#What is wholesale software?

[mckinlily]

Plot armor but it’s Bruce Wayne’s wealth.

Bruce is one of the richest men in the world. Bruce does not want to be one of the richest men in world.

He starts by implementing high starting salaries and full health care coverages for all levels at Wayne Enterprises. This in vastly improves retention and worker productivity, and WE profits soar. He increases PTO, grants generous parental and family leave, funds diversity initiatives, boosts salaries again. WE is ranked “#1 worker-friendly corporation”, and productively and profits soar again.

Ok, so clearly investing his workers isn’t the profit-destroying doomed strategy his peers claim it is. Bruce is going to keep doing it obviously (his next initiative is to ensure all part-time and contractors get the same benefits and pay as full time employees), but he is going to have to find a different way to dump his money.

But you know what else is supposed to be prohibitively expensive? Green and ethical initiatives. Yes, Bruce can do that. He creates and fund a 10 year plan to covert all Wayne facilities to renewable energy. He overhauls all factories to employ the best environmentally friendly practices and technologies. He cuts contracts with all suppliers that engage in unethical employment practices and pays for other to upgrade their equipment and facilities to meet WE’s new environmental and safety requirements. He spares no expense.

Yeah, Wayne Enterprises is so successful that they spin off an entire new business arm focused on helping other companies convert to environmentally friendly and safe practices like they did in an efficient, cost effective, successful way.

Admittedly, investing in his own company was probably never going to be the best way to get rid of his wealth. He slashes his own salary to a pittance (god knows he has more money than he could possibly know what to do with already) and keeps investing the profits back into the workers, and WE keeps responding with nearly terrifying success.

So WE is a no-go, and Bruce now has numerous angry billionaires on his back because they’ve been claiming all these measures he’s implementing are too expensive to justify for decades and they’re finding it a little hard to keep the wool over everyone’s eyes when Idiot Softheart Bruice Wayne has money spilling out his ears. BUT Bruce can invest in Gotham. That’ll go well, right?

Gotham’s infrastructure is the OSHA anti-Christ and even what little is up to code is constantly getting destroyed by Rogue attacks. Surely THAT will be a money sink.

Except the only non-corrupt employer in Gotham city is….Wayne Enterprises. Or contractors or companies or businesses that somehow, in some way or other, feed back to WE. Paying wholesale for improvement to Gotham’s infrastructure somehow increases WE’s profits.

Bruce funds a full system overhaul of Gotham hospital (it’s not his fault the best administrative system software is WE—he looked), he sets up foundations and trusts for shelters, free clinics, schools, meal plans, day care, literally anything he can think of.

Gotham continues to be a shithole. Bruce Wayne continues to be richer than god against his Batman-ingrained will.

Oh, and Bruice Wayne is no longer viewed as solely a spoiled idiot nepo baby. The public responds by investing in WE and anything else he owns, and stop doing this, please.

Bruce sets up a foundation to pay the college tuition of every Gotham citizen who applies. It’s so successful that within 10 years, donations from previous recipients more than cover incoming need, and Bruce can’t even donate to his own charity.

But by this time, Bruce has children. If he can’t get rid of his wealth, he can at least distribute it, right?

Except Dick Grayson absolutely refuses to receive any of his money, won’t touch his trust fund, and in fact has never been so successful and creative with his hacking skills as he is in dumping the money BACK on Bruce. Jason died and won’t legally resurrect to take his trust fund. Tim has his own inherited wealth, refuses to inherit more, and in fact happily joins forces with Dick to hack accounts and return whatever money he tries to give them. Cass has no concept of monetary wealth and gives him panicked, overwhelmed eyes whenever he so much as implies offering more than $100 at once. Damian is showing worrying signs of following in his precious Richard’s footsteps, and Babs barely allows him to fund tech for the Clocktower. At least Steph lets him pay for her tuition and uses his credit card to buy unholy amounts of Batburger. But that is hardly a drop in the ocean of Bruce’s wealth. And she won’t even accept a trust fund of only one million.

Jason wins for best-worst child though because he currently runs a very lucrative crime empire. And although he pours the vast, vast majority of his profits back into Crime Alley, whenever he gets a little too rich for his tastes, he dumps the money on Bruce. At this point, Bruce almost wishes he was being used for money laundering because then he’s at least not have the money.

So children—generous, kindhearted, stubborn till the day they die the little shits, children—are also out.

Bruce was funding the Justice League. But then finances were leaked, and the public had an outcry over one man holding so much sway over the world’s superheroes (nevermind Bruce is one of those superheroes—but the public can’t know that). So Bruce had to do some fancy PR trickery, concede to a policy of not receiving a majority of funds from one individual, and significantly decrease his contributions because no one could match his donations.

At his wits end, Bruce hires a team of accounts to search through every crinkle and crevice of tax law to find what loopholes or shortcuts can be avoided in order to pay his damn taxes to the MAX.

The results are horrifying. According to the strictest definition of the law, the government owes him money.

Bruce burns the report, buries any evidence as deeply as he can, and organizes a foundation to lobby for FAR higher taxation of the upper class.

All this, and Wayne Enterprises is happily chugging along, churning profit, expanding into new markets, growing in the stock market, and trying to force the credit and proportionate compensation on their increasingly horrified CEO.

Bruce Wayne is one of the richest men in the world. Bruce Wayne will never not be one of the richest men in the world.

But by GOD is he trying.

[amalgamasreal]

So I don't know how people on this app feel about the shit-house that is TikTok but in the US right now the ban they're trying to implement on it is a complete red herring and it needs to be stopped.

They are quite literally trying to implement Patriot Act 2.0 with the RESTRICT Act and using TikTok and China to scare the American public into buying into it wholesale when this shit will change the face of the internet. Here are some excerpts from what the bill would cover on the Infrastructure side:

SEC. 5. Considerations.

(a) Priority information and communications technology areas.—In carrying out sections 3 and 4, the Secretary shall prioritize evaluation of— (1) information and communications technology products or services used by a party to a covered transaction in a sector designated as critical infrastructure in Policy Directive 21 (February 12, 2013; relating to critical infrastructure security and resilience);

(2) software, hardware, or any other product or service integral to telecommunications products and services, including— (A) wireless local area networks;

(B) mobile networks;

(C) satellite payloads;

(D) satellite operations and control;

(E) cable access points;

(F) wireline access points;

(G) core networking systems;

(H) long-, short-, and back-haul networks; or

(I) edge computer platforms;

(3) any software, hardware, or any other product or service integral to data hosting or computing service that uses, processes, or retains, or is expected to use, process, or retain, sensitive personal data with respect to greater than 1,000,000 persons in the United States at any point during the year period preceding the date on which the covered transaction is referred to the Secretary for review or the Secretary initiates review of the covered transaction, including— (A) internet hosting services;

(B) cloud-based or distributed computing and data storage;

(C) machine learning, predictive analytics, and data science products and services, including those involving the provision of services to assist a party utilize, manage, or maintain open-source software;

(D) managed services; and

(E) content delivery services;

