Recently [Faith Ekstrand] announced on Mastodon that Mesa was updating its contributor guide. This follows a recent AI slop incident where someone submitted a massive patch to the Mesa project with the claim that this would improve performance ‘by a few percent’. The catch? The entire patch was generated by ChatGPT, with the submitter becoming somewhat irate when the very patient Mesa developers tried to explain that they’d happily look at the issue after the submitter had condensed the purported ‘improvement’ into a bite-sized patch.
The entire saga is summarized in a recent video by [Brodie Robertson] which highlights both how incredibly friendly the Mesa developers are, and how the use of ChatGPT and kin has made some people with zero programming skills apparently believe that they can now contribute code to OSS projects. Unsurprisingly, the Mesa developers were unable to disabuse this particular individual from that notion, but the diff to the Mesa contributor guide by [Timur Kristóf] should make abundantly clear that someone playing Telephone between a chatbot and OSS project developers is neither desirable nor helpful.
That said, [Brodie] also highlights a recent post by [Daniel Stenberg] of Curl fame, who thanked [Joshua Rogers] for contributing a massive list of potential issues that were found using ‘AI-assisted tools’, as detailed in this blog post by [Joshua]. An important point here is that these ‘AI tools’ are not LLM-based chatbots, but rather tweaked existing tools like static code analyzers with more smarts bolted on. They’re purpose-made tools that still require you to know what you’re doing, but they can be a real asset to a developer, and a heck of a lot more useful to a project like Curl than getting sent fake bug reports by a confabulating chatbot as has happened previously.
Mesa is working to update our contributor guide. Can you guess why?
Did you guess AI?
Because if you did, you'd be right. I don't want to put anyone on blast here so please don't go digging to find the motivating MR and harass the contributor or anything like that.
But the situation was exactly what you might think. Someone ran ChatGPT on the code and asked it for suggestions on making it more performant. They applied a bunch of the changes against their local branch, tested it, and found that it gave maybe a 0.5-1.0% perf boost in some titles.
That's totally fine. I don't care what tools you use to find a bottleneck. I'll happily take more FPS, no matter who found the issue or how. If some AI assistant helps you find things no one else has found and lets us make drivers faster, great!
But that's not what happened.
What happened next is that they then tried to make it the Mesa project maintainers' job to sort through the shit ChatGPT spit out and decide what's useful and what's not and why the changes helped and whether or not they were correct. The contributor had no no idea and, more importantly, they had no desire to actually learn about the Mesa code-base or the hardware in question. They just wanted to run ChatGPT and send its suggestions towards upstream.
This is not useful. This is not contributing. It's just burning maintainer time sorting through AI hallucinations. We have enough mediocre code to review that comes from actual humans who are actually trying to learn about Mesa and help out. We don't need to add AI shit to the merge request pile. If you don't understand the patch well enough to be able to describe what it does and why it makes things faster, don't submit it.
So now we're making it really clear: If you submit the merge request, you're responsible for the code change as if you typed it yourself. You don't get to claim ignorance and "because the AI said so". It's your responsibility to do due diligence to make sure it's correct and to accurately describe the change in the commit message.
Some things shouldn't have to be explicitly written down but here we are... 😩
The internet has already taught us that an electric surfboard is a great way to get around on the water while looking like an absolute badass. [RCLifeOn] is continuing to push the boat forward in this regard, however, adding thrust vectoring technology to his already-impressive build.
If you’re unfamiliar with the world of electric surfboards, the concept is relatively simple. Stick one or more electric ducted fan thrusters on the back, add some speed controllers, and power everything from a chunky bank of lithium-ion batteries. Throw in a wireless hand controller, and you’ve got one heck of a personal watercraft.
Traditionally, these craft are steered simply by leaning and twisting as a surfer would with a traditional board. However, more dynamic control is possible if you add a way to aim the thrust coming from the propulsion system. [RCLifeOn] achieved this by adding steerable nozzles behind the ducted fan thrusters, controlled with big hobby servos to handle the forces involved. The result is a more controllable electric surfboard that can seriously carve through the turns. Plus, it’s now effectively an RC boat all on its own, as it no longer needs a rider on board to steer.
