I’ve noticed an uptick as well. This isn’t the first time it’s happened over the years, though. Spam is a cat-and-mouse game. Every now and then spammers learn how to break through, and it takes some time for Google to adapt.

I’ve been surprised by the latest wave, because it’s so obviously spam. Mostly phishing attempts full of misspellings and even numbers in place of letters, like F1del1ty instead of Fidelity. Should be pretty easy to filter.

Racism in America is real. Anyone telling you otherwise is probably just living a charmed life and incapable of accepting that their personal experience is not universal.

I don’t have the time or energy to prove this exhaustively, but here’s a starting point: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Driving_while_black

In 2019, as reported by NBC, the Stanford Open Policing Project found that “police stopped and searched black and Latino drivers on the basis of less evidence than used in stopping white drivers, who are searched less often but are more likely to be found with illegal items.”

Please refer to the citations on that page for more details. Lots of studies in various states showing the same thing. The fact that the mere existence of racial profiling in America is still debated, when it has been consistently proven again and again for decades, is itself a clear indicator of a different kind of racism.

Here’s a little story that stuck in my memory, about how a white woman finally came to realize that racial harassment by police was a real thing. It’s kind of hilarious, in a dark, face-palmy kind of way. https://franklywrite.com/2020/06/01/a-white-woman-racism-and-a-poodle/

It’s explicitly forbidden for anyone to discriminate against you based on your race or ethnicity

Ironically, it’s very common to be asked for this information specifically because of anti-discrimination laws, so they can demonstrate statistically fair practices. I always see a box for this on medical forms, new-hire paperwork, etc. I believe the law requires it to be optional and only used for regulatory reports. So that’s probably what OP heard about.

which would indicate that it’s somehow needed to generate AI-generated CSAM

This is not strictly true in general. Generative AI is able to produce output that is not in the training data, by learning a broad range of concepts and applying them in novel ways. I can generate an image of a rollerskating astronaut even if there are no rollerskating astronauts in the training data.

It is true that some training sets include CSAM, at least in the past. Back in 2023, researches found a few thousand such images in the LAION-5B dataset (roughly one per million images). 404 Media has an excellent article with details: https://www.404media.co/laion-datasets-removed-stanford-csam-child-abuse/

On learning of this, LAION took down their database until it could properly cleaned. Source: https://laion.ai/notes/laion-maintenance/

Those images were collected from the public web. LAION took steps to avoid linking to illicit content (details in the link above), but clearly it’s an imperfect system. God only knows what closed companies (OpenAI, Google, etc.) are doing. With open data sets, at least any interested parties can review, verify, and report this stuff. With closed data sets, who knows?

Sorry, it looks like the real estate option in Portugal is no longer available. :( Now it would take a €500K investment in a local business or €250K in a nonprofit. If you’re that stinkin’ rich, you probably have better options already.

According to https://www.globalcitizensolutions.com/real-estate-citizenship/ , Cyprus offers a citizenship path with real estate purchase of €300K. Greece and some other countries do, as well.

I’m not worried about getting raided by the KGB or anything like that, but break-ins happen and my computer equipment would be a prime target for theft.

I occasionally cycle my backup drives off-site, so I want those encrypted as well.

The cost of encryption is very close to zero, so I don’t even entertain the question of whether I should encrypt or not. I just encrypt by default.

Are you able to spend a lot of money on it? Last I checked, there were a few places in the EU that had a citizenship track if you purchased substantial property. So if you’re in position to buy a nice house, that’s an option. I think Portugal is the most approachable cost-wise. But it’s been a while since I looked at this so I’m sure things have changed.

Several countries will allow extended student visas, even if you only speak English. I think Sweden allows this.

Then of course there’s the easy way: marry a Canadian.

Silly question perhaps, but are you sure you’re using the correct port on your Linux system? If I plug my external HD into a USB2 port, I’m stuck at 30-40MB/sec, while on a USB3 port I get ~150-180MB/sec. That’s proportionally similar to the difference you described so I wonder if that’s the culprit.

You can verify this in a few different ways. From Terminal, if you run lsusb you’ll see a list of all your USB hubs and devices.