(4) internet- or network-enabled sensors, webcams, end-point surveillance or monitoring devices, modems and home networking devices if greater than 1,000,000 units have been sold to persons in the United States at any point during the year period preceding the date on which the covered transaction is referred to the Secretary for review or the Secretary initiates review of the covered transaction;

(5) unmanned vehicles, including drones and other aerials systems, autonomous or semi-autonomous vehicles, or any other product or service integral to the provision, maintenance, or management of such products or services;

(6) software designed or used primarily for connecting with and communicating via the internet that is in use by greater than 1,000,000 persons in the United States at any point during the year period preceding the date on which the covered transaction is referred to the Secretary for review or the Secretary initiates review of the covered transaction, including— (A) desktop applications;

(B) mobile applications;

(C) gaming applications;

(D) payment applications; or

(E) web-based applications; or

(7) information and communications technology products and services integral to— (A) artificial intelligence and machine learning;

(B) quantum key distribution;

(C) quantum communications;

(D) quantum computing;

(E) post-quantum cryptography;

(F) autonomous systems;

(G) advanced robotics;

(H) biotechnology;

(I) synthetic biology;

(J) computational biology; and

(K) e-commerce technology and services, including any electronic techniques for accomplishing business transactions, online retail, internet-enabled logistics, internet-enabled payment technology, and online marketplaces.

(b) Considerations relating to undue and unacceptable risks.—In determining whether a covered transaction poses an undue or unacceptable risk under section 3(a) or 4(a), the Secretary— (1) shall, as the Secretary determines appropriate and in consultation with appropriate agency heads, consider, where available— (A) any removal or exclusion order issued by the Secretary of Homeland Security, the Secretary of Defense, or the Director of National Intelligence pursuant to recommendations of the Federal Acquisition Security Council pursuant to section 1323 of title 41, United States Code;

(B) any order or license revocation issued by the Federal Communications Commission with respect to a transacting party, or any consent decree imposed by the Federal Trade Commission with respect to a transacting party;

(C) any relevant provision of the Defense Federal Acquisition Regulation and the Federal Acquisition Regulation, and the respective supplements to those regulations;

(D) any actual or potential threats to the execution of a national critical function identified by the Director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency;

(E) the nature, degree, and likelihood of consequence to the public and private sectors of the United States that would occur if vulnerabilities of the information and communications technologies services supply chain were to be exploited; and

(F) any other source of information that the Secretary determines appropriate; and

(2) may consider, where available, any relevant threat assessment or report prepared by the Director of National Intelligence completed or conducted at the request of the Secretary.

Look at that, does that look like it just covers the one app? NO! This would cover EVERYTHING that so much as LOOKS at the internet from the point this bill goes live.

It gets worse though, you wanna see what the penalties are?

(b) Civil penalties.—The Secretary may impose the following civil penalties on a person for each violation by that person of this Act or any regulation, order, direction, mitigation measure, prohibition, or other authorization issued under this Act: (1) A fine of not more than $250,000 or an amount that is twice the value of the transaction that is the basis of the violation with respect to which the penalty is imposed, whichever is greater. (2) Revocation of any mitigation measure or authorization issued under this Act to the person. (c) Criminal penalties.— (1) IN GENERAL.—A person who willfully commits, willfully attempts to commit, or willfully conspires to commit, or aids or abets in the commission of an unlawful act described in subsection (a) shall, upon conviction, be fined not more than $1,000,000, or if a natural person, may be imprisoned for not more than 20 years, or both. (2) CIVIL FORFEITURE.— (A) FORFEITURE.— (i) IN GENERAL.—Any property, real or personal, tangible or intangible, used or intended to be used, in any manner, to commit or facilitate a violation or attempted violation described in paragraph (1) shall be subject to forfeiture to the United States. (ii) PROCEEDS.—Any property, real or personal, tangible or intangible, constituting or traceable to the gross proceeds taken, obtained, or retained, in connection with or as a result of a violation or attempted violation described in paragraph (1) shall be subject to forfeiture to the United States. (B) PROCEDURE.—Seizures and forfeitures under this subsection shall be governed by the provisions of chapter 46 of title 18, United States Code, relating to civil forfeitures, except that such duties as are imposed on the Secretary of Treasury under the customs laws described in section 981(d) of title 18, United States Code, shall be performed by such officers, agents, and other persons as may be designated for that purpose by the Secretary of Homeland Security or the Attorney General. (3) CRIMINAL FORFEITURE.— (A) FORFEITURE.—Any person who is convicted under paragraph (1) shall, in addition to any other penalty, forfeit to the United States— (i) any property, real or personal, tangible or intangible, used or intended to be used, in any manner, to commit or facilitate the violation or attempted violation of paragraph (1); and (ii) any property, real or personal, tangible or intangible, constituting or traceable to the gross proceeds taken, obtained, or retained, in connection with or as a result of the violation. (B) PROCEDURE.—The criminal forfeiture of property under this paragraph, including any seizure and disposition of the property, and any related judicial proceeding, shall be governed by the provisions of section 413 of the Controlled Substances Act (21 U.S.C. 853), except subsections (a) and (d) of that section.

You read that right, you could be fined up to A MILLION FUCKING DOLLARS for knowingly violating the restrict act, so all those people telling you to "just use a VPN" to keep using TikTok? Guess what? That falls under the criminal guidelines of this bill and they're giving you some horrible fucking advice.

Also, VPN's as a whole, if this bill passes, will take a goddamn nose dive in this country because they are another thing that will be covered in this bill.

They chose the perfect name for it, RESTRICT, because that's what it's going to do to our freedoms in this so called "land of the free".

Please, if you are a United States citizen of voting age reach out to your legislature and tell them you do not want this to pass and you will vote against them in the next primary if it does. This is a make or break moment for you if you're younger. Do not allow your generation to suffer a second Patriot Act like those of us that unfortunately allowed for the first one to happen.

And if you support this, I can only assume you're delusional or a paid shill, either way I hope you rot in whatever hell you believe in.

[ernmark]

I just stumbled across somebody saying how editing their own novel was too exhausting, and next time they'll run it through Grammerly instead.

For the love of writing, please do not trust AI to edit your work.

Listen. I get it. I am a writer, and I have worked as a professional editor. Writing is hard and editing is harder. There's a reason I did it for pay. Consequently, I also get that professional editors can be dearly expensive, and things like dyslexia can make it difficult to edit your own stuff.

Algorithms are not the solution to that.

Pay a newbie human editor. Trade favors with a friend. Beg an early birthday present from a sibling. I cannot stress enough how important it is that one of the editors be yourself, and at least one be somebody else.

Yourself, because you know what you intended to put on the page, and what is obviously counter to your intention.

The other person, because they're going to see the things that you can't notice. When you're reading your own writing, it's colored by what you expect to be on the page, and so your brain will frequently fill in missing words or make sense of things that don't actually parse well. They're also more likely to point out things that are outside your scope of knowledge.

Trust me, human editors are absolutely necessary for publishing.

If you convince yourself that you positively must run your work through an algorithm before submitting to an agent/publisher/self-pub site, do yourself and your readers a massive favor: get at least two sets of human eyeballs on your writing after the algorithm has done its work.