@Giornalismo e disordine informativo articolo21.org/2025/10/e-il-3-… Dopo l’abbordaggio da parte delle navi israeliane, le principali sigle sindacali hanno indetto la manifestazione generale per il 3 ottobre. L’Italia scende in piazza. “L’aggressione contro navi civili che trasportano cittadine e cittadini italiani, rappresenta un fatto di
@Giornalismo e disordine informativo articolo21.org/2025/10/a-gubbi… Più di 250 giornalisti uccisi in due anni, in media 11 al mese. Mai così tanti, in nessun altro conflitto. A cui si aggiunge il divieto d’ingresso per la stampa internazionale. Quello che sta succedendo a Gaza viene raccontato, tra mille rischi
@Giornalismo e disordine informativo articolo21.org/2025/10/israele… Le immagini delle telecamere, che in contemporanea trasmettono un video delle dirette della navigazione, cominciano a spegnersi con le prime manovre di abbordaggio dei soldati: in meno di un’ora le connessioni cadono man mano, formando sul display una
@Informatica (Italy e non Italy 😁) Phantom Taurus. Questo gruppo APT, legato alla Repubblica Popolare Cinese, è emerso dopo oltre due anni di monitoraggio da parte dei ricercatori di Unit 42 di Palo Alto Networks. Le sue operazioni di spionaggio, concentrate su enti governativi e di telecomunicazioni in Africa, Medio Oriente e Asia, rivelano un livello di
AI-Generated Biography on Amazon Tries to Capitalize on the Death of a Beloved Writer Kaleb Horton
On September 27, several writers published obituaries about writer and photographer Kaleb Horton, who recently died. The obituaries were written by friends, acquaintances, and colleagues, but all of them revered him as a writer and photographer, whose work has appeared in GQ, Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, and VICE.
Some of these obituary writers were shocked and disgusted to discover an AI-generated “biography” of Kaleb Horton was suddenly for sale on Amazon.
“I cannot overstate how disgusting I find this kind of ‘A.I.’ dog shit in the first place, never mind under these circumstances,” writer Luke O’Neil, who wrote an obituary for Horton, told me in an email. “This predatory slop is understandably upsetting to his family and friends and fans and an affront to his specific life and to life itself. Especially days after his death. All week people have been eulogizing Kaleb as one of the best, although sadly not widely read enough, writers of his generation, and some piece of shit pressed a button and took 30 seconds or whatever it is to set up a tollbooth to divert the many people just learning about him away from his real and vital work. And for what? To make maybe a few dollars? By tricking people? I can't say what I think should happen to thieves like this.”
The book, titled KALEB HORTON: A BIOGRAPHY OF WORDS AND IMAGES: The Life Of A Writer And Photographer From The American West, was published on September 27 as well, is 74 pages long, and has all the familiar signs of the kind of AI-generated books that flood Amazon’s store on a daily basis.
Even at just 74 pages, the book was produced at superhuman speed. That appears to be the normal cadence for the author, Jack C. Cambron, who has no online footprint outside of online bookstores, and who has written dozens of biographies and cookbooks since his career as an author appeared out of thin air earlier in September. He has written biographies about director Cameron Crowe, Fulton County, Georgia district attorney Fani Willis, and pop singer Madison Beer, to name just a few. There’s no consistent pattern to these biographies other than a lot of the people they’re about have been in the news recently.
All these books also have obviously AI-generated covers, which is the most obvious and one of the most insulting signs that Horton’s biography is AI-generated as well: The person on the cover looks nothing like him.
AI-generated books on Amazon are extremely common and often attempt to monetize whatever is happening in the news or that people are searching for at any given time. For example, last year we wrote about a flood of AI-generated books about the journalist Kara Swisher appearing on Amazon leading up to the release of her memoir Burn Book. In theory, someone who might be interested in the book or Swisher might search for her name on Amazon and buy one of those AI-generated books without realizing it’s AI-generated. We’ve seen this same strategy flood public libraries with AI-generated books as well.
Amazon did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The company has said that it does not want these books in its store in response to our story about the AI-generated Kara Swisher books last year, but obviously is not taking any meaningful action to stop them.
