Hal-5700X

2025-08-29 00:41:39

Phison Dismisses Reports of Windows 11 Updates Bricking SSDs, Runs Rigorous Tests Involving 4500 Hours on Drives But Unable To Reproduce Errors

archive.is/9oazk

Phison Dismisses Reports of Windows 11 Updates Bricking SSDs, Runs Rigorous Tests Involving 4500 Hours o…

Phison has dismissed the claims of Windows 11 updates bricking its SSDs after conducting several hours of rigorous testing on its solutions.

^Wccftech

404 Media

2025-08-28 13:29:28

Imgur's Community Is In Full Revolt Against Its Owner

The front page of Imgur, a popular image hosting and social media site, is full of pictures of John Oliver raising his middle finger and telling MediaLab AI, the site’s parent company, “fuck you.” Imgurians, as the site’s users call themselves, telling their business daddy to go to hell is the end result of a years-long degradation of the website. The Imgur story is one a classic case of enshitification,
playlist.megaphone.fm?p=TBIEA2…
Imgur began life in 2009 when Ohio University student Alan Schaaf got tired of how hard it was to upload and host images on the internet. He created Imgur as a simple one stop shop for image hosting and the service took off. It was a place where people could host images they wanted to share across multiple services and became ubiquitous on sites like Reddit.

As the internet evolved, most of the rest of the internet got its act together and platforms built their own image sharing infrastructure and people used Imgur less. But the site still had a community of millions of people who shared images to the site every day. It was a social media based around images and upvotes, with its own in-jokes, memes, and norms.

In 2021, a media holding company called MediaLab AI acquired Imgur and Schaaf left. MediaLab AI also owns Genius and World Star and on its website, the company bills itself as a place where advertisers can “reach audiences at scale, on platforms that build community and influence culture.”

The community and culture of Imgur, which MedialLab AI claims is 41 million strong, is pissed.

For the last few days, the front page of Imgur (which cultivates the day’s “most viral posts”) has been full of anti MediaLab AI sentiment. Imgurian VoidForScreaming posted the first instance of the John Oliver meme several days ago, and it’s become a favorite of the community, but there are also calls to flood the servers and crash the site, and a list of grievances Imgurians broadly agree brought them to the place they’re in now.

GhostTater, a longtime Imgurian, told me that the protest was about a confluence of things including a breakdown of the basic features of the site and the disappearance of human moderators.

“The moderators on Imgur have always been active members of the community. Many were effectively public figures, and their sudden group absence was immediately noticed,” he said. “Several very well-known mods posted generic departure messages, smelling strongly of Legal Department approval. These mods had many friends and acquaintances on the site, and while some are still visiting the site as users, they have gone completely silent.”

A former Imgur employee who spoke with 404 Media on the condition that we preserve their anonymity because they’re afraid of retaliation from MediaLab AI said that several people on the Imgur team were laid off without notice. Others were moved to MediaLab’s internal teams. “To the best of my knowledge, no employees are remaining solely focused on Imgur. Imgur's social media has been silent for a month,” the employee said. “As far as I am aware, the dedicated part-time moderation team was laid off sometime in the last 8 months, including the full-time moderation manager.”

Imgurians are convinced that MediaLab AI has replaced those moderators with unreliable AI systems. The Community & Content Policy on MediaLab AI’s website says it employs human moderators but also uses AI technologies. A common post in the past few days is Imgurians sharing the weird things they’ve been banned for, including one who made the comment “tell me more” under a post and others who’ve seen their John Olivers removed.

“There were no humans responding to appeals or concerns,” GhostTater said. “Once the protest started, many users complained about posts being deleted and suspensions or bans being handed out when those posts were critical of MediaLab but not in violation of the written rules.”

But this isn’t just about bad moderation. Multiple posts on Imgur also called out the breakdown of the site’s basic functionality. GhostTater told me he’d personally experienced the broken notification system and repeated failures of images to upload. “The big one (to me) is the fact that hosted video wouldn’t play for viewers who were not logged in to Imgur,” he said. “The site began as an image hosting site, a place to upload your images and get a link, so that one could share images.”

MediaLab AI did not respond to 404 Media’s request for comment. “MediaLab’s presence has seemed to many users to fall somewhere between casual institutional indifference and ruthless mechanization. Many report, and resent, feeling explicitly harvested for profit,” GhostTater said.

Like all companies, MediaLab AI is driven by profit. It makes money as a media holding company, scooping up popular websites and plastering them with ads. It also owns the lyrics sharing site Genius and the once-influential WorldStarHipHop. It’s also being sued by many of the people it bought these sites from, including Imgur’s founder. Schaaf and others have accused MediaLab AI of withholding payments owed to them as part of the sales deals they made.

The John Olivers and other protest memes keep flowing. Some have set up alternative image sharing sites. “There is a movement rattling around in User Submitted calling for a boycott day, suggesting that all users stay off the site on September first,” GhostTater said. “It has some steam, but we will have to see if it gets enough buy-in to make an impact.”

This startup bought up Imgur, Genius and Amino. Why are they all suing?

Whisper cofounder Michael Heyward’s second company made a $1.1 billion business out of acquiring startups like Imgur Then came the lawsuits.