Because here's the thing:

AI draws from whatever data sets it's trained on, and those data sets famously aren't curated.

You cannot trust it to know whether that's an actual word or just a really common misspelling.

People break conventions of grammar to create a certain effect in the reader all the time. AI cannot be relied upon to know the difference between James Joyce and a bredlik and an actual coherent sentence, or which one is appropriate at any given part of the book.

AI picks up on patterns in its training data sets and imitates and magnifies those patterns-- especially bigotry, and particularly racism.

AI has also been known to lift entire passages wholesale. Listen to me: Plagiarism will end your career. And here's the awful thing-- if it's plagiarizing a source you aren't familiar with, there's a very good chance you wouldn't even know it's been done. This is another reason for other humans than yourself-- more people means a broader pool of knowledge and experience to draw from.

I know a writer who used this kind of software to help them find spelling mistakes, didn't realize that a setting had been turned on during an update, and had their entire work be turned into word salad-- and only found out when the editor at their publishing house called them on the phone and asked what the hell had happened to their latest book. And when I say 'their entire work', I'm not talking about their novel-- I'm talking about every single draft and document that the software had access to.

[lonelyroommp3]

a few people are talking in the notes about how it will vary depending on how you know the hosts. like personally for a good friend i’ll show up in the first half hour (maybe even early for a BESTie), for a friend who’s not super close an hour late, when i don’t really know the hosts or as a plus one two hours or more. and people are getting absolutely inflamed about the existence and unspoken nature of this. but what’s the alternative? sending out invites saying “i don’t really know you so don’t show up before 8”? i also think people settle into rules like this anyway even in their absence as they aren’t arbitrary - if i don’t know you, i don’t really want to be one of the few people in your house making small talk and putting out bowls of pretzels (and vice versa) so i’ll come late.

also, i’m not autistic (though i have struggled with social anxiety so i can relate to aspects of it) and like, a lot of these rules aren’t innate and predownloaded with the neurotypical software. i also had to learn them, sometimes the hard and awkward way. that’s just how a LOT of society works IMO.

exactly! like the etiquette does make total sense when you think about it even if it's not first glance intuitive or contradicts other cultural expectations about punctuality in different situations (although as i said in another ask response, contradictory punctuality standards in different situations is just like. a completely normal part of society lol), and i can bet every single person on the planet regardless of whether they're autistic or not has had an experience of having to learn this or any other unspoken etiquette rule the hard way.

however i think a lot of people on this website (and on other social media lol) have fallen into the trap of thinking "some neurotypical social rules are difficult for me, as a neurodivergent person, to grasp or even understand the purpose of. this means they are objectively stupid and pointless and designed to confuse me personally and/or force me into masking and we should therefore reject them wholesale" which is actually oftentimes not the most helpful way to move around the world. like if it's really that stressful for you then by all means stick to your autistic and/or neurodiversity affirming friend group who will give you an exact to the minute schedule of when you are expected to arrive for every single social event, if that's genuinely what you need then go for it. but that doesn't mean the people (neurotypical or otherwise) who would find it awkward at best and actively rude at worst when someone they hardly know shows up to their 8 til late party at 7:32pm are wrong for that

[delyth-thomas-art]

Tired Webcomic Creator Noises

Gags … ah yes lets make art into mindless content spat out by Ai cos we've been literally killing creators with inhumane workloads to spit out as many episodes as possible for mindless consumption.

I make my comics with passion and love of the craft! I have a degree in Comics, I spent years...years learning, practising, experimenting, adapting. I recall the days where you may get a page a week, or a few at the start of the month back in the 2000s era of self hosted webcomics and smackjeeves. (Rant below)

I've had to learn how the whole scrolling format worked to adapt to where all the readers had gone to, having been taught the traditional print page formats. And now cos its suddenly a massive money maker for these few hosts and they've pushed creators to the brink with the sheer volume they want pumped out that of course they want to use AI.

But it will speed up colouring! I have multiple tools available by the software I use and made by the wonderful people who love creating that colouring isn't that much of a chore, Its my fav part honestly. And its also a job sector within comics, colourists are skilled artists and this is another way to trim the fat, to pocket more money and keep churning out the 5th millionth villainess story.

Yes I am in most views a tiny creator, I haven't even broken their 1000 sub goal to even try applying for ad rev in the near 5 ish years on webtoon. But what I make I love, I spend hours researching folklore, scripting, drafting the whole kabudle like many other creators. And other than the kind supporters on my Patreon and Ko-fi I don't make much from the hours, days, weeks I pour into what I make. But at least I know its made with my own hands. That its made with love as corny as that sounds.

Ai is creeping its tentacles into everything, now ethically trained ai tools to help smaller creators would be fine. Most creators already rely on 3d tools to speed up things like backgrounds for webcomics. But when we don't know what its trained on, and is marketed wholesale as something anyone can use to make "content" is where it gets insidious. I am all for anyone with the desire to create and tell a story to go out there and do so, whether a beginner or a master. Part of the joy of a long running webcomic is seeing the artist grow both artistically and literary. But with ai it will be all one homogenous style, a copy of what ever is the hot thing. We already have amazon stuffed to the teeth with ai generated books, videos, merch and more all to be sold in some get rich quick manner. (need I point at the Willy's Wonderland incident). Youtube videos being spat out by faceless accounts stealing and regurgitating content at the speed no human video making team can easily match without cutting out quality or fact checking.

It is tiring. Creatives as a whole are treated poorly for decades, and now with the rapid late stage capitalism, website /social media enshitification and the blind headlong rush into the next big money making thing (watches the nft crash). I can't deny Covid sped this up, as everyone was locked inside and turned to what we creators made for comfort. But that content eating boom, lead to more demand, faster output and tighter budgets. We are seeing journalists being cut, game designers in their thousands and recently Dreamworks cutting a bunch and pushing to make their Robot film come out sooner due to public demands.

Skilled creatives are being treated like disposable fast food restaurant employees. Used til they burn out, get injured and even die! And then are simply replaced.

I've never been a creator with huge ambitions to work at places like DC, Marvel or Top Cow. I simply wished to create and share stories with the world, to bring smiles, to create art that evokes emotions, inspires others to look around themselves and create too.

Art is for everyone. You just need to take that scary jump, there is a whole array of welcoming communities willing to teach and share. I wouldn't have improved so much without the kindness of the webcomic groups I've discovered and learnt from. Everyone is always learning, and there no shame in not knowing how to do a thing. Even I started with the cheesy how to draw books as a kid and made my own pokemon and digimon.

Don't let the world treat your art as content. It is "ART" as much as what's kept in the louvre is seen as art, so is that little stick man doodle on a postit.

So Try something new, try a new material, a new style.

And support the artists you enjoy, tip their Ko-Fi, pledge to their Patreon, buy a sticker or print. Share their posts and tell them what you love about what they make.

Don't let machines steal away the art in HEART.

[rjzimmerman]

Electricity That Costs Nothing—or Even Less? It’s Happening More and More. (Wall Street Journal)

Excerpt from this Wall Street Journal story:

Most people pay a fixed price for each kilowatt-hour of electricity they consume throughout the day. The price is set by their power company and only changes at infrequent intervals—once a week, a month or even only once a year.

