Even more oddities spotted in the news

[robkelk]

Recent immigrants to Canada think Canada accepts too many immigrants

1 in 4 newcomers struggle to work in their area of expertise, CBC survey finds

[robkelk]

We all knew (or should have known by now) that it's possible to run a program inside a PDF file.

The Register: They've only gone and made Doom run in a PDF file

Monochrome, but it works.

[classicdrogn]

HP wizards, eat your hearts out

[Bob Schroeck]

AI Just Reimagined The Harry Potter Cast As If They Were Disney Characters, And I Can’t Unsee Draco Malfoy As Peter Pan

[robkelk]

Gotta steal 'em all? Game store thieves target Pokemon cards

[robkelk]

Alternative Rock Band the pillows Officially Disband After 35 Years

Probably best known in North America for their work on the FLCL soundtrack.

[robkelk]

Well, they've convicted the person who flew a drone into a firefighting aircraft during last month's Palisades wildfire. He pled guilty, so he won't be going to jail, but he has to pay for the repairs to the aircraft and perform 150 hours of community service. (No word on whether that service includes cleaning up the damage done by the fire while the water bomber was on the ground being repaired instead of fighting the fire.)

Some background about the drone pilot, courtesy of The Register:

Not only is he one of the founders of game developer Treyarch, which was acquired by Activision and became one of the studios behind the Call of Duty franchise, but he's also the president of Skydance Interactive, a Skydance Media subsidiary that develops VR apps and video games for the media giant. Oh - and Akemann also holds a PhD in mathematics from UC Berkeley.

So, not some random teenager who was too stupid to realize what he was doing.

[Dartz]

2032 - Rocks Fall, everybody dies?


Surely it can be diverted? We can shorten those odds a lot.

[robkelk]

2032 - Rocks Fall, everybody dies?


Surely it can be diverted? We can shorten those odds a lot.

That would give the Space Force something to do...

[MilkmanConspiracy]

Patriotic Ontario pilot creates massive maple leaf in the sky to send message to U.S. (CBC.ca)

[MilkmanConspiracy]

"'Grease and rags' sewer fatberg halts Bryan Adams concert"

Also America is seemingly ending production of new pennies. It’s probably about time.

[classicdrogn]

Also America is seemingly ending production of new pennies. It’s probably about time.

Yeah, more than time. "A penny saved is a dime's space wasted" has been true for practical purposes since the mid nineties at the latest.

[robkelk]

Less acid rain has actually posed problems for Maritime corn crops

Because the soil doesn't have enough sulphur in it for high-quality corn.

[robkelk]

We all knew (or should have known by now) that it's possible to run a program inside a PDF file.

The Register: They've only gone and made Doom run in a PDF file

Monochrome, but it works.

Because that wasn't enough of a challenge: DOOM in a PDF on Linux

[robkelk]

Looks like we missed this when it happened a month and a half ago.

Diamond Comic Distributors Files Voluntary Petition for Relief Under Chapter 11

Apparently, the bankruptcy of the primary comic book distribution company is strting to affect independent comic publishers... or, at least, so says CBC radio news.

[robkelk]

Sesame Street episode nets Chelsea, Que., writer her first Emmy award

[robkelk]

OPINION: Website switches from ad-supported to Paetron-supported, gets rid of ad software, runs substantially faster

Out went WordPress. In came pure static pages. Out went all the tracking and cookies. In came ... nothing. From a technical aspect, the new site was a tremendous success, with pages served in single-digit milliseconds instead of the many hundreds needed previously. The site codebase was a tenth of the size of the old installation. As for user experience, all they got was pure content delivered nearly instantaneously.

At this point, adtech can be considered malware.

[robkelk]

Vancouver International Auto Show removes Tesla over safety concerns

Nicholl said, in response to a question from CBC News, that the concerns prompting the removal were "all-inclusive" of the prospect of protests and vandalism against Tesla.

Which is why this is not being posted in Politics -- it was not a political decision, it was a security issue.

[robkelk]

Don't hold back, Jackson Weaver, tell us what you really think.

(Oh, wait -- it's Jackson Weaver, CBC's answer to Jay Sherman.)

"Snow White — like all live-action remakes — doesn't deserve to exist"

His biggest complaint is that Disney isn't making original movies nowadays. No, really. He's complaining that Dsiney is unoriginal.

[robkelk]

A couple of articles about AI, bith from The Register.


First, Cloudflare builds an AI to lead AI scraper bots into a horrible maze of junk content

The network-taming company built the tool after noticing that almost one percent of all requests to access web content that it can see now come from AI crawler bots. Those bots are probably scraping data that’s gathered up to train AI models.

Web site operators can in theory block AI crawlers using various means such as a robots.txt file or changing web server settings to disallow visits from bots. Some even use CAPTCHAs to test whether visitors to a site are human, or adopt software designed to stymie bots.

In reality crawler operators ignore the instructions in robots.txt files, or work around CAPTCHAs and web server settings. The result is a lot of unwanted crawler traffic consuming resources, and info fed into training data without creators’ permission – a contentious practice currently being tested in court amidst allegations of copyright abuse.

Cloudflare’s response is to let crawler bots in and use generative AI to create junk content for them to devour in what the company has termed an “AI Labyrinth”.

fight fire with fire, fight AI with Ai.


Second, Do AI robo-authors qualify for copyright? It's still no, says appeals court

The US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit has affirmed a lower court ruling that content created by an AI model without human input cannot be copyrighted.

Nothing new in the way of US copyright law. The plaintiff intends to appeal.

[Bob Schroeck]

Don't hold back, Jackson Weaver, tell us what you really think.

(Oh, wait -- it's Jackson Weaver, CBC's answer to Jay Sherman.)

"Snow White — like all live-action remakes — doesn't deserve to exist"

There used to be a critic like that writing for the Asbury Park Press when I was a teenager. Nothing was ever good enough for her refined tastes, with the invective scaling in direct proportion to how likely it was to be enjoyed by the general public. It got to the point that my friends and I took a negative review from her as reason enough to go see a film. This was a woman who declared that Star Wars was worthless junk best consigned to the trash can of cinematic history, as it would no doubt be once it flopped at the box office.

His biggest complaint is that Disney isn't making original movies nowadays. No, really. He's complaining that Dsiney is unoriginal.

Well. He clearly was raised in a Skinner box before being given a job at the CBC.

[hazard]

A live action remake does not stand or fall on how original it is... it stands or falls on whether or not it actually manages to tell its story well.

It could even be a frame by frame recreation, and as long as it captures that energy of the non-live action original... it's probably going to be about as good a movie as the original.

[robkelk]

Well, other reviewers are complaining about the movie for other reasons (not the least of which is the perception that the actress playing Maleficent can't act as well as the rest of the cast can).

---

NASA's inbox goes orbital after email mishap spams entire space industry

A lone voice cries out from reply-all chaos: 'Someone tell DOGE to rehire whoever maintains this email list'

[Mamorien]

There used to be a critic like that writing for the Asbury Park Press when I was a teenager.  Nothing was ever good enough for her refined tastes, with the invective scaling in direct proportion to how likely it was to be enjoyed by the general public.

Sounds like Anthony Lane, film critic at The New Yorker during the period when the Loomis household had a subscription and a man whose reaction to more or less any cinematic endeavor with the stench of popcorn about it involved unadulterated opprobrium.

[robkelk]

Author Blocked From Promoting Memoir About Meta

The book in question, Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism, is published by Flatiron Books. And Meta (fair disclosure: I own stock in Meta) is learning about the Streisand effect... because the injunction doesn't stop anyone else from discussing the book.