“We aim to provide the best possible shopping, reading, and publishing experience for customers and authors and have content guidelines governing which books may be listed for sale," Amazon spokesperson Ashley Vanicek told me in an email last year. "We do not allow AI-generated content that creates a poor customer experience. We have proactive and reactive measures to evaluate content in our store. We have removed a number of titles that violated our guidelines.”
comunque, poiché l'italia non conta una cippa sullo scenario internazionale, le attività di protesta che danneggiano l'italia e non direttamente israele non hanno alcun senso. masochismo puro. ma davvero gli sciperi in italia dovrebbero spaventare israele? sembra la frase di daitarn 3: "se se non temi questa potenza combatti" con israele che se la ride...
The main use of Sora appears to generate brainrot of major beloved copyrighted characters, to say nothing of the millions of articles, images, and videos OpenAI has scraped.#OpenAI #Sora2 #Sora
OpenAI’s Sora 2 Copyright Infringement Machine Features Nazi SpongeBobs and Criminal Pikachus
Within moments of opening OpenAI’s new AI slop app Sora, I am watching Pikachu steal Poké Balls from a CVS. Then I am watching SpongeBob-as-Hitler give a speech about the “scourge of fish ruining Bikini Bottom.” Then I am watching a title screen for a Nintendo 64 game called “Mario’s Schizophrenia.” I swipe and I swipe and I swipe. Video after video shows Pikachu and South Park’s Cartman doing ASMR; a pixel-perfect scene from the Simpsons that doesn’t actually exist; a fake version of Star Wars, Jurassic Park, or La La Land; Rick and Morty in Minecraft; Rick and Morty in Breath of the Wild; Rick and Morty talking about Sora; Toad from the Mario universe deadlifting; Michael Jackson dancing in a room that seems vaguely Russian; Charizard signing the Declaration of Independence, and Mario and Goku shaking hands. You get the picture.
0:00 /1:33 1×
Sora 2 is the new video generation app/TikTok clone from OpenAI. As AI video generators go, it is immediately impressive in that it is slightly better than the video generators that came before it, just as every AI generator has been slightly better than the one that preceded it. From the get go, the app lets you insert yourself into its AI creations by saying three numbers and filming a short video of yourself looking at the camera, looking left, looking right, looking up, and looking down. It is, as Garbage Day just described it, a “slightly better looking AI slop feed,” which I think is basically correct. Whenever a new tool like this launches, the thing that journalists and users do is probe the guardrails, which is how you get viral images of SpongeBob doing 9/11.
0:00 /1:23 1×
The difference with Sora 2, I think, is that OpenAI, like X’s Grok, has completely given up any pretense that this is anything other than a machine that is trained on other people’s work that it did not pay for, and that can easily recreate that work. I recall a time when Nintendo and the Pokémon Company sued a broke fan for throwing an “unofficial Pokémon” party with free entry at a bar in Seattle, then demanded that fan pay them $5,400 for the poster he used to advertise it. This was the poster: With the release of Sora 2 it is maddening to remember all of the completely insane copyright lawsuits I’ve written about over the years—some successful, some thrown out, some settled—in which powerful companies like Nintendo, Disney, and Viacom sued powerless people who were often their own fans for minor infractions or use of copyrighted characters that would almost certainly be fair use.
0:00 /1:35 1×
No real consequences of any sort have thus far come for OpenAI, and the company now seems completely disinterested in pretending that it did not train its tools on endless reams of copyrighted material. It is also, of course, tacitly encouraging people to pollute both its app and the broader internet with slop. Nintendo and Disney do not really seem to care that it is now easier than ever to make Elsa and Pikachu have sex or whatever, and that much of our social media ecosystem is now filled with things of that nature. Instagram, YouTube, and to a slightly lesser extent TikTok are already filled with AI slop of anything you could possibly imagine.And now OpenAI has cut out the extra step that required people to download and reupload their videos to social media and has launched its own slop feed, which is, at least for me, only slightly different than what I see daily on my Instagram feed. The main immediate use of Sora so far appears to be to allow people to generate brainrot of major beloved copyrighted characters, to say nothing of the millions of articles, blogs, books, images, videos, photos, and pieces of art that OpenAI has scraped from people far less powerful than, say, Nintendo. As a reward for this wide scale theft, OpenAI gets a $500 billion valuation. And we get a tool that makes it even easier to flood the internet with slightly better looking bullshit at the low, low cost of nearly all of the intellectual property ever created by our species, the general concept of the nature of truth, the devaluation of art through an endless flooding of the zone, and the knock-on environmental, energy, and negative labor costs of this entire endeavor.