Van Diesen, a software salesman, recently signed up to receive electricity from two providers that charge him the hourly price on the Dutch wholesale power market, rather than a fixed price that resets monthly or annually. When the price of electricity falls low enough, smart meters in his house begin charging his two electric cars.  

Wholesale prices swing wildly each hour of the day, and even more so as a larger share of electricity flows from wind and solar installations. Because the generation costs of wind or solar farms are negligible, market prices will be near zero when there is enough renewable power to cover most of a region’s electricity demand. 

Electricity market dynamics get weirder when renewable-energy producers don’t have an incentive to stop feeding power into the grid, usually because of government subsidies. Then grids can be flooded with excess power, pushing prices into negative territory.

Van Diesen said he’s made 30 euros, equivalent to around $34, over the past five months charging his car, enough to cover the service fee from his power supplier, a Norwegian company called Tibber.

“I’m charging the car for free,” said van Diesen, who is part of a group of clean-energy enthusiasts in the Netherlands who call themselves green nerds. “To me it’s also like a hobby and a game—how far can I go?”

Doing laundry in the evening? The electricity could be free a few hours later when demand dies down and the wind picks up. Likewise, in regions with lots of solar power, charging an electric vehicle in the morning is usually far more expensive than powering up under the midday sun—or whenever the price is right.

In the U.S., most states don’t currently allow such real-time pricing, but many think that will change. Already, in some of the world’s biggest economies from Western Europe to California, the occurrence of zero and negative wholesale power prices is growing fast.

Wholesale prices across continental Europe have fallen to zero or below in 6% of all hours this year, up sharply from 2.2% in 2023 and just 0.3% in 2022, according to data collected by Entso-E, the group of European transmission system operators. In markets with lots of renewable capacity, this year’s figure was higher: 8% in the Netherlands, 11% in Finland and 12% in Spain. Analysts expect those numbers will grow as more solar panels and wind turbines are installed.

The changes sweeping Europe’s electricity markets, which were accelerated by the energy crisis brought on by the war in Ukraine, show what could happen in the U.S. in a few years when renewable capacity reaches a similar scale. In 2023, 44% of EU electricity was generated by renewables, compared with 21% in the U.S.

[earhartsease]

things that might have hinted to us sooner that we're autistic include our two year stint in the mid 2000s working customer services for a "buddhist ethical gift business" doing phones and computer stuff, mainly troubleshooting wholesale deliveries - during which we developed the following two habits that have not so far left us

every time we sent an email we'd murmur "fly like the wind!" as we'd just seen Toy Story 2 and that was our takeaway

we discovered a hack in the database software that allowed us to sort orders in reverse order by hitting the E key, and this started us intoning "eeeee" happily whenever we hit that key - which turned into a strange talismanic relationship with drawing a lowercase e in the air with our index finger to express appreciation (nobody knows that's what we're doing so it's a great stealth stim)

anyway it's a testament to our three fellow customer service workers that nobody batted an eyelid at any of this, but in retrospect all four of us were luminously on the spectrum

[he-is-lightning-in-a-bottle]

Get to Know Me Tag

Tagged by the feisty @lurkingshan, thanks Shan!

Do you make your bed?

Kinda. After my divorce, I bought lovely new bedding and happily made my bed every morning for like a year. Then I got lazy. I sorta half-ass it, where I fluff my pillows and pull up sheets and straighten the blankets and bed spread, but it's not photo-worthy or anything.

What’s your favorite number?

3. I like triads and trinities. In fact, I named my first dog Trinity. And I had three children!

What is your job?

I’m an author. I have 4 non-fiction books published under my given name and 15 fiction books published under a pseudonym. Many of my books were best sellers. Despite this fact, it is not enough to pay the bills. So I supplement my income with speaking engagements, teaching classes, and running a handful of websites, one of which is a wholesale distribution platform for artisanal imported foods. Basically, I'm self-employed and keep myself busy doing anything that interests me.

If you could go back to school, would you?

No. While I love learning and don't mind taking the occasional class to be introduced to a cool skill (like making stained glass!), I absolutely refuse to do any more higher education than I already have. I was sorta super nerdy at school because of an eidetic memory, so I collected degrees in Biblical Studies, Philosophy, Greek, Linguistics, and Russian Literature before I finally realized I didn't want to be a perpetual student.

Can you parallel park?

Nope. I learned how to do it to get my Driver's License over 30 years ago and have literally never had to use the skill since.

A job you had that would surprise people?

Hmmm. My job-jobs were all pre-children so people are surprised when they find out I ever had any since my last one was decades ago. But I didn't just have a few, I had a LOT of jobs because I finished school early and had to pay for my entire university education myself because of poor parents, and I think that's the most surprising thing. I was a waitress (14-16), a shop clerk (16-18), an acquisitions librarian's assistant (18-19), a bank teller (20), a digital librarian for a major software development company (20-21), a language tutor (18-21), an adjunct professor (22-24), a houseparent in a boy's home (24), and a cog in the county tax assessor's office (24-26). I also volunteered as a translator for Doctor's Without Borders and as a suicide prevention counselor for LGBTQ youth. At 26, I had my first child and became self-employed.

Do you think aliens are real?

Possibly, but I struggle to believe humans have ever interacted with any.

Can you drive a manual car?

Yes!

What’s your guilty pleasure?

Cop shows. I agree ACAB, but I love love LOVE the testosterone-fueled fantasy world of shows like Hawaii Five 0.

Tattoos?

None. I didn't want any at first because all the tattoos I'd seen on old people didn't age well thanks to saggy skin, wrinkles, etc. Now I kinda wish I'd had at least one.

Favorite color?

Dark azure.

Favorite type of music?

I LOVE IT ALL. If you live long enough, you discover awesome music in every genre. Like, I thought I hated heavy metal, but then I discovered the album Pale Communion by Opeth a decade ago and loved literally every single song!

Do you like puzzles?

Yes, but I don't make the time to do them.

Any phobias?

Heights. Absolutely terrifying.

Favorite childhood sport?

Cross country! I ran on my varsity team in HS and continued it through college.

Do you talk to yourself?

No. I am so quiet. On the weeks I don't have custody of my kids, I have sometimes had weeks where I work exclusively from home and don't interact with another human person beyond text messages and emails. When I finally speak out loud for the first time in days, the sound of my voice is jarring and unfamiliar.

What movies do you adore?

About Time. The Royal Tenenbaums. Shawshank Redemption.

Coffee or tea?

Coffee! I used to be more of a snob about it, but I recently fell in love with Korean instant coffees and THEY ARE SO GOOD. HOLY SHIZNITS.

First thing you wanted to be growing up?

A teacher in a foreign country.

I haven't been keeping track of who tagged who, so I'd like to tag @absolutebl @juneviews @twig-tea @sorry-bonebag @stefanyd @waitmyturtles @disaster-j @cooloddball @spicyvampire and @norahastuff If you'd like to play and I didn't tag you, please do!! Be sure to tag me so I can read your post.

