…exactly the kind that discourages 60-something, non-technical family members.

Nah - you’re complaining that you “were forced into handing your password to someone else” when there were at least six ways you could have avoided that:

• you gone to the computer,
• they send the computer to you,
• you remote in to the computer,
• you tell them “suck it, you should have blocked iCloud sign-in with MDM” or, as others mentioned,
• you sign out before handing the computer back or, my favourite,
• don’t sign in to personal accounts on work devices even if they bug you to.

Finally, we release devices like this all the time through our ABM account. It takes 5 days maximum. Your IT team led you up the garden path.

You couldn’t remote in to type in your password?

And machine-gunning the Doc.

Still have to explain them.

Full text:

The Taylor Swift Album Leak’s Big AI Problem

Apr 19, 2024 9:06 AM

When The Tortured Poets Department leaked, some Taylor Swift fans swore it must be AI. Expect that to be a common refrain.

Photograph: Neilson Barnard/Getty Images

On Thursday, Taylor Swift did a very Taylor Swift thing: She posted an Instagram story with a link to buy “Fortnight,” the first single off of her new album, The Tortured Poets Department. It was cute, maybe even unnecessary. Taylor Swift is one of the biggest recording artists in the world. She announced TTPD in February while accepting the Grammy for best pop vocal album for her last record, Midnights. Swift sold 19 million albums in the US alone last year; she doesn’t have to post IG stories about a new single. Yet there she was getting the internet all frothy like it was 1989.

As she posted, though, something else was agitating her massive fan base: The Tortured Poets Department had leaked, allegedly spreading thanks to a Google Drive link that made the rounds online. (Piracy is back, baby!) Almost immediately, there were two camps: One said true fans would wait until the album’s official release, at midnight on Friday. The other couldn’t wait and pressed Play anyway. Among that latter group was a subcamp: people who thought the leak—or parts of it, at least—were the product of artificial intelligence.

Claims of “gotta be AI” come from several corners, but many seem to stem from one particular line, in the album’s title track, in which (alleged) Swift sings, “You smoked then ate seven bars of chocolate / We declared Charlie Puth should be a bigger artist.” (The rumor mill is speculating it’s a line about her ex, Matty Healy.) The audio has since been removed for copyright violation, but when an X user posted that snippet online, the suggestions that it was AI-generated quickly followed.

Upon the album’s release, everyone learned that the song was, in fact, real. They also learned the tracks that had been circulating before the album’s release were only part of the package. Swift returned to Instagram at 2 am Friday to announce that it was actually a “secret DOUBLE album”—The Tortured Poets Department: The Anthology—31 songs in total. But the “must be AI” reaction remains a complex one.

Online life is awash in AI-generated fake-outs. Just a few years into the LLM revolution, the need to not believe your lying eyes is a given. Same goes for your lying ears. The bigger problem is that while skepticism and fact-checking are, generally, always a good idea when getting information online, AI has become so prevalent that it can also be a cop-out. Don’t like what your honest eyes see? Convince yourself it’s AI.

What makes this all even trickier is that AI is progressing to the point where composing something like The Tortured Poets Department doesn’t seem too far out of its realm of possibility. An AI version of Johnny Cash has already covered Swift’s “Blank Space.” “Heart on My Sleeve,” an AI-generated song from 2023 that sounded shockingly similar to one actually made by Drake and the Weeknd, was close enough to the real deal that some folks thought it might be a promotional tactic.

When the frenzy around The Tortured Poets Department finally dies down, this will all likely end up looking like a minor distraction. But it does say something uncomfortable about online fandom: There are a great many people who will rush to the defense of their fave, even when the criticism is valid. As my colleague Jason Parham wrote recently, Beyoncé’s internet isn’t exactly utopia. Swift TikTok—especially now that her songs are back on the platform—has its delightful turns, but watching people squabble about her talents isn’t one of them.

This becomes particularly tiring because it’s a reminder that the interdependency between the internet and artists like Beyoncé and Swift has never been greater. In many ways, neither of them really needs the support of online hordes protecting their good names and hyping their music. They’re internationally known superstars. People would find out about their tours, and the movies of their concerts on Netflix and Disney+, even if every word they uttered didn’t go viral.

The Monitor is a weekly column devoted to everything happening in the WIRED world of culture, from movies to memes, TV to Twitter.

Yet, watching them go viral has become a sport in and of itself. Swift’s Easter eggs (and weird Spotify pop-ups and surprise double albums), Beyoncé’s art-directed captionlessInstagram posts—these things regularly become news, and they bring in people who maybe couldn’t care less, just to see why everyone is tweeting. This is the ouroboros of modern pop music.

