I change themes just often enough to completely forget how to do it and also forget whatever other adjustments I had to make to it all work. And like... is my config versioned somehow? This is a long way to say, Thank You for inspiring me to look at all that stuff again!
Alex Stamos talked about this a bit on TWiT late last year:
"It's getting hard to not be conspiracy minded here. They closed CSRB, destroyed CISA. CISA has no confirmed director. This just adds to kind of a complete surrender at least on the cyber side. We are spectacularly poorly prepared right now for a cyber attack."
Hopefully there's still MAD (mutually assured destruction). That is, the US has (I presume) a rather formidable array of cyber offensive capabilities. Anyone thinking of cyber attacking the US might find that concerning - hopefully concerning enough that they decide that an attack isn't worth it.
I mean, I'd far rather that that US had both offensive capability and a solid defense. But the situation is not totally hopeless - or so I hope.
A study led by Stanford Medicine researchers has found that an injection blocking a protein linked to aging can reverse the natural loss of knee cartilage in older mice.
I would love that, as long as the lifespan didn't change. If everyone turned into mice we'd have a lot more space for other stuff, we'd need less food, less resources in general, since we'd be physically smaller, this thought is one of the reasons I like the movie arthur and the minimoys, where the main character gets shrunk to like 2mm in size!
If only a small percentage of studies make it past the mice stage to be tested on humans, it means that a lot more studies have been done on mice than humans. Hence, we know more about mouse biology than human biology. So over time, it must get easier and easier to generate positive results in mice, which are uncorrelated with the success in humans.
It's worse than that. People get to interfere in mice. You can stunt their growth, give them transparent skin, grow more or less limbs, cut into them ... you can't experiment at all on humans.
Especially when it comes to pregnancies we know more about a lot of animals than about humans. Why? Well pregnancies is how you multiply meat in animals, which is what farmers are interested in (and pay for). Which ironically also means animal pregnancies can be treated in case of trouble much more effectively.
Why pregnancies? Pregnancy changes a LOT of chemical processes in the body and so quite a bit of "normal" medical knowledge doesn't apply to pregnant women. Which has caused the medical establishment to declare anything that isn't explicitly tested on pregnant women as a no-go zone. So even problems and medications that we do know about, doctors won't apply them to pregnant women.
Yes there are metabolic changes in the mother herself during pregnancy but that's not why it's hard to research. The main fear is that drugs will cross the placenta and affect the growing fetus, or similarly be transmitted through breast milk to an infant. Very young humans are uniquely vulnerable to disruption in their growth that can cause life-long problems.
I imagine because mice dont misbehave, lie about taking the drugs, get enough sleep, eat consistently and dont have to take other drugs masking complex interactions.
"As the Internet continues to evolve, it is no longer the technically innovative challenger pitted against venerable incumbents in the forms of the traditional industries of telephony, print newspapers, television entertainment and social interaction. The Internet is now the established norm. The days when the Internet was touted as a poster child of disruption in a deregulated space are long since over, and these days we appear to be increasingly looking further afield for a regulatory and governance framework that can challenge the increasing complacency of the very small number of massive digital incumbents.
It is unclear how successful we will be in this search for responses to this oppressive level of centrality in many aspects of the digital environment. We can but wait and see."
If you think the time that a given social network spends at the top is long now, wait until there's a "regulatory and governance framework" knocking out most newcomers.
"It’s hard to quantify just how widespread the phenomenon is, but certain notably offline hobbies are exploding in popularity."
Assuming this is an actual trend that is actually "exploding"... I wonder what this means for the short term in the AI industry? Could we see a drop in users and then a big popping of the bubble?
That does seem like a really big assumption though.
The number of knitting kits sold (an example from the article) to me sounds like it might correlate more with the number of TikTok videos about knitting than the hours spent knitting.
The article almost encourages this interpretation, although I'd praise it for at least acknowledging the "performance" part.
It seems to mash consumerism, commercial Social Media and GenAI into one though.
Still, I try to see the positive side, and I think there certainly could be such a trend.
No idea if it's just a small part of people going against the grain, or a broader shift.
Regarding media addiction, there is a pattern that would be kind of similar, the large cohort of elderly people who are addicted to media and the commercial web, compared to the comparatively smaller portion of younger people falling victim.
Among my "elder millenial" friends, I can only say that abstinence from doomscrolling and modern tech (especially smartphones and SM) seems to correlate with integrity and smartness.
> The number of knitting kits sold (an example from the article)
Also, "knitting kits" were not a thing for most of my life. You'd just buy yarn needles and yarn. This is not some kind of a craft where you need dozens of implements.
