Reject the pull of hype and rage cycles, protect your attention

Read a book, bake a tasty treat, go on a little walk, snuggle a cat or dog

I believe in you

Near La Push Beach, Washington.

#photography #SilentSunday

This week on Nostalgia Time, I must get a 'turbo' I can't rest until I get a 'turbo' 😆we play Lotus Turbo Challenge II
Watch here and enjoy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KAg20ngtaZ8

#retrogaming #retro #amiga

You're paying AI companies a monthly subscription fee to be fingerprinted like a parolee.

I got bored and ran uBlock across Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini simultaneously.

Claude:

• Six parallel telemetry pipelines.
• A tracking GIF with 40 browser fingerprint data points baked into the URL, routed through a CDN proxy alias specifically to make it harder to block.
• Intercom running a persistent WebSocket whether you use it or not.
• Honeycomb distributed tracing on a chat UI because apparently your conversation needs the same observability stack as a payments microservice.

ChatGPT:

• proxies telemetry through their own backend to hide the Datadog destination URL from blockers.
• uBlock had to deploy scriptlet injection — actual JS injected into the page to intercept fetch() at the API level — because a network rule wasn't enough.
• Also ships your usage data to Google Analytics. OpenAI. To Google. You cannot make this up.
• Also runs a proof-of-work challenge before you're allowed to type anything.

Gemini:

• play.google.com/log getting hammered with your full session behavior, authenticated with three SAPISIDHASH token variants, piped directly into the Google identity supergraph that correlates everything you've ever done across every Google product since 2004.
• Also creates a Web App Activity record in your Google account timeline. Also has "ads" in one of the telemetry endpoint subdomains.

When uBlock blocks Gemini's requests, the JS exceptions bubble up and Gemini dutifully tries to POST the error details back to Google. uBlock blocks that too. The error messages contain the internal codenames for every upsell popup that failed to load.

KETCHUP_DISCOVERY_CARD.
MUSTARD_DISCOVERY_CARD.
MAYO_DISCOVERY_CARD.

Google named their subscription upsell popups after condiments and I found out because their error handler snitched on them.

All three of these products cost money.
One of them is also running ad infrastructure.

Touch grass. Install @ublockorigin

#infosec #privacy #selfhosted #foss #surveillance

A quick fix on my Akai S950 Sampler, I connect the Amiga to it and have some fun in this week's video.
Watch here and enjoy: https://youtu.be/NAns4BZ7hkc?si=H87g4cWEP5Girnoc

#retro #musicproduction #amiga

Most people don't realise that sheep can be sociable with people, just like a cat or a dog. Here we were sitting at the edge of the field and Dom came and lay down next to us, chewing his cud, just content to be in our company on this lovely day.

Note also the *extremely* fashionable state of Giles' jeans. Balenciaga could sell those for a thousand quid.

#defaidodon #sheepofMastodon #sheep

In case you needed more reasons to avoid using AI, perhaps the very means to think are enough to consider; unless it's too late to consider...

https://publichealthpolicyjournal.com/mit-study-finds-artificial-intelligence-use-reprograms-the-brain-leading-to-cognitive-decline/

Another day, another instance of someone on the Fediverse telling people not to do something which is essentially a public good.

This time it's a librarian telling people not to borrow ebooks from libraries. The other option isn't cheaper, permanent physical books, I'm afraid. For many people, it's immediately available ebooks on pirate sites.

It's taken me so long to get my friends, nieces and godchildren to use Libby and BorrowBox (for audiobooks).

It is very disheartening to read something so exclusionary and privileged. I know most librarians want you to take advantage of anything and everything a library has to offer because their use justifies their expenditure.

#bookstodon