• 0 Posts
  • 96 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 23rd, 2023

help-circle






  • The first time I ever experienced this was in a printshop with a bunch of older guys who were definitely not computer illiterate, but all gathered around the monitor for the server that ran our RIP/platemaker to watch commands appear in the terminal when I remoted in from my computer to do something or other. (They would go into the room and work directly on the machine, but it was loud in there and smelled funny, so I remoted in.)

    They made jokes about me being a hacker, and although being distinctly boomer-ish, it was high praise coming from some of the smartest people I’ve ever worked with.
    (I’ve worked with more accomplished people, and more highly educated people, but not with folks who had built a successful business that dealt with a variety of complex tech from the ground up with their own knowledge and effort. It was a bit charming to have them wowed by such a simple thing.)




  • I’m not sure. I suspect that TextSniper predates the feature on Mac.

    On Mac (and iOS, too) recognized text is just treated as text. So on Mac, you just get a text selection/entry cursor (the “I-beam”), and you can select text for whatever action (copy, lookup, etc). On iOS it’s same, except no cursor on account of it being a touch interface. It’s sort of annoying on iOS with images that have a lot of text - double clicking an image to zoom has to be done with care, otherwise it selects text instead of zooming in.


  • Monument@lemmy.sdf.orgtoTechnology@lemmy.world*Permanently Deleted*
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    3
    ·
    edit-2
    1 month ago

    I can also do that on my MacBook.

    (This comment is not as facetious as it seems. I knew you could copy text from images, but I just tried to test some limitations, and it’s a weirdly comprehensive feature - I can copy text from photos and/or videos in the screenshots app, the Preview app, the Photos app, QuickTime, and even from YouTube videos in Safari (but not Firefox, interestingly enough) - assuming that means it’s an OS-level thing. Quick search says this rolled out in 2021.)



  • I work on a small team and recently realized my boss is falling victim to survivorship bias. Another colleague and I handle our work, which is mission critical to the org, competently and fairly opaquely, only raising issues as they arise. However some other members of our team have less critical but more visible work that they tend to bungle. The department invests hiring dollars, training efforts, and materials purchases in service of remediating those issues. But my colleague and I are both burned out, eyeing the door, and fully aware there’s no one who understands what we do or is capable of doing it within our organization - aside from each other, but our respective scope of work is non-overlapping and there’s truly not wiggle room to cross train or support each other’s work. I’ve said all I know to say to leadership about this issue but they seem willfully ignorant.

    When one of us goes, I think the other will follow quickly. Hiring takes almost 2 months at my work, so the gap/lack of knowledge transfer will make for a huge shit show.


  • But then, as now, it won’t understand what it’s supposed to do, and will merely attempt to apply stolen code - ahem - training data in random permutations until it roughly matches what it interprets the end goal to be.

    We’ve moved beyond a thousand monkeys with typewriters and a thousand years to write Shakespeare, and have moved into several million monkeys with copy and paste and only a few milliseconds to write “Hello, SEGFAULT”



  • Someone commented here yesterday that just as NAFTA allowed manufacturers to export jobs and find reasoning to squeeze blue collar workers, creating a general shift to white-collar work in the U.S., this move is designed to squeeze those higher paying white-collar jobs, so that even more money goes into corporate and investor coffers.
    My own addition to that thought is that it seems the natural end product is that the only way to make money once that system has done it’s evil deeds is to have money and be a member of the investor class.

    Or, in other words - they aim to do to all of the U.S. what Walmart did to small towns across the U.S.

    Without a care in the world, obviously. I think the people wealthy enough to not be impacted by this will thrive on exploitation until the U.S. economy is sucked dry to the point of unsustainability for their grift (or revolution occurs), then, like the parasites they are, will take their grotesque wealth and move onto other economies they can exploit.



  • I did a quick search, so I’m basically an expert now. imaginary hair flip

    So, some flashlights have multiple brightness modes. I guess that’s controlled via a tiny, low power microprocessor.
    And if it’s a computer, it can be hacked!

    So the firmware does things, depending on the capabilities of the hardware in the flashlight, but you can set it to override defaults for brightness, change how many levels of brightness you have, add (or remove) a blinky SOS mode, sleep timers in case it’s accidentally left on, and even add a way to check the battery percentage via a button press pattern, that the flashlight responds to with a series of blinks.
    No lie, kind of fascinating stuff. I like to hack other stuff, like smart appliances (replacing firmware so it doesn’t share my data, but I still get to use it as a smart device). I don’t think I would be into talking to my flashlight via Morse code, but I can see the appeal as both a hobby, and for folks who need flashlights as safety equipment.



  • The focus on piracy is a smoke screen. It’s about capacity.

    Build the capacity, and then just start growing that list of reasons things are blocked.

    This is out of scope for this community, but the U.S. is amidst a coup.
    I mean, literally, it’s being raided by a corporate stooge that is breaking all manner of laws to just reshape it in whatever image they see fit.
    In a geopolitical sense, they’re trying to break relationships with close allies, and trying to isolate the country. We see that with the tariff threats, the withdrawal from WHO, the Paris Climate accords, and now with threats to withdraw/pull back from NATO. Domestically, it’s clear that businesses are bowing to Trump or facing government punishment. That much is evidenced by social media companies filtering search results, by media companies tepid criticism of Trump and by the lack of national coverage over anti-trump sentiment. We also see it in terms of the investigations that Trump and his cronies are trying to bring against NPR, of all things.

    This is a play in the move to control information access in the U.S. After the media, and social media, which are now yolked, the open web is the next biggest threat to their coup.
    And now this is the legislation they’re pushing.