[–] 1 point 1 week ago

I figure these headlines are a best interpreted as a repeating reminder to degoogle.

The hints have only increased in urgency over the past couple of decades, from "we might do marketing" to "we spy on you" to "we do genocide".

Anyway -- nothing special about this headline, but finally I acted upon it: 1-2-3 backups of my google-email/photo/drive archives and reduced my google accounts to an empty skeleton (while I figure out if there's still any third party services I've forgotten about reliant on that email address).

I'd mostly migrated away from google a decade ago, maybe I can dispose of this skeleton account by the end of the year.

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  • [–] 6 points 1 week ago (3 children)

    Why does it appear to be 150% hydration? Or was it a really long over-proof which digested so much starch and protein that this was the result?

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  • [–] 7 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (3 children)

    You can't directly compare renting and mortgaging. A few differences:

    What you have after (nominally) 30 years:

    • Renting: nothing.
    • Owning: secure rent-free accomodation. Can work less and do more of what you enjoy.

    Other ongoing costs:

    • Renting: moving house every ~1-5 years.
    • Owning: building insurance, council rates, water supply, (sometimes body corp fees); (total ~$50-$200/week depending on bushfire/flood risk).

    If you're a keen gardener:

    • Renting: time and costs to rebuild then restore to original every time you're evicted. Uncertain planning timeframes.
    • Owning: Go ahead and plant that orchard and have excellent fruit and nuts for the next 30-60 years.
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  • [–] 4 points 1 month ago (1 child)

    All I can find in the article is the following [emphasis mine]:

    Another AI breach is under investigation after a rogue agent accessed public information on a state government web application.

    The NSW premier's department on Friday said it had been informed by OpenAI, the tech company behind ChatGPT, that one of its models accessed a National Parks and Wildlife Service web application containing historical information and data on fires in NSW.

    No mention of "hacking" or breaking in to systems -- just some sort of word-association-insinuation. Did anything actually happen? Sounds like fuss about nothing again.

    The LLM agent's process is suggested to have sought out information beyond the bounds of the task defined by its operator -- which is a recurring pattern to criticise about LLM reliability/safety/usefullness, but there's no suggestion anything nefarious happened from the perspective of NSW government.

    If something significant did happen, please post a decent article about it.

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  • Medicare hack.... (www.linkedin.com)
     

    [...] There was no hack, no breach of patient records, and no compromise of private data. The material is aggregate MBS/PBS utilisation and spend - the same non-personal statistics researchers, journalists and analysts pull every week. Guest/anon access on that stack has been there since the SAS platform was set up that way. A human doing the same literature-to-source trail would have done the same thing and nobody would have called it a hack. [...]

    [–] 6 points 2 months ago*
    • Holding mechanical parts together during assembly, for example some parts in automatic transmissions. It dissolves in the transmission fluid and doesn't impair it's performance or clog anything like greases could.
    • Packing a replacement oil-pump with it to effectively pre-prime it so it pumps oil as soon as you start the engine it's attached to.
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  •  

    A well researched and referenced video (see yt description for references and spreadsheets), from Sharath of Building Beautifully.

    The cost of building transit in the Anglosphere has spiralled out of control. Australia, New Zealand, Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, Singapore and Hong Kong are all terrible at managing transit costs. Meanwhile, nations like France, Spain, South Korea and Turkey are running laps around the Anglosphere, building world-class transit at unprecedented speeds for prices up to four times cheaper. There is no reason for building transit to cost this much. Follow me as we unpack the staggering reasons that costs have spiralled out of control, and what we can do about it. Thank you to Jedwin Mok for appearing in this video! Jedwin introduced me to the transit costs crisis in mid-2025, which led me to ultimately create this video and interview him for it.

     

    Ceccanti believed ChatGPT could help as an organizational tool for their housing project. He aimed to create a bespoke chatbot that would help steward the land, keep track of their things to do and show others how to emulate their project.

    During this process, Ceccanti didn’t spend “ridiculous amounts of time” engaging with ChatGPT, said Fox. He continued to work, while also farming and taking care of their animals: goats, a horse, his cat, a dog and several chickens. Invested in the people and relationships around him, he spent quality time with his friends and wife, she said. Life went on without any issues for years while they slowly made progress on their housing plan.

    In the spring of 2025, Ceccanti’s obsession with the chatbot began. He told Fox in late January that he needed a bigger record of his conversations with the bot so that he could continue using it to work on their sustainable housing project with longer prompts and conversations – upgrading from a $20-a-month subscription to a $200 one. By mid-March, he had begun spending more than 12 hours a day in the basement, sometimes up to 20, typing to ChatGPT, Fox recalled. That’s when “he decided to really start chasing the creation of an independent AI on a home server”.

    Over time, his relationship with the chatbot came to replace his human connections, Richardson said: “Every time he went back to ChatGPT, it hooked him a little bit more, and after a while, he stopped being interested in anything else.”

    On 11 June – day 86 after Ceccanti’s heaviest engagement with the bot – Fox begged him to stop using ChatGPT. In a moment of clarity, he listened to her. He unplugged his computer and quit ChatGPT.

    On the third day, however, when Fox and Richardson were out for work, they received a phone call from their neighbor saying Ceccanti was in their yard acting strangely. When they returned, they found him talking to their horse, with the horse’s lead rope tied around his neck like a noose.

    “He was absolutely enraged with us. He did not recognize that he was not himself anymore,” said Richardson.

    Ceccanti moved to his friend’s place in Portland and eventually resumed using ChatGPT. After a month, however, he quit ChatGPT again, just a few days prior to his death.. “He was going to go to Hawaii and not take his computer, and he was going to work on finishing a story and get his shit together,” said Fox. By the time he stopped engaging with ChatGPT, he had 55,000 pages worth of conversations with it, according to Fox.

    TW: suicide

    Joe Ceccanti – who had been missing for several hours – had jumped from a railway overpass and died. He was 48.

    Fox couldn’t believe it. Ceccanti had no history of depression, she said, nor was he suicidal – he was the “most hopeful person” she had ever known. In fact, according to the witness accounts shared with Fox later, just before Ceccanti jumped, he smiled and yelled: “I’m great!” to the rail yard attendants below when they asked him if he was OK.

     

    As Agence France-Presse reports, Venezuelan officials say the US air strikes that killed at least 56 soldiers also destroyed numerous non-military targets, including the Venezuelan Institute for Scientific Research (IVIC).

    On Wednesday, the country’s science and technology minister Gabriela Jimenez shared footage of an obliterated building which she says housed the mathematics department at the IVIC. On top of this, Jimenez said that four other IVIC buildings were targeted for destruction: the physics, chemistry, ecology, and nuclear research centers.

    “Two missiles struck the area directly,” Jimenez wrote on Telegram referencing the mathematics center, per AFP which translated the comment. “The attack was total: these areas housed servers and equipment essential to our computer networks that were completely devastated.”

    In addition to the academic buildings, the governor of La Guaira, Jose Alejandro Teran, said the US air strikes destroyed a medicine warehouse located on the coastal city near Caracas.

    “Tons of medicine burned to ash, tons of food,” Teran said in a video posted on social media. “Here are the results of what the bombs and missiles of the United States government have done… to destroy our warehouses full of medicine and food.”

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