Even as this notoriety has made a select few artists very rich, it’s also created a series of problems. Yes, the Beyhive and the Swifties can be intense, but there are also their detractors who, in the case of Swift, promote countless dumb conspiracy theories, most of them concerning her being a government psyop to influence the 2024 US presidential election. Her private jets are now a matter of public interest.

Swift fans, though, do mobilize. When deepfake pornographic images of the singer went viral on social media in January, her fans rallied to drown them in “Protect Taylor Swift” posts. When Ticketmaster seemingly botched the initial release of her Eras Tour tickets, the fans made enough noise that US lawmakers took notice. On Tuesday, Meta’s Oversight Board announced it’s taking a closer look at deepfakes on its platforms. That same day, The Wall Street Journal reported the US Justice Department had plans to file an antitrust lawsuit against Live Nation, Ticketmaster’s parent company.

Almost makes me want to see what would happen if someone did try to pass off AI Taylor as the real thing.

Between 20 and 30 officers and soldiers are implicated…

Pretty sensationalist headline.

They are only clean and have GPS or even apps since Uber. Before they had competition, only premium cabs were vaguely healthy to use.

This is much the same as Calibri, Arial and other bundled fonts. Even Times New Roman is meant to be licensed for commercial work.

Not sure if 100% a joke or just partly but Volkswagen was probably providing the mechanical engineers who were retrofitting Lexus vehicles of the project as they had for the already-deployed driverless vans. See NYT & MacReports

It’s literally nostupidquestions.

Humans and Neanderthals were neighbours for longer than previously thought. Also, we’re maybe back to humans making more tools.

…the discovery of more of its remnants alongside human fossils points to Homo sapiens inhabiting central Germany at the same time.

“It turns out that stone artefacts that were thought to be produced by Neanderthals were in fact part of the early Homo sapiens tool kit,” says Jean-Jacques Hublin, a professor in palaeoanthropology at Collège de France.

“This fundamentally changes our previous knowledge about this time period: Homo sapiens reached northwestern Europe long before Neanderthal disappearance in southwestern Europe.”

Is there more?

This article’s a week old. The relief has been announced in tax bracket adjustments that roll back the Stage 3 cuts that were essentially going to remove the third bracket (primarily benefiting those earning >$135,000)

ABC story

What are the new stage 3 tax cut brackets?

Here’s how the proposed plan looks at a glance:

Earn up to $18,200 – pay no tax

Pay a 16 per cent tax rate on each dollar earned between $18,201-$45,000

Pay a 30 per cent tax rate on each dollar earned between $45,001-$135,000

Pay a 37 per cent tax rate on each dollar earned between $135,001 — $190,000

Pay a 45 per cent tax rate on each dollar earned above $190,000

What were they going to be?

Here’s what the previous plan looked like at a glance:

Earn up to $18,200 – pay no tax

Pay a 19 per cent tax rate on each dollar earned between $18,201-$45,000

Pay a 30 per cent tax rate on each dollar earned between $45,001-$200,000

Pay a 45 per cent tax rate on each dollar earned above $200,000

January is named for Janus, February for a religious feast, March for Mars and June for Juno (Jupiter’s wife). April may also be a goddess Apru but the connection is still not agreed upon.

Planet names, days of the week, months, which year is zero - even that we have 7 days in the week - All of these are direct religious references that we’re fine with.

It does match passwords https://haveibeenpwned.com/Passwords

According to The Associated Press, one sailor (SEAL) fell into the water and the other jumped in after them, following protocol.

That’s an interesting protocol.

Interesting choice to be made by Tesla: recall and change the parcel shelf or remove the middle seatbelt in the back.

Another option available to Tesla is removing the rear-centre seatbelt and re-certifying the Model 3 as a four-seater.

The latest Honda HR-V small SUV introduced in 2022 was certified in Australia as a four-seater as the Japanese car giant chose not to invest in engineering a top-tether point for the middle rear seat – and instead elected to remove the middle rear seatbelt.

And the original story is that:

On Nov. 16, Reuters published a special investigation under the headline “How an Indian startup hacked the world,” detailing how Appin allegedly became a “hack for hire powerhouse that stole secrets from executives, politicians, military officials and wealthy elites around the globe”

I hate teams that say Agile says “no doco”.

The principle is “Working software over comprehensive documentation… That is, while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more.”

Agile absolutely needs documentation but it shouldn’t hold up delivering working solutions and shouldn’t be more complicated than necessary.

We don’t want the old-school projects where software was ready but not delivered until a bible of doco was typeset, printed and bound.