[gh0st-eaterr]

Welcome to Hell

(read: ya boy's getting around to actually cleaning up his blog a bit)

This is my main (only) active blog. I mostly post in relation to Guild Wars 2 and art, but there's gonna be some unrelated stuff mixed in, because I barely have enough spoons to run one blog let alone multiple for various purposes. This blog does not generally have 18+ content, but I'd frankly much prefer you to be 18+ should you decide to interact. I do not and will not interact with minors.

Anyways, hi. I'm Ghost, or Av (short for Abhartach, 'Av-ar-tagh').

I'm a long-time player of GW2 of about...9-ish years, I do art on a semi-professional basis, I'm an IRC mod for the SCP Wiki, and I used to be a software engineer in the days before the Great Plague.

I'll pop more under the cut so this doesn't turn into some massive, screen-consuming post.

A Little Bit More About Me...

20s || He/him || Several crows in a trenchcoat, but you didn't hear it from me || Your Local Friendly Neurotic Houseplant™

Not gay as in happy but queer as in fuck you

AuDHD; disabled.

Have an honors degree in computer science for some fucking reason???

Art Related Stuff

Stuff relating to my art and characters will be tagged #my art and #my characters respectively. Tags specific to a character will generally follow the #oc: [name] format. I'll compose a list of these and come back and edit this when my brain's not running on fumes.

I will do my best to tag any potentially triggering content, such as eye strain, gore, insects/bugs/creepy crawlies in general, sensitive topics -- you get the idea. If I miss something, do reach out and let me know.

I do, occasionally, take on commissions. As of right now I typically do this through Ko-fi or P@ypal directly. I am working on a pricing list for in-game Guild Wars 2 currencies or gemstore items.

This blog has never and will never condone the usage of Generative AI for art in any medium. GenAI is theft. Fuck off with that shit.

Corollary to the above, I do not consent to the usage of any of my art for such things, nor do I consent to the reposting of my art on any platform. I do not mind if people take some inspirations from my work, but please, for the love of god, don't start ripping off my shit wholesale.

General Blog Stuff

Tagging methods still apply. Mostly. Sometimes I will just reblog shit without tags, and I may or may not go back and fix this.

My rambles are typically tagged under #houseplant.txt

I tend to live under a rock and as such, I don't deal in drama. Especially fandom drama. Odds are, I won't have a fucking clue what you're on about anyway unless it's something major.

I'll come back and edit this at some point with links to specific character stuff. I'm sleepy.

[sharkface]

🔥 electronics?

I genuinely think in this day and age everyone who can should have a basic understanding of electronic repair both software and hardware. It is honestly not terribly difficult once you get into it to replace parts or fix software issues (provided there is no tampering from our good friend planned obsolescence which plagues electronics worse than anything on earth) that are really common and your average person with a phone or computer will have access to tech support resources that can prevent you from having to take it to a shop and pay a ton of money for a pretty simple fix or have to buy a new machine wholesale. Just learning the basics will be enough way more often than you think and it's honestly not that complex or intimidating once you know what you're doing a little bit

[naharie]

Some rambling thoughts on AI

I've seen a lot of strong reactions to recent AI innovations, whether it be people excited and enthusiastic declaring we are witnessing a new age, or those afraid, angry, or both, at what is and will happen. (And quite a number of the latter, especially on Tumblr.) And to some degree, both sides are understandable. AI can in fact, be used both for great good, and for great evil. However, the reactions of both parties are skewed and will almost certainly not get them to the goal they want to reach.

Since this is Tumblr, let's start with the negative side. What does this group want? For AI to be stopped from replacing human roles and jobs, especially creative ones. The general idea seems to be that we need careful and fairly immediate regulation (or some would argue a wholesale ban) of AI.

The first problem I see with regulating or banning AI is that it's incredibly unlikely to happen, at least in the US where many such companies are based. Mega corps already spend billions in lobbying for tax law changes and cuts, keeping down minimum wage, lowering what they have to to for employees, and really anything that will let them make even a little bit more profit. And like it or not, the reality is that in the long run it costs less to buy the machines, develop the software, maintain the machines, pay for electricity, ..., than it does to pay actual humans with the appropriate skills. (I know this doesn't talk about how well this is or isn't working for various fields, but we'll get to that later, trust me.)

Secondarily, unless the legislation was thorough (which is unlikely, for the same reasons as #1), companies will either find a loop hole to practically keep doing things exactly the same way. Or they'll do what they do with anything else they don't want to get in legal trouble for: outsource it. If the US bans or heavily regulates AI but doesn't carefully regulate the transmission, transport, and use, of AI goods, mega corp will simply move some of its servers oversees to somewhere without those rules, as a likely example, India.

And thirdly, it's delusional to imagine that even if thorough legislation is passed that it will actually mean all that much to mega corp. The fact that it would be illegal would not stop them in the slightest. If you have someone lived under a rock your entire life and don't believe me, go look up the union busting tactics and techniques used by big companies, restaurants, stores, and more.

Enough about that for now, though. Let's look at the other side, at least briefly: the people who are wholesale for AI. What do they want? The increased growth of AI, and for AI to become a much more integral part of our everyday lives. How is this to be done? Hype, throwing money at AI companies, and a lot of development work to build tooling on top of AI.

Now, what problems are there with this plan? As someone who likes having a least a little bit of privacy, where do I even begin. Perhaps with that. If AI is fully integrated with society, to a point where it is expected, the same way many businesses and websites expect you to have a smartphone, in many ways, privacy will be gone, at least so far as you relate to the government. If you somehow don't believe that modern governments spy on their citizens, even through corporations, I would advise you to learn about what happened with Snowden. He himself admits that it's not just the US, and even if it was, they collect about everyone, regardless of country, and then share it with the relevant government so they can get permission to keep doing it.

The second glaring issue that has yet to have a complete solution offered is the power cost of AI. Public data sources show that global power consumption went up by 25% just between 2000 and 2021, and it only continues to climb. And how, you may ask, is this power generated? By using (mostly burning) non renewable fuel sources. More than 60% of all the power in the world comes from non renewable sources. But what does that have to do with AI? AI is usually accelerated using either a GPU (Graphics Processing Unit (a.k.a a graphics card)) or dedicated hardware. In other words, some of the most power hungry computer hardware used by normal machines. There is only a finite amount of traditional fuel sources left, and the more power we need and generate from them, the less time we have left. I'm not saying countries shouldn't switch to nuclear. What I'm saying is that they seem to be unfortunately reluctant to, and if we don't, the other renewable sources will not keep up with AI, and we could potentially see a massive power crisis.

And that's not even speaking about stolen jobs. I think for this audience, I don't need to. People already know what's happening with WGA and artists, and if you don't, a quick google search should enlighten you enough our purposes.

So, what's the actual status of AI? Well, that depends on what field you are looking at. AI text generation/chat bots are doing...somewhat okay. What they can do is impressive, but still has lots of points of failure. And at least in the case of ChattGPT, OpenAI has admitted that they are nearing the limits of their current method. AI video generation is a new field and still has a long way to go before it becomes very promising at all. AI video manipulation is approaching realtime capability on modern hardware, AI sound work begins to equal that of less trained humans.

