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Cake day: Jun 14, 2023

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FWIW, you can still press Shift-F10 to open a command prompt, then run oobe\bypassnro. The computer will reboot / restart the setup process and this time there’ll be a small link “I don’t have internet” that’ll allow you to set up a local account.
Just make very sure not to connect it to the internet (cable or Wi-Fi) before this point.

There have been rumours of newer versions of Windows 11 not allowing the bypass anymore, but I haven’t personally seen any evidence of this so far.

Still a shit show though - trickery like this shouldn’t be necessary.


According to FlightStats and FlightRadar24, the original plane was a Boeing 777-206 from 2003, which has been replaced by a 777-300 from 2023. It’s en route now over the Atlantic.

So an issue caused by Boeing’s recent series of quality problems seems unlikely, unless there was a dodgy spare part involved.


This is actually a super smart move, from an evil genius point of view. The plaintiffs now have an interest in the company growing instead of shutting down.

Though I really hope some judge somewhere stops that deal.


What color is your function?

It’s a rant opinion piece about the caveats of mixing async and sync functions, and divides code into ‘red’ (async) and ‘blue’ (sync) functions to explain the various problems associated with it.


I really wish there were any even remotely credible way to disagree with that statement.


I offer you a third option: at least one Lidl in Croatia uses blinking tags for stuff they really want you to look at.

Sometime soon we’re gonna have to invent a spam filter for real life. Hey, maybe that’s the use case that the Vision guys at Apple have been looking for?


Thanks to a few centuries of upper nobility, we already know that marrying your cousin for several generations is not always a good idea. It’ll be interesting to see what happens after a few iterations of AIs being trained on data mostly produced by other AIs (or variations of themselves). I suppose it largely depends on how well the training data can be curated.


ChatGPT says:

Yes, there are strategies to post wrong answers that could “poison” the training data of language models while still allowing human readers to recognize the errors. Here are a few approaches:

  1. Subtle Semantic Errors: Provide answers that contain subtle but significant semantic errors. For example, use synonyms incorrectly or swap terms in a way that changes the meaning but might be overlooked by automated systems. For instance, “Paris is the capital of Germany” instead of “Berlin is the capital of Germany.”
  1. Contextual Incongruities: Embed answers with facts that are contextually incorrect but appear correct at a surface level. For example, “The sun rises in the west and sets in the east.”
  1. Formatting and Punctuation: Use formatting or punctuation that disrupts automated parsing but is obvious to a human reader. For example, “The capital of France is Par_is.” or “Water freezes at 0 degrees F@harenheit.”
  1. Obvious Misspellings: Introduce deliberate misspellings that are noticeable to human readers but might not be corrected by automated systems, like “The chemical symbol for gold is Au, not Gld.”
  1. Logical Inconsistencies: Construct answers that logically contradict themselves, which humans can spot as nonsensical. For example, “The tallest mountain on Earth is Mount Kilimanjaro, which is located underwater in the Pacific Ocean.”
  1. Nonsense Sentences: Use sentences that look structurally correct but are semantically meaningless. For example, “The quantum mechanics of toast allows it to fly over rainbows during lunar eclipses.”
  1. Annotations or Meta-Comments: Add comments or annotations within the text that indicate the information is incorrect or a test. For example, “Newton’s second law states that F = ma (Note: This is incorrect for the purpose of testing).”

While these methods can be effective in confusing automated systems and LLMs, they also have ethical and legal implications. Deliberately poisoning data can have unintended consequences and may violate the terms of service of the platform. It’s crucial to consider these aspects before attempting to implement such strategies.


Well, I can confirm from personal experience (me and family) that tourists wanting to enter the US aren’t treated that much differently from criminals.


But then you’ve created dozens (or hundreds) of opportunities a day for someone to get your passcode by shoulder-surfing, which you probably wouldn’t even notice in many situations. I’d argue that unless someone forcibly borrowing your face or fingers to unlock your phone is a strong possibility, entering a passcode each time is less secure than using biometrics.
Especially since the passcode also protects various security settings.


Postal 2. The game mechanics and open-world flexibility have aged amazingly well, it’s still very funny, and I love the way the game’s level of violence firmly depends on the player’s actions.
Plus the Postal Dude’s petition to make whiney congressmen play violent video games is needed more than ever.

On Android I miss Spaghetti & Marshmallows, where you had to build towers out of said materials. That was a wonderful game with great physics but sadly only runs on very old phones.


So far I’ve found most of what I’ve been looking for on www.exlibris.ch, though www.orellfuessli.ch seems quite nice as well. Normally it says in the details whether or not a particular book comes with DRM.

