We've been watching some domestic television from NZ, and I'm kind of marveling about it.
NZ is small! About twice the land area of my home state of GA, but with half the population.
Or, compared to CA, NZ is less than 40% the size of CA, and has less than 15% the population.
(or, you know, roughly the size of the UK, but with 1300% less people.)
And they have significant domestic television production, and much of it is high quality. And also film.
This further drives home my longstanding belief that every US state, (and probably much smaller areas) could sustainably support local media production.
Hiram, Dallas, and Douglasville all have studios of various sizes, but they're all used for major hollywood productions. Mostly Marvel stuff, from what I've gathered.
The infrastructure for independent distribution is missing.
I don't know a lot about the TV/movie business, but it's possible it'll be like startups where a lot of them are done by people who got an education in the business working for the big shots. Some portion of them might go on to make independent stuff.
That goes into some more history, but in short: If you work in film you're necessarily classified as a contractor. Even if, say, you work at Weta Studios. You cannot unionise (this is being fixed), or otherwise benefit from usual employment expectations.
Peter Jackson has done both a lot of good & harm to our economy.
for radio, certainly. And GA has always had strong independent TV ( TBS, TNT, CNN) but aside from some public access networks, captain isotope, and the occasional game show, I'm not aware of any regional shows in the last 30 years.
not only that, but OFC NZ has substantial incentives for film production and a lot of the formats produced there - like in Australia and Canada - are usually internationalized and licensed for distribution.
Productions like "The Tribe" can't be sustained by the domestic market of New Zealand alone, even if all Kiwis would only consume TV and cease all other entertainment and leisure expenses...
when comparing NZ / US economies, consider the different attitudes to taxation and state sponsorship of the arts. I suspect NZ is more like Canada (which Americans sometimes label "socialist") than like the US.
I'm talking about journalism there, but the ideas are equally applicable elsewhere.
Monoculture is monopoly, monopoly is maximally profitable for monopolists.
A diverse culture and media landscape would be more generally profitable. There would be more money in it overall, and that money would reach more people (while producing more things, faster, and probably at the same level of quality), and overall be *better* in several measurable ways.
But the gatekeepers have less power and money in that system.
Does Thunderbird have an integrated inbox? I am trying to remember why I didn't stick with it... I used to use K9Mail too. Right now I use one app on my phone and another on my laptop and I would love to streamline, but with 12+ email accounts...an integrated inbox is a must or Ibfear I will miss things.
Hello Thunderbird. As much as I like to see more crypt-automation (thanks), I would REALLY like to see an implementation of AutoCrypt in Thunderbird INCLUDING an indication of trust. See implementation at Threema: https://threema.ch/en/faq/levels_expl PLEASE can you integrate AutoCrypt as soon as possible!? Many thanks.
In real life, I've seen good, sensible, compassionate people turn into racists, bigots and conspiracy theory belieivers.
Why? Because they were radicalised.
Radicalisation happens when people get exposed again and again to lies spread by extreme groups, usually about vulnerable minorities the extremists want to persecute.
It is *really* important for Fediverse admins to block this material. The further these lies spread, the greater the danger to minorities.
it’s a sad day, when you have to feel anxious because someone took your grandchildren to a church service. Their other grandma believes a black prophet created white people to punish his followers for their sins.
jesus you even got two of them on here without any sense of self awareness.... A cryptobro and a putin bootlicker "but what about the radical left". Luckily fediverse blocking is much more effective than other networks.
the most common example of radicalisation on fedi I’ve seen is caused directly by over-moderation creating echo chambers where people who think they’re always 100% right saviours of the oppressed and humanity overall lash out with aggression, racism and sexism upon encountering anything that doesn’t confirm their worldview, or even just casually because nobody’s gonna contest them.
It’s really important for the Fediverse admins to block only the material that really needs to be blocked and not just anything they don’t like or agree with.
It is also important not to turn this banning into censorship. Creating a social buble out of the fediverse could have the similar effect. We need to draw this line very carefully. Some things that contradict our oppinions are not always fake news . So far my experience here has been very "left" biased. And while this is very comfortable for me, this is exactly where the danger lies. Not having one's ideas challenged can lead to complacency and radicalisation.
Re: April Fools. Even as a kid I didn't particularly like shows that revolved around pranking the unsuspecting public, especially pranks that tried to scare people. I always hoped a show would spend 1000s pranking me then, when the ruse was revealed, I'd refuse to sign the waiver
Yes! Also, there seems to be a certain type of "comedy" in film and TV drama that revolves around things continually going wrong for the main character. I find these deeply troubling, distressing even, and will leave the room if the family want to watch them.
The key question to put to every single talking head Tory shoved infront of a camera this weekend to laud this deal is “…how many years from now do you foresee the CPTPP being of sufficient economic scale that it offsets the losses the UK economy has suffered due to Brexit?”
