Yes, the comment was justified. AI beaver head is fine, but AI that pretends to be real is not.

The stick pile is in his room, of course, not outside. He wants a showcase for Christmas.

Originally, I trusted the AI to cover the head only, but as usual, it also made tiny changes to the background. So I edited the post and this time just put the head over the original photograph by hand.

Point taken; I edited the post and made sure that only the beaver head is generated, and otherwise it’s the authentic photograph.

lol right, must sound like Treknobabble but for the 2000s. Heck, for kids these days, it’s probably as gibberish as original Treknobabble.

I bet distant future archaeologist, be they human or alien, will assemble the bits and pieces like this: Child worker programmers would work in these inflatable tiny castles on the soft floor with their laptops. That was the last attempt to revive feudalism. Why it didn’t catch on to other office jobs remains lost in the past.

An annoyance that came shortly after was that they were not allowed to ship the Java Runtime Environment / Development Kit with a javax.crypto library that allowed for algorithms stronger than DES (such as AES, Twofish, Blowfish, …), or long passwords, iirc.

There was some way to download something extra (Java Cryptography Extension (JCE) Unlimited Strength Jurisdiction Policy Files) and fiddle it in, but with regulation in the US, I think.

I was quite sad when I made one of my early programs based on that and it turned out to be useless to US citizens, and hard to use for everyone else. I think I made a bouncycastle-based version later, but it was basically a full rewrite.

Edit: I’m starting to remember more absurdities of the time: Even with the JCE, the best algorithm for symmetric encryption was 3DES, which was not a legal requirement, just laziness of Sun Microsystems. While it was somewhat safe, it was less than ideal and really slow.

That does make sense. Smartest thing he has said so far.

We already have “Miss Germany” etc. Why did we not think of using that term for the respective leader?

At a protest many years ago in Germany, two undercover cops were beaten up pretty badly by other cops. They had a “safeword”, but apparently the other cops were already in a frenzy and didn’t stop.

At my school, there was this guy in my general circle. Played in a punk band, different one than mine, hanging out at the same parties, didn’t talk much, but easy to get along with. Also, looked like a punk and partied like a punk. Really good with his instrument, also did jazz on a high level.

Many years later, someone sent me a link from a left leaning forum: He was caught as a deep undercover cop. Apparently went to the police academy (~ 3 years in Germany) and got planted shortly after. He “lived” 100 km from his home with roommates who politically active, again in a punk band, participating in apparently as many political groups as he could schedule. Almost all of them were entirely legal, such as advocating for better welfare laws. He sat there, listened, didn’t talk much. No contact to actual terrorist cells or anything like that. Minor vandalism and unregistered protests perhaps.

They only caught him after a few years when someone from our home town recognised him at a punk concert and called him by his real name in front of other people. He just walked away, and his fake personality disappeared immediately. From what I can find, doing low-profile police work ever since.

It’s a bit concerning that they spy on entirely legal groups as well as groups who commit minor offences with such enormous resources. Must have cost like 100k per year; with deep analysis of his reports probably more. Just to get a list of people to “take care of” when we go full Trump here?

Anyway, my point: Surprising that the undercover cop in the picture makes so many mistakes. He was apparently spotless.

The leading all but one languages help to me a Lord with Google assistant not your relevant

I remember the “big movement” when Twitter turned into a right wing cesspool.

At first, the biggest problem was that there were TWO main alternatives: Mastodon and Bluesky. So those who left split into two groups, ending up with a dead timeline, missing out on news. (I and my “bubble” use it to keep up with Covid vaccines, politics, safety etc.)

I joined the Mastodon group, because it solves the problem of a single crazy billionaire potentially buying & enshittifying it. But I fully admit that it is not user friendly at all. People who are not in IT just want it to WORK, like Twitter used to. They don’t want to “educate themselves” about servers, fediverse and networks. The user experience clearly hasn’t even been a thing. It’s techies writing software for themselves. What it needs is a full analysis of the experience from the start: Who are you, user, why are you considering Mastodon, what are your expectations, what are the experiences in the first 30 seconds after entering “mastadon” (oh, you misspelled it?) or “twitter alternative” into a search engine, etc. “pick an instance” is already the passive-aggressive demand nobody wants to hear.

In the end, my instance was shut down without a fair warning, all the reconnected and new contacts lost, no option to move. Trying Bluesky now, but many stayed at Twitter (now X), moved to Mastodon with or without success (most onto my dead instance), or gave up on microblogging.

I think we need something simple again. I remember what SUSE did for Linux in the 90s. Linux users were all like: Only debian is even somewhat useable, but if you should really do LFS. Non-techies willing to switch for “political” or other reasons were hit in the face with “Pick a distro!!!”. SUSE has been called “the Windows among the Linux distros” by those people, but it did the right thing. It provided exactly the simplification we needed: “This is Linux, you simply buy it on CD in a retail store like your other software, you run the installer.” It was a good thing.

IRC is the one good old thing that still works great. When they tried to enshittify freenode, we just moved, collectively. Many non-IT channels & servers died after 2010, though.

Get your hands on Metformin or paxlovid

I came to a very similar conclusion recently: https://lemmy.world/comment/11880279

Let’s hope that Brazil creates a mass-movement that makes it easier to follow. Aren’t they even like the world majority in Portuguese?