È stato scoperto un nuovo toolkit di phishing, MatrixPDF, che consente agli aggressori di trasformare normali file PDF in esche interattive che aggirano la sicurezza della posta elettronica e reindirizzano le vittime a siti Web che rubano credenziali o scaricano malware. I ricercatori di Varonis, che hanno scoperto lo strumento, sottolineano che MatrixPDF viene pubblicizzato come un simulatore di phishing e una soluzione per specialisti di black team. Tuttavia, sottolineano che è stato individuato per la prima volta su forum di hacker.
“MatrixPDF: è uno strumento avanzato per la creazione di PDF di phishing realistici, progettato per i team di black team e per la formazione sulla sicurezza informatica”, si legge nell’annuncio. “Con l’importazione di PDF tramite trascinamento della selezione, l’anteprima in tempo reale e le sovrapposizioni personalizzabili, MatrixPDF consente di creare scenari di phishing di livello professionale. Funzionalità di sicurezza integrate come la sfocatura dei contenuti, i reindirizzamenti sicuri, la crittografia dei metadati e il bypass di Gmail garantiscono affidabilità e distribuzione in ambienti di test.” Il toolkit è disponibile con diversi piani tariffari, che vanno da $ 400 al mese a $ 1.500 all’anno.
I ricercatori spiegano che il builder MatrixPDF consente agli aggressori di caricare un file PDF legittimo e poi di aggiungervi funzionalità dannose, come l’offuscamento del contenuto, falsi prompt “Documento protetto” e sovrapposizioni cliccabili che puntano a un URL esterno con il payload.
Inoltre, MatrixPDF consente azioni JavaScript, che vengono attivate quando un utente apre un documento o clicca su un pulsante. In questo caso, il codice JavaScript tenta di aprire un sito web o di eseguire altre azioni dannose.
La funzione di sfocatura crea file PDF il cui contenuto appare protetto, sfocato e contiene un pulsante “Apri documento protetto“. Cliccando su questo pulsante si apre un sito web che può essere utilizzato per rubare credenziali o distribuire malware.
Un test condotto da specialisti ha dimostrato che i PDF dannosi creati utilizzando MatrixPDF possono essere inviati a una casella di posta Gmail e che l’email riesce a bypassare i filtri anti-phishing. Questo perché questi file non contengono file binari dannosi, ma solo link esterni.
Un altro test condotto dai ricercatori dimostra come la semplice apertura di un PDF dannoso provochi l’apertura di un sito web esterno. Questa funzionalità è più limitata, poiché i moderni visualizzatori di PDF avvisano l’utente che il file sta tentando di connettersi a un sito remoto.
Gli esperti di Varonis ci ricordano che i file PDF restano uno strumento popolare per gli attacchi di phishing perché sono ampiamente distribuiti e le piattaforme di posta elettronica possono visualizzarli senza preavviso.
Theoretically USB-C is a pretty nifty connector, but the reality is that it mostly provides many exciting new ways to make your device not work as expected. With the gory details covered by [Alvaro], the latest to join the party is Segger, with its J-Link BASE Compact MCU debugger displaying the same behavior which we saw back when the Raspberry Pi 4 was released in 2019. Back then so-called e-marked USB-C cables failed to power the SBC, much like how this particular J-Link unit refuses to power up when connected using one of those special USB-C cables.
We covered the issue in great detail back then, discussing how the CC1 and CC1 connections need to be wired up correctly with appropriate resistors in order for the USB-C supply – like a host PC – to provide power to the device. As [Alvaro] discovered through some investigation, this unit made basically the same mistake as the RPi 4B SBC before the corrected design. This involves wiring CC1 and CC2 together and as a result seeing the same <1 kOhm resistance on the active CC line, meaning that to the host device you just hooked up a USB-C audio dongle, which obviously shouldn’t be supplied with power.
