It's interesting to me

[674473243df88fox]

Just a little taste of the future...

TheVerge: "Facebook removes ‘deepfake’ of Ukrainian President Zelenskyy"

In the fake video, Zelenskyy surrenders to Russian invasion

The deepfake appears to have been first broadcasted on a Ukrainian news website for TV24 after an alleged hack, as first reported by Sky News on Wednesday. The video shows an edited Zelenskyy speaking behind a podium declaring that Ukraine has “decided to return Donbas” to Russia and that his nation’s war efforts had failed.

[674473243e190voodoo47]

derpfake


//I agree, there are some pretty good deepfakes out there, this however, is not one of them.

[674473243e386Nameless Voice]

I think that's already the present, not the future.  The amount of propaganda and lies going around - and from both sides - is insane.

I've seen some crazy stuff, including what appears to be a Ukrainian influencer on a set with red paint on it, and another video of people in body bags moving while pretending to be dead, claimed to be in Ukraine, but actually from a climate protest in Italy years ago.
I don't even know what to believe any more.

"The first casualty of war is truth."

[674473243e4b5fox]

Propaganda and fake news are probably as old as mankind but deep fakes on hacked official news channels are next level. This particular one wasn't well executed yet but it's only a matter of time until something in that vein will lead to catastrophic consequences.

[674473243e65dvoodoo47]

you'll always want to paint yourself as a hero, while making the other side look like a complete villain. nobody will go "muahaa, we are the bad guys, we know it and we enjoy it, let us create as much destruction and misery as possible". it's always at least "this is bad, but we must do it because our final goal is noble", if not outright "we slay evil in the name of everything that is good and pure". that's how the world was, is, and always will be, whoever thinks otherwise is incredibly naive.

though in this scenario, UA doesn't really have a tough job painting the invading Reds as villains, I'd imagine. and the Red propaganda is, yet again, a bit on the derpy side - made me remember the bad old times when were being poker-face explained how the US is bomber-dropping potato beetles at us to destroy our glorious crops. you know your propaganda is dumb when even a 10-year old kid thinks it's retarded.


anyway, would advise to perhaps not start/continue this - one of the nice things about this forum is that there is almost no talk about politics. maybe we should keep it that way.

[674473243ea39fox]

anyway, would advise to perhaps not start/continue this - one of the nice things about this forum is that there is almost no talk about politics. maybe we should keep it that way.

I get that and personally I'm not looking to get into the political side of this specific war but some of the more technical aspects overlap with stuff that was often brought up here before (various Cyberpunk-related themes, electronic warfare, hacking in general, privacy/censorship, futuristic weapon systems, etc). I hope that's still alright with y'all?

[674473243ededJDoran]

...anyway, would advise to perhaps not start/continue this - one of the nice things about this forum is that there is almost no talk about politics. maybe we should keep it that way.

Yep, as they say, never discuss politics, sport, or religion, with any friends that you want to keep. But it is difficult to remain silent about injustices such as the present situation in the Ukraine.

To change the subject, since I think we could all do with a good laugh, what current TV sit-coms are actually funny? I don't watch much TV, so I'm not familiar with the current crop of sitcoms. Actually, I've not seen most sitcoms in the past ten years or longer, so which ones would you recommend as being actually funny and worthwhile?

[674473243eef5voodoo47]

it's just a recommendation. I don't like like politics - but not being allowed to speak freely, I hate more. I will never tell anyone that talking about something is forbidden.

[674473243f006Nameless Voice]

Yeah, it's not a topic that would go anywhere, anyway.

People are nasty, people in power tend to be even more nasty, but each will believe they are heroic.  Nothing much we can do about it, can't change human nature by grumbling on a forum.

Talking about funny TV shows sounds much more productive.

[674473243f3b9Kolya]

Actually, I've not seen most sitcoms in the past ten years or longer, so which ones would you recommend as being actually funny and worthwhile?

