Arthur Besse
cultural reviewer and dabbler in stylistic premonitions
- 75 Posts
- 24 Comments
Arthur Besse@lemmy.mlOPto
Wikipedia@lemmy.world•Stream capture (also known as *stream piracy*, not a good alternative to bittorrent)English
93·5 months agowhoosh
Arthur Besse@lemmy.mlto
Technology@lemmy.world•Leak Exposes Details of Peter Thiel’s Secretive ‘Dialog’ SocietyEnglish
19·5 months agoFor each participant, Dialog logs a membership status, every retreat the person has attended, a biography, a home city, and a private access token. WIRED is not publishing the tokens, which function as login credentials, or the personalized account links that contain them.
This is an odd thing to say given that neither Wired nor their source (“the Swiss hacktivist maia arson crimew”) appear to be publishing any of the actual data whatsoever, beyond the handful of mostly nonspecific references to it in the article text. (Eg, lots of sentences like “The website directory names sitting Trump administration officials, two US senators, six members of the Paypal Mafia, a former Middle East chief of intelligence, and a sitting ambassador to the United States, along with the founders and directors of many of the country’s largest surveillance, data-broker, and advertising-data companies.” - omitting names of any of these people.)
Also, the linked archive says:
Update 6/16/2026, 5:47 pm EDT: WIRED updated this article to correct a conflation of two people named Jeff Epstein. A small revision was also made to address a security concern raised by a Dialog representative.
Someone helpfully had already made an earlier archive before that, so we can see what information Wired journalists Dell Cameron and Yulia Almazova removed at the request of a Dialog representative: where it now says “The retreat is scheduled for August 12-16 at a venue near Dublin” it originally said “The retreat is scheduled for August 12-16 at the Powerscourt Hotel outside Dublin”.
when i browse my lemmy profile via your mastodon instance i see that my first post of this same wikipedia article (to [email protected]) does render correctly there - it is only this cross-post i made to [email protected] which has the wrong preview. (if you figure out why, i’d be curious to know!)
why is this the OG preview
no idea, that is odd. from searching i see that that preview comes from this post from 2023 (who’s permalink is on a domain which no longer runs lemmy; the instance which was
feddit.deis nowfeddit.org).if you look at my post made today here on lemmy.ml it has the correct thumbnail from wikipedia.
Arthur Besse@lemmy.mlOPto
Wikipedia@lemmy.world•Monuments in the United States to Nazi collaboratorsEnglish
1·9 months agoRemoved by mod
Arthur Besse@lemmy.mlOPto
Wikipedia@lemmy.world•Monuments in the United States to Nazi collaboratorsEnglish
1·9 months agoRemoved by mod
Arthur Besse@lemmy.mlOPto
Wikipedia@lemmy.world•Abolish ICE is a political movement seeking the abolition of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agencyEnglish
10·10 months agoCBP is also the agency who’s officer(s) murdered Alex Pretti yesterday. (It was an ICE officer who murdered Renee Good.)
Arthur Besse@lemmy.mlto
Wikipedia@lemmy.world•Lights Out (that game with a grid where toggling one tile toggles adjacent tiles as well)English
3·10 months agoGNOME has a version of it called
lightsoff(which is packaged in most major distros)
Arthur Besse@lemmy.mlOPto
Wikipedia@lemmy.world•Abolish ICE is a political movement seeking the abolition of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agencyEnglish
7·10 months agoThis is a sedate forum
[citation needed]
Arthur Besse@lemmy.mlto
Technology@lemmy.world•Israel’s IDF Bans Android Phones—iPhones Now ‘Mandatory’English
3·1 year agoI think you misunderstood me
Go ahead and post the same link for Google job listings. I’ll wait.
My comment was in response to your comments (bolded below) in this thread:
I was already thinking of getting a Linux phone next, this is helping to seal the deal. Fuck Apple the genocide enablers.
please do explain how Apple is doing anything here. If Israel wants to provide their military with iPhones they’re going to no matter what Apple does.
They don’t have to do business with/in Israel.
That still will not stop a nation state (especially Israel) from getting their hands on Apple devices.
My point was not to say that Google is better than Apple here - in fact, unlike Apple (as far as I know), Google has actually built AI tools specifically tailored for Israel’s genocidal business requirements.
