Daring Fireball: It’s Game Over on Vocal Deepfakes
March 21, 2023
Daring Fireball: It’s Game Over on Vocal Deepfakes:
Real recordings will be called fake and fake recordings will be leaked as purportedly real. I don’t think the general population is prepared for this, and I worry that news media organizations aren’t either.
This tech is moving out of the uncanny valley and into the indistinguishable realm… And bad actors will absolutely go wild with it.
Bonsai Coding · weblog.masukomi.org
March 21, 2023
Bonsai Coding · weblog.masukomi.org:
Writing code is a lot like maintaining a Bonsai Tree. If you stop pruning it it’ll stop being a Bonsai and turn into a bush. Little tweaks, frequently aesthetic ones, will help to keep it beautiful and under control. It will still grow in unexpected directions, as other developers make changes, but careful pruning will keep it balanced, and healthy.
A Rebuttal to Scaling Mastodon is Impossible · weblog.masukomi.org:
Armin Ronacher wrote that Scaling Mastodon is Impossible
I’d like to offer a rebuttal. As someone who’s been doing professional web development since 1995, with most of that time being spent in Rails jobs, or doing Rails work on the sidelines, I think i have a pretty good perspective on the situation. For those who don’t know, Mastodon is written in Ruby on Rails.
A great read on how ActivePub solves the problems of social networks in smart ways, some of which aren’t really being used as best practices yet but have potential.
Spelunking Apple’s Open Source | Bitsplitting.org
March 20, 2023
Spelunking Apple’s Open Source | Bitsplitting.org:
Since the earliest days of Mac OS X, Apple has complied with the licenses for the dozens of open source components it includes in the OS by posting (sometimes a little belatedly) updated versions of the source code to its Open Source at Apple web page.
This resource is useful primarily to developers, but may also interest curious technophiles who want to take a peek “behind the curtain” to see how much of the magic just beneath our fingertips is made.
If you visit the page today, you’ll see a new emphasis on Apple’s high-level projects, such as Swift and WebKit. At first glance you might wonder if the extensive list of all the open source projects has been removed from the site.
There’s no need to worry: the whole list, indexed by the pertinent platform and OS release to which they belong, is still available on a separate Releases page. Even better, each of these releases now has a corresponding GitHub repository, hosted in a dedicated organization reserved exclusively for open source distributions.
Daring Fireball: Samsung Responds, Hand-Wavingly, to Fake Moon Photos Controversy:
And that’s my point. What if the moon weren’t the same? What if it gets hit by a large meteor, creating a massive new visible-from-earth crater? Or what if our humble friend Phony Stark blows tens of billions of dollars erecting a giant billboard on the surface of the moon, visible from earth, that reads “@elonmusk”? A photo of the moon taken with one of these Samsung phones wouldn’t show either of those things, yet would appear to capture a detailed image of the moon’s surface. A camera should capture the moon as it is now, and computational photography should help improve the detail of that image of the moon as it appears now. Samsung’s phones are rendering the moon as it was, at some point in the past when this ML model was trained.
His attempt at rewriting history involves blocking SF 2442, a bill that aims to teach middle and high school students about the Holocaust and genocides. Drazkowski doesn’t let his self-processed ignorance get in the way of spouting ahistorical “both-sides” nonsense about white settlers dying in genocidal slaughters perpetrated by Native Americans.
“You know — and I grew up in Wisconsin, so I’m not a historian of Minnesota,” he said on the senate floor, “but I do understand that the genocides between the white people and the Indians going back included, kind of several genocides each way.”
J.K. Rowling Compares Trans People to ‘Harry Potter’ Death Eaters, Spectacularly Misunderstands Own Creation | The Mary Sue
March 20, 2023
She went on to say she knew that those speaking against her “believed they were fighting for underdogs and difference and fairness,” but then, in a move that’s simultaneously shocking and not surprising at all, she compared trans people to Death Eaters, the fascist and murderous group of “purebloods” Harry Potter and his friends go up against in her books. When Rowling was asked what she would say to people who claimed she had become just like the villains she wrote about, she answered:
I have no interest in ever revisiting the Harry Potter books, but I’m pretty sure I remember why the Death Eaters were living in secret. It wasn’t because they were part of an oppressed group. It was because they chose to hate and hurt people who they saw as “lesser” and were rightfully punished for it. I definitely remember the Death Eaters’ philosophy wasn’t “you disagree with us, you must die.” It was more along the lines of, “You were born a certain way and because of that we want to terrorize you, cast you out of society and ultimately kill you.”
— via Boing Boing
Bono and The Edge: Tiny Desk Concert – YouTube
March 17, 2023
(216) Bono and The Edge: Tiny Desk Concert – YouTube:
It’s hard to overstate the kindness and good-natured humor Bono and The Edge brought to the Tiny Desk. When they first arrived at the NPR Music offices, Bono spoke on an imaginary phone, “The talent’s here! The talent’s coming through,” poking fun at their own fame, while carrying The Edge’s guitar. (The Edge called Bono the best roadie he’s ever had.) The two never stopped beaming, like two overjoyed newcomers thrilled at the chance to play for someone.
The performance was a preview of U2’s new album, Songs Of Surrender, featuring stripped-down versions of songs from across the band’s catalog. To help pull off several reimagined songs from the 2000 album All That You Can’t Leave Behind, Bono and The Edge invited a teen choir from the Duke Ellington School of the Arts in Washington, D.C., to join them. During rehearsals, Bono told the students to think of “Beautiful Day” as the kind of “post-drinking” singalong you’d bellow with friends after leaving a bar. He then quickly realized none of them are old enough to drink, before feigning a heart attack.
Traveling without bassist Adam Clayton or drummer Larry Mullen Jr., Bono and The Edge made the trip from Ireland to the States specifically for the Tiny Desk, arriving in D.C. after five days of rehearsals at Bono’s New York apartment. When they settled in for the performance, they treated the office to four songs, including a deeply emotional version of “Stuck in a Moment You Can’t Get Out Of,” written for the late INXS singer Michael Hutchence, and a reworked version of “Walk On,” which Bono said was inspired by and dedicated to the people of Ukraine.
Less than thrilled by callout to a transhopic stand-up comic, but it’s the only nit I’d pick.
— via Boing Boing
Sony Group Portal – Gallery | Sony Design | History of Sony Design:
On this page you can see a wide range of products and services created by Sony designers.
Please take a look at the history of Sony Design.
One item I’d never seen before is the HB-101, which was actually a pretty sexy looking MSX1 Compatible home computer that never went anywhere.
— via Daring Fireball
Woody Guthrie posthumously teams up with Dropkick Murphys for an anti-Tory anthem | Boing Boing
March 17, 2023
Woody Guthrie posthumously teams up with Dropkick Murphys for an anti-Tory anthem | Boing Boing:
The Murphys released their first Guthrie-penned album, This Machine Still Kills Fascists, back in September 2022, with another follow-up, Okemah Rising, due in May. That first collection of songs includes a rollicking union anthem called “All You Fonies.” But on the band’s recent European tour, the song took on a new life as an anti-Tory anthem. So they just released a new, live recording of the song, reworked as “All You Tories” — once again proving that Woody Guthrie’s songs remain painfully relevant.
Solidarity
Pocket Realities 