Posts

DALL-E 3 is here. And the future too, or almost at least.

Prompt: generate 3D images of the inside of a house in Singapore. It needs to look modern and minimalistic, with light colours, to show a customer. Focus on the living room.

It still sucks at generating text... Trying to get an 80s style logo for superuser.one...

Raspberry Pi recently launched Bookworm, and with that, a new kernel package.

However, due to the massive changes from Bullseye to Bookworm, they are not suggesting a dist-upgrade.

In the past, we have suggested procedures for updating an existing image to the new version, but always with the caveat that we do not recommend it, and you do this at your own risk.

This time, because the changes to the underlying architecture are so significant, we are not suggesting any procedure for upgrading a Bullseye image to Bookworm; any attempt to do this will almost certainly end up with a non-booting desktop and data loss.

Keep seeing more and more topics, threads and sites about it. And it's probably not getting half as much attention as it deserves.

Here's a summary from Danny Mekić post:

• The European Commission wants to turn digital communication apps into mass surveillance tools by automatically scanning EU citizens' live conversations, photos and videos for criminal offenses, even if they are not suspected of a crime.
• Hundreds of academics, privacy regulators and EU legal experts have condemned the proposal, arguing it grossly violates privacy rights and the technology cannot accurately detect criminal activity.
• When the EU Council meeting showed insufficient support for the proposal, the Commissioner launched a paid advertising campaign on social media targeting specific countries to sway public opinion.
• The campaign used emotionally manipulative images and music to suggest opponents did not want to protect children, while also misleadingly claiming majority European support.
• The ads were microtargeted to exclude people interested in privacy, Euroscepticism, Christianity and other critical political/religious groups, creating an uncritical echo chamber.
• This microtargeting violates the social media platform's policies, the Digital Services Act, and GDPR.
• When a proposal lacks sufficient support, the proper response is to withdraw or amend it, not pressure doubting members through manipulative disinformation campaigns.
• By setting aside European values, the Commission is endangering the foundations of the European Union.
• The Commission should take down the ad campaigns and refrain from future attempts to bend public opinion through illegal targeted ads.
• The document was written by a jurist and technologist who is critical of the Commission's overreach and disregard for democratic processes and individual rights.

Via Kagi: Undermining Democracy: The European Commission's Controversial Push for Digital Surveillance

Very simple Python script that tracks one or multiple hosts/domains for IP changes, and prints it in a Matrix room.

# docker logs ipchanged
29-09-2023 - 11:26:35 - Logged in as @turtlebot:matrix.org
29-09-2023 - 11:26:35 - IP address for be.yeri.be is 94.105.123.126
29-09-2023 - 11:26:35 - IP address for sg.yeri.be is 58.96.238.208
29-09-2023 - 11:26:35 - IP address for industry.yeri.be is 78.23.172.72
29-09-2023 - 11:29:36 - IP address for be.yeri.be is 94.105.123.126
29-09-2023 - 11:29:36 - IP address for sg.yeri.be is 58.96.238.208
29-09-2023 - 11:29:36 - IP address for industry.yeri.be is 78.23.172.72

Includes a Docker container to keep it running.

Via Kottke.

Oh, man. Recently got my hands on an old Asus CN65. Back in the olden days at Google we were always tinkering with these devices (and they were a breeze to support). Great "parent devices" as they are really hard to destroy (aka download dodgy shit and fill them with viruses).

This post is mostly for myself, as a reminder, for the next time I need to do this.

Seems like this Chromebox was actually a GVC unit. Google has this thing where devices auto-install the Google Meet app and autoload it at boot. Officially, it's called CfM (Chrome (or ChromeOS?) For Meet). It requires a separate licence in your Google Admin to get this to work.

This is quick and dirty (and with the help of ChatGPT).

FlatTurtle has a new site, and there's been some fine-tuning here and there that led to a few typos creeping in. I wanted a quick tool to plug in a page, and that would highlight possible mistakes.

I've been a personal (paying) user of LanguageTool for a few years now (European, and less spammy and dodgy than Grammarly)