https://fortune.com/2025/08/01/artificial-stupidity-ai-trading-stock-market-behaviors-price-fixing-collusion-wharton-study/

In July 2025, a vulnerability in the GiveWP WordPress plugin exposed the names and email addresses of approximately 30k donors to the Pi-hole network-wide ad blocking project. Pi-hole subsequently self-submitted the list of impacted donors to HIBP.

A note that this setup runs a 671B model in Q4 quantization at 3-4 TPS, running a Q8 would need something beefier. To run a 671B model in the original Q8 at 6-8 TPS you'd need a dual socket EPYC server motherboard with 768GB of RAM.

Title, I'm sick of online tech communities that clearly are casually of the opinion that women are stupider than men or stupid outright. Funny how the example of a tech incompetent person is always your grandma never your grandpa—have recently been seeing this archetypal person mutate into your mom now, not even your grandma. I know so many women my mom's generation who have been programming for decades... The assumption that anyone in online tech communities must be a guy because women are too stupid or uninterested in tech, etc.

The thing that annoys me the most is that these men don't think of themselves as anti-woke gamergaters or anything. They probably think of themselves as "progressive" #resist libs IME. It's sad that growing up I had to deal with the attitudes towards me being the only girl who chose to do IT classes at my school (and like, not to blow my own trumpet but clearly the most competent kid in the class by far too—I don't think that's too much of a brag considering I'm talking about a group of like 20 children) and nothing's changed when I'm in online communities of my own choosing as an adult years later.

It's so detached from reality when people think that misogyny is an oppression that's been "overcome" when clearly the majority of men still have as a base unchallenged assumption that women are stupider than men.

Your communities are only going to have fewer and fewer women over time because of these attitudes. And then the men in them will wonder why there's so few women in techy communities. Must be because our feeble female brains are too dumb to understand tech.

https://needtoknow.co.uk/2025/07/30/britains-most-tattooed-man-claims-he-is-unable-to-watch-prn-as-new-age-check-system-mistakes-his-ink-for-a-mask/

https://archive.ph/ndMUS

A few notes:

1. Yes, it does use generative AI. It caches the result per-MP so there are, at most, 660-ish generated images.

2. Yes, this might be illegal. It's meant to protest the "Online """Safety""" Act" by highlighting how useless it is at preventing circumvention. Do not use for anything that might get you a knock on the door.

3. No, the licenses arent valid. The only "real" info used to generate them is the mugshot of the MP in question.

4. No, this doesn't grant you anonymity. ID checkers and their clients will still log your IP and fingerprint your browser info, anyone with the means and motive can still find the real user (just like before!).

I have a side gig helping old people with technology and my last job was helping a guy set up his new computer.

His old computer ended up in a boot loop so he bought a new one.

And this is an older guy, so he accesses his emails on his computer and his phone is just for making phone calls.

You need to have a Microsoft account to use Windows 11, and this guy was stuck at the login step for his new computer. He'd been without a computer for a week so he really wanted someone to help him out.

He had tried to login to his Microsoft account too many times, so Microsoft sent him an email to verify it was him. But he didn't have a computer to access his emails on. Microsoft is making some big assumptions about the number of devices people have and their availability when setting up a new computer.

Buying a new computer is a quite expensive and not very exciting endeavor for most people, so they're only going to do it when they really need to. Which for this guy is when Windows 10 stopped working on his old computer.

So people could be down a device when they go to set up their new Windows 11 PC.

It frustrates me because it adds an extra layer of shit people need to deal with, and it means you can't use a perfectly good computer because Microsoft wants to populate your device details against your contact record in their CRM.

Fortunately this guy has all his passwords written down, and I was able to access his emails from his phone to get the Microsoft code. As a quick aside, I also had to deal with a bit of authentication hell, needing to receive an SMS from his email provider to access his inbox to get the code Microsoft had sent. I was trying to explain to him what each code was for, so I can see how it would be easy for someone to get lost in these side quests of codes when you're trying to do one specific thing.

If I had a USB drive with Mint on it, I almost would have just switched him over. He wasn't a power user from his own admission so he would barely notice the difference, aside from the lack of popups and extortion Microsoft does to its users.

It made me think of how different the setup process was when I installed Bazzite on an old work laptop. I was creating the password for the root user, Bazzite recommended 8 characters for the password but I put in the regular 4 digit PIN I use for some things.

Bazzite comes up with a notice saying something like 'We recommend a password of 8 characters. Your password is less than recommended, so you'll have to press ENTER twice to confirm'.

Bazzite knows what a good minimum length password is, but also acknowledges it's your computer and you can use it how you want.

I know this isn't a surprise to anyone here, but it pisses me off how user hostile Microsoft is. Requiring an account feels like marketing or the board getting in on the software design process. Windows has muscled itself into being the go-to OS for consumer electronics. More consideration needs to be made for that 5% of users that don't have a computer, phone, and tablet all talking to each other. Especially when you expect less tech savvy people to use your shitty software because you've done so much to block any competition.

Oh, and I find it galling you hand over your contact details to Microsoft for a paid OS and it still doesn't come with office software. Open Word on a fresh install of 11 and you're met with a pop-up to buy a subscription to Office 365. One of the first things I did for this guy was install Libreoffice and SumatraPDF, setting both of them as defaults.

Sometimes the big software vendors are the biggest ads for their FOSS alternatives.

https://futurism.com/ceo-replacing-workers-ai

It wasn't always best to be a native white man, surprisingly. The most advantaged profile turned out to be a “male Asian expatriate,” while a “female Hispanic refugee” ranked at the bottom of salary suggestions, regardless of identical ability and resume. Chatbots don’t invent this advice from scratch, of course. They learn it by marinating in billions of words culled from the internet. Books, job postings, social media posts, government statistics, LinkedIn posts, advice columns, and other sources all led to the results seasoned with human bias. Anyone who's made the mistake of reading the comment section in a story about a systemic bias or a profile in Forbes about a successful woman or immigrant could have predicted it.

hello everyone, creating this thread to ask about what laptop i should get for HD video editing specifically using DaVinci. i dont want an Apple, so I’ve been eying the Acer Nitro V Gaming Laptop with Intel Core i9-13900H Processor and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060 Laptop GPU. is this a good choice? also, im hesitant about NVIDIA’s whole boasting about their card using AI driven graphics, would this somehow affect my future work in a negative way like image smoothing on HD TVs or is this something that’s avoidable? the laptop also has 16 gigs of RAM, would i need to get larger RAM too like the G.SKILL Ripjaws V Series (XMP) DDR4 RAM 64GB (4x16GB)? i’m a dummy when it comes to this stuff, so any help would be appreciated.