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2026-01-06

• 12:13 UTC This system can sort real pictures from AI fakes — why aren’t platforms using it? – This system can sort real pictures from AI fakes — why aren’t platforms using it? TIL there is a defined standard for cryptographic assertions of AI-free image origination: Tags: via:wonkish photography authentication slop ai metadata photos images fakes c2pa cai adobe

2026-01-05

• 11:05 UTC Pi Reliability: Reduce writes to your SD card – Pi Reliability: Reduce writes to your SD card Techniques to extend SD card lifespans in Raspberry Pi systems; putting /var/log into RAM is a nice trick Tags: reliability raspberry-pi hardware home sd-cards ram
• 11:05 UTC Solid state drive – ArchWiki – Solid state drive - ArchWiki the Arch Linux wiki page about SSD tuning and enabling TRIM -- extremely detailed and useful! Tags: trim ssd hardware arch-linux linux
• 11:05 UTC Understanding EV Battery Life – Understanding EV Battery Life Ireland's SEAI have published a decent blog post with some real world facts about EV battery lifespans: In 2020 GeoTab, a telematics solution provider, published real world battery data of 6,000 EVs (BEV & PHEV) over millions of days to produce 2 free to use tools that provide invaluable insight into the impact of temperature and SoH of EV batteries in the long term. This real-world data showed the average EV battery lost around 2.3% capacity per year. In other words, a 300km range EV today will have lost 34km in 5yrs. Data also showed that heat & fast-charging (DC charging) is responsible for more battery degradation than age or mileage, so high levels of use i.e. driving or mileage does not appear to be a concern. GeoTab's real world data along with other reports of EVs far surpassing their warranty by multiples of distance, cases of high level of use are plentiful. For example a 2017 Renault Zoe 52kWh, that's in use as a taxi in (hot) Turkey with 345,000Kms on the clock and a near perfect 96% SoH after driving further than an average Irish car's life expectancy. Tags: seai ev batteries cars driving bev

2025-12-18

• 10:48 UTC _Cheap science, real harm: the cost of replacing human participation with synthetic data_ [pdf] – _Cheap science, real harm: the cost of replacing human participation with synthetic data_ [pdf] A new paper from the inimitable Abeba Birhane, on the increasingly common practice of generating synthetic data using LLMs: Driven by the goals of augmenting diversity, increasing speed, reducing cost, the use of synthetic data as a replacement for human participants is gaining traction in AI research and product development. This talk critically examines the claim that synthetic data can “augment diversity,” arguing that this notion is empirically unsubstantiated, conceptually flawed, and epistemically harmful. While speed and cost-efficiency may be achievable, they often come at the expense of rigour, insight, and robust science. Drawing on research from dataset audits, model evaluations, Black feminist scholarship, and complexity science, I argue that replacing human participants with synthetic data risks producing both real-world and epistemic harms at worst and superficial knowledge and cheap science at best. "Synthetic data: stereotypes compressed" is absolutely spot on. This doesn't give insights into human behaviour and beliefs, just into stereotypes. It is increasingly common in social science fields, under the names of "digital twins" and "silicon samples". Tags: data surveys abeba-birhane papers ai synthetic-data digital-twins simulation testing social-science silicon-samples

2025-12-16

• 11:06 UTC Chafa: Terminal Graphics for the 21st Century – Chafa: Terminal Graphics for the 21st Century Chafa is a very impressive image renderer for modern text terminal apps. It blows my mind that there's a direct line from my own gif320 tool ( https://github.com/jmason/gif320 , now 33 years old) to this! Tags: gif images terminal video graphics cli
• 10:52 UTC Boost for artists in AI copyright battle as only 3% back UK active opt-out plan – Boost for artists in AI copyright battle as only 3% back UK active opt-out plan Wow, this is an absolute bollocking for the Labour plan: 95% of the more than 10,000 people who had their say over how music, novels, films and other works should be protected [in the UK] from copyright infringements by tech companies called for copyright to be strengthened and a requirement for licensing in all cases or no change to copyright law. By contrast, only 3% of people backed the UK government’s initial preferred tech company-friendly option, which was to require artists and copyright holders to actively opt out of having their material fed into data-hungry AI systems. Tags: ai training data copyright law uk uk-politics llms

2025-12-15

• 12:00 UTC Avoid UUID Version 4 Primary Keys | Software Engineer, Author, High Performance PostgreSQL for Rails – Avoid UUID Version 4 Primary Keys | Software Engineer, Author, High Performance PostgreSQL for Rails A well-researched article suggesting that random UUIDs do not make a good primary key for database tables; I would tend to agree (for cases where performance is important). UUID v4s increase latency for lookups, as they can’t take advantage of fast ordered lookups in B-Tree indexes For new databases, don’t use gen_random_uuid() for primary key types, which generates random UUID v4 values UUIDs consume twice the space of bigint UUID v4 values are not meant to be secure per the UUID RFC UUID v4s are random. For good performance, the whole index must be in buffer cache for index scans, which is increasingly unlikely for bigger data. UUID v4s cause more page splits, which increase IO for writes with increased fragmentation, and increased size of WAL logs For non-guessable, obfuscated pseudo-random codes, we can generate those from integers, which could be an alternative to using UUIDs If you must use UUIDs, use time-orderable UUIDs like UUID v7 Tags: postgres rails databases sql mysql uuids indexing primary-keys keys lookup storage random

