Express Cocaine Delivery
UPS drivers get an express delivery to prison. Mickey Mouse has a new sheriff. Everyone is doing AI in the dumbest ways possible. And y'all? It's time to talk about salmon.
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UPS drivers charged with trafficking cocaine
Two UPS drivers were among five men charged with trafficking cocaine using UPS packages.
There is really just not much more to this story; it's about as straightforward as it gets. Like, they haven't been convicted yet, but its like, oh, yeah that makes total sense okay.
If only they could deliver my packages with the same level of drive and focus as they were the cocaine.
DeSantis takes over Disney district
Supposed governor Ron DeSantis signed a piece of paper today that says "I now own Disney World."
Because satire is dead, the governor (of an actual place, it's even on maps) has been beefing with Disney because Disney didn't emphatically support homophobia or something. So anyway, now the governor is getting back at them by asserting his dominance over the district that Disney previously self-governed.
In fact, they almost accidentally added a big financial burden to surrounding districts while trying to pull this move, and had to backtrack to make it more of a tepid play in order to not do that.
What this actually means is, well, nothing. And it sure as hell doesn't seem like it's doing anything to improve the lives of the people he claims to govern, but idk, maybe he'll force Disney to lower their park prices or something.
Anyway, Disney is bad too, so this entire story is just stupid, but its a notable thing in THE HEADLINES so there ya go.
Get your underage nudes taken off the internet with this one neat trick
The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children has launched a new tool which can help prevent the spread of underage child exploitation material online.
It's not perfect, but in essence, if a child has a copy of an exploitative photo or video of them, they can use the tool to generate a "hash" of the file and send it off to a database. Online services can then query the database with their own hashes to ensure that it wasn't something that was flagged to be removed.
If you're not familiar, a "hash" of a file is basically a way to take a whole file like an image or video and turn it into a jumbled mess of meaningless letters and numbers. Critically, the same file hashed the same way will always produce the same jumbled mess. This makes it incredibly easy to check if a file is the same as another file. It is commonly used to ensure that large downloads were done accurately, or to ensure that you didn't accidentally get a bad version of a file.
The tool does not upload the exploitative imagery, only the meaningless hash, so no worries there. But still, this is an opt-in tool, and has to be opted-into by services as well. Not perfect. But something.
Everyone wants to do AI things and they're all bad at it
Snap is releasing a chat AI which you can talk to just like anyone else on the platform. However, before even releasing it, they'd like you to know that the AI "may have hallucinations" every now and then. Presumably that is how they plan to cover their asses over the whole "what the hell is this robot saying?" thing.
Meanwhile at Meta/Facebook, the Z U C C has told us that they're working on not one but several "AIs and AI personas" to "help people in various ways," because we truly do need the help of Z U C C's artificial intelligence.
So while Snap's AIs are hallucinating and Z U C C is helping us in various ways, Elon Musk is seeking out AI researchers to apparently help him make an AI that's just a tad more racist. Quite literally he is bemoaning that AI is already "too woke" and that he intends to make an AI that is "not woke".
I am fucking dying, y'all.
You're about to read about salmon in Tasmania
Okay I need to talk about something that isn't AI and racism so instead how about Tasmanian salmon farming scandals???
A large Salmon farming company in Tasmania was caught using thousands of pounds of antibiotics for their fish by the country's Environmental Protection Agency.
Instead of following the prevailing standards of getting their stock vaccinated, the company just kinda has been yeeting literal tons of antibiotics into their farm fish. While they say that the fish have a long waiting period after being treated in order to ensure that there are no trace antibiotics, it doesn't stop the antibiotics from polluting the water systems, and thus the fish everywhere else around there.
Anyway I also learned about the term "degree days" because apparently the duration of time that the Salmon had to wait after being antibiotic'd is measured in "degree days." You take the temperature of the water over a given number of days to measure degree days. Per the article, if the water temperature is 16 degrees C and you needed to wait 1,000 degree days, that'd be 63 days. NEAT.
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