Although it’s not easy to tell when this particular J-Link device was produced, the PCB notes its revision as v12.1, so presumably it’s not the first rodeo for this general design, and the product page already shows a different label than for the device that [Alvaro] has. It’s possible that it originally was sloppily converted from a previous micro-USB-powered design where CC lines do not exist and things Just Work, but it’s still a pretty major oversight from what should be a reputable brand selling a device that costs €400 + VAT, rather than a reputable brand selling a <$100 SBC.
For any in the audience who have one of these USB-C-powered debuggers, does yours work with e-marked cables, and what is the revision and/or purchase date?
Profitez des vidéos et de la musique que vous aimez, mettez en ligne des contenus originaux, et partagez-les avec vos amis, vos proches et le monde entier.
La chiusura parziale di uffici e servizi pubblici a causa della mancata approvazione del bilancio federale non è un evento inedito negli Stati Uniti e lo “shutdown”, o la minaccia di esso, viene spesso utilizzato come uno strumento di pressione polit…
“LA PENSIONE NON È DOVUTA” La Fornero torna a fare terrorismo pontificando sulla Finanziaria: «Punirà i giovani». Parola di chi ha fabbricato migliaia di esodati. Da 14 anni insiste, cioè da quando tentò di distruggere quel che restava di un Paese massacrato dallo spread e in pieno tsunami da crisi dei debiti sovrani. Non ci riuscì. Ma da allora è un continuo rimodellare la realtà, vantare operazioni pseudo-strategiche, ergersi a salvatrice della patria.
Anche stavolta Fornero vede grigio e lancia un siluro dal titolo: «Legge di bilancio, il solito mercato che alla fine punisce i giovani». L’ex ministro del Lavoro, impegnata vita natural durante a giustificare la sua sanguinosa riforma, sostiene che sarebbe sbagliato proporre «provvedimenti che ripropongono per l’ennesima volta la falsa illusione dell’anticipo del pensionamento per fare posto ai giovani o il falso mito del diritto acquisito».
E per chiudere dichiara: «Mostrateci, governo e opposizione, quello sguardo lungo e inclusivo che per molto tempo è mancato alla politica italiana». Sorvolando sullo sguardo inclusivo (poiché il suo includeva i sottopassi delle stazioni come abitazioni per i 170.000 esodati fabbricati a mano),fa specie che la ex docente universitaria torinese continui a definire un diritto acquisito, praticamente una grazia del sovrano che getta dobloni dalla finestra ai villani, quello che secondo la Costituzione è uno dei patti sociali più inscalfibili in una democrazia; un contratto fra Stato e cittadini, i quali ne rivendicano il rispetto e l’applicazione nel momento in cui maturano requisiti anagrafici e contributivi di legge.
Fornero riesce a concretizzare due paradossi: definisce regalìa una prerogativa di legge, ancor più dopo l’applicazione in toto del sistema contributivo. E trasforma un dovere costituzionale (quello dell’erogazione della pensione ai lavoratori) in un principio contabile, scambiando allegramente lo Stato per una Spa.
È lo stesso errore che si commette sulla Sanità quando si evoca il pareggio di bilancio, ritenendo erroneamente che debba essere un investimento a scopo di lucro e non un servizio indispensabile da eseguire anche in perdita.
Una delle navi della Global Sumud Flotilla, la Alma, è stata abbordata dalle navi dell’IDF.
Al momento le navi si trovano nella zona definita ad alto rischio, a 10 miglia nautiche dalla costa di Gaza. Nelle scorse ore una ventina di navi non identificate erano state captate dai radar della Flottilla, dando il via allo stato di allarme.
People Are Farming and Selling Sora 2 Invite Codes on eBay
People are farming and selling invite codes for Sora 2 on eBay, which is currently the fastest and most reliable way to get onto OpenAI’s new video generation and TikTok-clone-but-make-it-AI-slop app. Because of the way Sora is set up, it is possible to buy one code, register an account, then get more codes with the new account and repeat the process.
On eBay, there are about 20 active listings for Sora 2 invite codes and 30 completed listings in which invite codes have sold. I bought a code from a seller for $12, and received a working code a few minutes later. The moment I activated my account, I was given four new codes for Sora 2. When I went into the histories of some of the sellers, many of them had sold a handful of codes previously, suggesting they were able to get their hands on more than four invites. It’s possible to do this just by cycling through accounts; each invite code is good for four invites, so it is possible to use one invite code for a new account for yourself, sell three of them, and repeat the process.
