EDIT: This happened back in 2025. Will leave as I’m sure I’m not the only one that didn’t know, but I saw it on hacker news and didn’t realize it was a year old. My bad.

In an odd approach to trying to improve customer tech support, HP allegedly implemented mandatory, 15-minute wait times for people calling the vendor for help with their computers and printers in certain geographies.

Callers from the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Ireland, and Italy were met with the forced holding periods, The Register reported on Thursday. The publication cited internal communications it saw from February 18 that reportedly said the wait times aimed to “influence customers to increase their adoption of digital self-solve, as a faster way to address their support question. This involves inserting a message of high call volumes, to expect a delay in connecting to an agent and offering digital self-solve solutions as an alternative.”

Of course it was a waffle house he "teleported" to. Seems you never end up at one by choice.

Basically a rewrite, could be interesting.

Played this a few years ago during Steam Next Fest. It's a 2D platformer collectathon with physics and nonsense humour.

NVIDIA had earlier described DLSS 5 in a way that suggested a deeper understanding of the scene. The follow-up answers paint a narrower picture. When asked whether the model reads PBR (Physically Based Rendering) properties from the engine, NVIDIA said: “DLSS 5 only takes the rendered frame and: “DLSS 5 only takes the rendered frame and motion vectors as inputs. Materials are inferred from the rendered frame.” In other words, the model is not reading metallic, roughness, normal maps, or other underlying material properties directly.

That may explain why some preview images raised concerns. In one example, a character appears to gain hair detail in an area where it was not visible before. In another, facial details appear altered enough (like the nose) to raise questions about whether the model is changing the look of the character rather than only improving lighting. NVIDIA’s response was that “the underlying geometry is unchanged,”

• In an internal all-hands, Google DeepMind leaders addressed staff concerns about Pentagon work.
• Leaders said there was a "robust process" to ensure the contracts align with Google's AI principles.
• At the same time, leaders said Google was pursuing more contracts in areas like cybersecurity and biosecurity.

I hope it's just growing pains.

Just as it says in the title. All these companies offering 'privacy' and 'security' services when they can't even keep their own shit secure. At the end of the day, the only chance we have at keeping private and secure is by handling our own data and avoiding all these companies entirely, and hope they all eventually disappear in bankruptcy hell.

Funny how this company is also a 'sponsor' for Have I Been Pwned, yet they are evidently just using that to market themselves to privacy conscious people by having their brand on the site.

These companies never cease to amaze me, and this causes me to trust Have I Been Pwned a bit less in terms of their marketed philosophy vs what they actually are.

I'm just ranting here, because I'm getting increasingly tired of all this shit. Sorry for that.

How to use data poisoning to trick the algorithm that’s profiling you (and why “personalization” is more fragile than you think)

Note: For education and defensive awareness only. I’m explaining the concept of data poisoning so teams can recognize risks and build safer systems. I’m not encouraging or providing guidance for misuse. :)

If you’re being tracked, scored, and predicted from your clicks… this is how the machine actually works (and how it breaks).

If a retailer can guess you’re pregnant before your family knows… imagine what ad platforms and recommendation feeds can infer about your money, your health, and your next life move from boring little signals you barely notice.

I’m Addie. I’ve spent 15 years in cybersecurity, and I teach cyber threats before they blindside you. In this vid, I break down the real mechanics behind prediction engines, why “scale” doesn’t protect models from manipulation, and how tiny amounts of poison in training data (or your own behavior) can make these systems confidently wrong.

Here’s what you’ll be able to do after this:

Understand how behavioral profiling and predictive analytics pull “private truths” from normal shopping and scrolling
Spot how personalized ads and recommendation systems build a story about you from clicks, watch time, and purchases
Learn what data poisoning means (in plain English) and why it works at web scale
See how an AI backdoor attack can hide in massive training sets without “breaking” accuracy
Recognize why adtech and real time bidding are fragile when signals get polluted by bots and noise
Understand model collapse and what happens when AI training data becomes AI-generated sludge

Start testing feedback loops safely so you can build hacking instincts without doing anything reckless Sources:

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2302.10149

https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.10149

I spent a few days chatting to the RetroDECK team (who are well and truly friends by now!), with the idea that it might be a good chance to focus on their real passion: retro gaming. Too often RetroDECK (which is all about emulation/retro gaming for the Steam Deck/Linux) just gets bottled up and mentioned as being less than it is.

Sure you get the typical emulation projects in there: PS2, PS3, Wii U, SNES and so on, but it really has so much more to offer to users. From odd little projects and engines to things like MUDs, pinball and more.

This was a nice chat with the team, it shows them all sharing what they're so passionate about. Retro gaming in all its forms.

From my friend Lazorne in the interview:

What I hope to do is simply provide people with an easy way to experience those memories again, provided they still have access to their old games. For one person retro might mean the PlayStation 3, while for others it could be systems like the TRS-80 or the BBC Micro.Both viewpoints are valid and that is how we approach the components included in RetroDECK as well.

You can find my article and the whole interview here:

https://gardinerbryant.com/retrodeck-is-more-than-emulation-an-interview-with-the-devs/

i have only one internal ssd and no external drives are connected