Anyone skilled with AI, even just regular CGI, has been able to do this convincingly for years. What's changing is that it's becoming better, easier and more widely available. This is a good thing. It's significantly increasing every individual's potential for creative expression, and it's simultaneously making the general public aware that you can't just trust random media without knowing the source. Not before, and not now.
You can try regulating, banning and censoring models, adding silly invisible watermarks, require Gen AI content to be labelled as such, and live with a complete false sense of security. You'd be making it way easier to deceive people.
Someone once told me that a person who doesn't believe anything will fall for everything. So if we don't know what to believe, do we all join our own conspiracy communities? Like on a grand scale?
No, we apply appropriate skepticism by considering context, history, motivations and prior knowledge of both the source and the persons or entities involved. The uncomfortable reality that no news sources were ever worthy of our full trust isn't new or recent since the rise of AI or even digital editing. So, to me, it's a net positive that at least now many more people are aware of it.
AI-generated media elements as well as the slightly more labor-intensive manual digital manipulation before AI (eg Photoshop) are both almost quaintly mild because at least there are digital artifacts which can be fairly easily detected, disproven or otherwise countered. Whereas the far more subtle but no less deceptive techniques like changing the order of interview questions in editing or selectively excerpting answers are essentially indetectable and have been widely used to skew reporting at mainstream national news outlets since at least the 1970s.
About 20 years ago I was professionally involved behind-the-scenes with the creation of mainstream news content at a national level. Seeing how the sausage was made was pretty shocking. Subtle systemic bias was constant and impacted almost everything in ways it would be hard for non-insiders to detect (like motivated editorial curation or pre-aligned source selection). Blatantly overt bias was slightly less common but hardly infrequent. Seeing it happen first-hand disabused me of the notion there were ever "reliable sources of record" which could be trusted. While it's true the better outlets would tend to be mostly correct and mostly complete on many topics, even the very best were still heavily impacted by internal and external partisan influences - and, of course, bias tended to be exerted on the things that mattered.
There's really no point to doing that. The drones which actually get used for attacks in places like Ukraine are not fancy off-the-shelf drones. They're very simple DIY systems made from basic electronic components. So, impossible to regulate.
We need to clearly define some stuff around Digital ID, since people seem to be using the term for distinctly different things.
There's (1) eGovernment platforms, where you can handle government-related business online using a login. There's (2) Digital ID cards, where you can use your phone in place of a physical ID or drivers license in real life. And then there's (3) full EU-proposed-style Digital ID, where government wants to act as a SSO provider for private online services, like social media.
Yet someone can be rightfully criticizing (3), as it would pose a major risk to online privacy, and someone else barges in with "here in [place] we have a great eGovernment platform which is very useful for filing your taxes online, I don't see why you'd oppose that". Not specifically in this thread, it's been noticeable over almost all Digital ID-related discussions in the past. Please be considerate of that.
This appears to be about (2), with the catch of it being made mandatory for anyone who wants to be employed in the UK.
"This appears to be about (2), with the catch of it being made mandatory for anyone who wants to be employed in the UK."
For people who are already working illegally, or plan to, it would change nothing, as they could dodge any checks by sub-contracting through someone who seems to be legally employed.
The government cannot be so daft as to ignore how much illegal work happens this way, so there has to be some larger scheme at play here.
If (2) being mandatory means that you need an Android or iPhone in order to work or do anything you need an ID for, then I refer to my basic stance whenever this kind of crap comes up:
Tying citizen's rights to acceptance of Alphabet or Apple's Terms of Service ought to be a crime against humanity. It would also be a bad idea for a sovereign state to give foreign corporations so much power.
The suspicion is that the government will introduce it as (2) but it will be extended to replace physical ID, especially as the government has discussed making driving licences digital. On top of that once introduced it is likely that you will need to provide ID for more things, possibly including (3).
Sounds to me like someone is misrepresenting their products. A solar panel's VoC should be its maximum possible output in ideal conditions (open circuit). If that's under your product's maximum input voltage, it should be no problem. Ever.
Is EcoFlow advertising a higher input voltage than their products can actually take, assuming most people won't actually reach it due to temperature inefficiencies? That'd be false marketing, and it'd make this article manipulative, false blaming of the customer.
STC ("standard testing conditions" for solar panels) is 25C so if it's freezing 0C you have 25 multiplied by 0.33 Volt = 8.25 Volt more than STC in open circuit situation.
Unfortunately inverter manufacturers seldom document how many Volt will destroy the MPPT and up to how many Volt the MPPT will safely turn off by itself before breaking.
Not to mention a fail-safe MPPT would/should just crowbar the input if there's any potential for overvoltage.
Solar panels are current sources that waste their power into a long string of silicon PIN diodes that eventually reach their forward voltage and begin to eat up all that juicy current.
You can just take the current and keep the voltage as low as you want, just make sure to take all the current or it's voltage will rise to let the diodes take the current you aren't using.
> A solar panel's VoC should be its maximum possible output in ideal conditions (open circuit)
I think this is where the confusion arises - what do you mean by ideal conditions? Ideal conditions for solar generation are not necessarily at the same time as the highest voltage operating conditions. VoC tends to be specified at Standard Test Conditions which has light-levels representative of a sunny day (1000 W/m2) and a cell temperature (not ambient) of 25 degrees C, which is already a lot cooler than most panels would typically be at that level of irradiance. So really, the label is already specifying a voltage higher than what you would typically experience during times of max generation.
