They are, if you scroll to the bottom of the github repo that OP posted there are some examples of what works and doesn’t work to break it.

Watermark data like this is stored in the least significant bits of the pixels themselves, or in the case of OPs example, they do a frequency decomposition on the image then store the watermark data in the coefficients. Basically you have to trash the pixel data at least a little bit to defeat it. So cropping or flipping the image won’t do it, but resizing or rotating with some kind of filtering will.

I have no idea how the machine-learning technique listed there is working, and their documentation link is broken :(

Also Dr Who. Our school had a kid who wore a big Tom Baker scarf and hat everyday. I hope he’s doing well.

I’ve tried, it sucks. Each broker has their own process, often several steps, and often a step is broken (like server errors, can’t get past a captcha, “try again later”, etc). You end up not just having to do the process, but also follow up with many of the ones that are ambiguous or returned server errors or whatnot. I did the top 8 or so brokers and then stopped.

Yep, the schedule is always a perpetual crisis. Justifies crunch, adding tech debt, shooting down dev wishlist items, cutting content, all sorts of things.

The last game I worked on got panned pretty hard, and amongst the hundreds of complaints I didn’t see one that hadn’t been raised internally months or years before release. Some of them I personally had shelved P4 change lists that were 6 months old. But hey, no time for that, we gotta get this E3 trailer out! Oh now that’s done? Well changelist is old now, can’t risk submitting that we got a presentation for the brass soon!

Anyway I think I’m retired, or something.

Not from this year specifically (but I only saw it this year): The Polish hackers who uncovered the train manufacturer’s repair shenanigans.

• Part 1: Breaking “DRM” in Polish trains – Reverse engineering a train to analyze a suspicious malfunction (2023)
• Part 2: We’ve not been trained for this: life after the Newag DRM disclosure (2024)

I was listening to a best-selling author’s recent audiobook, and the professional voice actress messed this one up. So you’re in good company. Really, who can we blame but the Greeks?

Mastodon.art has a small but nice community. AI art isn’t allowed. Someone could always lie, I guess, but the community is small enough that engagement bait isn’t really a thing, there’s much larger mastodon instances those people would probably use. They also aggressively defederate fascists.

YouTube offers random A/B testing of titles and thumbnails now, and unfortunately the clickbait/red circle/soy face stuff absolutely does work. Everyone seems to agree that the “metric has ceased to be a good measure” when it comes to the algorithm, but it’s so opaque and omnipotent that people who can’t afford for their videos to be buried have no choice.

YouTube doesn’t just reward you for doing it, you are actively punished for not doing it. The same way one “underperforming” video can have cascading negative effects on your entire channel.

I can’t imagine relying on it for my family’s income. Google basically has hundreds of thousands of people doing spec work for them.

Yeah, Zip disks suuuucked. I always had to carry two for redundancy because they failed to read so often. Even having every second or third CD burn fail, because you looked at it wrong, was more reliable than Zip disks.

Pre-COVID. I wonder what it’s like now. Anecdotes from people who work in education seem to say it was pretty devastating for child development, but it’s hard to tell if it’s above and beyond the perennial “this new generation is totally fucked” sentiment.

Firewatch. I liked the visual style but everyone raved about the writing specifically and I thought it wasn’t great. I don’t want to shit on them too hard because they did try, and you can’t control how other people hype your work, but I found the characters really flat.

I think it’s possible that Robert Trump, Donald Trump’s younger brother, was an early victim of COVID. He died suddenly and was “very ill” but no specific cause was ever mentioned AFAIK. I think this was covered up because it was politically inconvenient for his brother.

I have nothing to really base it on except the timing and reaction was suspect.

Even the UK foppish sex joke is pretty old. I remember a Dana Carvey special from 1995 making the same joke about the infamous Hugh Grant blowjob.

Every town around me have installed these fucking things, covering every major route. In order to get out of my local area without being tracked I have to drive on some serious hillbilly roads. It’s exhausting.

Huh, found a source from 1683 where a guy named Edward Tyson presented his research on the worm to the Royal Society, and he called it the “joynted worm”. He also refers to it by its Latin name Lumbricus latus which AFAIK just means “flat worm”, and Lumbricus teres Intestinalis which I’m guessing means “round worm of the intestine”.

This is actually a great paper because he’s arguing against spontaneous generation of insects from rotting meat by pointing out that these worms are only found within the bodies of living animals and therefore must be the product of these animals eating eggs or body segments of the worm.

https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/pdf/10.1098/rstl.1683.0020

OK, looks like at least as far back as this they were calling it “tape worm”. This just makes me wonder how old “tape” is:

…And the first is, it’s being flat; hence call’d Lumbricus Latus… and by some in English, the Tape-worm. -page 115

The first Underworld from 2003 is like this, but it’s painfully early 2000s. It’s from that era when every action movie was ripping of The Matrix as hard as possible.

One time I worked on something where a character threw a spear. For some reason they didn’t have a spear on set and asked the actor to just pretend. Then our instructions from the director were to make the actor twirl the spear before he threw it. Just because it looks super cool to twirl stuff, I guess.

Not only did the actor not pretend to twirl it, the shot was about 30 frames long (one second is 24 frames). So we had like 15 frames to make him twirl this giant spear, which the actor didn’t do. It was either make it look like dog shit or make a full, hero digital double and completely re-do the shot as 100% CGI, which there wasn’t time or budget for.

Yeah, it looked like dog shit. The whole project did.

Also failure of public works, like a train crash that kills 20 people, means that trains are bad. Clearly this program isn’t working and should be privatized. But 20 people killed daily on the highways, well those people are just idiots. Never mind the structural issues.

This message brought to you by the people who stand to benefit and also, by coincidence, own the newspapers.

I’m not a huge traveler, but I’ve been to the UK and parts of Europe. The Czech Republic was my favorite place, of the places I’ve been. Ironically never been to Canada, despite having some extended family there. I would love to go, and I love being in foreign places, but I hate getting there. Travel is awful, especially now.

I’ve lived in both urban and rural areas, and the fear is constant everywhere among people who have never traveled. Urban people are afraid that everyone in the country is a Deliverance KKK member, and rural people think the cities are a gang-infested war zone. What’s wild is that, unlike visiting other countries, they could just hop in the car and visit the city or countryside for a weekend. They are consuming lazy media tropes and taking them as fact.

Traveling, even just regional travel, would benefit a lot of people in the USA. We have way more in common with each other than with the oligarchs.

Watching videos has been broken for a few weeks. On the 24th of Sep they mentioned that they’d identified a potential cause, but since then there haven’t been any updates. They typically aren’t super communicative and tend to lock down posts because of the huge surge of duplicate bug reports and unhelpful comments they get whenever this happens. So the silence is not that unusual, but it has been slightly longer than usual for an update.