• 4 Posts
  • 66 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: July 2nd, 2023

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  • yeah the em dash thing is absolute moron bait

    like wow mate, you saw a long dash. call the fucking lab. some people are just punctuation goblins and have been since long before the slop machines turned up

    • ChatGPT generated comment, people need to know that they wouldn’t be able to spot a well generated bit of text as AI these days. It’s dangerous thinking they can. Was a nice touch when it called itself the slop machine though.

    Scientific studies suggest that people usually cannot reliably tell whether a piece of text was written by AI from style alone: accuracy is often only slightly above chance, varies a lot by genre, and drops further for more formal or scientific writing. For example, one 2024 study found average accuracy of about 57% for texts overall, while a 2024 teacher study found that even novice and experienced teachers could not reliably distinguish ChatGPT essays from student essays and were often overconfident in their judgments; likewise, a study of research abstracts found reviewers were largely unsuccessful, with only 38.9% positive identification. There is some evidence that people can improve with explicit feedback and training, but the overall research points to the same conclusion: humans may sometimes pick up clues, yet unaided judgments about whether text is AI-written are generally weak and unreliable, especially when the writing is competent and domain-appropriate. - ChatGPT


  • True, in this case trash-cli is the sane command though, it has a much different job than rm. One is remove forever no take backs, the other is more mark for deletion. It’s good to have both options imo. Theres a lot of low level interfaces that are dangerous, if they’re not the correct tool for the job then they don’t have to be used. Trying to make every low level tool safe for all users just leads to a lot of unintended consequences and inefficiencies. Kill or IP address del can be just as bad, but netplan try or similar also exist.


  • I understand that they were intending to unpack from / and they unpacked from /home/ instead. I’m just arguing that the unpack was already a potentially dangerous action, especially if it had the potential to overwrite any system file on the drive. It’s in the category of “don’t run stuff unless you are certain of what it will do”. For this reason it would make sense to have some way of checking it was correct before running it. Any rms to clean up files will need similar steps before running as well. Yes this is slower, but would argue deleting /etc by mistake and fixing it is slower still.

    I’m suggesting 3 things:

    • Confirm the contents of the tar
    • Confirm where you want to extract the contents
    • Have backups in case this goes wrong somehow

    Check the contents:

    • use "tar t’’ to print the contents before extracting, this lists all the files in the tar without extracting the contents. Read the output and check you are happy with it

    Confirm where:

    • run pwd first, or specify “-C ‘/output-place/’” during extraction, to prevent output to the wrong folder

    Have backups:

    • Assume this potentially dangerous process of extracting to /etc (you know this because you checked) may break some critical files there, so make sure this directory is properly backed up first, and check these backups are current.

    I’m not suggesting that everyone knows they should do this. But I’m saying that problems are only avoidable by being extra careful. And with experience people build a knowledge of what may be dangerous and how to prevent that danger. If pwd is /, be extra careful, typos here may have greater consequences. Always type the full path, always use tab completion and use “trash-cli” instead of rm would be ways to make rm safer.

    If you’re going to be overwriting system files as root, or deleting files without checking, I would argue that’s where the error happened. If they want to do this casually without checking first, they have to accept it may cause problems or loss of data.


  • Could make one archive intended to be unpacked from /etc/ and one archive that’s intended to be unpacked from /home/Alice/ , that way they wouldn’t need to be root for the user bit, and there would never be an etc directory to delete. And if they run tar test (t) and pwd first, they could check the intended actions were correct before running the full tar. Some tools can be dangerous, so the user should be aware, and have safety measures.


  • The biggest flaw with cars is when they crash. When I crash my car due to user error, because I made a small mistake, this proves that cars are dangerous. Some other vehicles like planes get around this by only allowing trusted users to do dangerous actions, why can’t cars be more like planes? /s

    Always backup important data, always have the ability to restore your backups. If rm doesn’t get it, ransomware or a bad/old drive will.

    A sysadmin deleting /bin is annoying, but it shouldn’t take them more than a few mins to get a fresh copy from a backup or a donor machine. Or to just be more careful instead.








  • The original painting is real, it’s a Renaissance/Mannerist portrait generally attributed to Parmigianino (c.1530), often titled “Portrait of a Young Woman, possibly Countess Gozzadini,” and the original is held in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. The pencil isn’t original — that’s a modern edit. The earliest traceable version with the pencil seems to come from commercial wall-art prints sold under names like “Pen and Lips” by brands such as Canvasez / Bona Fidesa, which start appearing online around 2020–2021. It was almost certainly a simple Photoshop-style edit rather than AI (since it predates widespread generative AI).