@Adam Conover and @Emily M. Bender (she/her) discuss how people are worrying about the wrong things with AI and how not enough people are worrying about the right things.
It's not the future, it's here today. It's not the exciting evils of The Terminator, it's the mundane evils of our already existing corporations.
If you prefer a quarter of the length but four times the intensity, check out @Adam Conover 's latest video from yesterday, which summarizes the themes of the discussion in glorious rant format (while still citing Stochastic Parrots!):
By weird coincidence I had my first Tetris dream last night (the above thing happened just now, the day after the dream). I never had them in the 90s, but my mom did. I've been listening to 2 Unlimited and Doctor Spin recently, that's probably why.
A year later we can see that the truth is that over decades his car company and rocket company both evolved ways of keeping Dilbert Stark from doing much damage—ruthlessly managing him to keep him out of the way of the core business. But his social media acquisition was so abrupt there was no time for Twitter to develop internal defences against a screeching, shit-slinging macaque.
i think he is also perfect example of being an expert in one field (startup/VC) does not automatically make you an expert in every field. E.g. he tweets about the war with the confidence of a Ukrainian general with regard to the accuracy of what he is saying.
Other than that, he is not Elon Level unhinged and all in all a reasonable follow
The thing is, being an "expert" in that topic means: I spent my parents' money on lottery tickets at the 7/11, then I won, and now I conduct seminars on how my Hollyfeld-level 7/11 technique is the best.
But that aside, HN ("the premiere VC comment section!") is one of the most societally toxic sites on the internet, just barely second to the various *chans. So that's a lot to answer for.
Just this week that Starbucks motherfucker said in front of Congress and god and everybody, "I grew up in government subsidized housing, nobody ever gave me anything. Stop denigrating me by calling me a billionaire, that's so unfair."
Yup. The easiest way to make a fuckton of money is to start with a smaller fuckton of money and not lose it. Confirmation bias then blinds us to the ones who lost their stake while we are directed to watch the winners in the casino and chant, "that could be me!"
I hate to be That Guy but as a) apartheid isn’t a term that should be thrown around lightly given the horrors it resulted in and b) well, accuracy it’s worth checking out the Snopes fact-check on this business and the origin of Musk’s wealth. Doesn’t mean he’s not still a shithead for any number of other reasons, mind, but let’s slam him for the stuff the shithead actually *did*. https://www.snopes.com/news/2022/11/17/elon-musk-emerald-mine/
Mmph: it's Snopes, and it does indeed appear to bust the emerald mine rumour. There are plenty of perfectly good reasons to dunk on Dilbert Stark/Space Karen without including dubious/baseless rumours.
I feel like a lot of people read Watchmen and thought, "Wow, Ozymandias seems like a really sharp, self-made dude who the author was totally not telling you in no uncertain terms was completely full of shit."
- 9/10 investments fail - 1/10 must bring at least 20x money back - Develop reputation as someone other people think is smart - You'll be pitched on a lot of dumb shit: invest in those which could bring 20x return - Use other people's money to invest more - Hope to have good luck that one in first ten works out
People have been flogging the secrets to riches since forever, and there are always fools who don't ask the obvious question. https://xkcd.com/1827/
Are we reading the same HN? Just took a look. Mostly cool tech stuff. A guy showing off a site he built. CDC people getting sick at the toxic train crash. Big companies behaving badly. Comments frequently thoughtful and evidence-based.
I dipped a toe in the toxic waters of 4 Chan once. There is no comparison.
1 April 1942 | 10,629 men were counted in the morning at #Auschwitz.
On that day: 91 prisoners died (incl. Tadeusz Mruk, no. 228) 48 prisoners were released (incl. Roman Trojanowski - no. 44 & Kazimierz Dutka - no. 246).
[prisoners of the 1st transports of Poles to Auschwitz]
G'day! Today we're going to take a look at the very fascinating vaginas of Thylarctos plummetus - commonly called drop bears. These Australian animals are very fascinating down under...
For those who haven't heard of drop bears, these predatory, forest-dwelling marsupials are so called due to their preferred hunting method of dropping from trees onto their mammalian prey. The Australian Museum has a detailed information sheet to tell you more: https://australian.museum/learn/animals/mammals/drop-bear/
The prior thread, which started to get a bit testy so I abandoned. The software wrote the admin password in plain text.. 3CX took little responsibility, didn’t fix it, and started arguing on Twitter basically. 😬
#3CX is a phone system on 140k odd IPs, it’s very popular with SMBs and government. To clarify the 140k IPs thing, that's actual phone systems - there's many more end users behind each phone system.
Looking more at #3CX supply chain issue in telemetry - CrowdStrike are on the money.
