Mountain lions in Los Angeles become night owls to avoid humans
Not a bad idea, honestly…
Re: Massive New Information on Aliens Just Came Out (penguinz0, YouTube)
I like Charlie’s take on this. Yes; I believe all of the people at the congressional hearing on UAPs were telling the truth, I just don’t think it means aliens. Whether they think so or not. There’s proof of strange craft flying around the skies and we don’t know who they belong to or how they’re able to do these seemingly impossible maneuvers, but that doesn’t mean aliens.
“Has there been to your knowledge any communication with a non-human life form?” Republican Eric Burlison asked. “The term communication is a bit of a trick word because there’s verbal communication, the problem is you also have non-verbal communication, and so I would say definitely yes,” Elizondo said. “When a Russian reconnaissance aircraft comes into US air space we scramble two F-22s, we are certainly communicating intent and capability. I think the same goes with this. We have these things that are being observed over controlled US air space and…they’re making it pretty obvious they have the ability to even interfere with our nuclear readiness.”
In Charlie’s video, he makes the point that we believed the “Wow!” signal from the 70’s was smoking gun evidence of life on other planets but it’s since been debunked.
I, too, believe the universe is far too vast for us to be the only intelligent life out here but that’s just it; it’s so vast there’s little to no chance we’re anywhere near any other life. We have satellites like Voyager and JWST venturing deep into space, snapping a bunch of photos and soaking in all the data they can and yet we’ve still not seen any signs of civilization anywhere but Earth.
I would absolutely love for a society of benevolent aliens to come save us from ourselves and welcome us into The Galactic Federation but that’s just wishful thinking.
Bluesky feels more like old Twitter than X does
I’ll go as far as saying it feels more like original Twitter than Mastodon, too. I don’t know what it is, like I was on mastodon for two years before Bluesky came out and I had already built a pretty nice little community over there. But Bluesky somehow feels more welcoming. Or at least it feels more like what I remember about Twitter circa 2013 when I was still having fun.
I like that both Mastodon and Bsky are mostly made up of regular every day people. They’re both decentralized, which is a plus. Though I never really put any thought into that before I learned what it meant through using Mastodon.
But one big thing I missed about Classic™ Twitter was realtime updates. Everything from news to celebrities - without radical far right crypto bro influencers sprinkled in. Maybe that’s what I like; influencers aren’t really a thing on Bluesky and there’s no MAGA nonsense. It’s like Twitter pre-Elon and pre-crypto.
Here’s Why I Decided To Buy ‘InfoWars’ - The Onion
This is perfect. InfoWars makes much more sense as satire.
Mark ‘Z-Pain’ Zuckerberg did a cover of ‘Get Low.’
I may be scarred for life after hearing Zuckerberg’s autotuned voice serenade me with “‘Til the sweat drop down my balls.”
“‘Get Low’ was playing when I first met Priscilla at a college party, so every year we listen to it on our dating anniversary,” Zuckerberg wrote on Instagram. “This year I worked with @tpain on our own version of this lyrical masterpiece…"
We are undoubtedly living in the Bad Place.
I only watched like 20 minutes of that UAP congressional hearing but I think I can summarize most of it:
whistleblower: we have reason to believe that UAP’s are real and may be alien craft
someone in congress: do you have any proof?
whistleblower: well OBviously I have proof but I can’t show you
Perplexity brings ads to its platform
Enshittification ensues
This is what natural selection looks like in the age of gen AI
Daring Fireball: 1Password: The Infinite Loop of Security
The 2024 Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report (DBIR) found that “the human element” (accidental breaches caused by human error, or victimization in phishing attacks and the like) was the number one cause of breaches. The same was true last year, and the year before that, and the year before that.
it’ll never happen to me…
I used the same weak ass password for hundreds of accounts. I ignorantly took the position of “I don’t have anything worth hacking so using the same password everywhere is fine.”
I sure fucked around and found out on that one.
A couple years ago I found myself in the middle of a shitstorm of hacked accounts after I fell for a phishing thing. I immediately switched from Windows 11 to Linux and spent almost two full days updating hundreds of logins with unique, random 20+ character passwords using 1Password. The damage was already done though. Or at least it was off to a pretty good head start.
I lost an entire Facebook account, my PayPal and Cashapp were compromised and I’m pretty sure they straight up cloned my browser because I was getting login attempts across a lot of different accounts for DAYS after that. Even things that had 2FA enabled. I have no idea how that’s even possible but they got in there.
I don’t like to advocate for specific brands here but 1Password has been a godsend. It’s worth the small yearly fee. Even if you don’t go with them, you need a password manager. Every time I’ve been fucked over with phishing or hacked accounts it was my fault; human error or maybe even just arrogance and being too loosey goosey with online security.
