joseph8th

Since ICE List is a MediaWiki site, it can have an API. I asked various AIs to write a web app that would scrape and mirror the data on the ICE List wiki.

The AI made a fast, bare-bones interface to the cloned data. I prompted it to make a nice README with instructions on how to host your own clone.

Once data is distributed, it's hard to destroy.

Disclaimer: I just prompted this. I didn't actually write it.

Not being snarky, but if you believe that, then you clearly are not an artist.

If it's not normal, then we can't extrapolate generalities from it, either. It's just an anecdote. One dude's anecdote. On the internet.

We used to call "solo poly"... "single".

The cinema industry in general is woefully way behind the curve in some respects... Cutting edge in others (like security).

No, the projector is never connected to the internet. It's connected to a cinema server. In the case of Sony, it's always a Sony server. This is not usually connected to the internet either. Instead, the usual topology is to have a Theater Management System (TMS) that pre-ingests content in the form of Digital Cinema Packages (DCPs) and then propagates it to each auditorium's server.

This TMS is also not connected to the internet in most cases. Digital cinema is locked down tight as an ATM. Most theaters have pretty meager on-site IT, so email and thumb-drives and hard-drives still rule.

I work in cinema IoT including KDM and DCP delivery and ingestion to TMS or cinema server, and our solution is to have a separate agent inside the private cinema network that can broker communication with cinema devices like projectors, calibrators, and audio processors. Some of these have their own UIs in the local network, or if you've got the company VPN, but in general for monitoring we just rely on SNMP or server API.

The cinema servers are different. They all have APIs that provide varying levels of monitoring, control, and automation for the server, itself, as well as connected devices including limited monitoring and control of projectors and audio. They all support RDP or VNC, so if you're behind the same firewall you can get to their UI. Same with TMSes... they have UIs that you can access remotely, if you're on the company VPN.

But the projector itself? Never on the internet. It's "married" to the cinema server, and will only work with that particular server, based on their respective certs.

In Sony's case, it sounds like the projector certs have expired, so now they are invalid when used with the updated server certs.

It hasn't changed much. Most features are still delivered on drives. They're just too damn BIG otherwise.

Keys are sent separately, and are valid only for a certain date-range, and for a specific cinema server. In this case, Sony servers only work with Sony projectors, and vice-versa. Each device has its own certs, but for encrypted feature encoding, the standard is Key Delivery Messages, which unlock the feature Digital Cinema Package (DCP). DCPs are a general purpose cinema package, and is also used to deliver unencrypted clips like ads and trailers.

But the key is the Key. It's only valid for the specific cinema server, and the cinema server is "married" to the projector by encryption. This protects against on-site MITM attacks.

If there's a server update that doesn't update the certs on either the server itself, or the projector (in Sony's case), then the marriage breaks, and the silver screen stays dark.

Nothing anyone else can do about it, either, since any valid certs would have to be issued by Sony, and nobody has the private keys except Sony.

This is the most likely, yup. The certs are unlikely to have a precise end-of-year expiration. It will be whatever the expiration is for the last certs loaded.

10 years in cinema IoT, here. Features are encrypted by Key Delivery Messages (KDM), and those are per cinema server/projector "marriage". No KDM will be considered valid if the server certs are expired.

This should make 2024 interesting for me.

And here's an Emacs org-mode compatibility layer to make writing your own D&D-style campaigns or handbooks even easier (if you grok Emacs):

https://github.com/xeals/emacs-org-dnd

Written around the same DND-5e-LaTeX-Template as the OP article:

https://github.com/rpgtex/DND-5e-LaTeX-Template

Same. And since I chose the SDF instance, I went ahead and finally got myself an sdf.org shell. A new toy to me, though it's been around since 1987.

Yah it does. Pretty fast too! Mastodon I think suffers from running on RoR. Lemmy is written in Rust.

Having run a Mastodon solo instance for a while now, I disagree on several points...

Mastodon has very few federation blocks built-in. Truth Social and Gab are about it. In both cases, the defederation is mutual, because even those two cesspools don't wanna mix effluence with each other, never mind the rest of the "libtards" in the wildly diverse and worldly Fediverse. They've chosen to be siloed.

So that pretty much demolishes the idea that even Mastodon is somehow intrinsically "echo-chambery". There are, again, no other built-in domain blocks.

If Mastodon is "echo-chambery" it's because the alternative is to remain federated with absolute cesspools. I made it 3 months running my instance before I had to start banning whole domains. There's multiple websites to help Mastodon admins curb the incessant shitstorm that exists in the Fediverse. Whole troll farms do nothing but pump out juvenile invective at innocent users... hundreds of posts with nothing but the N-word, K-word, F-word and detailed rape threats.