And of course, AI art is doing just fine for itself, thank you. They all have their limits of course. One big one for AI art is the limited number of tokens/words and therefore complexity of the prompt given. There are ways to partially mitigate this, but nothing complete yet. As an example, try to generate an image for the following prompt: "A cat on a skateboard riding a dragon, that is Smoug from the Hobbit, burning down a forest on the mountainside while flying down toward the lake on laketown, while in the bottom right corner there is a circle showing laketown where Bard stands at ease, holding out his bow and a singular arrow, looking out towards the mountain." Then, if you have enough money, hire an artist to make you a picture from the same prompt. It's not even a competition, one of them is clearly better, and its the artist's.

But wait you may say, this isn't a complete essay. You left out some of your proofs, arguments, and conclusions, and left us with something incomplete. To that I say: you are right, this is not an essay, it is a rambling combination of thoughts I've had, and I made revisit these points in the future if I or anyone else cares.

[ryo-maybe]

Ho postato 40.162 volte nel 2022

Sono 9.327 post in più del 2021!

1.698 post creati (4%)

38.464 post rebloggati (96%)

Blog che ho rebloggato di più:

@coolyo294

@yukariyakumofficial

@turbobyakuren

@hetare-ttk

@haropla

Ho taggato 2.779 dei miei post nel 2022

#rinnequest - 160 post

#ryo of the rebellion - 42 post

#holy shit - 27 post

#yeah - 22 post

#uriel asks - 16 post

#ew spoilers - 12 post

#fragment bits - 11 post

#yukariyakumofficial - 11 post

#shb spoilers - 11 post

#starlight spoilers - 10 post

Longest Tag: 140 characters

#which is actually an inflatable animal that i want to see poked until all the empty air has gone out and left behind a delicious nugget of h

I miei post migliori nel 2022:

#5

1.444 note - Postate 19 agosto 2022

#4

I love Ryouichi Ikegami’s style a whole damn lot because you could pick any panel of his and it’d make for a perfect reaction picture because he draws characters like this:

1.554 note - Postate 25 ottobre 2022

#3

I think it's neat when characters, regardless of gender, age or anything else, are pathetic but less in a "spineless harem isekai self-insert" and more in a "couple (literal or metaphorical) years away from a middle age crisis, dark circles around the eyes that contribute to making them look like a raccoon too tired to sift through the trash, which they can't even afford anyway" kind of way, you feel me

1.606 note - Postate 5 giugno 2022

#2

can u explain why AI art is bad without fearmongering, moralizing or bootlicking lol

I'm going to answer in good faith, even though the tone you're using sounds like you're harboring anything but. The issue with AI art isn't specifically inherent to the tools used to produce it, because, ultimately, a tool is merely that: something devoid of will which, in the hands of a human, can produce a specific outcome. It's the human element that taints what we could otherwise enjoy for the unquestioningly fascinating topic that is AI art and, by extension, AI software as a whole.

Now, the problem isn't people, period, but the kind of people that are responsible for giving AI the bad rep it's been getting, along with the intent that goes into both the development of AI tools and the things produced by dint of said tools. I'm talking about the tech bros happily rubbing their hands, waiting to provide business moguls with a brand new means to commodify and mass-produce what artists stake their entire livelihoods upon, because when you have enough zeroes lined up in your bank account, your eyes are utterly blinded to the soul and personality that human beings put into their handiwork, and which a machine won't ever be able to reproduce no matter how much stolen art you feed it. Oh yeah, by the way, that's how AI art tools have been making the rounds: by chewing on thousands upon thousands of stolen pictures made by actual people so that they may learn how to ape someone's style and spit out absolutely soulless derivatives, while the original authors don't see a lick of recognition or monetary retribution for any of it. Do I need to tell you why stealing and parading someone else's art as your own is a terrible, vile thing to do?

But sure, you did ask me to refrain from "fearmongering, moralizing or bootlicking", which I guess I've already done. So since you'd rather I skipped straight to the point in a concise manner, lemme offer some quick examples of why the culture surrounding AI art has already developed into one of the most abysmally disappointing displays of how greed and an utter lack of human decency can ruin something objectively brimming with possibilities:

Less than a week after the sudden death of Korean artist Kim Jung-gi, someone trained an AI model to mimic his artstyle, having the audacity of asking for credits if anyone wished to use it. I sincerely hope I don't have to explain to you why this is a ghoulish example of the kind of tone-deafness sported by tech bros who buy wholesale into the AI art craze.

A piece of AI art was submitted to an art contest and won. The "artist"'s work amounted to little more than picking a series of prompts and letting the machine do the work. It's as much art as googling a smattering of terms and making a collage of pictures taken from Pinterest (and even then, you would have put more work into it than this person did). That they won at all says a whole damn lot about how abysmal the respect given to artists - real artists - nowadays is.

There are a multitude of people out there already selling prints of AI-generated art. I could link some of them here, but honestly, type "ai art prints" on a search engine and you'll get inundated by them. I've seen and personally know artists who have had to undersell their works because commissions were the only thin, frayed string they could hang on in hopes of making it through the week without fucking starving themselves, but here we are: any random asshole can now yell "MASSIVE BREASTS, THIN WAIST, COCKTAIL DRESS, HUGE BADONGAS" at a computer, let it mash together a trillion of other people's hard work, and print it for easy bucks that the actual authors of the basic ingredients of their insipid soup will never, ever see a dime of.

It really bothers me that you mentioned "no bootlicking". Whose fucking boots is this side of the debate supposedly tasting? That of the artists who post every day about how angry, sad and terrified they are by the prospects of what the development of AI art will entail for their livelihood and passion? What kind of gall did your mother birth you with that you have the spiteful spunk to type that word, when you've got shit like an artist who had their sketch stolen while they were drawing it on stream, then fed to an AI and posted by someone passing it off as their own art? How does that not ignite your indignation? "Bootlicking". Like anyone's tongues have been tasting leather but those of the same tech bro chodes who kept trying oh so hard to convince us NFTs were the future while ruining the environment to make the absolute stupidest point ever made in the history of humanity.

7.769 note - Postate 17 ottobre 2022

Il mio post numero 1 del 2022

Since Tumblr wants to be a bitch, here’s a timestamped link to the jugglers doing working their magic in front of the Pope while Megalovania plays in the background. No this wasn’t edited. It’s a livestream

14.532 note - Postate 5 gennaio 2022

Guarda ora l'Analisi del tuo anno 2022 di Tumblr →

[talenlee]

The End of Tweets

The End of Tweets

Today, at some point after this post goes up, if I’ve timed this right, Twitter is going to close down the system that lets my blog freely create a tweet and post it, without me doing it personally. If you haven’t checked my twitter, which I haven’t been promoting since November 2022, the only thing posted there is links to my blog posts, and retrospring posts — which is also generated by that same system. This is an API – an Application Program Interface. APIs are complicated if you want to understand them but if you just want to be generally aware of what they are, APIs are ways that two programs can directly communicate with one another – the software running my blog and the software running twitter are both bumping into one another directly.

