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tal

@ tal @lemmy.today

Posts
42
Comments
3415
Joined
3 yr. ago

Off-and-on trying out an account over at @tal@oleo.cafe due to scraping bots bogging down lemmy.today to the point of near-unusability.

  • What kind of things do you think movies are most dishonest about?

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  • Early PCs didn't play beep-boop sounds when you typed or when displaying a letter on the screen either, so join the crowd. I mean, people would have shoved a screwdriver through the speaker diaphragm if they had to listen to that all day.

    If you go all the way back to teletypes, okay, there was an impact sound, and computer keyboards were significantly noisier up until membrane and rubber domes became popular, but that's about as far as reality takes one.

  • What kind of things do you think movies are most dishonest about?

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  • What kind of things do you think movies are most dishonest about?

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  • A lot of explosions in movies are, as I understand it, gasoline explosions (which produce a deflagration). Those are impressive and very visible and orangy and don't actually create all that much pressure, so damage from the pressure wave or shrapnel isn't so much a thing. You can do the stoic walk out of an explosion thing.

    I think that the video of the Beirut explosion, which is large and filmed from a distance, so you can see the shockwave traveling over time, drives home how there is a lot of force going on in the air.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LNDhIGR-83w

  • What kind of things do you think movies are most dishonest about?

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  • Years back, I remember watching the Wargames scene where the computer was trying to "guess a passcode". Which it was doing remotely. Determining one digit at a time.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tGNBdjVO04Y

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F7qOV8xonfY

    I said, "This is completely ridiculous. That's not how any kind of real world authentication system works." Dramatic, yes. Realistic? No, never happen.

    Some years later, there was a severe remote exploit for the filesharing feature for Windows 95 and 98 systems. Not only had the Microsoft person who designed the thing stored the password to a share in plaintext instead of hashing it, which would have precluded this from working, but there was also a bug where the server's authentication system could be sent a malformed message and only validated as many bytes of the password as had been specified in the authentication message. Someone promptly went out and wrote an exploit to brute-force access to a share by just asking it to only validate the first byte, try each, get in in at most 256 tries. I look at that and say "yeah, but it also exposes the next byte of the password itself, and those probably persist even after the thing is patched, not to mention the potential for credentials reuse for other things". I go modify Samba's smbclient to iterate through the thing, extract the password one byte at a time. I message a buddy who has a Windows 98 machine on the network, "hey, can I break into your machine for a sec?" He comes up "Uh, okay. What are you up to, tal?"

    I fire it up and we're sitting there watching his password be printed on my Linux box's screen, one letter at a time. I said, "This is exactly like that scene in Wargames that I said could never, ever happen in real life, was just Hollywood. Guess that showed me." He says, "fucking Microsoft".

  • What kind of things do you think movies are most dishonest about?

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  • Peter Thiel: The pope is ‘working for the Chinese Communists’ by criticizing AI

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  • Well, China would rather have AI in China than in the US. I don't think that that part is what's dumb about this.

    I think that if I were the current American far-right, I'd stop dragging the pope into this stuff. Like, there is an anti-Catholic strain in the far-right that's been around for a long time, but as I've commented before, if you start getting those anti-Catholic Protestants riled up, you're also probably going to antagonize the Catholics, and a Catholic-Protestant schism in the US would be really bad for the Republican Party, since they're trying to keep social conservatives as a bloc in their coalition.

    I guess it's more-understandable with Thiel than when Trump was having a spat with the pope, since Thiel isn't as directly a political operator, but still.

    If the pope says something that you don't like, and you're a prominent right-wing figure in the US, even if you really have it in for Catholics, you're probably better-off biting your tongue and just addressing the thing they said, not turning it into a conflict with the person. Like, if I were Thiel, I'd have said "AI is really important to make the US competitive on the international stage" or something. Whatever, but avoid referencing the pope in particular.

  • Picked up this set this week, hoping to help a shop relocate

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  • I believe that it's a Briticism.

  • Picked up this set this week, hoping to help a shop relocate

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  • The heck kind of paint job is that? Blue and gold?

    searches

    Huh. Apparently that was a legit British North African camouflage scheme. Totally unaware of that.

    https://www.quora.com/Was-the-Matilda-II-actually-painted-blue-during-WWII-If-so-why

    Was the Matilda II actually painted blue during WWII? If so, why

    sort of….

    In the early part of the North African campaign British armour was painted a mix of sand, slate grey and what I’d call sky blue (I think the official spec was silver grey but as a modeller I do find that the same shade of paint from two different modelling companies can be quite different…. online forums are full of modellers arguing about RAL numbers and how modern samples compare to original paint revealed during restoration of real vehicles! )

    Its both a disruptive pattern which breaks up the distinctive tank shape and well chosen for blending in with the horizon (parts of the western desert are perfectly flat). The slate grey would fade to a paler blue making the tank appear more blue than sand over time. The same scheme was applied to many other vehicles.

    considers

    I guess, now that I think about it...most of the movies I've seen about the North Africa Campaign were in black and white, so...no way to know. Huh. TIL.