^{Iain Martin, Forbes Staff (Forbes Australia)}

minioctt

2025-08-29 00:03:05

quasi un “vecchio posseduto sclera” momento in questa sera altrimenti silente

Stavo quasi in procinto, forse, di andare a dormire… quando a un certo punto, stando in bagno, da giù per strada sento scatenarsi la più assoluta pazzia; e stavolta non in senso figurato. Infatti, dal nulla si è iniziato a sentire questo tizio — che credo sia uno dei pazzi della città, per l’appunto, anche se non lo riconosco di faccia e non so come si chiami (ho sentito un “Carmine”, magari era lui? non che cambi molto) — che ha iniziato a tirare bestemmie e porconi, non è ben chiaro perché. 😶

Anche se non ho idea di cosa ci sia dietro, la situazione è certamente molto divertente, anche perché non è la prima volta che sento questo preciso tizio. Giuro di averlo sentito almeno un’altra volta in passato, tanti mesi fa, se non addirittura più di un anno fa, e questo suo tono è inimitabile… Tira i jastemoni, e lo fa con questa enfasi assurda, che addirittura gli richiede diversi secondi di cooldown. Però non gli basta una sola volta, e quindi ripete la stessa identica frase almeno altre 3 o 4 volte, per poi fermarsi… ma solo prima di passare poi ad una diversa espressione a dir poco colorita. 😻

Per fortuna, anche se ho perso forse i primi 20 secondi di “mannaggia a Dio veramente” a causa del lag dello Xiaomi di merda, lo #sclero è durato abbastanza da permettermi di registrarlo al volo… e, adesso che è arrivata una volante della Polizia (chiamata da qualcuno) e lui ci stava parlando, e si è apparentemente calmato del tutto, riascoltare l’audio fa specialmente pisciare dal ridere. Mannaggia a questo, #mannaggia quello… mannaggia alla quiete pubblica violata all’una di notte, direi io! Prima di questo lieto fine, per un paio di minuti c’è stata pure una signora che gli ha urlato contro ma, ripeto, non ho capito la lore. 😏

Ma allora, ecco che concedo a tutti di vivere questo misticismo, allegando qui la registrazione audio del casino; dopo aver opportunamente cancellato le parti di solo rumore, cosa che lo ha fatto pure scendere da 3 minuti e 46 ad appena 1 minuto e 37 (per quanto ho limitato il taglio dei momenti morti silenziosi, che sono fondamentali all’atmosfera), ed aver amplificato un bel po’ tutto (perché, per quanto il microfono del telefono sia capace di catturare suoni lontani, lui stesso non ci crede abbastanza). 💣

Comunque sia, wow. Il tutto è molto magico, e mi sono sentita un po’ Zeb89 che registra gli atti di “vecchia posseduta sclera” in tale momento, perché è così assurdo… anche se, in questo caso, gli scleri finalmente da me archiviati sono solo audio; sia perché voglio evitare di doxxarmi ora che sono sul balcone, e sia perché prima dal bagno non si vedeva niente comunque. Ah, a proposito… questo è in assoluto il primo file audio che carico in un post, da quando ho il sito del fritto misto di octospacc! Insomma, poteva essere qualunque audio, e invece abbiamo avuto, in ordine, insulti a Dio, a “tutti i santi”, alla Maronn’ e Pumpej, e degli “oh” che sembrano rigurgiti. Quindi, buonanotte così!!! 🥰

#città #Mannaggia #pazzi #pazzo #rumore #scleri #sclero

Jon von Tetzchner

2025-08-28 12:01:11

Vivaldi takes a stand: keep browsing human

Just like society, the web moves forward when people think, compare, and discover for themselves. Vivaldi believes the act of browsing is an active one. It is about seeking, questioning, and making up your own mind.

Across the industry, artificial assistants are being embedded directly into browsers, and pitched as a quicker path to answers. Google is bringing Gemini into Chrome to summarize pages and, in future, work across tabs and navigate sites on a user’s behalf. Microsoft is promoting Edge as an AI browser, including new modes that scan what is on screen and anticipate actions.

These moves are reshaping the address bar into an assistant prompt, turning the joy of exploring into inactive spectatorship.

This shift has major consequences for the web as we know it. Independent research shows users are less likely to click through to original sources when an AI summary is present, which means fewer visits for publishers, creators, and communities that keep the web vibrant. A recent study by PewResearch found users clicked traditional results roughly half as often when AI summaries appeared. Publishers warn of dramatic traffic losses when AI overviews sit above links.

The stakes are high. New AI-native browsers and agent platforms are arriving, while regulators debate remedies that could reshape how people reach information online. The next phase of the browser wars is not about tab speed, it is about who intermediates knowledge, who benefits from attention, who controls the pathway to information, and who gets to monetize you.

Today, as other browsers race to build AI that controls how you experience the web, we are making a clear promise:

We’re taking a stand, choosing humans over hype, and we will not turn the joy of exploring into inactive spectatorship. Without exploration, the web becomes far less interesting. Our curiosity loses oxygen and the diversity of the web dies.

Jon von Tetzchner, CEO, Vivaldi

The field of machine learning in general remains an exciting one and may lead to features that are actually useful.

But right now, there is enough misinformation going around to risk adding more to the pile. We will not use an LLM to add a chatbot, a summarization solution or a suggestion engine to fill up forms for you, until more rigorous ways to do those things are available.

Vivaldi is the haven for people who still want to explore. We will continue building a browser for curious minds, power users, researchers, and anyone who values autonomy. If AI contributes to that goal without stealing intellectual property, compromising privacy or the open web, we will use it. If it turns people into passive consumers, we will not.

We will stay true to our identity, giving users control and enabling people to use the browser in combination with whatever tools they want to use. Our focus is on building a powerful personal and private browser for you to explore the web on your own terms. We will not turn exploration into passive consumption.

We’re fighting for a better web.

vivaldi.com/blog/keep-explorin…

Vivaldi takes a stand: keep browsing human | Vivaldi Browser

Browsing should push you to explore, chase ideas, and make your own decisions. It should light up your brain. Vivaldi is taking a stand. We choose humans over…

^{Jon von Tetzchner (Vivaldi Technologies)}