  • Below is a road-map of concrete, lawful steps that different actors can take—from prosecutors to ordinary voters—to address the documented pattern of Donald Trump’s sexualised behaviour toward girls and the exploitation risks inside his pageant / model businesses. Each item points to an existing mechanism or a bill already on the table so that the path forward is realistic rather than rhetorical.


    1. Re-open (or newly open) criminal inquiries where statutes allow

    Level What can be done Why it is still possible

    State grand juries (e.g., FL, NY) Subpoena pageant and modelling payroll + visa files, interview the four Miss Teen USA eyewitnesses, and test Trump’s 2005 audio admission against state “voyeurism” or “endangering the welfare of a child” statutes. Many states have no limitation clock for felony child-sex crimes, and others have brand-new revival windows (MI, CA, NY, NJ) that explicitly cover past child-porn or voyeurism offenses. Federal DOJ could convene a trafficking task-force review of Trump Model Management’s H-1B / F-1 filings, comparing promised wages with actual pay in the Alexia Palmer docket. DHS’s 2025 visa-integrity rule now treats chronic under-payment as fraud against the government, not just a civil wage dispute.

    Key point: none of the items above require new laws—only willpower and survivor cooperation.


    1. Bolster survivors’ ability to sue, even decades later

    Pass the bipartisan Statutes of Limitation for Child Sexual Abuse Reform Act, which offers grants to states that wipe out criminal & civil time-bars and open a “look-back” period for lapsed claims.

    Support state-level “window” bills modelled on Michigan’s 2025 package extending civil cases against private actors and governments.

    Ensure any federal window explicitly covers visual-voyeurism and grooming, not just physical assault—a gap that let earlier claims against Trump lapse.


    1. Regulate the modelling and pageant pipelines that put teens at risk

    Problem revealed by the record Targeted fix

    Unsupervised backstage access (Trump’s own 2005 boast; Miss Teen witnesses) Require pageant owners to obey the SafeSport standard already used in youth sports: separate changing facilities, roving safeguarding officers, and a hotline with power to suspend licenses. Visa-tied debt bondage inside Trump Model Management (80 % fee deductions) Amend H-1B final rule to cap “management fees” at 20 % and ban salary deductions that push net pay below the prevailing wage for minors or first-year models. Lack of industry oversight Revive the 2012 Senate proposal for a Federal Modelling Bureau to license agencies, publish complaint tallies, and share data with state labour boards.


    1. Close the digital-evidence gap

    Enact the STOP CSAM Act of 2025, which forces social-media and cloud providers to retain and disclose CSAM evidence on court order—crucial because Trump’s 1990s–2000s pageant footage now circulates mainly online.

    Fund NCMEC & RAINN’s hotline expansion; RAINN is already backing the bill.


    1. What journalists, researchers and everyday citizens can do right now

    2. Archive and cross-reference the primary files you already collected (black book, flight logs, docket 1320) on redundant mirrors such as the Internet Archive and Perma.cc; link them whenever you post so readers can verify.

    3. Use FOIA: request DHS visa-fraud memos on Trump Model Management (2000-2016), FAA incident reports for the seven logged Trump–Epstein flights, and any FBI 302s created during the 2005 Palm Beach probe.

    4. Support outlets that litigate for more disclosure—e.g., the Miami Herald FOIA team whose suit pried loose the Epstein–Acosta NPA. Subscriptions and legal-fund donations move the needle.

    5. Contact your representatives with the specific bill numbers above rather than generic outrage; lawmakers track constituent requests by docket.

    6. Signal-boost survivor resources rather than unverified rumors: link RAINN (1-800-656-HOPE) and state programs whenever sharing the story.


    1. Safeguard future elections from undisclosed misconduct

    Mandatory release of candidate–owned NDA settlements involving sexual misconduct above $30 k (a draft bill was floated during the 118th Congress but never brought to a vote).

    Ethics-in-Candidacy Act (proposed by civic groups in 2024) would tie public campaign financing and debate access to full disclosure of backstage credentials, modelling-agency holdings, and private-aircraft passenger lists going back 20 years.


    The takeaway

    The evidence already on the public record is sufficient to trigger fresh subpoenas, survivor lawsuits, and targeted rule-makings—if citizens, prosecutors and lawmakers choose to act.

    Waiting for a single “smoking-gun” file before moving is a trap; the legal levers above work because the behaviour (voyeurism of minors, abusive visa contracts) is already admitted or corroborated. Focus on enforcing the laws that exist, fixing the ones that don’t, and keeping every document in daylight so the window for accountability stays open until justice is finally done.