Election Conspiracy Theories Are for Everyone
In the days following Donald Trump’s clear win, conspiracy theories about how votes were tampered with or how the election was stolen from Kamala Harris have spread on the left, with viral tweets, TikTok videos, and posts on Threads making a chaotic and spotty case alleging a fishy result.
Maybe we need some zany conspiracy theorists on the left. It works out pretty favorable for the MAGA people anyway. Maybe we’ve just been playing it too clean and… sane.
iPhone text prediction is so bad I think our only option at this point is to rewrite the entire English language to better align with how autocorrect wants us to talk.
Beatles' ‘Now and Then’ Makes History As First AI-Assisted Song To Earn Grammy Nomination
many fans assumed that the remaining Fab Four members…must have used generative AI to deepfake the late John Lennon. That was not actually the case. Instead, the Beatles used a form of AI known as “stem separation” to help them clean up a 60-year-old, low-fidelity demo recorded by Lennon
At first glance I thought this was a dumb headline about some gen AI songbot trained on Lennon’s voice. This actually makes sense though! Would love to see more old gems cleaned up to studio quality.
Your Standing Desk Might Actually Be as Bad as Sitting All Day
…a new study from researchers in Australia and the Netherlands has found standing for long periods of time might not be much better than sitting after all – and actually comes with its own life-threatening risks.
Ahmadi says the real take-home from this research is that standing, by itself, should not be considered a cure-all for the ailments of sedentary, seat-bound lifestyles.
Who keeps increasing the difficulty 🥴
How to work at McDonald’s and still become a millionaire
“Every dollar I get, I’m taking some of that money and I’m going to put it over here so that I can own my time and eventually have that money fund my entire life.”
This is so dumb lol idk why I’m even sharing it. Winning the lottery is literally the only way you’re getting rich at McDonalds.
I’ve done research on this. In one study, we looked at a group of people who [each] had about $11 million in net worth, and we compared them to a group of people who [each] had about $500,000 in net worth. These people had almost 18 times more money. And what we found is they only spent twice as much, on their house, their vacation, their watch and their car.
Some millionaires are making 18x more than a couple lower class peasants who only make half a million a year and they’re only spending twice as much? They’ll be poor forever at this rate 🤪
I just bought the domain name worksucks.me. I think I’m going to start working on a silly little thing like Fesshole only instead of random confessions you can anonymously submit a post bitching about your job. No idea if it’ll ever come to fruition but I need something to tinker with. And before you say there’s already Glassdoor - that’s a professional website where you can actually find a job. Mine does nothing and brings absolutely nothing to the table aside from a stream of posts from strangers who hate their job.
This scientist treated her own cancer with viruses she grew in the lab
She chose to target her tumour with two different viruses consecutively — a measles virus followed by a vesicular stomatitis virus (VSV). Both pathogens are known to infect the type of cell from which her tumour originated, and have already been used in OVT clinical trials.
Halassy felt a responsibility to publish her findings. But she received more than a dozen rejections from journals…because the paper…involved self-experimentation.
Self experimentation has led to a lot of medical breakthroughs. It almost seems more humane to me in a way but I can totally see how you wouldn’t wanna advertise someone self-curing cancer with a virus. Next thing you know there’s a new trend on TikTok of shooting yourself up with staph to cure high cortisol levels.
Taylor Swift Fans Are Leaving X for Bluesky After Trump’s Election
“I think that’s the kind of rhetoric we want to get away from,” Kim says. She also notes that X’s recent update to the “block” feature, which allows people to see the profile and posts of users that have blocked them, has contributed to a more negative experience on the platform. “Twitter has definitely become such a hellscape,” Kim says.
I like Swifties. I’d much rather hang out with them than the alt right cryptobros on xitter. Love seeing the community grow
It's like seeing a car crash from inside the car
The driver's got his head craned back he's telling you a joke
You see the bus on collision course
You point your arm and turn your head and wait for the impact
This is the feeling we learn to live with in North America
The morning headlines always accompanied with sweat and nausea...
Indie web escapism
Back in 2016 I didn’t have this community. I had Twitter and I think Tumblr? And definitely Facebook.
Facebook is already a shitshow. People fighting and ending lifetime friendships, a few Trump supporters being schooled on what tariffs actually are even though it’s a little too late now.
I’m glad I have a nice place to go and escape the noise and general insanity of the impending fascist regime, even if I am coming here to bitch about it.
I don’t know most of you very well but I’m glad we’re all here.
Trump plans to dismantle Biden AI safeguards after victory
Biden’s order established wide-ranging oversight of AI development. Among its core provisions, the order established the US AI Safety Institute (AISI) and lays out requirements for companies to submit reports about AI training methodologies and security measures, including vulnerability testing data.
Representative Nancy Mace (R-S.C.) warned that reporting requirements could discourage innovation and prevent developments like ChatGPT. And Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) characterized NIST’s AI safety standards as an attempt to control speech through “woke” safety requirements.
Honestly at this point I’m okay with being reduced to paste by a T-9000 unit