2025-12-09

• 10:04 UTC ‘Pig Butchering’ Scams May Have Spurred Thailand-Cambodia War – 'Pig Butchering' Scams May Have Spurred Thailand-Cambodia War Via TJ McIntyre -- indications that the Thailand-Cambodia war is being driven by the "pig butchering" scammer compounds operating in the border area: Cambodia’s 2019 census put O’Smach’s population just over 9,850, but that doesn’t include the prison-like, office-dormitory compounds that have appeared here over the past five years, with the capacity to house 10,000 more. Around 50 sites like these now line the Cambodia-Thailand border, designed to house a slice of the trillion-dollar cybercrime industry—primarily teams running investment scams, dubbed “pig butchering” for the way they fatten their targets up; sextortion scams that blackmail victims, including children, by threatening to make sexual images public; scams that impersonate police to gain account access; and fraudulent online gambling sites. Once aimed largely at the Chinese public, these now target victims worldwide and rake in tens of billions of dollars a year in Cambodia alone. The compounds evolved from a casino industry that caters mostly to Chinese tourists and Thai day-trippers and has been linked to human trafficking, drug smuggling, and the endangered wildlife trade. From 2016, physical casinos were dwarfed by the online gambling industry (outlawed by Cambodia in 2019), which progressed to illegal sites and outright scams. Operators rent space in casinos and purpose-built compounds controlled by Chinese criminals, Myanmar warlords, and the Cambodian political elite. Scam companies rely heavily on forced and trafficked labor from Asia, Africa, and Latin America to chat with targets, pose as romantic interests and employees at fake investment platforms, and persuade them to make deposits. Survivors tell us that torture, rape, and beatings are common. As the fighting raged in July, some trafficking victims reached out for help, saying they were locked in their dorms by their bosses. Videos shot from inside these sites show missiles flying overhead, explosions thundering outside, some workers appearing to break out and run, and damage from shelling in the grounds. Tags: scams phishing pig-butchering war grim-meathook-future thailand cambodia scammers

2025-12-08

• 11:37 UTC Year in Review 2025: Hari Kunzru on AI slop and censorship – Year in Review 2025: Hari Kunzru on AI slop and censorship Hari Kunzru nails it: These days I have a sense of falling from a precipice toward a torrent of algorithmically driven slop. It’s coming, whether we want it or not, and the consequences for our communal life will be devastating. It’s now seven years since Steve Bannon outlined his infamous strategy to “flood the zone with shit.” This, he said, was a way to “deal with” the media, whom he saw as the real enemies of MAGA. In practice, it has been a very effective method of censorship. With every important issue of the day, the “zone” of public discourse is immediately filled with a volume of competing narratives, often mendacious or misleading. It’s no longer necessary to suppress information. You just have to make the cost of sorting fact from fiction, in terms of time and effort, too high to pay for the ordinary person, who can’t spend all day online weighing up competing claims about robots or pedophilia or Iran. Generative AI now allows the production of disinformation at scale. The kind of influence ops we associate with Cambridge Analytica or the Russian Internet Research Agency can be conducted with unprecedented scope and sophistication: Thousands of fake people — tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands — making videos, posting in forums, astroturfing entire contexts in which people will live out their political lives. Couple this with the collapse of trust in all kinds of authority, and there is no one even to say what might distinguish “disinformation” from any other kind of data. [...] The desire to return to consensus reality is hopelessly nostalgic. Yes, there are still hard limits: The “cloud” is a physical place, scooping out mountains for raw materials and venting heat and carbon dioxide out of gargantuan data centers; political power still grows out of the barrel of a gun. But the layer of the stack in which our subjectivities are formed, the place where our beliefs about the world are shaped, is also a battleground. We must teach ourselves to navigate the torrent that is replacing consensus reality, this turbulent, treacherous mediatized flow. There is no shore to swim back to, but in the new age of magic, when reality is labile and can be recoded by the power of signs, by narrative and memes and vibes and compelling images, art becomes a truly political technology. This is not art as critique. Critique is just sincere-posting, dutifully pointing out yet again that the Medbed isn’t “real.” Art can mess with our masters in ways we don’t yet fully understand. It makes culture. It is a transmitter of values. It is the lava out of which future realities will congeal. Tags: misinformation disinformation facts reality future ai slop hari-kunzru steve-bannon flooding-the-zone-with-shit art media propaganda

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