I was referring to the “This is actually a good sign for self driving” part of their comment.

The captcha circumvention arms race has been going on for over two decades, and every new type of captcha has and will continue to be broken as soon as it’s widely deployed enough that someone is motivated to spend the time to.

So, the notion that an academic paper about breaking the current generation of traffic-related captchas (something which the captcha solving industry has been doing for years with a pretty high success rate already) is “good news” for the autonomous vehicle industry (who has also been able to identify such objects well enough to continue existing and getting more regulatory approval for years now) is…

i hope you’re joking. please, tell me you’re joking?

Copy left is very much not communist. Get out of here with that tankie rhetoric

i don’t actually think copyleft is communist per se, but i dig that you’re somehow mad about my joke - the intended butt of which was people who (typically disparagingly) insist that it is 😂

yep, since it’s under a “copyleft” (communist) software license that’s how it has to be.

You can use this design, but if you want it to accommodate 3½-inch disks you’ll need to scale it down to two thirds of its specified size before printing it.

Does your computer have a floppy drive? You might be able to find a copy of this at a secondhand store:

Formally.

I wish we’d stop calling them “exploding batteries”. The battery isn’t the explosive, it’s the explosives that were hidden in the device.

Do you want to stop calling them exploding pagers too? How about other exploding things? And what should https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_Lebanon_pager_explosions be renamed to? Maybe 2024 Lebanon explosions of explosives inside of pagers? 🙄

Right, so why are you editorializing the title to say something that the article in fact does not say?

The title is a copy+paste of the first sentence of the third paragraph, and it is not misleading unless you infer “exploding batteries” to mean “exploding unmodified batteries”. But, the way the English language works, when you put explosives inside an XYZ, or do something else which causes an XYZ to explode, it becomes an “exploding XYZ”. For example:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exploding_animal
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exploding_cigar
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exploding_pagers
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exploding_trousers
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exploding_watermelon
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exploding_whale

The fact that bombs are explosive is not revolutionary or all that interesting.

That fact also is not what the article is about.

sometimes a cigar is just a cigar

(@Ilovethebomb@lemm.ee:) Just to be clear, the pager thing wasn’t exploding batteries, they had apparently been modified at the production level to have explosives in them, which could be triggered by the pager system itself.

(me:) Did you read the article? It sounds like you didn’t.

(you:) The article literally talks about inserting an explosive layer inside the battery at production. Just like the comment said.

I am really curious: can you tell me, do you actually think the first commenter in fact read the article and was agreeing with its suggestion that the batteries could have been manufactured with explosives inside of them?

(you): It isn’t “any batteries can explode”.

Nobody claimed that, but in retrospect I guess I can see how, read alone, the pull quote I selected from the article to be the title of this post could be interpreted that way.

Of course not, what did you expect?

I encourage you to, it’s pretty interesting.

i encourage you to re-read the original comment in this thread after reading the article 😂

You are inferring what someone meant, and then applying some super pedantic reasoning.

I think I am inferring correctly, especially since the person you’re talking about replied “of course not” to my question about if they read the article.

Since apparently many people aren’t reading the article: It is about how cheap it actually is (eg $15,000) to buy a complete production line to be able to manufacture batteries with a layer of nearly-undetectable explosives inside of them, which can be triggered by off-the-shelf devices with only their firmware modified.

Just to be clear, the pager thing wasn’t exploding batteries, they had apparently been modified at the production level to have explosives in them, which could be triggered by the pager system itself.

What? 🤦 The comment I replied to said:

Just to be clear, the pager thing wasn’t exploding batteries, they had apparently been modified at the production level to have explosives in them, which could be triggered by the pager system itself.

It seems clear that “they had apparently been modified at the production level” is referring to the pagers, rather than their batteries. But the article is explaining how it could have been that the batteries were the part of the pager that had the explosives (in which case it was the battery that was exploding).

Did you read the article? It sounds like you didn’t.

Did you read the article? It sounds like you didn’t.

What if there were an outside force that was attacking students/university

That happened at UC Los Angeles a few months ago; the university police chief and 19 of his officers stood by and watched the attacks for over 3 hours before intervening: https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/2024/05/11/ucla-protests-police-inaction-fights/

UC Merced annual training required only 7 rounds, while UC San Francisco used 7000 and UC Santa Barbara used 9000 🤔

Shoutout to UC Davis for having the only police department on the list who “did not use any military equipment during this timeframe”.

For some reason the linked PDF varies from the screenshot in several ways, though most of the numbers are the same. (UC Riverside’s number of rounds of .556-range ammunition used in training is 3000 in the screenshot but 6000 in the PDF now.)

I was curious how much this launcher costs:

… over here I see this glorified paintball gun is normally $2400 but currently on sale for just $1850.