The DRM-free books are still digitally marked - Ex Libris will include your e-mail address in one of the first pages, and there are probably subtle differences in the text itself. I don’t mind that, though I blame the technology for the occasional annoying ‘typo’ in the book.


I ue Epubor Ultimate because I never got Calibre’s de-DRM working on my machine. It’s drag&drop for Adobe Digital Editions and also works very well in the very rare cases that I want a book that’s only available on Amazon (though buying one of those still leaves a bit of a bad taste in my mouth).
A DRM-free copy of the original is still preferred though. There’s one online shop in Switzerland that has started selling more of these lately. Maybe that’s a good sign.


I should probably care about this way more than I do, but this is a fight I’ve largely given up. The ‘right’ thing to do would be to boycott all DRM-encumbered content, but that’s a fight that very few people outside of a comparatively small circle of tech idealists would even about, much less care… and boycotts have never worked for CDs, DVDs or even VHS tapes. The sad truth is that DRM does work as designed for the overwhelming majority of less tech-savvy consumers who either aren’t aware of or can’t be bothered to try alternatives.

The good news is that it’s relatively easy to remove the DRM from ebooks, especially compared to other types of media. As long as this remains possible with just a few additional mouse clicks, the status quo “works for me”. I’m all for paying the artist/author, I just don’t want the thing I’ve bought taken away from me as soon as the publisher decides to pull the plug on their DRM server.

And what I’ve noticed here in Switzerland, even though it’s non-representative and anecdotal evidence, is that more and more ebooks are sold DRM-free.


It’s as if iPhones were only able to make calls to other iPhones

Don’t give them ideas!


I suspect that’s a lie. From a technical point of view there are way easier and cheaper ways to detect potential customers. A simple LDR would probably do a better and more reliable job and cost hundreds of times less.

The spokesdroid also stated that the machines do not take pictures. Duh. It’s a camera, what else would it do. May they meant it doesn’t store images, but the statements made so far don’t exactly instill trust.

I say sue them into oblivion. Make an example out of them.


That was my first thought as well!
Though OP might prefer Return to Castle Wolfenstein.


Especially with the fake “eye” it creates for you on the front of the device.

I can totally see a fringe use case for meetings etc. where you can look super attentive while daydreaming or sleeping.


Almost makes populist Argentine president Javier Milei’s “pack 300 of your ideas into a mega-decree that effectively becomes law with immediate effect until/unless parliament gets around to repealing parts of it with a 2/3 majority” strategy look like the more sensible approach.


Man, I loved that game so much. And it was super easy to build and substitute your own levels, sprites, background music, sound effects, even the mechanics of the game itself, as much of it was script-based and the game came with editors for everything. You could practically write your own game on top of the existing engine and weaponry.

It also was the only game on my 486DX with its own minimalistic config.sys because it needed a mind-boggling 6800kB of free RAM.


I’m well aware of the difference (see my other posts). But it still means that even with the maximum fine, a revenue of 100 billion is still a revenue of 96 billion. Even with an unrealistically low profit margin of 10% it was still worth it to them.


You’re making good points and I think we’re on the same page. I agree that revenue does not equal profit, I just want the fines to be as high as possible.


I don’t know, a percentage of revenue hurts more than the same percentage of net profit. Maybe some companies need to be forced to operate at a net loss until they clean up their act.


The EU knows fines of ‘up to’ 4% of revenue for privacy violations, which means the company still gets to keep 96% of whatever it’s made by breaking the law. The fine should be a minimum of 50%, plus jail time for the managers responsible. Any punishment that does not make the shareholders cry with fury is too low and will do nothing to change the situation.


IMHO the full title should read, “Hertz replaces shoddily built and expensive-to-fix cars, which just happen to be EVs, with more reliable models, which happen to be ICE cars.”

That, and there was something about charging infrastructure.


Sadly it didn’t work for me. I liked the concept but gave up after two weeks because I didn’t enjoy the experience at all and didn’t seem to make any progress (Swiss learning Spanish). YMMV of course.


TL;DR: Meta has been tracking your every move on the web for years and probably won’t be stopping anytime soon. Now they’ve announced a feature to share the information they’re collecting with you.


I see several issues with your SMTP session.

First, gmail.com will be protected by SPF and DKIM and your message will likely be flagged as spam (or outright rejected) because it’s clear that you’re not sending on behalf of the real gmail.com.

Second, commands should be in all-caps. A server may accept or reject lowercase keywords.

Third, you need to leave a blank line between the mail headers and the body, so that part of your session would look like so: …

DATA
354 Go ahead
From: ...
To: ...
Subject: ...