My point is that if Apple wanted to boycott a country (which in the case of Israel they obviously don’t, which job listings at their R&D centers are just one of many points of evidence of) it would actually make it difficult-to-impossible for any substantial part of the boycotted country’s government to rely on using iPhones.
(Unlike Android derivatives which can easily be used without direct reliance on Google’s services…)
As an aside, while I would not use iOS (due to it being proprietary), it is hard to dispute that (for most adversaries, at least) compromising it is generally much more expensive/difficult/unlikely than Android. So, given that Apple is very friendly to them, the IDF’s policy decision to use iPhones makes sense.
Arthur Besse@lemmy.mlto
Technology@lemmy.world•Israel’s IDF Bans Android Phones—iPhones Now ‘Mandatory’English
81·1 year agoPhysically obtaining the devices is insufficient; they need ongoing software updates and other network services too.
The IDF could/would absolutely not be doing this if they did not trust that Apple is a very committed partner.
You can also observe from Apple’s job listings that they are.
Arthur Besse@lemmy.mlOPto
Technology@lemmy.world•The Economist on using phrenology for hiring and lending decisions: "Some might argue that face-based analysis is more meritocratic" […] "For people without access to credit, that could be a blessing"English
2·1 year agoI haven’t heard of academics and/or media from China advocating for applications of phrenology/physiognomy or other related racist pseudosciences. Have you?
Arthur Besse@lemmy.mlOPto
Technology@lemmy.world•The Economist on using phrenology for hiring and lending decisions: "Some might argue that face-based analysis is more meritocratic" […] "For people without access to credit, that could be a blessing"English
31·1 year agoone can also get the full paper directly from yale here without needing to solve a google captcha:
I don’t have the time nor the expertise to read everything to understand how they take into account the bias that good looking white men with educated parents are way more likely to succeed at life.
i admittedly did not read the entire 61 pages but i read enough to answer this:
spoiler
they don’t
Arthur Besse@lemmy.mlOPto
Technology@lemmy.world•The Economist on using phrenology for hiring and lending decisions: "Some might argue that face-based analysis is more meritocratic" […] "For people without access to credit, that could be a blessing"English
18·1 year agoPlastic surgery would become more popular.
One of the paper’s authors had the same thought:
“Suppose this type of technology gets used in labor market screening, or maybe dating markets,” Shue muses. “Going forward, you could imagine a reaction in which people then start modifying their pictures to look a certain way. Or they could modify their actual faces through cosmetic procedures.”
She also bizarrely says that:
“we are very much not advocating that this technology be used by firms as part of their hiring process.”
and yet, for some reason:
The next step for Shue and her colleagues is to explore whether certain personality types are drawn to specific industries or whether those personality types are more likely to succeed within given industries.
Arthur Besse@lemmy.mlOPto
Technology@lemmy.world•Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task [edited post to change title and URL]English
23·1 year agoThanks for pointing this out. Looking closer I see that that “journal” was definitely not something I want to be sending traffic to, for a whole bunch of reasons - besides anti-vax they’re also anti-trans, and they’re gold bugs… and they’re asking tough questions like “do viruses exist” 🤡
I edited the post to link to MIT instead, and added a note in the post body explaining why.
Arthur Besse@lemmy.mlto
Technology@lemmy.world•Should we remove XSLT from the web platform?English
5·1 year ago(tldr: libxslt is a significant source of vulnerabilities and it should absolutely be removed from browsers ASAP.)

















explanation (click to expand)
this post links to the wikipedia article “stream capture” (which the article says is also called stream piracy).
the article is about fluvial geomorphology.
the title i chose for it (“Stream capture, also known as stream piracy, is not a good alternative to bittorrent”) is a joke, premised on the fact that the terms “stream capture” and “stream piracy” can also refer to ripping (aka capture, a technique which can be used for piracy) of streaming media.
BitTorrent is a popular protocol often used for pirating media. In truth, capturing (video) streams is an alternative to using BitTorrent for piracy, but the quality of media one can find on BitTorrent is often much higher than what one can find on streaming sites. So, many discerning pirates would agree with the statement in the post title. However (in my opinion, at least) the incongruous subject of the linked article makes this funny.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theories_of_humor#Incongruity_theory for more information.