intelligence. Reducing payroll processing time by 75% and saving you 3 days a week.
fwiw I am using the Xero API without publishing my application - I do have to pay a £5/month custom connection fee but other than it works ok. This is not an endorsement of Xero though :-)
What I really like about the Greater Anglia trains that do the run from Cambridge North to Liverpool Street? The seat back trays have little grooves in for your phone or tablet (or here, Kindle).
Two years ago I painted anthracnose lesions on apples, strawberries and mango. The symptoms are caused by related fungi within the genus Colletotrichum.
“Non passibus aequis” was my mother’s favourite phrase from Virgil’s Aeneid. Literally “not with equal paces”, it describes Aeneas’ son Iulus as he escapes Troy with his father, and immediately brings the scene to life. Who hasn’t seen a parent hurrying with a small child, after all?
Thought brought to you by a section of Travis Baldree’s “Bookshops and Bonedust” where our protagonist’s dwarf friend is walking “two strides to every one of Viv’s”
With the future of .io coming into question this week, with the news that the UK will return sovereignty of the British Indian Ocean Territory to Mauritius, I thought it would be a good time to see how ICANN has treated disappearing countries and ter…
This blog is a continuation of our earlier collaboration (which can be found here and here). These posts focused on our first efforts to set up a workflow to image 5.25-inch floppy disks using a…
Handing the Chagos islands to Mauritius means the sun will set on the British Empire (on the 21st of March 2025, when British Antarctic Territory passes equinox, assuming the treaty is signed by then): reddit.com/r/geography/comment…
, new regulations - The Internet Domain Registry (Prescribed Practices and Prescribed Requirements) Regulations 2024 - was published, to do exactly that.](https://thegoatery.dyndns.org/photo/preview/640/5742628 "On Tuesday, [following a consultation](https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/powers-in-relation-to-uk-related- domain-name-registries), new regulations - The Internet Domain Registry (Prescribed Practices and Prescribed Requirements) Regulations 2024 - was published, to do exactly that.")
Kelly MacNeill
in reply to SwiftOnSecurity • • •Offbeatmammal
in reply to SwiftOnSecurity • • •For I am CJ
in reply to SwiftOnSecurity • • •Can confirm
At previous employer, "Security" got the thankless job of "securing" new DNS servers (after minor incident revealed owners of 'old' servers weren't maintaining them)
We implemented reputation based DNS +ad blocking w/ new servers
After change: 90% of all new malware infections were either people who ran sketchy email attachments (because: 'fail open') or laptops connected to untrusted internet (because 'off-site' connections didn't use our DNS)
SecureWaffle🧇
in reply to SwiftOnSecurity • • •@catsalad
sbszine
in reply to SwiftOnSecurity • • •Harshad Sharma
in reply to SwiftOnSecurity • • •lj·rk→⁽³⁹ᶜ³⁾
in reply to SwiftOnSecurity • • •It's just very unfortunate that MV3 is killing uBO although there's now uBO Lite. Probably good enough for security purposes, but still sucks.
I actually /like/ the initiative of MV3 to reduce code exec in extensions (duh), but I'm convinced one could've found a solution that would have allowed to keep the power of uBO at similar levels. This would've also been a good spot for Mozilla to step in and propose a better MV3+...
forest
in reply to SwiftOnSecurity • • •Thorne Lawler
in reply to SwiftOnSecurity • • •Horrifying/Fascinating thought:
Antivirus Vendors are already one of the richest sources of aggressive malware.
What if the false dichotomy was simply scrapped?
“Improve your corporate security with Phageware!”
“Self deploying”
“Eradicates all other malware undetectably”
“Attacks and cryptographically detains hostile actors on your network”
“Make the C&C seat YOUR seat for a change!”
DISCLAIMER: This is a fucking awful idea and under no circumstances should it be allowed to happen (as if we had any say in it)
Strypey
in reply to SwiftOnSecurity • • •> I ran the AV at a place and when I deployed adblock the detections fell off a cliff
Switching from Windows to GNU/Linux has a similar effect. Do both, and you'll eliminate the vast majority of virus/ malware/ spyware vectors.
#GNULinux #virus #malware #spyware