  • 4Chan trolls UK government with another AI hamster as fines hit $800k

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  • No infrastructure for having the British government blacklist sites today. You'd need a British version of what China and Russia run today. Could be that they'll wind up adding it.

  • Trump gets OpenAI to offer US 5% stake, far lower than Sanders’ target

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  • Trump gets OpenAI to offer US 5% stake

    https://www.schwab.com/learn/story/some-indexes-accelerate-entry-massive-ipos

    Some Indexes Accelerate Entry for Massive IPOs

    FTSE Russell: FTSE Russell announced the results of its index consultation on May 26, 2026, with changes effective as of the same date. Russell's U.S. Equity indexes will now allow fast entry for very large IPOs on the fifth trading day, instead of waiting for the next quarterly rebalance. However, the weight of the IPO in the index will be based on investable market capitalization. In other words, only shares available to public investors will be considered when calculating the company's size. Plus, IPOs must have at least 5% of shares available to public investors, either on the IPO date or within the next 12 months.

    Uh. So does that 5% count towards the minimum float amount that triggers automatic buying by some index funds?

  • SO wanted me to make this tuna casserole from his childhood

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  • Hmm. considers So, like...she kinda added some crispiness to the noodles on the underside that way?

  • SO wanted me to make this tuna casserole from his childhood

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  • It also microwaves up well after having been chilled, so makes for great leftovers to snag a slice of from the fridge. It doesn't really have much to get soggy.

  • SO wanted me to make this tuna casserole from his childhood

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  • One of my favorite childhood foods was sombrero pie. Still love it. I think it came from a Betty Crocker cookbook at some point.

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    Pretty sure that this is it.

    https://www.food.com/recipe/sombrero-pie-348597

    Man, when you grow up with something, it just...yeah, it hits you.

  • 4Chan trolls UK government with another AI hamster as fines hit $800k

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  • As 4Chan has no assets in the United Kingdom (given that it has no connection to the United Kingdom), that would require you to show up in a US court as a platiff

    I think that the way this works is that first the British government has to go to a British court and secure a ruling against 4Chan and then go to a US court and prove to it that 4Chan is under British jurisdiction to get that ruling enforced by a US court. As an aside, I think I'd be careful if I were 4Chan --- there are things that they can do that are not immediately obvious, like targeted advertising aimed at Brits, that might place them under British jurisdiction in the eyes of US courts. I also dunno about accepting donations from Brits. But if they rigorously kept their nose clean, then I agree --- it's very much possible that a US court would rule that there is no British jurisdiction.

    However, I do have to say that I think that the prospect of Ofcom arguing the matter in front of a serious-looking judge in a British court, horsehair wig and all, while presenting material from, say, /d/ (NSFW), and having said judge gravely contemplate it and British law seems like it'd be sound fodder for a comedy skit.

  • 4Chan trolls UK government with another AI hamster as fines hit $800k

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  • platiff

    Given that this is quoting the lawyer, I can't tell if the lawyer typoed "plaintiff" or if the author of this article did. Given the other errors outside of the quote and lack of a "[sic]", I'm inclined to blame the article author, but...

  • 4Chan trolls UK government with another AI hamster as fines hit $800k

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  • The additional AI hamsters were a threat in 4Chan’s previous response, as they promised to use an “even larger rodent” next time around. 

    See, I would have expected a capybara or something, rather than a higher-res hamster.

    EDIT: looks at actual image Oh, I see. It's like, a Kaiju hamster. Dwarfing the buildings it's sitting near.

  • SO wanted me to make this tuna casserole from his childhood

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  • That's a nostalgia food for me too.

    Mom would do a checkerboard of alternating white jack and yellow cheddar on top. Oh, and sprinkle a bit of some cornmeal on top of the cheese to add crunch.

    EDIT: I need to make some.

    EDIT2:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ld9EP5yAX4&t=47s

  • Microsoft Teams' new controversial AI will listen to your meetings and answer before you ask, but it won't be turned on by default

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  • https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/clippy

    Clippit, better known as Clippy, is the default animated character in the English Windows version of Microsoft Office Assistant, an interactive user's guide that came pre-installed with Microsoft Office bundles from 1997-2003. Due to its impractical and intrusive nature, Clippy quickly became a subject of mockery among Office users, inspiring a series of satirical images and parodies addressing its overall incompetence.

    I guess we'll see if Round 2 goes better than Round 1.

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  • True CLI...How do you currently automate screen capture on...Linux?

    Under Wayland?

     
            $ grim