Source: Hacker News
Source: Hacker News
Source: Hacker News
Source: The Verge - All Posts
Donald Trump has launched a new meme coin, according to posts from his X and Truth Social accounts last night. The posts, which have come just days before Trump’s inauguration, were initially met with suspicion by many that his accounts had been hacked.
Skeptics highlighted by Decrypt last night pointed to several red flags, such as that the millions of dollars seeding the project came from Binance and Gate, which only serve overseas customers. The coin’s website credits the project to the same group behind Trump’s NFTs, as noted by Cointelegraph, which reports that sources close to Trump’s family confirmed the announcements’ legitimacy.
Both posts remain up as of this morning.
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Screenshot: X
The idea that Trump would debut a meme coin is no big surprise, given his multiple NFT collections and his introduction of a crypto platform last year. He has made cryptocurrency a big part of his new agenda and has assembled a crypto and AI-focused tech policy team led by “crypto czar” David Sacks. Trump also plans to issue an executive order naming crypto a “national imperative or priority” after he’s inaugurated next week, Bloomberg reported ahead of the weekend.
TL;DR: I converted my Anycubic Linear Kossel to Klipper.
Using a hacked Chromebook as the host, which is great and I recommend hacking surplus education market Chromebooks for many of hobby projects usually done with an SBC.
Running in containers as a docker-compose project, which works but is dumb and wasteful.
Next I’m going to try to do some systematic performance experiments to it, but that’s for a later post.
Details below.
Source: Published articles
Marc Andreessen explains the newest faction of conservatism.
Source: NYT > U.S.
The president delivered the 17-minute speech from the Oval Office in the White House.
Source: Ars Technica
After months and years of rumors and official hints, Nintendo has finally pulled back the curtain on the Switch 2 with a first-look trailer (and sparse promo web site) highlighting many small changes from the old Switch.
The short trailer shows off the Switch 2's larger tablet and screen, and a slightly more rounded edge on the top and bottom. The new system also sports an additional USB-C port on the top (next to a headphone jack) and a wider, U-shaped kickstand along the backside that can support the system at a number of wider angles.
The trailer also shows off black Joy-Cons that are significantly larger than those on the original Switch, with colored accents behind the joystick itself. An extended, colored Joy-Con "rail" on the inner edge features wider shoulder buttons and a new connector in the center. Rather than sliding in vertically, like the plastic rail on the Switch Joy-Cons, the controllers on the Switch 2 snap in horizontally with what appears to be a magnetic connection, and disconnects with the aid of a horizontal lever to the side of the shoulder buttons.
Source: OSNews
If you don’t want OpenAI’s, Apple’s, Google’s, or other companies’ crawlers sucking up the content on your website, there isn’t much you can do. They generally don’t care about the venerable robots.txt, and while people like Aaron Schwartz were legally bullied into suicide for downloading scientific articles using a guest account, corporations are free to take whatever they want, permission or no. If corporations don’t respect us, why should we respect them?
There are ways to fight back against these scrapers, and the latest is especially nasty in all the right ways.
This is a tarpit intended to catch web crawlers. Specifically, it’s targeting crawlers that scrape data for LLM’s – but really, like the plants it is named after, it’ll eat just about anything that finds its way inside.
It works by generating an endless sequences of pages, each of which with dozens of links, that simply go back into the tarpit. Pages are randomly generated, but in a deterministic way, causing them to appear to be flat files that never change. Intentional delay is added to prevent crawlers from bogging down your server, in addition to wasting their time. Lastly, optional Markov-babble can be added to the pages, to give the crawlers something to scrape up and train their LLMs on, hopefully accelerating model collapse.
↫ ZADZMO.org
You really have to know what you’re doing when you set up this tool. It is intentionally designed to cause harm to LLM web crawlers, but it makes no distinction between LLM crawlers and, say, search engine crawlers, so it will definitely get you removed from search results. On top of that, because Nepenthes is designed to feed LLM crawlers what they’re looking for, they’re going to love your servers and thus spike your CPU load constantly. I can’t reiterate enough that you should not be using this if you don’t know what you’re doing.
Setting it all up is fairly straightforward, but of note is that if you want to use the Markov generation feature, you’ll need to provide your own corpus for it to feed from. None is included to make sure every installation of Nepenthes will be different and unique because users will choose their own corpus to set up. You can use whatever texts you want, like Wikipedia articles, royalty-free books, open research corpuses, and so on. Nepenthes will also provide you with statistics to see what cats you’ve dragged in.
You can use Nepenthes defensively to prevent LLM crawlers from reaching your real content, while also collecting the IP ranges of the crawlers so you can start blocking them. If you’ve got enough bandwith and horsepower, you can also opt to use Nepenthes offensively, and you can have some real fun with this.
Let’s say you’ve got horsepower and bandwidth to burn, and just want to see these AI models burn. Nepenthes has what you need:
Don’t make any attempt to block crawlers with the IP stats. Put the delay times as low as you are comfortable with. Train a big Markov corpus and leave the Markov module enabled, set the maximum babble size to something big. In short, let them suck down as much bullshit as they have diskspace for and choke on it.
↫ ZADZMO.org
In a world where we can’t fight back against LLM crawlers in a sensible and respectful way, tools like these are exactly what we need. After all, the imbalance of power between us normal people and corporations is growing so insanely out of any and all proportions, that we don’t have much choice but to attempt to burn it all down with more… Destructive methods. I doubt this will do much to stop LLM crawlers from taking whatever they want without consent – as I’ve repeatedly said, Silicon Valley does not understand consent – but at least it’s joyfully cathartic.
Source: OSNews
It’s hard to see how to move forward from here. I think the best bet would be for people to rally around a new community-driven infrastructure. This would likely require a fork of WordPress, though, and that’s going to be a messy. The current open source version of WordPress relies on the sites and services Mullenweg controls. Joost de Valk, the original creator of an extremely popular SEO plugin, wrote a blog post with some thoughts on the matter. I’m hoping that more prominent people in the community step up like this, and that some way forward can be found.
[…]Update: Moments after posting this, I was pointed to a story on TechCrunch about Mullenweg deactivating the WordPress.org accounts of users planning a “fork”. This after he previously promoted (though in a slightly mocking way) the idea of forking open source software. In both cases, the people he mentioned weren’t actually planning forks, but musing about future ways forward for WordPress. Mullenweg framed the account deactivations as giving people the push they need to get started. Remember that WordPress.org accounts are required to submit themes, plugins, or core code to the WordPress project. These recent events really make it seem like you’re no longer welcome to contribute to WordPress if you question Matt Mullenweg.
↫ Gavin Anderegg
I haven’t wasted a single word on the ongoing WordPress drama yet, but the longer Matt Mullenweg, Automattic’s CEO and thus owner of WordPress, keeps losing his mind, I can’t really ignore the matter any more. OSNews runs, after all, on WordPress – self-hosted, at least, so not on Mullenweg’s WordPress.com – and if things keep going the way they are, I simply don’t know if WordPress remains a viable, safe, and future-proof CMS for OSNews.
I haven’t discussed this particular situation with OSNews owner, David Adams, yet, mostly since he’s quite hands-off in the day-to-day operations and has more than enough other matters to take care of, but I think the time has come to start planning for a potential worst-case scenario in which Mullenweg takes even more of whatever he’s taking and WordPress implodes entirely. Remember – even if you self-host WordPress outside of Automattic, several core infrastructure parts of WordPress still run through Automattic, so we’re still dependent on what Mullenweg does or doesn’t do.
I have no answers, announcements, or even plans at this point, but if you or your company depend on WordPress, you might want to start thinking about where to go from here.
