Hard Pass

California Republicans running in the state's most competitive House races are appearing to keep some measure of public distance from Trump ahead of the Nov. 3 election.

There’s something about JD Vance that makes him almost impossible to assess. Like Bigfoot, he’s a naturally blurry creature. His voice lands somewhere between the parents in Charlie Brown specials and those buzzers they put outside convenience stores to chase off teens. The vice president is hostile architecture in human form, a suit stuffed with charisma’s anti-matter.

This has served him well in his quest for political power. Being instantly forgettable is an asset for someone who made their name as a liberal hillbilly whisperer only to switch to an online edgelord identity at the behest of far-right backers. But if you’re willing to hold and rotate Vance’s recent statements in your mind, you’ll find something uncharacteristically interesting. He’s put the tiniest sliver of distance between himself and President Donald Trump on artificial intelligence, and it provides an inkling of how Republicans might move beyond a decade of Trumpism.

I’ll catch you up on the current AI conversation. Large-language models built by companies like OpenAI and Anthropic keep breaking out of their testing sandboxes. The companies actively promote that their products are breaking the law and hacking into other private businesses, showcasing their power while appearing somewhat concerned with safety. Recently, those same AI CEOs have started pleading for government regulation of artificial intelligence, a “stop me before I kill again” plea that many critics believe is meant to lock in their position at the top of the industry.

Trump has been incredulous about the ask. He has thrown his red hat in with AI boosters and reacted to the idea of slowing down as a slight against his discernment. In a day-long rant on Truth Social, the president said the only “guardrails that AI needs is a strong and smart . . . president.” He said that there was a “sick conspiracy . . . against AI and data centers” and that slowing down AI development would leave us behind China on the global stage.

“We already have tremendous CRIMINAL and REGULATORY power over these companies!” he wrote. “Conspiracy Theorists, Treasonists, Traitors, and Leakers, BEWARE!”

In the week since, Vance has taken a slightly more skeptical tone on AI development. On Monday he told reporters on Monday that the U.S. needs to be “careful” about AI. He looked sideways at CEOs’ request for industry regulation, saying that the move might be a “Trojan Horse” masking their true intentions.

That John Denver's full of shit, man.

hi. i'm looking for an extremely simple selfhosted photo gallery software. i have photos from my laptop, a camera, and my phone. they are all rsync'ed onto my server. so on the server I have ~/Pictures/Laptop ~/Pictures/Camera ~/Pictures/Phone filled with JPEG/PNG/HEICs and no subdirectories.

i want to view photos from all three directories on a single timeline/feed, from the web (and if possible, via a mobile app). currently I VNC onto the server to run XnView and check each directory and this is a terrible user experience especially on a phone.

i don't want to run a separate database or anything complex, so things like Immich or Photoprism are not an option. would be nice to be able to assign a tag to some images ("work", "computer", ...) but it's not a necessity. and i don't need the ability to edit/remove images from the gallery.

i've considered rolling my own solution but thought there might be something already available.

thanks!

cross-posted from: https://piefed.world/c/tech/p/1413087/spain-orders-blocks-on-archive-today-and-its-mirrors

I host my own instance of invidious behind a reverse proxy. It's awesome. I use Redirector for Firefox so that when I'm on the interwebs, YouTube videos and embeds redirect automagically to my self-hosted invidious instance. I used the setup instructions in the Invidious-Redirector documentation.

Recently, I was on a new website and the embed didn't redirect. I tried to figure it out, but couldn't. The best I could do was try changing /embed/* to /oembed/* but that didn't work.

So I thought I'd ask here: How would you go about setting up a rule or multiple rules to sort this?

Edit to add: If you go to the new website, make sure you either have AI chatbots blocked in uBO or create a rule ||autonomoustechnology.ai^. Otherwise there is an annoying AI chatbot that pops up that you'll want to block.

From 2024, but funny to read....

What makes this situation so ridiculous is that while we're all watching for scammers attempting to imitate legitimate organisations, FedEx is out there imitating scammers!

Maybe there’s a simpler solution: perhaps, don’t put your hand on your cat like that, for example? Just a thought…

cross-posted from: https://piefed.world/c/tech/p/1412342/companies-make-it-hard-to-access-your-personal-data-under-state-privacy-laws-cr-finds-on

Nearly every time you buy something online or sign up for a loyalty program, you leave behind personal information that can be collected, shared, and sold among companies including advertisers, retailers, and data brokers. This kind of information is sometimes used to charge consumers more for a range of products and services, from groceries to insurance to mortgages, and to target them for financial fraud and identity theft.

A growing number of state privacy laws were designed to give consumers some control over that information, including the right to see what companies know about them. But a yearlong Consumer Reports investigation found that exercising those rights can often be extremely difficult—and that many companies and data brokers appear to be falling short of their legal obligations.

Over the past year, CR worked with 84 citizen volunteers to request their personal data from 169 companies they regularly interact with and 22 data brokers. The results were concerning: Roughly 25 percent of requests to companies failed to receive a response. Among data brokers, the failure rate was 34 percent, even though some of those brokers claim to maintain data on the vast majority of U.S. households.

cross-posted from: https://piefed.world/c/tech/p/1412361/flock-lawsuit-calls-out-alleged-law-enforcement-misuse-of-nationwide-license-plate-readi