Not in their blog yet but it looks like the compromise extends back months, not from today.
Also - if you have an early version, it auto upgraded to an impacted version. It looks like quite a lot of planning went in from beginning of year, but the threat actor(s) really went nuts with access gained this week and started mass smash and grabbing at scale, and hands on keyboard'ing, earlier this week.
I'm on holiday at the moment but I'll maybe write something up on 3CX at the weekend as I found some stuff.
Really good spot by CrowdStrike and investigation so far.
It looks like the threat actor opted to burn the capability, not sure why, as they went noisy.
Also, the TA infrastructure is still up and provides remote access to impacted orgs - org may want to contain. The 3CX installer and updater still delivers app which calls out.
Also quickly on containment with 3CX, if you're a high risk org (e.g. government) I would kill the 3CX boundary server as a precautionary measure (it also auto updates from the same vendor and most orgs run on Linux = I don't think anybody has checked it yet, and it's by design internet inbound accessible) and Windows Firewall rule to stop 3CXDesktopApp.exe reaching outbound internet. It will kill your phone system capability, note. You can uncontain when you have a better idea what happened.
One more on #3CX - the Mac binaries are also impacted and the threat actor was using Mac victim systems. First time I’ve seen that in a supply chain attack. The TA is probably in North Korea, if you have impacted users contain them and rotate all their financial access logins, eg banks.
Reality check: one of the open source DLLs they bundled was trojanised. A trojan isn't a vulnerability. The DLL was provided directly by the vendor in their update process, via their build pipeline.
ReversingLabs has a look at what happened at #3CX - although 3CX are trying to blame "vulnerabilities" in open source code, the reality is _their_ build environment is compromised. The malicious DLLs have Sigflip run on them, for one thing.
Regarding #3CX - been comparing findings with industry peers. Some things not commonly understood but will be evidenced:
- the attacker infrastructure spun up early this year. - they didn’t launch noisy or with infostealers. They were quietly using access at orgs a month ago (by which I mean hands on keyboard). - for some reason they mass deployed automated infostealers in the past week which is super noisy, rumbling themselves out loud - smash and grab approach.
I guess they realised the gig was up and dashed for all the bases all at once to max out the remaining access before losing it. I wonder if they were up in 3CX itself and could tell when they actually realised the full extent?
I know, it is not a tail recursion. The fixedpoint function is elegant but not efficient. It is important that Funktal can handle it, and in fact it showed me a design flaw I still have to fix. But in practice I would not use it. I'll send you a tail-recursive one for contrast later. Your tool is very cool!
On April 1st a certain blue website is taking away the verified tick. For April 1st we at bne.social are making it available to you, but only for a suspiciously short time. Conditions apply.
Please join us in wishing #Mozilla a happy 25th birthday! 🎉
To quote Mozilla Foundation's Mark Surman:
"The internet was built by people FOR people, and it's the people using the internet who should determine its future, not a few powerful organizations."
On behalf of everyone here at #Thunderbird, thank you to anyone past and present at Mozilla who's helped make the internet a better, safer place.
Really happy you're still around after all these years… and in such a great shape. The Thunderbird is getting closer to a Phoenix as of late. This new energy is incredible.
Keep up the good work, the Internet and the general public needs you 💪
Disclaimed: None of it is real. It’s just a movie, made mostly with AI, which took care of writing the script, creating the concept art, generating all the voices, and participating in some creative decisions. The AI-generated voices used in this film do not reflect the opinions and thoughts of their original owners. This short film was created as a demonstration to showcase the potential of AI in filmmaking.
so this feels like a perfect highlight of the things these tools should be good at. Take existing things and glue them together.
That stated, it also feels a lot like a "draft" version of this story. A lot of the dialogue is formulaic. It's missing important elements of a story. The visual elements are present, but not polished.
Is this going to replace the modern movie ecosystem? No. But it may help improve several processes like pitching movies.
Ridiculous dream last night: Got into a massive fight with The Rock because he broke a decorative plate while dusting. I was very rude about his acting abilities. Oh, and The Kids from Fame were there trying to calm things down.
my experience is that the iPad can integrate with the keyboard really well, but it’s not really all that pleasant to do any real work on if I’m honest.
no I still use the laptop for real work. But often of an evening I think I could blog but the on screen keyboard just takes up too much space for me to see what I'm doing
Obviously keyboards work for Android too, but if you connect a Bluetooth mouse to an Android phone, you get a tiny mouse pointer that works. This is not an April fool's joke.
My workplace in approx 1997 at a financial #news company on Fleet Street in #london. A sea of CRT monitors. I had a #sun #unix workstation on my desk running solaris 5.5.1. #retro
With Italy banning ChatGPT until they can remove their Italian sources that created the data set, I was curious if they had crawled my data - maybe not?