What this meant is that any time I made a post, I didn’t have to think about how to advertise and promote it, it just gets posted to twitter and tumblr (and it gets posted to tumblr in full, which is pretty sweet).

Tomorrow, at least assuming everything is going the way it’s going, that stops.

This means this is probably, to some extent, a sunset of my time on Twitter. I check it from time to time, to make sure that my DMs are available. I know I’m not extracted from the system wholesale. At work, I have a professional twitter account, because it’s an important skillset for students to build on (hypothetically). We might be seeing a reduction in relevance for twitter there, too, because, and this is pretty funny, the reason we taught them how to use twitter was because, a few years ago, ‘competent at twitter’ was a fundamentally important toolset for social media degrees. That might be fading out, but the good news is that the skills we taught are largely transferable.

I know I’m not getting rid of twitter, but my twitter account, talen_lee, and its related cousins, is going to go dark. Sadly, so to is my most successful twitter thing, Dwarven Porn, with its 16,000+ followers. I don’t know why it is so successful (really), and its follower base is not entirely porn robots, to my surprise. I was always okay with the idea of reducing twitter usage and just relying on automated services so that, for the people who really wanted it, they’d still have convenient updates to my blog, but not contributing new, unique stuff to twitter as part of the ‘content’ mill.

This was my compromise. I don’t like going without Twitter. Mastodon and Cohost aren’t giving me quite what I want as replacements; Cohost is great because of the people there, but it tends to be pretty technical, web-dork based, and it doesn’t have a lot of tools for getting people’s attention or contacting them safely. No DMs to slide into, as it were, and it’s not easy to initiate a conversation on a topic with someone else. Mastodon frustrates me a little bit because most of the time, any given day on Mastodon, a meta-topic winds up coming up.

What I want is for Mastodon to be a site where I see something being talked about, think about it, and share it. I want to feel like it’s a place where when I post work on a game, people will comment, people will talk about it with me. Right now, Mastodon feels a bit sensitive, a bit raw, like I can’t just post any old thing. Twitter, being so mainstream and having so general an attitude meant that I didn’t have to think much about what I was posting, but Mastodon has an aura of a culture of don’t.

None of which is to say Mastodon is bad, it just is a place where, for example, if I’m in a bad mood I’m not about to log on and post something like ‘man, fuck Wizards of the Coast,’ because hey, that might be upsetting to someone who’s sensitive and I gotta be careful.

When my blog software can share to Mastodon and Tumblr and… man, is Cohost on the horizon? I’m excited by that! But we don’t know, I don��t know how likely that is.

Twitter has been a part of my life for the past nine years. In June, it will be ten years full. I got on twitter originally to promote my friend’s work, and then my own work, and the original reason to not tweet was that twitter, in general, was inane and bad. There was always this vibe that twitter wasn’t a good platform and I shouldn’t be there because tweets were small and tedious. What I didn’t appreciate when I started and grew into was the way twitter worked as an excellent scratch pad, where the short form of tweets meant I had to try and express ideas in a constrained space, and where the time stamp on everything meant I could chart my own engagement with ideas over time.

Also, I owe Twitter a lot for being a better person. I basically asked a lady once on twitter, like in 2013 about a question I thought was at the time pretty complex, and she gave me a 101 introduction to some ideas, which I then spent some time delving into. There was a kind of painful unpacking to do there, which went through stages, but I undeniably did not get exposed to better language for without the interface of twitter. There’s no doubt in my mind that without the addition of a large cloud of trans women into my life, I wouldn’t have learned a host of things that were, to me, at the time, kind of academic.

It’s not like it’s done, done, done. For all I know, given the nature of how corporations are stumbling and confused these days, this may mean Twitter winds up changing back, a few weeks later. Who knows, maybe the whole program becomes open source.

At least for now, though, this needs some noting, some stamp in the timeline: This is probably going to be the last post of mine promoted on twitter, or tomorrow night’s one.

Check it out on PRESS.exe to see it with images and links!

#Diary #Meta

[cerrein-sharma]

Types & examples of e-commerce businesses

Hrithik Sharma

Internet is not only for entertainment purposes. it is a way to represent your skills and teach others & a wonderful platform to connect with your loyal customer. Today we will see how many different ways we can sell our product to customers { in any form }.

 

What is e-commerce?

Full-form of e-commerce: electronic commerce.

The process in which business or commerce transactions are done over the internet via a website using mobile or desktop.

You can sell anything from “mobile covers” to “website plugins” through your website or register to another platform, even though you can target second-hand goods to needy ones.

e-commerce can be available for generic & specific goods

{1} Generic – where consumers can buy anything from books to home decor

e.g. Amazon or Ali express

{2} Specific – here they sell only specific products such as only furniture goods or only stationery products.

e.g. FreshDirect

We have a different way to serve our customers with different medium

Types:-

{1} B2B – Business to Business

When a manufacturer sells a product to a wholesaler directly, if you are a manufacturer you can develop your website or list your company to different B2B agencies to serve wholesalers or small businesses.

e.g. Alibaba

{2} B2C – Business to Consumer

When a company or seller develops their portal to sell the goods, services & products directly to the buyer. A third person develops the portal or website to incorporate the manufacturer, whole seller or retailer to sell goods.

e.g. Amazon

{3} C2C – Consumer to Consumer

Where one consumer sells the goods, services & products to another consumer using the internet made by a third party.

e.g. Ebay

{4} C2B – Consumer to Business 

Here consumers provide services to businesses e.g. if you go to Fiverr you can find various freelance working for organisations to assist to write the blog or develop specific software for them

e.g. Freelancer or Fiverr

{5} B2G Business to Government 

Where government agency acts as a customer & business as a supplier e.g. when government organise the tender at the portal and bidder { business } comes to bid.

e.g. Boeing ( producing military hardware for the US government)

{6} D2C Direct to Consumer

Here organisation sells the product to consumers directly without any middlemen and they can easily reach their customers without going through thousands of processes.

e.g Dollar Shave Club

stay connected with us for more articles:- cerrein.com

[sacchi-ko]

elfgrove​:

elfgrove​:

New Things to Beware on the Internet

On May 3rd, Google released 8 new top-level domains (TLDs) – these are new values like .com, .org, .biz, domain names. These new TLDs were made available for public registration via any domain registrar on May 10th.

Usually, this should be a cool info, move on with your life and largely ignore it moment.

Except a couple of these new domain names are common file type extensions: “.zip” and “.mov”.

This means typing out a file name could resolve into a link that takes you to one of these new URLs, whether it’s in an email, on your tumblr blog post, a tweet, or in file explorer on your desktop.

What was previously plain text could now resolve as link and go to a malicious website where people are expecting to go to a file and therefore download malware without realizing it.

Folk monitoring these new domain registrations are already seeing some clearly malicious actors registering and setting this up. Some are squatting the domain names trying to point out what a bad idea this was. Some already trying to steal your login in credentials and personal info.

This is what we’re seeing only 12 days into the domains being available. Only 5 days being publicly available.

