been a while since I uploaded my photography bullshit, here's a few photos I took on my 1950s 35mm camera :3

(Retina IIA, HP5+ developed in Rodinal 1+50)

The LLM honeymoon phase is about to end: https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/2024/the-llm-honeymoon-phase/

As someone who hates bright colours, rainbows, sparkles and cuddles.

Please don't let my apathy of that stuff ruin your expression of it. Just keep I mind I am just being that grumpy dad person who sits down, tired looking sipping his coffee. But you do you and never ever let me stop you from you doing you.

One of the weirdest things I learned working in the music industry is that if you have a gold or platinum record, like the physical framed album, it’s not actually your album. The presses just use whatever happened to be going through at the moment and put your sticker on it.

I bet no one has drawn a furry Samus because that seems like a strange juxtaposition.

*does an image search*

...oh.

Furry Masterchief? Wait, doesn't he already have cat ears?

Furry Optimus Prime? ... ... Damn it.

girl who cultures you in a petri dish

Do they actually make reliable microsd cards, or are they all just shit that'll die after a few months of use?

linguistic hypothesis: language exists so that we can make silly little sounds and other purposes have just been bolted onto it and corrupt the concept

liechten deez nuts

I don't know how well folks are paying attention to what's going on in France right now, but left wing politicians in the French government are accusing President Emanuel Macron of trying to steal an election, as well as conducting a type of coup and given the available evidence, I'm having a hard time disagreeing with that sentiment.

https://www.commondreams.org/news/french-left-macron

'This Election Is Being Stolen From Us': French Left Calls Mass Protest Against Macron

"Leftist parties in France on Tuesday accused President Emmanuel Macron of election theft and announced mass protests after he rejected Nouveau Front Populaire's proposed candidate for prime minister, even though the left-wing coalition won the most seats in a snap parliamentary contest last month.

The left-wing parties that formed NFP in June to fight off the surging far-right expressed outrage at Macron's decision, with the Jean-Luc Mélenchon-led La France Insoumise (LFI) Party condemning Macron's dismissal of a leftist government as a "coup" and urging a "firm response from French society."

Although I must confess that I'm not an expert on the French system of government, on some level this seems like an extremely straightforward story. Back in June, Macron responded to his "centrist" party's extremely poor showing in European Parliament elections by calling an ill-advised snap election. As you can imagine, this did not go well and for a while it looked like Marine Le Pen's fascist National Rally party would win control of the country, until the burgeoning French Left and the country's centrist parties worked together to defeat the fascists at the ballot box. This left the parliament divided, but crucially the left wing parties working together controlled the most seats, which in turn means that the new French Prime Minister should be someone chosen by those parties. Except Macron, whose centrist bloc came in second place behind the left coalition but ahead of the fash, has been openly antagonistic to the left in France his entire time in office. Since the election he's dragged his feet and delayed naming a Prime Minster until now, when he's used the excuse that he believes a left wing government would immediately face a vote of no confidence (presumably engineered by the fascist right and crucially his *own* centrist bloc) to reject the left wing alliance's choice for Prime Minster entirely.

To say this is highly irregular, even unprecedented would be more than a mild understatement; from out here it looks like after the French left saved the country from fascism, Macron is preventing them from taking power pretty much entirely because he's a reactionary capitalist pig who hates anyone left of Otto von Bismarck. Furthermore, it's important to keep in mind here that the fascist right doesn't have the ability to collapse a left wing government on its own, so Macron is more or less admitting that his centrist bloc would work *with* the goddamn National Rally to do so; all of which makes this situation rather a lot like putting a gun to the country's head and saying "I can't let the will of the people stand because then someone, specifically us, would pull the trigger and blow the whole thing up."

Now that left wing alliance, the Nouveau Front Populaire, is (accurately, as far as I can tell) calling this a coup, organizing for Macron's impeachment, and promising to take the fight to the streets. In the meantime, Macron's government, which has already resigned, remains in power in a caretaker role. It's unclear how long this can continue on, but for the moment Macron is doing exactly what the left is accusing him of doing - stealing an election, against the will of French voters at large.

#FrenchPol #Macron #Fascism #Neoliberalism #NFP #Coup #Protests #NationalRally #LePen #Melenchon #GreenParty #LucieCastets

#Telegram is a tricky ecosystem from security perspective, because it’s quite diverse and complex:

1. Public groups and chats are widely used by both #Russia and #Ukraine. These include both publicly available and “private” (invite-only) chats neither can be really considered secret because…
2. …group chats can’t be end-to-end encrypted (E2EE), so their contents are readable to at least Telegram operators, probably as easily as running a single SQL query.
3. Telegram bots don’t support E2EE either.

So here’s an important distinction: while Telegram is great and highly usable for disseminating public or semi-public information (unencrypted public or invite-only groups), it’s quite poor for highly confidential communications. Yet, especially the Russian side uses it a lot for just that - there are reports of “secret groups” used for front-line command or control, correction of fire or as a channel for communication with spies and collaborators in Ukraine. Except these “secret groups” really aren’t, at least not in OPSEC and cryptographic sense (groups can’t use E2EE in Telegram).

This is one purely marketing win for Telegram, because even mainstream journalists notoriously confuse these concepts.

Yes, it is technically possible that a Russian operator opens an actual “secret chat” with each of his collaborator, but it’s highly impractical and I doubt majority of them do it.

Which is further confirmed by the panic caused by detention of Durov in Russian military channels 🤷

In any case, France taking over Telegram infrastructure is still highly speculative - the main point of the arrest is almost complete lack of moderation in Telegram, even for the most severe CSAM (child abuse) content.

While in Russia arrest of Durov would likely lead to his genitals being connected to a field telephone in order to convince him to hand over the infrastructure (that’s why he ran away from Russia in the first place), in #France he will be likely just subject to a regular, boring law enforcement process that ends with a trial and suspended sentence, at best, if he agrees to improve content moderation. Part of the panic in Russia is that Russian routinely project the practices of their own law enforcement onto everyone else.

nobody: “no you can’t just say that canadian culture is just maple syrup”
actual canadian: “do you ever eat snow with maple syrup”

PCMCIA is how spies encode their audio files

I've found a lot of conflicting and confusing reports about the #SecureBoot issue caused by a Microsoft update, so here's my relatively informed take about it.

Spoilers: this isn't an issue with GRUB, but with another less known bootloader called shim. GRUB can also be affected though. So let's talk about how the bootchain of a #Linux distro works and what happened to it. 🧵 1/11

If you give 1st-time homebuyers $25K towards purchase, you will simply inflate prices $25K. If you regulate the housing industry, you will be able to house people affordably.

Guess which one of these ideas is preferred by landlords, real estate, etc?

Verbose update from the FA tech team:

Too long for alt text. Content is available on Fender's journal here: https://www.furaffinity.net/journal/10936501

TL;DR: FurAffinity is back up, attacker may have briefly engaged in email spoofing. Attacker did not (to their knowledge) ever have access to real FA emails or user data. You were logged out and should log back in.

As before, we don't know who the hacker is or how they did it. (See my misinfo post for more: https://dragon.style/@pyrex/113004484026364537)