There are also dozens of people claiming to be selling or giving away codes on Reddit and X; some are asking for money via Cash App or Venmo, while others are asking for crypto. One guy has even created a website in which he has generated all 2.1 billion six-digit hexadecimal combinations to allow people to randomly guess / brute force the app (the site is a joke).
The fact that the invite codes are being sold across the internet is an indication that OpenAI has been able to capture some initial hype with the release of the app (which we’ll have much more to say about soon), but does not necessarily mean that it’s going to be some huge success or have sustained attention. Code and app invite sales are very common on eBay, even for apps and concert tickets (or game consoles, or other items) that eventually aren’t very popular or are mostly just a flash in the pan. But much of my timeline today is talking about Sora 2, which suggests that we may be crossing some sort of AI slop creation rubicon.
This week Jonathan talks with Brandon and TC about Veilid, the peer-to-peer networking framework that takes inspiration from Tor, and VeilidChat, the encrypted messenger built on top of it. What was the inspiration? How does it work, and what can you do with it? Listen to find out!
Did you know you can watch the live recording of the show right on our YouTube Channel? Have someone you’d like us to interview? Let us know, or contact the guest and have them contact us! Take a look at the schedule here.
Kodak announced two new types of film that it will sell directly to photography stores, sidestepping a bizarre distribution agreement that has been in place since its bankruptcy.#Photography #FilmCameras #film
Kodak Is Selling Its Own Film Again for the First Time in a Decade
Kodak announced two new stocks of color film on Wednesday, in a move that has excited the photography world and which indicates that the photography giant is directly distributing still photography film again.
“To help meet the growing demand for film, Kodak is excited to announce the launch of two color-negative films, KODACOLOR 100 and KODACOLOR 200, in 135 format rolls,” Kodak said in an Instagram post. “For the first time in over a decade, Kodak will sell these films directly to distributors, in an effort to increase supply and help create greater stability in a market where prices have fluctuated. These films are sub-brands of existing Kodak films and offer the same high quality you’ve come to expect from Kodak.”
That quote is key—there are various types of Kodak film on the market right now. Those films are all made by Eastman Kodak (the legendary 133-year-old photography company) but they are sold through a totally separate company called Kodak Alaris, which is a UK-based company spun off from Eastman Kodak in 2012 as part of its bankruptcy. Since then, Kodak Alaris has had the sole right to distribute the still film stocks that Eastman Kodak manufactures. The sense in the photography community is that this arrangement is, at best, annoying and that it has perhaps led Kodak to not focus as much on making new film stocks as it should; there was further concern last year after Kodak Alaris was sold to a private equity firm.
What remains unclear is what KODACOLOR actually is; in the photography world, many “new” films are rebranded versions of other films that are on the market, are rereleased versions of film that had been previously discontinued, or are respooled versions of movie film that have been altered for still photography.
The Wednesday announcement of KODACOLOR makes clear that Eastman Kodak will be selling KODACOLOR directly to photography stores itself, which suggests that the company has wrested at least some control over the distribution of its films from Kodak Alaris, and raises all sorts of exciting possibilities about the future of Kodak film. The details of how or why it did this are not yet available and Kodak did not immediately respond to a request for comment. But it is notable that while Kodak manufactures about a dozen different types of film including Kodak Gold, Ektar, Portra, and Colorplus, the only “still film” listed on the Kodak website is now the new KODACOLOR film stocks.
Regardless of the reasoning or specifics behind the news, the announcement of new film stocks from the most important film company in the world is the latest sign of the enduring and resurgent popularity of analog film photography. And it at least shows that Kodak is interested in creating new types of film for the hobby; as Petapixel points out, it is Kodak’s “first new film in a very long time.” In recent years, there has been a handful of new film stocks announced and released, most notably a type of film called Phoenix from a company called Harman, which is made in a new factory in England and, according to the company, has been “hugely successful.”
HARMAN TECHNOLOGY ANNOUNCES SIGNIFICANT ONGOING INVESTMENT IN THE FUTURE OF PHOTOGRAPHIC FILM HARMAN technology Ltd, one of the world’s largest manufacturers of analogue photographic films, darkroom papers, and photo chemicals, has further reaffirmed…
Francy 🌻
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