However, the max voltage could exceed this rating at times when there are cold ambient temperatures with enough light for the module to function, but not enough sun to meaningfully heat the cells. So in this scenario you may have maximum voltage, but you're far from maximum power nor at 'ideal conditions'.
What does “maximum possible voltage” mean for a solar panel? Do you include things like cloud edge effect (which increases incident light beyond direct sunlight?) What about installs with a nearby window reflecting light onto the panel? Do you include ultra-cold environments (which will reduce the resistance and therefore often increase voltage, although admittedly not, I think, Voc)?
VoC is the maximum potential voltage a cell is physically capable of producing. It does not consider real-world conditions. Rather, real-world conditions cause the solar panel's output voltage to be somewhere between 0 and its VoC.
Voc is just the open circuit voltage measured at the terminals (plugs). “Nameplate” Voc is at standard test conditions (STC) of 1000 W/m^2, 25 deg C cell temperature, and a standard are mass/spectrum. The combo of 1000 W/m^2 and 25 C cell temp is not common in the real world in most climates, but still happens. Even relatively hot climates can have times in winter that exceed nameplate Voc if inverters turn off (making the panels go to open circuit).
Obviously you include everything, otherwise it wouldn't be a maximum. You can define a minimum temperature for this, of course, but the customer should know about it.
There's no theoretical maximum voltages for solar panels like there kind of is for batteries. They're just giant array of photodiodes and they just generate whatever voltage potentials proportionate to amount of lights received.
You could produce a "max voltage flying low earth orbit over Gobi with no shadows from Starlinks" value, but that's just the value for circumstantial most absurd situation you happened to have come up with, not a guaranteed theoretical maximum.
The current is what varies proportionally with the amount of light received.
The open-circuit voltage depends mostly on the structure of the solar cells and on the temperature. It has only a very weak (logarithmic) dependence on the amount of light received.
The voltage that you measure at the output depends on the open-circuit voltage, on the amount of light received and on the amount of current that you draw from the panel.
The maximum open circuit voltage for a solar cell is easy to estimate, because it happens at the minimum temperature for which it is designed and the maximum solar illumination. It can be exceeded only using a light concentrator that projects on the panel light collected from a much greater area.
There is a theoretical maximum: the open circuit voltage of a single photovoltaic junction cannot exceed the bandgap of the semiconductor used, no matter how much light you apply. The manufacturer knows the semiconductor used and the number of junctions in series.
They produce current until the diodes start conducting given the forward voltage, as they'll take any current you don't extract off of your hands.
Of course if you want to extract maximum power you have to balance the higher worth of the current you take against the loss of current to the diode forward conduction.
You can configure a Pi-hole with filter lists. Alternatively, Cloudflare, Mullvad and Adguard offer public DNS resolvers with family-friendly filter lists.
For YouTube there's the BlockTube browser extension. You'll need to configure it yourself, but it's very flexible. It lets you block channels, videos and keywords.
Thanks for the DNS resolver idea - will look into that.
The issue with having to actively block YouTube channels is that there are so many! I really want something where all channels are blocked by default and I can whitelist them, but without actually hiding the channels themselves, just stopping the videos from playing so discovery isn't affected.
BlockTube also has an advanced blocking feature[0], which lets you define blocks using JavaScript if statements. You can flip it around to a whitelist-system by returning true (block) by default, and returning false (don't block) on your rules. But this does hide videos from search, recommended, homepage, etc.
What you're suggesting could potentially be done by creating an extension which checks the channel_id, then blocks calls to the /videoplayback endpoint if the channel is not whitelisted. Though do be aware that titles and thumbnails could also be explicit.
Side note: All of this is very technical and not suitable for the average parent, which is not great.
Yet I pick a Chromium based browser because Firefox is awfully anti-user. I still can't load extensions that are not Mozilla-approved, a major deal breaker for me. Then there's the "news" (ragebait slop) on the new tab screen by default, almost like I'm using MS Edge, and also the many sponsored & "suggested" (read: sponsored) links by default in new tab and the address bar as well.
The only acceptable Gecko-based browser I know of right now is Zen, which is great but still in beta. And Tor & Mullvad Browser are good for private one-time sessions.
We need competition for a free and open internet, I fully agree. Mozilla is far from a decent champion for that cause. I'm far more excited at what Ladybird has to offer.
Extensions in Firefox are required to be signed by Mozilla. If you make your own build of an open-source extension, it will not load. The setting to disable this check only works in Developer Edition, ESR and Nightly builds.
Firefox nightly is pretty darn stable, though I'm not sure if there's any security issues with it. I use it for both mobile and desktop, and have for the past 5~10 years and haven't had any issues that weren't fixed by immediately downloading a fresh build (this happened twice) or were caused by me performing unsupported/insane actions (transferring browser profiles (indexeddb) on mobile via CLI commands using remote devtools).
I've got one buggy device, but I suspect corruption due to the error message and I'm more interested in saving the unsyncable data I've got on that profile than I am in trying to fix it by clearing data.
Sponsor stuff that you can just turn off (Firefox) vs. Selling out your privacy directly (chromium with worse fingerprinting protection) and indirectly (Google browser monopoly).
Appears to have been given on 3 El Dorado South, San Francisco. The map marker shows a street called Avenida South San Francisco, Mexico, in front of a bar called El Dorado.
Grok 4 Fast is likely Grok 4 distilled down to remove noise that rarely if ever gets activated in production. Then you'd expect these results, as it's really the same logic copied from the big model, but more focused.
You can try regulating, banning and censoring models, adding silly invisible watermarks, require Gen AI content to be labelled as such, and live with a complete false sense of security. You'd be making it way easier to deceive people.
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