The kit is pretty much a product of the TikTok / YT influencer era. Indeed, a typical kit will often contain needles, yarn, and a... link to a video you can watch:
"It is a DDOS attack involving tens of thousands of addresses"
It is amazing just how distributed some of these things are. Even on the small sites that I help host we see these types of attacks from very large numbers of diverse IPs. I'd love to know how these are being run.
There are plenty of providers selling "residential proxies", distributing your crawler traffic through thousands of residential IPs. BrightData is probably the biggest, but its a big and growing market.
And if you don't care about the "residential" part you can get proxies with data center IPs for much cheaper from the same providers. But those are easily blocked
And how do you get those residential IP addresses?
Well, you just need people to install your browser extension. Or your proprietary web browser. Or your mobile app. Or your nice MCP. Maybe get them to add your PPA repository so they automatically install your sneakily-overriden package the next time they upgrade their system.
Anything goes as long as your software has access to outgoing TCP port 443, which almost nobody blocks, so even if it's being run from within a Docker container or a VM it probably doesn't affect you.
Bright Data specifically offers a sdk that app developers can use monetize free games. A lot of free games and VPN apps are using it. Check out how they market it, it's wild... - https://bright-sdk.com/
In the most charitable case it's some "AI" companies with an X/Y problem. They want training data so they vibe code some naive scraper (requests is all you need!) and don't ever think to ask if maybe there's some sort of common repository of web crawls, a CommonCrawl if you will.
They don't really need to scrape training data as CommonCrawl or other content archives would be fine for training data. They don't think/know to ask what they really want: training data.
In the least charitable interpretation it's anti-social assholes that have no concept or care about negative externalities that write awful naive scrapers.
I guess the hypothesis makes sense. They say it's probably Drugs, Alcohol, Obesity and Fourth, some of the increase may be due to changes in reporting. As people have become more aware of the danger of falls, falls that used to not be recorded as a cause of death may increasingly be reported as a cause.
I'm curious how many deadly falls are the result of an ilness. Would having an heart attack in an unlucky moment skew the statistics? I guess they normally would not research the cause of death deeper if there is an obvious reason.
A good friend recently lost her dad to a fall in his back yard. Technically it was a second or third stroke in the past few years, but this time he also fell backwards onto a cement stepping stone in his backyard.
So you're correct that these things can often be related.
Another friend has never had a fainting spell in his life. But three years ago, fainted luckily forward I guess, and knocked out a tooth.
I'd add overwhelmingly increasing stupidity by enforced safety, preventing people from learning from their (small) mistakes, leading to big ones. Just recently I was talking to a friend about how everything agile is being exterminated in favor of safety, e.g. police chasing two lonely cars slowly drifting on a frozen public mountain road during the night with no other cars/people in sight due to "endangering public". How else should people learn how to handle critical situations than being exposed to them in a low-risk controlled manner?
> I assume you've spotted the pattern by now: the US trade representative has forced every one of its trading partners to adopt anticircumvention law, to facilitate the extraction of their own people's data and money by American firms. But of course, that only raises a further question: Why would every other country in the world agree to let America steal its own people's money and data, and block its domestic tech sector from making interoperable products that would prevent this theft?
> Here's an anecdote that unravels this riddle: many years ago, in the years before Viktor Orban rose to power, I used to guest-lecture at a summer PhD program in political science at Budapest's Central European University. And one summer, after I'd lectured to my students about anticircumvention law, one of them approached me.
> They had been the information minister of a Central American nation during the CAFTA negotiations, and one day, they'd received a phone-call from their trade negotiator, calling from the CAFTA bargaining table. The negotiator said, "You know how you told me not to give the Americans anticircumvention under any circumstances? Well, they're saying that they won't take our coffee unless we give them anticircumvention. And I'm sorry, but we just can't lose the US coffee market. Our economy would collapse. So we're going to give them anticircumvention. I'm really sorry."
> That's it. That's why every government in the world allowed US Big Tech companies to declare open season on their people's private data and ready cash.
> The alternative was tariffs. Well, I don't know if you've heard, but we've got tariffs now!
> I mean, if someone threatens to burn your house down unless you follow their orders, and then they burn your house down anyway, you don't have to keep following their orders. So…Happy Liberation Day?
I’d argue that what you're experiencing isn't the Network Effect anymore, but rather Vendor Lock-in.
The Network Effect implies the platform gets better for you as more people join. If they are deleting your content, the network is no longer serving you—it’s just holding you hostage. This is enshitification as it best. (this ironie with a cory doctorow link)
At this stage, it’s just a walled garden. Staying because 'everyone is here' while being silenced is learned helplessness.
You're voluntarily staying in a walled garden that refuses to let you speak.
I agree with you, but perhaps walled garden and network effects are not mutually exclusive. I.e. if I leave the garden, I'm losing value of being able to reach many people I care about.
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