It should look something like this:

Bus 002 Device 001: ID xxxx:yyyy Linux Foundation 3.0 root hub
Bus 002 Device 002: ID xxxx:yyyy <HDD device name>
Bus 003 Device 001: ID xxxx:yyyy Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub
Bus 004 Device 001: ID xxxx:yyyy Linux Foundation 3.0 root hub

So you can see three hubs, one of which is 2.0 and the other two are 3.0. The HDD is on bus 002, which we can see is a USB 3.0 hub by looking at the description of Bus 002 Device 001. That’s good.

If you see it on a 2.0 bus, or on a bus with many other devices on it, that’s bad and you should re-organize your USB devices so your low-speed peripherals (mouse, keyboard, etc.) are on a USB2 bus and only high-speed devices are on the USB3 bus.

You can also consult your motherboard’s manual, or just look at the colors of your USB ports. By convention, gray ports are USB 1.0, blue ports are 2.0, and green ports are 3.x.

If you’re running KDE, you can also view these details in the GUI with kinfocenter. Not sure what the Gnome equivalent is.

DBAs think everything is a database.

Yeah, Matrix is a very, very hard sell. I mean, “normal” people (for lack of a better term) are put off by Mastodon, and Matrix is a hundred times more complicated to join. I’m also not sure what it would look like to use Matrix the way I use Discord. Perhaps there is functionality in Element/Matrix I have never explored since I use it more for messaging and group chat, not for communities with multiple channels like IRC/Discord/Slack.

In any case, Discord is too entrenched to be replaced by something that is merely technically superior, or even more user-friendly. Realistically, you can’t migrate entire communities if they’re bigger than a tight-knit IRL friend group, and even that is hard. That seems to be the only reason X still exists.

Almost, yeah. Certainly the big corps.

This is why I strongly favor services that use end-to-end encryption or do not store history in the first place.

There are not many times when I’ve needed to search back through history on a Discord server, and every time I have I thought to myself “this would be much better on any platform besides Discord”. Discord would, IMHO, be a better product if they did not retain history forever.

Ditto for Slack. Slack has the additional gall to limit access to that data unless you pay for a premium plan, despite the fact that they keep the data forever regardless (as evidenced by their occasional free trials which magically bring all history back, and some search tricks you can use to access old posts regardless).

Both Slack and Discord have lulled their user base into a false sense of privacy. Nothing you post there should be considered private.

It doesn’t really matter if they do or don’t. What matters is that they can change their TOS at any time, they keep an archive of all historical data, and you will have pretty much no recourse no matter what they decide to do with it in the future.

Who knows what will happen to Discord in five or ten years?

They might get bought by a narcissistic billionaire.

They might sell all their data to Google for training AI.

They might go bankrupt and sell off their assets to the highest bidder.

They might have an IPO and begin the usual value extraction at the expense of their users.

I know, I know…crazy ideas, right? When has anything like that ever happened?!

My guess is that this is a teenager, and this is probably their first experience with git and version control in general. Just a hunch.

Anyway, it is reasonable to expect a mainstream GUI app from one of the largest companies in the world to be approachable for people who do not know all the inner workings of the command line tools that are used behind the scenes. And it is reasonable to expect any destructive action to have clear and bold warnings. “Changes will be discarded” is not clear. What changes? From the user’s perspective, the only changes were regarding version control, so “discarding” that should leave them where they started — with their files intact but not in version control.

Have mercy on the poor noobs. We were all there once.

I feel bad for this kid. That really is a bad warning dialog. Nowhere does it say it’s going to delete files. Anyone who thinks that’s good design needs a break.

Half the replies are basically “This should be obvious if your past five years of life experience is similar to mine, and if it isn’t then get fucked.” Just adding insult to injury.

30 years ago, maybe. Post-Napster, not relevant. Most online piracy is non-commercial now, and it’s still illegal across most of the world.

In practice, Python is not easy to learn programming with. Not at all. I see beginners wrestling with Anaconda and Jupyter notebooks and I weep.

The fact that pip is intentionally broken on macOS and some modern Linux distros sure doesn’t help. Everything about environment management is insane.

https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/on-the-etiology-of-fuckers

If you have your day ruined by Cloudflare, I’m going to either assume you run a bot network, you’re trying to do something incorrectly, or you are part of the dark web.

Or you are unfortunate enough to share a subnet with someone who got on Cloudflare’s bad side, in which case there is basically no recourse.

There are a million legitimate reasons to use a VPN, for example, but Cloudflare doesn’t care.