This is the first line of text.
This is the second line.
.
250 Queued

Having said that, many servers will require an encrypted connection (SMTPS), many ISPs will block port 25 for residential customers as an anti-spam measure (so your local mail server may accept the message from your script but be unable to forward it), ESMTP should be preferred over SMTP etc.
If at all possible, you should use a full-featured mail library for this and use your ISP’s own mail server.

Doesn’t Pop_OS come with a sendmail command?


I’m looking forward to the interview with the guy who got fired because he was late for work and offered “an airplane window fell on my car” as an excuse.


Why do you say this? What gives you the idea that they will face some form of workload pressure because of this?

Oh, I’d be very surprised if any actual personal responsibility found its way to them. But they’re gonna have to look super busy and worried for the press for a while, find somebody else to pin the blame on, call friends in government to ‘expedite’ any investigations and reassure their shareholders. That’s gonna cost them a lot of time they could have spent on nicer things such as working on their handicap, doing coke in the coutry club’s bathroom or firing a couple of hundred workers.

Other than that I totally agree with you.


Wow. My stepdaughter and her boyfriend flew with one of these just yesterday.

I hope this is resolved soon. The top brass at Boeing probably won’t be getting a lot of leisure time until then.


Have you looked at a Volvo XC40/XC60 or even EX30, if available where you live? They’re not perfect, but spacious, very pleasant to drive, generally very reliable, safe, with decent range and CarPlay (though not Android Auto).


I’m making a wild and probably spectacularly wrong guess here: C&C 1 has German text on it and there’s Sternenschweif, and the white plastic thinggy might be a Schuko / Type L adapter (it’s kinda hard to tell with that camera angle), which would suggest a place somewhere in Southern Tyrolia.

Looking forward to OP’s answer though. If it’s close to me, I’m gonna book that room and spend a day ripping all of those to SSD.


I can’t imagine the other choice could be worse

It probably depends on what you want to achieve. At the moment it’s probably to avoid hyperinflation, another national bankruptcy and poverty levels climbing to new all-time highs. Massa (the other guy) is known for trying to counter the effects of the current massive inflation by printing more money for government subsidies (let that sink in for a moment), so one could argue that whatever Milei actually does, it can’t be worse than that.

His (to put it mildly) over-the-top rhetoric, homophobia/misogyny and the suggestions to sell your organs to make ends meet etc. are different beasts altogether, but I can’t blame the voters for ranking having food on the table higher than strengthening LGBTQ+ rights. I’m grateful I don’t have to make that choice in my own country.


Probably a lot of both, though the last government Fernandez/Kirchner was a special treat, considering especially the Kirchner clan’s history of economic failure and record-breaking number of corruption charges. But during the 2019 elections Kirchner promised to have learned her lesson and do better this time, which appears to have convinced a majority of voters. 🤷‍♂️


I think that’s a bit oversimplified. Milei’s no doubt a knob and there’s a good chance he’ll screw up, but the alternative would have been the former minister of economy doing four years of the same, which would have been a 100% chance of screwing up. So before you make any more oversimplified statements, consider the alternative to Milei.

Milei has inherited a country on the brink of economic collapse and hyperinflation, caused by a government that has financed its overspending by just printing more money for decades, and borrowing whatever foreign currency it could. This is obviously not sustainable.
He wants to link the peso to the dollar (so the government can’t print more money at will anymore - not to mention the fact that many transactions are already half-legally done in dollars anyway) and do away with some of the many regulations that the Peronists have been promising for decades will help the economy, but which most experts agree have unsurprisingly crippled it further, and in many cases facilitated corruption.
His opponent’s political program can be summed up as “introduce more subsidies”.
Which one makes more sense to you?


Same here. Milei as an experiment could go either way, but staying the course would have led to certain disaster… and to be frank, the country as a whole doesn’t have a lot to lose at this point anyway.


You’re welcome - glad to have been of service. 🙃


Android’s notifications are actually a great concept for their simplicity - every app with notifications is one icon in the status bar - that’s being somewhat abused by a feature added in later versions of Android: background activities have been increasingly limited with every major Android version to save battery, except for apps with active notifications. Hence the seemingly unnecessary notifications by apps that use them just to stay alive.

Plus the sheer number of apps that want your attention keeps increasing.

As a workaround you can ask Android not to show certain types of notifications from certain apps (except for some system apps). Swipe the notification slightly left or long-press it, and there should be a cog icon or button that takes you to the available options for the respective app. Or depending on brand and model of your phone, go to Settings and search for “notifications” for additional options.


It’s really just a well-marketed workaround for a design flaw that gave some phones a unibrow.


*Oxygen Not Included* is on sale this weekend. If (like me) you happen to have wanted to play it for a long time, but were worried you lack the patience/stamina and give up after a couple of hours, the price is now at a level where buyer's regret is rather unlikely.
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