evilstevie @evilstevie@mastod1.ddns.net

If I want to read an article on a website, I want to read it. Throw in a couple of pictures if you like, provided they're actually relevant. But if it's one of those pages that uses scroll based animation, stickies and [shudder] parallax effects, you can jam it up your hoop.

This instance is hosted on a 20 year old laptop, boost to give it a stress test.

In this case, there is also a simple mathematical reason why mass surveillance works like shit.

You have three ingredients:

a very large population,
a tiny number of actual terrorists,
and a detection system with a measurable false-positive rate.

That combination is mathematically nasty.

Assume you monitor one million people and ten of them are actually terrorists. Now assume you have an extraordinarily good detection system: it identifies 90% of the terrorists and has a false-positive rate of only 0.1%.

It will correctly identify nine terrorists.

But among the 999,990 innocent people, a 0.1% false-positive rate produces roughly 1,000 false alarms.

So your supposedly excellent surveillance system gives you about 1,009 alerts, of which only nine are real. More than 99% of your alerts are false positives.

And this example is deliberately generous. A false-positive rate of just 0.1% is unrealistically low for a real-world system trying to infer something as vague and complicated as terrorist intent from communications, behavior, associations, travel patterns, social media activity and other surveillance data. At 1%, the same example would produce roughly 10,000 false positives for nine true positives. At 5%, it would produce nearly 50,000.

This is the base-rate problem. When the thing you are looking for is extremely rare, even a remarkably accurate detection system can produce vastly more false positives than true positives. In the real world, where detection is messy and the criteria themselves are ambiguous, the problem gets much worse.

And now you have created a second problem: alarm fatigue.

Someone has to investigate all those innocent people. Analysts learn that almost every alarm they see is bullshit. Attention becomes the scarce resource. The system designed to find the needle in the haystack responds to the difficulty of finding the needle by continuously adding more hay.

Mass surveillance therefore has a fundamental scaling problem: collecting more data is easy. Producing more alerts is easy. Producing more human attention is not.

Right-wing politicians have always struggled to get creative people to work for them so not surprised they’re eager adopters/promoters of AI-generated content, it’s a resentful fuck-you thing as well as convenience

This is the funniest thing I've seen today, possibly ever

protip: make your handoff documents to team members unhinged so they are motivated to actually read them

Polar bear!

Site: We noticed that you are blocking our ads.

Me: That’s right.

Site: But that’s how we pay for this content. Will you disable your ad-blocker?

Me: No. My ad blocker is how I stop you from spying on me.

Site: But we’re not spying on you.

Me: Then how did you know I’m blocking your ads?

propranolol implies the existence of propranolmao

Good morning dear amazing Tooteroonies of near n far🌞☕
It is Frejasday! Ports of weekend visible, sun 12° n some wind😉
I wish yous a fabulous day filled with happiness, kindness, optimism, camaradery, magic, insight, wisdom, love, funs, joys, smiles, giggles n laughter😊🤙
#Fredag #Frejasday #MorningGreetings #Smiles

I am making a collection of sweary phrases for a grumpy but colourful art project. The whole collection to date is here: https://eclectech.co.uk/ffs

I'm after things you might say when shouting in angry frustration at a news headline (where an exasperated "for fuck's sake" is common in English).

I have been offered the suggestions below for Czech. Please vote for the one(s) you would choose to use, and I will add the top voted to the collection.

If this has landed in your timeline & you don't know what I'm talking about, the original thread about the project is here
https://things.uk/@eclectech/117071859569448514

Díky!

#theFFSproject #Czech

Undocumented #ESP32 behaviour discovered - Raw IQ Capture with Espressif's ESP32 Chips:

> This opens up the possibility of using the ESP32 as a low-cost software-defined radio (SDR) platform

> ESP-SDR currently supports the original ESP32, ESP32-C3, ESP32-C5, ESP32-C6, ESP32-C61, ESP32-S2, ESP32-S3 and ESP32-S31.

https://espargos.net/espsdr/

(first disclosed by h0m3us3r, 3 days ago: https://www.reddit.com/r/esp32/comments/1wq37xz/got_raw_iq_streaming_out_of_an_esp32s3_at_80_mss/)

#espargos #sdr #radio #electronics #makers #embedded #sbr #expressif

@jakecoppinger The ability to decode all 80 channel of Bluetooth in cheap hardware changes the BT security picture substantially

SCADA, or as I like to call it, "involuntary retrocomputing"