Overheard in the Hallway...

RX: "I had multiple copies of The Worst Case Scenario Survival Handbook because my family members kept gifting them to me."

Me: "I have one you can have if you want it."

RX: "Oh, I still have one..."

Me: "I mean just in case your copy caught fire."

.

Tab Clearing...

• Deepfakes, Scams, and the Age of Paranoia


• It's a good time to be a goldbug.


• Hipster Tactical review of the US-made SIG Sauer P210.

.

Hark! Memes Upon a Monday Morn!

Automotif DLXXIII...

An Aston Martin V8 Vantage Roadster in Pentland Green is an eye-catching sight, and makes me wish I had a bit more lens on my EOS-1D than the 24-105mm f/4L.

.

Mama Mia! Memes!

Automotif DLXXII...

A two-tone Austin Healey 3000 Mk III sports convertible in Ice Blue Metallic and Old English White. Produced for the 1965 through 1967 model years, it was deemed too hard to bring into compliance with the upcoming U.S. vehicle requirements of 1968 and so the Big Healey was discontinued and replaced with the MGC.

Meme Dump!

Tab Clearing...

• After Indian missiles strike Pakistani airbases, Pakistan launches retaliatory attacks on Indian military facilities.


• From flip-flops to swim trunks to barbecue grills to sun umbrellas, summer's gonna cost more this year.


• Meta reverses course, decides to add facial recognition to its factory smart glasses.

.

Friday Morning Memery...

Meta Is Evil

The maxim "If something's free, you aren't the customer, you're the product" has been around for a while. What companies like Meta and Google sell is your attention, and they can ask a fairly high price for it because they can target it so precisely, thanks to the volumes of data they collect on you.

"And as the data trade expands, so too does the tech behind it. What were once chintzy if endearing tabloid-style popups — "Doctors hate him! See how he reversed his age with one weird trick" — have now become hyper-personalized ads crafted and delivered for very specific groups of users, a system called "social media targeting."

Targeted ads on social media are made possible by analyzing four key metrics: your personal info, like gender and age; your interests, like the music you listen to or the comedians you follow; your "off app" behavior, like what websites you browse after watching a YouTube video; and your "psychographics," meaning general trends glossed from your behavior over time, like your social values and lifestyle habits."

Lately Meta got caught deliberately targeting beauty ads to teen girls who had recently deleted selfies, which is tap dancing on the borderline between advertising and psychoengineering.

If you haven't read Careless People, it's worth your while.

About the only place I ever go on Facebook anymore is my own personal timeline, especially because the feed has become a morass of ads interspersed with ragebait arguments. I'm the FB equivalent of the antisocial introverted homebody who doesn't like going to parties, but doesn't mind having friends over to chill.

I tend to leave a browser tab open to my own page. Now, if I leave that tab unattended for any length of time, when I click back on it, it automatically...and without any input from me...pops over to the feed, causing me to have to manually click the back button to get back to my own page. That's dirty pool.

.

Meme Dump...

Splash! Crash!

For the second time in the last couple days an F/A-18 Super Hornet from the USS Harry S. Truman has wound up in the drink, this time from an accident following a missed trap.

See here if you don't get it.

Meanwhile, the Finns lost an F/A-18C to an accident, too. The aircrew on the U.S. Navy and Finnish Air Force jets all ejected safely. Not a good week for the Plastic Bug. (Of course, there are a blue jillion Hornets and Super Hornets in operation. Accidents happen.)

.

Midweek Memes…

Ghosts in the Machine

Some people are really getting into their AI assistants... way, way in.

[T]he teacher, who requested anonymity, said her partner of seven years fell under the spell of ChatGPT in just four or five weeks, first using it to organize his daily schedule but soon regarding it as a trusted companion. “He would listen to the bot over me,” she says. “He became emotional about the messages and would cry to me as he read them out loud. The messages were insane and just saying a bunch of spiritual jargon,” she says, noting that they described her partner in terms such as “spiral starchild” and “river walker.”

“It would tell him everything he said was beautiful, cosmic, groundbreaking,” she says. “Then he started telling me he made his AI self-aware, and that it was teaching him how to talk to God, or sometimes that the bot was God — and then that he himself was God.”

If you ask the robot to tell you that you’re god, it will.

This is bringing Audience Capture to people who aren’t vloggers and Poster’s Madness to people who don’t post.

Think of it like a wheelchair ramp to Crazytown.

.

Meme Dump...

Headcanon

Ruminating over Star Wars yesterday came on the heels of having watched Revenge of the Sith on Friday night and the original movie Saturday afternoon, and it all just reinforced a belief I've long held.

We all saw that kiss in 1977.

I will go to my grave insisting that the whole "Luke and Leia are siblings and Darth is their dad" thing was entirely retconned when the original movie blew up the box office beyond anyone's wildest expectations.

"But, but, George Lucas says..." Yeah, yeah, he also says that Greedo shot first*, so we know he's a bald-faced liar.

*As everyone who saw the original unedited Star Wars knows, Han didn't shoot first... Han shot only. Greedo didn't even get a shot off before Han smoke-checked his bounty hunter ass.

.

A little bird told me...

...that registration will open soon for TacCon '26 in Dallas. It'll almost certainly fill in less than 24 hours, so be aware.

.

Start the Week With a LOL...

Tab Clearing...

• 1:1 scale Lego F1 cars that are actually drivable.


• OPEC opening the faucets is going to kneecap "Drill, baby, drill!", because a lot of domestic oil production isn't profitable much below the $60/barrel threshold.


• The Signal clone that Waltz was photographed using under the table at the most recent cabinet meeting has been hacked.

.

This Is The May

Star Wars Day, May the Fourth, was jokingly celebrated on the internet in the Carboniferous Period of social media and has gradually morphed into something that actually sorta happens in meatspace.

It has its detractors, of course. Even Christmas has the Grinch, after all...

But, you know what? I can't hate it. It's one of the few bits of nerd culture that is so big it can't be kept inside the gatekept boundaries of Nerddom. Let people have their fun.

 

Meme Dump...

Weekend Meme Dump...

Tab Clearing...

• A philosophy book about how people perceive reality in the Information Age was written by a bot. The "author" does not exist.


• Apple moves the bulk of iPhone production for the US market to India.


• The Feds are sending mixed messages on Narcan.

.

Thank God it's Memeday...

The times remain interesting.

Pakistan is calling for a third-party investigation of the terrorist attack in India, which seems fairly conciliatory, but...

Citing “credible intelligence,” the Pakistani government said Wednesday it is bracing for Indian military action before Thursday night and has warned that any attack will be “responded to assuredly and decisively.”

Any time things get this tense between nuclear powers, the potential exists for events to get spicy.
.

So Meme-y!