Alex Vranas @Alex@vran.as

@theverge The Verge is really going to compare having involuntary pornography distributed of you to getting fired for hate speech, huh?

At least it's clear who will win this thing: The lawyers.

Exploring music by @gribbles. Good background music to focus to. Enjoying the tracks "What are the media" and "Jetty".

@suricrasia crackles like pop rocks candy.

Just followed every artist on the @radiofreefedi rotational. Looking forward to discovering lots of new music.

@vegan4alivingplanet Context: This picture was from the Australian protests against COVID safety measures in 2020. A movement largely celebrated by right-wing conspiracy theorists who felt that basic public safety measures during a pandemic were actually a deliberate and coordinated effort to deprive them of their freedom.

Just so that everyone knows exactly what this right-wing anti-science picket sign actually means.

@davidnjoku It's well organized chaos.

@davidnjoku Between all the tab groups on all my open browser windows between all of my virtual desktops, I rarely have less than 100 tabs open at any given time, and that's just my personal laptop. Closer to 200 on my work computer.

I really hate Microsoft products. Thankfully I only have to deal with them at work, and not all the time.

Answer: It discreetly opens a "create share link" dialog in another part of the program (where I can't see it), and DOES NOT COPY ANYTHING TO THE CLIPBOARD.

To a casual user, it appears successful though.

And that's how I pasted a malicous spam link I was reporting earlier into a Teams chat when I was trying to share a SharePoint file from another chat...

You try to share a link to a SharePoint item from a Teams chat, and there's this button. Take a guess what it does. Remember, this is a Microsoft product.

Question for everyone who uses cutesy misspelled words and text art in your alt tags: do you know what alt tags are for?

Because people with screen readers don't want to hear the sounds that "chooooooooooonker" or ":-(" make.

@negative12dollarbill Yes! You definitely read the same article as I did, because I remember by eyes glazing over when I read that part.

Found the article. Seems like I was off on the cost ($64k, not six-figures), but here's the whole thing if you want to die inside: https://cointelegraph.com/news/mysterious-bitcoiner-spends-64k-inscribe-9mb-of-data-on-bitcoin

@mort As someone very much into actual cryptography, Cryptocurrencies were of huge interest to me when Bitcoin was a new thing.

The "experts" today that are completely divorced from cryptography and only care about market hype have thoroughly convinced me to never touch a blockchain-related product ever again, because I never see anyone who actually knows what they're talking about endorse this stuff.

There is something so incredibly funny to me about watching a journalist that specializes in Cryptocurrency encountering a 9MB blob of encrypted data, and marveling over the fact that a language model couldn't magically break the cypher.

And then to tell the world that this is how he tried to decrypt data, with zero awareness that they're saying something devastatingly stupid to anyone who actually understands the topic.

And cryptography is literally the backbone of the tech he covers...

Cryptocurrency people are so funny. Recently someone with deep pockets spent six-figures embedding 9MB of encrypted data into the BTC blockchain.

I read a write-up about it one some website dedicated to cryptocurrency, and the author was especially impressed with the fact that encrypted data cannot be decrypted without a key. He noted that "not even ChatGPT could decrypt it".

Of course Cryptocurrency people don't understand cryptography... That's why they buy pretend internet money.