I was going to suggest >Black Books which ran from 2000-2003. But then I realised that's more like 20 years. Doesn't matter though, it's humour is timeless and quite similar to >Rick & Morty, which would be a more recent contender, albeit animated, which is Dan Harmon's second hilarious series after the excellent >Community or at least the first two seasons of it.

[674473243f5eafox]

Black Books is one of the best BritComs of all times... all times! So are IT Crowd, Father Ted, Nighty Night, Spaced, Peep Show, I'm Alan Partridge, Phone Shop, League of Gentlemen, The Mighty Boosh, Blackadder and quite a few others. I love them all very much. Unfortunately they all ended many years ago and BBC did successfully get rid of their talents and good shows (presumably because they were not in line with modern woke sensibilities) so I'm really not sure what to recommend in terms of newer shows.

[674473243f8a0voodoo47]

Rick & Morty

I always liked Venture Bros better.

[674473243fa28Nameless Voice]

It's not a sitcom, but for recent humorous British television, you can't go far wrong with Taskmaster.
The whole series should be available on YouTube, too.
https://www.youtube.com/c/Taskmaster/playlists

[6744732440339sarge945]

I have released my first Chrome extension. I'd be happy about feedback. 
It's a new-tab-page (browser startpage) with a simple bookmark system: Karl Marks

Out of curiosity, I decided to check this out.

I have some feedback.

The page looks quite weird when there are no links. Maybe it should always show the "manage" page if there are no entries

Also, it might be a good idea to (optionally) include a search bar as well, I don't know if it's possible to search using the users default search engine from a chrome extension, but it would be cool.

Lastly, being able to have categories (or even a full folder tree) would probably be very useful, especially if people want to add a whole bunch of links. Although, since it's not a replacement for the standard bookmark system, maybe that's not relevant, as "most" bookmarks could be standard bookmarks and this could instead be used for more often-accessed pages.

As part of testing this, I downloaded the project from github, ran it locally and it basically works fine. It's also significantly more up-to-date than the Chrome web store version, offering a lot more settings. As a chrome extension this is very good, lightweight and just works. I had a look at the javascript and it's fine, nothing fishy or particularly badly written. Also, I noticed your repo doesn't contain a license file of any kind. Is that intentional?

Compared to something like Speed Dial (which is 1.55 MB, WTF!) it's nice and lightweight and doesn't do anything insane or have any nonesense features, which is very good. So many start page extensions try to be super fancy and they just end up getting in the way. Speed Dial is especially egregious as it defaults to searching with some obscure Russian search engine.

--

Unrelated to the extension itself, I feel like making this (or any kind of start page extension for that matter) specifically a chrome extension is kind of a double edged sword. While it's definitely convenient and easy to simply install, it does restrict it's use to Chromium-based browsers, which is especially important on Mobile where only a few browsers actually support addons. This might especially be a concern for "normal" users, since having a Karl Marx on their PC/Laptop but not their phone would be kind of disappointing, and convincing most normal people to use any alternate browsers, especially one with a different UI than they are used to, is always a hard sell, limiting it's usefulness to most people who are used to to regular Chrome on Android. As far as I know, iPhone users are even more screwed as there's no browsers at all that I am aware of which support Chrome extensions for iOS.

I'm not suggesting that you change it, especially since doing so would effectively require a rewrite as you would have to use something like sqlite rather than storage.sync if you wanted to maintain persistent data and allow for selfhosting and access from multiple devices, which is problematic as I haven't found any good ways to access a database through javascript (and for good reason, browsers should absolutely not be able to do that), so you'd likely have to change to a client-server model with something like Node, and it's not exactly small and lightweight at that point, and is even more outside of the usability for most normal people than a chrome extension because it would require hosting, either on a home server or a VPS.

There are already plenty of browser-agnostic open-source startpage systems available. Unfortunately, virtually all of them suck hard. They are usually extremely bloated, or aren't actually selfhosted, or are so limited that they don't offer much at all and you may as well do it yourself.

