Please enjoy jwz mixtape 184.
Here Is a List of 10 Extremely Good Goat Beards
Also: Goat Husbandry 101:
Personality: Friendly and gentle, but can be spirited
Personality: Calm and affectionate
Personality: Curious, friendly, and independent
Personality: Easygoing and quiet
Personality: Generally gentle but can be pushy with each other
Personality: Social but somewhat stubborn
DNA Lounge update
DNA Lounge update, wherein Codeword will will be closing at the end of July.
The Long, Slow, Rotten March of Progress
You can no longer expect forty years of drudgery and then a spluttering death from good old-fashioned blue-collar pneumoconiosis. You can't make it through life hating your boss instead of yourself, not when new forms of labour discipline demand that you be your own boss. Your flesh is already obsolete. But there's an answer: to survive in the coming era of automation, you have to bring it in faster; announce its apocalypse, learn to code, add yourself to the army of programmers building an appier tomorrow. [...]Desperation is everywhere; exhibitors make lunging grabs for any passers-by wearing an "INVESTOR" lanyard, proffer stickers and goodies, scream for attention on their convention-standard signs. These do not, to put it kindly, make a lot of sense. "Giving you all the tools you need to activate and manage your influencer marketing relationships," promises one. "Leverage what is known to find, manage, and understand your data," entices another. The gleaming technological future looks a lot like a new golden age of hucksterism. It's networking; the sordid, stupid business of business; pressing palms with arrogant pricks, genuflecting to idiots, entirely unchanged by the fact that this time it's about apps and code rather than dog food or dishwashers.
None of these start-ups are doing anything new or interesting. Which shouldn't be surprising: how often does anyone have a really good idea? What you actually get is just code, sloshing around, congealing into apps and firms that exist simply to exist. Uber for dogs, GrubHub for clothes, Patreon for sex, Slack for death, PayPal for God, WhatsApp for the spaceless non-void into which a blind universe expands. [...]
Capitalism doesn't know what to do with its surpluses any more; it ruthlessly drains them from the immiserated low-tech manufacturing bases of the Global South, snatches them away from a first-world population tapping at computer code on the edge of redundancy, but then has nowhere better to put them than in some executive's gold-plated toilet. This soil breeds monsters; new, parasitic products scurry like the first worms over the world-order's dying body.
Leave Britney's Command and Control Server Alone!
The extension uses a bit.ly URL to reach its C&C, but the URL path is nowhere to be found in the extension code. In fact, it will obtain this path by using comments posted on a specific Instagram post. The one that was used in the analyzed sample was a comment about a photo posted to the Britney Spears official Instagram account.The extension will look at each photo's comment and will compute a custom hash value. If the hash matches 183, it will then run this regular expression on the comment in order to obtain the path of the bit.ly URL:
(?:\\u200d(?:#|@)(\\w)
Looking at the photo's comments, there was only one for which the hash matches 183. This comment was posted on February 6, while the original photo was posted in early January. Taking the comment and running it through the regex, you get the following bit.ly URL:
http://bit.ly/2kdhuHX
Looking a bit more closely at the regular expression, we see it is looking for either @|# or the Unicode character \200d. This character is actually a non-printable character called 'Zero Width Joiner', normally used to separate emojis. Pasting the actual comment or looking at its source, you can see that this character precedes each character that makes the path of the bit.ly URL:
smith2155<200d>#2hot ma<200d>ke lovei<200d>d to <200d>her, <200d>uupss <200d>#Hot <200d>#X
Tags: computers, conspiracies, mad science, pranks, spam
Turn your doodles into meat
I feel like these Deep Dream-esque nightmare generators are like the computer version of anti-Semitic and racist political cartoons: "This is what Humans look like, ha ha". The machines are insulting and libeling us.
Image-to-Image Translation with Conditional Adversarial Nets. Their interactive demos aren't working any more, but someone made another one here.
Cyriak has some good ones:
And there's an octothorpe category:
Hooray, I can't even restore my iPhone
Something has again gotten corrupted in the iPhone music database, so I keep getting:
even though:
Which is amazing design: "Because I somehow think that all of the music won't fit, I will sync none of it. You're welcome."
So I just want to nuke it from orbit and re-install from local backup, and wait 5 hours for all the music to re-sync. But when I try to do "Restore iPhone" I get:
And if I put the phone into "Recovery" mode (hold down power+home for 30+ seconds), I get:
Latest iTunes, latest MacOS, latest iOS. Double-you tee fuck, Apple.
The only effect of doing a mere "Restore Backup" is that it blows away all my saved passwords. Thanks again for that feature, dicks. What year is this? Apple thinks that sane people store their password vault inside their heads?
Update: And after all this wheel-spinning, now "Autoimporter" won't launch when I plug in the phone; and it seems like every other time I plug the phone in, it tries to re-sync 5000+ tracks, and then says it failed to sync 4000+ of them. Also, the act of syncing makes iTunes on the desktop just stop playing at random times, because apparently copying files out the USB port and playing music at the same time is too confusing for it.
Previously, previously, previously.
Tags: computers, firstperson, lazyweb, mac, phones, photography
Noted fascist collaborator Peter Thiel funds noted pro troll Palmer Luckey in building surveillance tools
Mr. Thiel's investment firm, Founders Fund [...] sees Mr. Luckey's venture in the mold of Palantir Technologies, a data-mining company co-founded by Mr. Thiel, which serves a wide range of clients, including intelligence agencies. [...]Mr. Luckey discussed the idea of using sensor technology on the Mexican border with Stephen K. Bannon, Mr. Trump's chief strategist, according to a person familiar with the meeting. [...]
A person who knows him described Mr. Luckey as a casual "prepper," someone who prepares for societal collapse, though another person said he was simply a military buff. [...] Among his assets is about 85 acres of property in upstate New York, including a luxury home built atop a decommissioned Atlas missile silo. [...] He owns a second property in Chico, Calif., with decommissioned Titan 1 missile silos, according to records.
Luckey on the hardships and deprivations of working at Facebook:
"At the moment I am an unemployed engineer, when I worked at Facebook I was just a business person," he told MoguraVR. "The Oculus offices were on the Facebook campus. It certainly was a great working environment. But I had to restrain myself working there. I could not cosplay while working at Facebook."
I'm not sure who he's cosplaying as in this photo, but I assume it's Steve Bannon.
Luckey's most notable business venture, of course, was Nimble America:
Nimble America says it's dedicated to proving that "shitposting is powerful and meme magic is real," according to the company's introductory statement. [...] "We conquered Reddit and drive narrative on social media, conquered the [mainstream media], now it's time to get our most delicious memes in front of Americans whether they like it or not," a representative for the group wrote in an introductory post on Reddit.