There’s a story in one of the comments about an IBM mainframe that shouldn’t be missed

Never heard of it but poking around their website it looks interesting; how do you like it?

For so much of my life that seemed to be the case

Marrow was interested in “how public institutions decide what’s worth showing, and what happens when something outside that system appears within it”.

He said using artificial intelligence to create it was “part of the natural evolution of artistic tools”, adding he sketched the image before he used AI.

“AI is here to stay, to gatekeep its capability would be against the beliefs I hold dear about art,” he said.

[…]

The artist, who said similar stunts he had carried out at Bristol Museum and Tate Modern were not “approved, sanctioned, or acknowledged”, denied it was vandalism.

“The work isn’t about disruption. It’s about participation without permission,” he said.

“I’m not asking permission, but I’m not causing harm either.”

It’s like the same “logic” AI companies use when they take copyrighted content without permission: claim you’re not causing harm so you don’t need permission. They don’t see the harm, so from their perspective it’s fine, even if the creator doesn’t want them taking their work.

Railing at the institution as being gatekeepers might reveal the flaw in their logic. People or institutions are entitled to decide what belongs in their collection and what does not. Random outsiders are not entitled to be a part of that collection. They can be invited in if the curators are interested in their work, but the curators are generally not required to add them just because they’ve made something. The artist can create their own collection and invite others to be a part of it, but they’re not entitled to be in anyone’s collection. They also can’t just go and take something from someone else’s collection without permission, and even taking a photo of someone else’s work and placing it in their collection would at the very least be bad form. The other artist is just as entitled to decide where they do or don’t want their work displayed.

With encryption and encryption backdoors I often use the illustration that I put a lock on the door of my house, not because I have something to hide, but because I have things valuable to me that I want to protect. Just because I have nothing to hide, it doesn’t mean I give the police a key to my house or let them add their own lock to my door. I wouldn’t want to come home one day and discover a random policeman had let himself in and was making copies of all my documents and photos just to make sure I wasn’t doing something bad. I’d be even more upset if I came home and discovered a policeman from another country had let himself in because he’d gotten a copy of the same key, or a thief was doing the same because he’d gotten a copy of the key.

Building off that illustration, I might have a collection of art in my house. This guy is not entitled to come into my house and look at my art, nor is he entitled to come into my house and put a picture on an empty space on my wall just because he thinks it should be there. Railing against gatekeepers keeping his slop out to me seems as ridiculous as him being mad that I won’t open my door and let him put a picture on my wall. He might not be damaging my walls, but just forcing his way in against my wishes is something I would view as harmful.

Sneaked is the traditional form as the past tense of a regular verb, dating back to at least the 1500s, whereas snuck only appeared as an irregular form in the 1800s and it’s not clear why. It’s very unusual for a regular verb to become irregular. Snuck is more common in US English than British English, although sneaked and snuck appear in both variants. Sneaked would seem more correct especially for British English.

A friend of mine from my TV days was working in South Africa when they hosted the association football World Cup and wound up talking to a woman who worked for the Football Association (the sport’s governing body in England and the reason the sport is called association football). She was angrily insisting to him that Americans invented the name “soccer” and that it never had that name in England. She might have been inebriated, but that was a lot to be confidently incorrect about her own employer.

Leave the field crews in cue until it’s time for their hit unless they’re being too loud!

I’ve seen this photo so many times I can pick out the camouflaged arm almost immediately.

Some of the digital de-aging the VFX companies do is really impressive, and having the full catalog of TNG shows and movies to reference they could probably make it darn near seamless. I remember watching some behind the scenes feature on what they did for Captain Marvel and they were explaining they wanted to de-age Samuel L. Jackson to about the time he did Jurassic Park, but they couldn’t really use that footage for reference because he was using prosthetics and makeup to play a character older than he actually was at the time. They had to kind of cobble it together using films before and after for reference to approximate the age they wanted.

I’ve never written a game FAQ but when I’ve done documentation for other things on a computer I’ve found that I prefer recording myself doing the task and then writing the guide while going back through the video. It’s too easy to skip steps otherwise.

In addition, the special protection of sensitive data like health data, political views or sexual orientation would be significantly reduced. Also, remote access to personal data on PCs or smart phones without consent of the user would be enabled.

The authoritarians can’t get Chat Control passed so they’re trying this instead?

That’s basic professionalism but also producers can be too distracted with the next part to clear the crew. Sometimes I’d end up clearing the crew even though I was running audio or Quality Control.

Top right looks a little like Godzilla

I would not; that muppet’s a menace! Things are always exploding around him! He shows such a disregard for safety that he makes Dr. Emmett Brown look like a responsible practitioner of science.

I didn’t think Dr. Honeydew was a medical doctor

Interesting; I’ve read that more and more jurisdictions are ending the concept of common law marriage. The idea is it existed in a time when a legal marriage was harder to get. Nowadays in those areas a legal marriage is easy to get so the thought is if those people never legally married it’s because they didn’t want to, not because they couldn’t, so there’s no reason to have a marriage forced onto the couple.

I had an old one that was DE-9!

I have some friends with the last name Raper. The oldest brother was able to make an account on Hotmail that was firstnamelastname@hotmail. A few years later I was with the middle brother when he tried to setup the same for himself but was told it had disallowed words. Although he used his middle initial C in the attempt which put “crap” in the username, I don’t think that was the disallowed word.

I know there are two outside Paris. We took my wife’s parents back to her dad’s hometown this summer and because I don’t feel comfortable with driving 5 hours to the west coast after flying overnight from North America we usually try to find a place to stay near Paris. We discovered our hotel would be about a half-hour’s drive from the Costco southwest of Paris and we joked about driving there after checking in so we could troll friends and family on social media that our first meal in France was a €1.50 Costco hot dog. I would be genuinely curious to check it out sometime if we ever had the time, just to see what’s the same and what’s different.

I have a strong preference for Dobie Pads, and found their version inferior