Remember the Mannequin Mountain? Here's a recent interview with the proprietor. "Over a period of about four months, 25,000 of them showed up."
Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.
It doesn't matter.
This is the taunt implicit in everything Zuckerberg does at this point in his reign. Here is a man who got unconscionably rich off the worst website that has ever existed, a website that has broken brains on a scale previously unimaginable in human history, and here is his stupendously wack vision for the future -- and everyone is just going to have to deal with it. There are many things to abhor about Mark Zuckerberg and his works, but the fundamental mediocrity of it all -- the lack of vision, the absence of any moral sense or shame, the inability and unwillingness not just to fix but even reckon with the dangerous and ungovernable thing he's made -- is what feels both most egregious and most of this moment. It is embarrassing and not a little enraging to realize that you are subject to the whims of an amoral and incurious capitalist posing as a visionary optimist. It is especially humiliating when the all-bestriding and inevitable figure in question is such a dim, dull nullity.
Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.
#uncategorized #bigbrother #computers #conspiracies #corporations #doomed
Hackers plant card-stealing malware on website that sells baron and duke titles:
> Hackers have taken control of the government site of Sealand, the North Sea micronation, since Oct 12th. People buying Baron or Duke titles have likely been skimmed. Sorry, sirs!
While it declared its independence and sovereignty in the '60s, the principality was never recognized as a formal state by any other UN nation and is considered a media stunt. The principality is primarily known these days for selling nobility titles through its website, a practice used by many other small countries or local governments to raise funds for their local budgets.
Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.
#uncategorized #computers #conspiracies #corporations #doomed #pranks #security
Kyle Rittenhouse's judge bestie, ladies and gentlemen:
"Ipads ... have artificial intelligence in them that allow things to be viewed through three-dimensions and logarithms," the defense team argued. "This isn't actually enhanced video. This is Apple's iPad programming creating what it thinks is there, not what necessarily is there."
Schroeder responded that the prosecution shouldered the burden of proof that Apple does not use artificial intelligence to manipulate footage.
Ok, everybody's going to be dunking on that logarithms thing for a long time, because let's face it, it's hilarious, but let's not lose sight of the fact that this is a fascist judge searching for loopholes to let a fascist, white supremacist terrorist murderer go free.
Before the trial, Schroeder ruled that the men shot by Rittenhouse cannot be referred to as 'victims" by prosecutors. Defense attorneys may, however, call them "arsonists" or "looters" if they could justify those labels. [...]
Judge Schroeder's phone suddenly rang to the ringtone of God Bless the USA. Released in 1984 by Lee Greenwood, the song is popular in conservative circles and often played as Trump's entrance theme during his rallies.
#uncategorized #bigbrother #computers #doomed #firstperson #stormtroopers
One used mass media to promote his barely-disguised virulent racism and horrific visions of humanity subjugated by incomprehensible, formless entities. The other was H. P. Lovecraft.
I wonder what Zuckerberg named his cat, though?
Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.
#uncategorized #ab #conspiracies #corporations #doomed #firstperson #tentacles
XScreenSaver 6.02 is out now, including iOS and Android.
Two new hacks this time, Marbling and Binary Horizon, plus a few minor updates.
Several of the old hacks have been re-enabled on Android, because it turns out that while they didn't work in the emulator, they do work on real Android hardware (of which I have none).
This release was built on macOS 11.6 instead of 10.14, so I think that means that it has native Apple M1 code in it -- though I doubt you'll notice any performance difference over the Rosetta2 emulation.
Also Apple completely changed how code signing works again, because hey, six more months have passed, it's clearly time for a redesign of the most incomprehensible part of their entire ecosystem, right? Is it better? No. No it is not, it's just differently awful. Again. Anyway, let me know if there are signing issues.
I also had to update Sparkle (the "Check for Updates" library), so hopefully auto-updates still work. Let me know.
About Marbling, the new one written by me. It started out fairly simple, but then it took the optimization train to crazytown. Here's the comment from the top of the source:
This generates a random field with Perlin Noise (Perlin's page, SIGGRAPH 2002 paper, Wikipedia entry), then permutes it with Fractal Brownian Motion (Wikipedia page, Book of Shaders, Shader Toy) to create images that somewhat resemble clouds, or the striations in marble, depending on the parameters selected and the colors chosen.
These algorithms lend themselves well to SIMD supercomputers, which is to say GPUs. Ideally, this program would be written in Shader Language, but XScreenSaver still targets OpenGL systems that don't support GLSL, so we are doing the crazy thing here of trying to run this highly parallelizable algorithm on the CPU instead of the GPU. This sort-of works out because modern CPUs have a fair amount of parallel-computation features on their side of the fence as well. (Generally speaking, your CPU is a Cray and your GPU is a Connection Machine, except that your phone does not typically require liquid nitrogen cooling and a dedicated power plant).
Update: Oh yeah, I forgot to mention. A while back someone requested an Apple TV version of XScreenSaver, so I took a crack at it. There's a tvOS target in the Xcode project, but when you launch it, it never instantiates SaverRunner. I imagine there's some xib or storyboard problem, but I couldn't figure it out so I gave up. If someone can get me past that, I'll take another look. BTW, it turns out that one of the hurdles of porting iOS to tvOS is that tvOS doesn't have newfangled UI elements like checkboxes and sliders.
#uncategorized #computers #firstperson #linux #mac #phones #security #xscreensaver
