cultural reviewer and dabbler in stylistic premonitions

  • 43 Posts
  • 46 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
cake
Cake day: January 17th, 2022








  • This add-on is not actively monitored for security by Mozilla. Make sure you trust it before installing.

    It’s pretty lame that Mozilla’s addons site still doesn’t show source code which is guaranteed to correspond to the binary you’re installing.

    Anyway, I went and read the source on github (which probably corresponds to the extension one can install) and while this part seems very straightforward this other part exceeds my understanding 😂 (i’m not suggesting it is malicious, i just don’t understand everything it is doing there or why it is necessary).

    What I was really looking at the source for was to see if they were simulating keystrokes (and inserting plausible delays between them) to defeat a more determined anti-pasting adversary, or if they were simply suppressing the hostile website’s onPaste handler so that pastes can happen as normal. And: they are doing the latter.

    I wonder if any paste-blocking websites detect and defeat this extension yet?











  • "but why" meme, with the the text "but why" over an image of Ryan Reynolds in medical scrubs in the film Harold & Kumar Go To White Castle

    meme culture is arguably a subset of that thing called “remix culture”, but, the guy who coined that term and created Creative Commons to support it was tragicomically mistaken about the viability (not to mention actual utility) of his efforts to get participants in it to care about engaging with copyright law via copyleft licenses.

    so, i think the answer to your question is: probably not.

    “hmm, i should find an appropriately licensed image to use” is not something most practitioners of applied memeography have ever said or will ever say (at least until general-purpose computers are actually outlawed, such that casual copyright infringement becomes non-trivial). imo. 🤡









  • big oof.

    We can conclude: that photo isn’t AI-generated. You can’t get an AI system to generate photos of an existing location; it’s just not possible given the current state of the art.

    the author of this substack is woefully misinformed about the state of technology 🤦

    it has, in fact, been possible for several years already for anyone to quickly generate convincing images (not to mention videos) of fictional scenes in real locations with very little effort.

    The photograph—which appeared on the Associated Press feed, I think—was simply taken from a higher vantage point.

    Wow, it keeps getting worse. They’re going full CSI on this photo, drawing a circle around a building on google street view where they think the photographer might have been, but they aren’t even going to bother to try to confirm their vague memory of having seen AP publishing it? wtf?

    Fwiw, I also thought the image looked a little neural network-y (something about the slightly less-straight-than-they-used-to-be lines of some of the vehicles) so i spent a few seconds doing a reverse image search and found this snopes page from which i am convinced that that particular pileup of cars really did happen as it was also photographed by multiple other people.