Again... this is happening on ActivityPub, right now.

You tell me... is it creating an echo chamber to ban Nazi scum?

Interestingly, I've found Lemmy to be surprisingly engaging and active after just a day of Reddit Migration. Sure, there's still a lot of "Reddit sucks" posts, but certainly not all, or even close to the majority.

I was on Mastodon for the Great Twitter Migration of Nov. 2022, and yeah... it was pretty hard to watch. Never have used Twitter, but I saw a lot of Twits struggling with Mastodon. I don't think the migration went well. The Twitter experience didn't translate.

Reddit, I think is a more traditional forum. And that does translate well. There are hundreds of threads with hundreds of comments on Lemmy, and it's really the same experience as Reddit. Reddit users find Lemmy familiar in a way that Twitter users did not find on Mastodon.

Biases because that's how I learned, but yeah... I agree. Learning C will help you be a better programmer in any C-like language.

C forces you to think like a programmer. Once you grasp that, you can learn most other languages with relative ease.

Maybe not counting Lisps.

It's a marketing term rendered meaningless by the marketers. Even those who know better keep calling LLMs "AI"

Really depends on how we define "information" right? In a very real sense, everything GPT outputs is simply noise. It only seems like information to pattern-recognizing animals like us. It's meaningless to another computer.

In this sense, also, everything a GPT bot pumps out is generated fiction until human minds validate the veracity of the output.

It HAS NO MEANING until read by a human being.

...said the crypto bros. Look how well that played out.

Emacs. :)

Oh boy, have I got a story for you.

Around 1999, my hometown (pop. ~600) fell for a conman. Like, the actual Town government, and almost everyone in it.

Pudgy, balding, middle-aged white dude breezed into town and seduced the owner of one of the motels. She kicks her husband out and starts taking Conman to town board meetings, etc. Eventually divorced husband.

Guy claims to be Hollywood connected, a wealthy promoter or agent, scouting locations for future filming, etc.

This goes on all summer, and the town manager and county administrator, and the whole board and chamber of commerce totally buy it, lock, stock, and barrel. Conman claims he can bring in some big country music star he knows. I don't remember who. I can't stand country, so why would I remember? Big star. Not Dolly big, but Boot Scooting Boogie big.

He convinced the town to foot the bill, that he would pay for everything once they had the final bill... and this podunk nowheresville town 60 miles from the nearest traffic light pays to fly this star in on a private jet, sets up a huge stage for her, and all like 50 of us that show up get a private concert. It sucked.

This whole time... Everyone in town is talking about this guy, right? And nobody is asking if he's legit. I mean, I did, but I had long hair and was a nobody, so...

Spoiler: he wasn't. Not even a month after the big concert, he disappeared with motel lady's (and her husband's) life savings, and obviously skipped on the million-odd bill for Peggy Rae or whoever TF it was.

Everyone looked like a moron. Motel lady declared bankruptcy and left town. I gloated mercilessly.

Idiots. They all voted Trump, too. Some people never learn.

So much projection. Who's "making it political" when he's using the term as a bludgeon? He's a knock-off Donald Trump JUNIOR.

Why anyone credits anything he says will forever escape me.

Oh no! Anyway...

I don't believe I have ever used Gedit for anything. Ever.

I'm an Emacs guy. I won't be using Text Editor, either. Ever. If it accidentally opens a file, that means I need to change "Open Files of This Type With..."

So all the gnashing of teeth and wailing seems a bit overwrought

This is my only real gripe, as well. I really like Tramp, so I use it anyway, but I gripe about it when it hangs

Once it starts it does almost nothing unless you're using it, and then it's still a lightweight document editor, not an Electron app

Hmmm... No, no I don't think I will. I don't trust anything that voluntarily associates itself with blockchain.

When will they learn? Mr. Robot is the only thing I can think of that actually cared about making "hacking" realistic. Even movies about hacking fail miserably.

It's a no-brainer. Hire literally any competent CS major to consult and do what they say

Agreed, with a caveat. Many big projects have multiple components. A company may make a strategic decision to open source one (or more) component explicitly to use it as a marketing strategy.

A startup side project I'm working on is going to do this. We're hoping that by providing something useful to other dev teams, we will raise the profile for the company that's giving the tech away.

If we can earn a good reputation for our tech, we hope that will translate to more signups for the company's product, which uses the tech.

At risk of repeating what everyone else has said... My PM does the "Hey" thing. I do not multitask. I'm a serial tasker.

So I turned off all notifications on Slack. The only way I know I have a message is the red dot that appears in the panel icon.

Now, it's async again. When I even glance up to see if there are new messages... Red dot or no red dot

Still? Heheheh. How long is it going to remain "the future"?

I don't even need to read the article to know it's trying to sell something.