What can you do? For now, be very careful where you type in .zip or .mov, watch what website URLs you’re on, don’t enable automatic downloads, be very careful when visiting any site on these new domains, and do not type in file names without spaces or other interrupters.

I’m seeing security officers for companies talking about wholesale blocking .zip and .mov domains from within the company’s internet, and that’s probably wise.

Be cautious out there.

I really want to reiterate how this can go wrong frequently and fast, folks.

A malicious actor sets up a page with an auto-downloader squatting on a domain name that matches a common zip file name like photos DOT zip. This website is set up to start an auto downloader upon being visited, downloading a zip file with the same name as the URL which contains malicious software (virus, worm, keylogger, etc).

Scenario.

Someone you know well sends you an email or text with promised photos attached. The email even reads something like this.

Because .zip is now a TLD, that plain text is automatically formatted into a link to malicious actor’s website without them having to send you anything.

Folk with family with iPhones or iPads that are sent multiple photos in one go might be familiar with iCloud’s tendency to automatically compile them into zip file for the sender and less savvy tech users have trouble NOT doing that.

These same less savvy users, or even just someone just not thinking in the moment, will click that .zip link, not realizing it isn’t the the same as clicking on the promised attachment.

They download a file that matches the name they expected. They open it because they were expecting that file and it’s from a trusted source. Except the file they downloaded isn’t the one that was sent by their trusted source and now they have malware.

Another Scenario.

An IT person tries to send you an email with instructions on how to resolve a problem with a commonly used filename like install-repair DOT zip or to install new software like microsoft-office DOT zip.

The email may start with instructions of where to go get the legitimate file to do the install or repair, but now a line later in the instructions is also has a link to a .zip URL. A user, already frazzled by IT problems, may click it to ensure they have the right file. Again, they download malicious code from a squatting website or it prompts them with a fake login and now the squatting website has stolen their login credentials for a legitimate site. All due to an expected email from a trusted source.

Above you can see microsoft-office DOT zip is already out there with a fake Microsoft login screen waiting to steal your credentials.

These risks are already out there now because the TLD has been activated.

Plain text on old post are already being resolved into links to the new websites.

Here you can see a tweet from 2021, long before .zip was a domain name, now resolves that plan text into a clickable link. You’ll start seeing this everywhere, and malicious actors do not have to lift a finger to send it to you.

Yes, a lot of users aren’t going to click that, but a lot of folk will. Whomever is squatting on photos DOT zip domain name has made a one time payment to have access to anyone that ever sees that file name typed out.

In an example of an existing squatter site, clientdocs DOT zip is exactly one such pre-setup .zip domain name that initiates an automatic download. This one may be harmless, but the set ups are already out there and waiting to catch folk.

It’s an unnecessary and risky can of worms that’s been opened up.

Holy Unforced Errors, Batman.

New Things to Beware on the Internet

On May 3rd, Google released 8 new top-level domains (TLDs) -- these are new values like .com, .org, .biz, domain names. These new TLDs were made available for public registration via any domain registrar on May 10th.

Usually, this should be a cool info, move on with your life and largely ignore it moment.

Except a couple of these new domain names are common file type extensions: ".zip" and ".mov".

This means typing out a file name could resolve into a link that takes you to one of these new URLs, whether it's in an email, on your tumblr blog post, a tweet, or in file explorer on your desktop.

What was previously plain text could now resolve as link and go to a malicious website where people are expecting to go to a file and therefore download malware without realizing it.

Folk monitoring these new domain registrations are already seeing some clearly malicious actors registering and setting this up. Some are squatting the domain names trying to point out what a bad idea this was. Some already trying to steal your login in credentials and personal info.

This is what we're seeing only 12 days into the domains being available. Only 5 days being publicly available.

What can you do? For now, be very careful where you type in .zip or .mov, watch what website URLs you're on, don't enable automatic downloads, be very careful when visiting any site on these new domains, and do not type in file names without spaces or other interrupters.

I'm seeing security officers for companies talking about wholesale blocking .zip and .mov domains from within the company's internet, and that's probably wise.

Be cautious out there.

[bmobile-route-software]

How Do I Choose an Inventory Management System?

Choosing the right inventory management system (IMS) is crucial for optimizing your supply chain, improving accuracy, and boosting efficiency. Here are key steps and factors to consider when selecting an IMS:

Define Your Needs and Goals:

Identify specific challenges you want the IMS to address (e.g., stockouts, tracking errors, slow turnover).

Set clear objectives for the IMS, like improving inventory accuracy, reducing costs, or enhancing visibility.

Consider your company size, product types, and order volume to understand the level of functionality needed.

Look for Key Features:

Real-Time Tracking: Essential for accurate, up-to-the-minute visibility of inventory across multiple locations.

Order Management: Ensure it can handle orders from multiple channels, including e-commerce, wholesale, or retail.

Barcode/RFID Scanning: Automates data entry, reduces errors, and speeds up receiving, picking, and packing.

Reporting and Analytics: Look for advanced reporting capabilities to track inventory trends, sales performance, and forecasting.

Integrations: Ensure compatibility with your existing systems, such as accounting, ERP, CRM, or e-commerce platforms.

Assess Ease of Use and Scalability:

User-Friendly Interface: The system should be intuitive and easy to use, minimizing the need for extensive training.

Scalability: Choose a system that can grow with your business. It should easily adapt to increased order volumes, additional warehouse locations, or expanded product lines.

Consider Automation Capabilities:

The IMS should automate time-consuming tasks, like updating stock levels, sending reorder alerts, and generating purchase orders. Automation can help reduce manual errors and free up staff for higher-level tasks.

Check Cloud-Based vs. On-Premises Options:

Cloud-Based Systems: These offer remote access, regular updates, and typically lower upfront costs, which makes them ideal for growing or multi-location businesses.

On-Premises Systems: These may provide greater control and security for large businesses with dedicated IT resources, though they usually come with higher installation and maintenance costs.

Evaluate Cost and Budget:

Upfront vs. Subscription Costs: Consider whether a subscription-based or one-time payment model fits your budget better.

Total Cost of Ownership: Look at ongoing costs like maintenance, updates, support, and training. Don’t forget any hardware costs (e.g., barcode scanners, RFID devices).

Review Customer Support and Training Options:

A reliable support team is essential, especially during initial setup and as you scale. Check for availability of training materials, tutorials, and whether support is included or an added cost.

Look for Customization and Flexibility:

Choose an IMS that allows you to customize workflows, reports, and dashboards to align with your business’s unique needs. Some systems offer add-ons or modular features, letting you pay only for what you need.

Evaluate Vendor Reputation and Reviews:

Research reviews and case studies to understand how well the IMS has worked for similar companies. Customer feedback provides valuable insights into software performance, reliability, and user satisfaction.

Test the System with a Demo or Free Trial:

A hands-on trial helps you assess the system’s fit for your operations. Use this time to explore features, test ease of use, and verify that it aligns with your workflow.

By following these steps, you’ll be well-equipped to select an inventory management system that aligns with your business needs, supports growth, and ultimately improves efficiency in managing inventory.

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