Personally, I run a home server and I wrote my own little startpage for it, which I have as the home page on all of my devices. It looks like this (excuse my terrible art skills):

It has no syncing, though. It's just got links to all my other hosted stuff, like syncthing, radicale etc, and a search box for my searx instance. The background is updated every day by a cronjob, and simply downloads a file from Lorem Picsum. That's good enough for me for now, but I can definitely see the appeal of Karl Marx for a relatively normal desktop user.

Overall, this is a very nifty extension, but I don't feel like extensions are a good way to go for something like this as long as extension support on Mobile remains terrible. At the same time, self hosting is even harder, so I guess we're screwed either way.

[67447324405a6Kolya]

Thank you very much for the extensive review @sarge945.

The Github repo is indeed more up to date at the moment, because the review process at Google takes a while. But I was able to publish the next version today and the extension in the store is now the same as in Github. It's in review again.

I originally started this project as a single-HTML-file-app which could be used on any browser. However at least in Chromium based browsers it is not comfortably possible to replace the new-tab-page with a custom URL. (Even with the help of other extensions that are dedicated to that purpose it's quite limited.)

Creating my own extension opened up that possibility + syncing of bookmarks, so I eventually chose to go that way. I'm aware of the drawbacks, but porting the extension at least to Firefox shouldn't be a big problem. It's just not my priority right now.

I considered adding a  search bar for while, but dropped that plan because you have the browser URL bar available which serves exactly that purpose (and usually better). With the extension the URL bar is even focussed on load. So I see no reason to duplicate that functionality.

I also considered folders or categories, but that would mean duplicating the browser's existing bookmarks feature. Karl Marks are meant merely as a quick jump off point for frequently used pages instead. This might change in the far future. 

I haven't really thought about a license yet, but it's on my list. Next I will probably look at the way icons are retrieved and provide settings for that part.

Thank you again.

[674473244070dvoodoo47]

so yeah, I was thinking youtube throwing random infected hooves and birds picking ticks vids has been the pinnacle of randomness and disgustingness.

facebook: "hold my beer while I load horses giving birth and constipated elephants getting unconstipated videos for you."


maybe I should just quit the internet.

[6744732440809fox]

You should definitely quit Facebook.

[6744732440911Nameless Voice]

You know, I think you can go through your YouTube history and remove videos you've watched, which should - hopefully - adjust the suggestion algorithms accordingly.  Might be worth a try?

[6744732440a05voodoo47]

I did NOT watch any of those videos. they are just there when I open youtube.com (and scroll around a little). definitely don't want to encourage the algorithm to show me more.

[6744732440ea5sarge945]

I considered adding a  search bar for while, but dropped that plan because you have the browser URL bar available which serves exactly that purpose (and usually better). With the extension the URL bar is even focussed on load. So I see no reason to duplicate that functionality.

Redundancy is fine. Redundancy is also redundant.

You should definitely quit Facebook.

This is just a generally true statement. Everyone should quit Facebook. If you're worried about talking to family etc, keep in mind you can completely deactivate your Facebook account and still use Messenger.

[67447324410fbNameless Voice]

voodoo47
Right.  But I'm thinking (maybe incorrectly) that it's suggesting them based on other things you've viewed.
So maybe deleting random things out of there might change the suggestions.  Or just deleting the entire history.
I assume if you open YouTube in a private window, it doesn't have any of those unwanted suggestions?

[67447324411eaKolya]

And by "random things" he means: Delete the horse porn.

[6744732441392fox]

I see a great premise for a modern "Brazil"-inspired story here. Could be Terry Gilliams swan song.

Btw, here are two comedy recommendations for (guilt-laden, obviously) Prime-users: "Patriot" and (sketch-based) "The Moth-Effect".

[6744732441674voodoo47]

suggesting them based on other things you've viewed

NO. hooves is literally the only thing on a cow I'm not interested in (as you can't eat them. ok, there a few more inedible bits, but you get the point). anyway, this is not a real issue, just a good thing to make fun of every once in a while. I may poke at it once or twice again sometime, and that will be it - probably once facebook comes up with something even more creative than horse spawning and elephants exploding from the rear end.