Scary Mary Branscombe
@marypcbuk.bsky.social
10K followers 1.7K following 41K posts
Omnivorous technology journalist. girl with the USB earring; author of the Cassidy At Large technomysteries. Like my writing? Buy me a ☕ https://ko-fi.com/marybranscombe. she/her. Warning: contains opinions. signal marypcbuk.44
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Reposted by Scary Mary Branscombe
paleofuture.bsky.social
I don't think there's any better example of leopards eating faces than the Lebanese immigrant who opened a Trump-themed burger restaurant and then got arrested by ICE.
chron.com
🍔 Houston’s Trump Burger appears to have shut its doors after a brief run on Chimney Rock: bit.ly/46LpQAx
marypcbuk.bsky.social
I have a postcard that belonged to *her* mother that was always up on the wall, of a painting of a beech wood full of bluebells with sunlight coming through the leaves, so it felt like a way of connecting her to that as well (she never really got over her mother dying and always missed her)
marypcbuk.bsky.social
She had asked (years before) for a proper old fashioned hearse with horses with black feathers which was the fashion when she was young (she was born in 1920 and wore boots with 13 buttons) and I was slightly sad I couldn’t run to that but I know she would have liked the bluebell wood
marypcbuk.bsky.social
Alt text screenshot of a tweet and a profile

Can we hear it for nominative determinism
sundersays.bsky.social
Lucy White, GB News regular, an ally and associate of Rupert Lowe, has come up with the send them all back case for remigration + mass deportations

"Millions of people have been imported into our country.

Therefore…

Millions of people will be exported out from our country".
marypcbuk.bsky.social
The mushroom shroud looks cool but a wicker basket is *right there* (or a cardboard box but wicker looks nicer). Did a green burial for my mum with a wicker casket on a handcart and now she’s part of a baby bluebell wood, something she loved
marypcbuk.bsky.social
I read it as they were incompetent, he was cautious and responsible and they continue to be incompetent by suggesting bad faith. A wave of permissions being withdrawn and reassigned looks *very* like enemy action (it just wasn’t an external enemy…)
marypcbuk.bsky.social
Watch the UNO Q with interest ($44 and Debian Linux and Arduino)
marypcbuk.bsky.social
I’ll have a step by step in AskWoody next week but basically when you get the dialogue that asks if you want the work or personal account there is a link at the bottom that says you can rename your personal account. Click it and follow the instructions and put in a different email for the personal
marypcbuk.bsky.social
Do not get baited to descend to the level of your annoying opponent is a good principle in law, I am told
Reposted by Scary Mary Branscombe
To be clear, he is not being charged for an ai service, he used an unrelated ai to make a program that slammed a regular non ai service that Google offers for 40,000 dollars worth of traffic. The 7k is probably the hardware costs of serving the traffic lol
Reposted by Scary Mary Branscombe
cait.bsky.social
guy in a legal advice reddit wants to know how to get out of paying google the money he owes them after vibe coding one of his apps into running 40 times a second for several days straight, but says it's not his fault bc they should have stopped him by making it harder to use
r/LegalAdviceUK u/ShavedAp3 • 3d
Join
Google want to charge me 7 k for API access what can I do as they are denying appeals
Debt & Money
Hi there and thanks for reading.
I tried to keep this brief and just ended up rambling on trying to get as much in as possible so here is my edited hopefully a lot smaller problem.
Google are charging me 7k for a mistake that I told them about within a day, the bill went from about £45 to 16k in a day! when I asked for help I was told "dont worry well reset it as a one off, you'll need to put measures in place and ill guide you through those after you agree" So i did he then said "I will monitor it for a further 24 - 48 hours and then tell you how to put the measures in place. " Less than 24 hours later the bill was now 23k and I found out how to stop it myself. Then came the long back and forth to get it reset.
Fast forward 5 months they have finally given me a 20k credit but with VAT the total bill at the time of the credit was 27k
The 20k would have cleared the costs at the time of making them aware they claim its both our responsibilities to monitor costs I feel I did that by contacting them as soon as I saw the irregularity.
I asked them to reconsider they said no the appeal has said that is their final offer so 1 now owe 7k.
Is there anything I can do here from a legal standpoint. I don't have 7k I barely have £45.
Thanks for reading I am in England if it helps. Intentional or not, OP used either 36k (16 + 20) or 43k (16 + 27) of API credit. Obviously what API it is matters, but with google maps, 16k would equate to ten million pulls. Or two hundred thousand Gemini 2.5 calls with 1000 token input and 5k token output.
Those aren't numbers that something running correctly should run up for any average person or company. So either google screwed up something (which is unlikely that it would only happen to one person in the entire network) or OP has some app or something which isn't running properly and is sending too much to the API.
Edit: It was OP's app, polling google maps nearly 40 times a second for days.

tom_watts • 3d
According to other posts he ended up polling Google maps direction API 2300 times per minute for a few days. Looks like a combination of OP not knowing coding and asking ChatGPT to do it for him, and potentially Google's backend doing something weird in interpreting the janky code.
•••
146 ShavedAp3 OP • 3d
Even if that was the case and it wasn't the sign up process doesn't have the documentation I refer to.
Funnily enough though asking an LLM to help me find it still took some digging after it did.
If you work in the field im sure its easy but those just tinkering or learning not so much.
If google didnt want people like me using it they could make it far harder to do so, they could have hard limits in place for sole users to prevent stuff like this and so many other things.
Should they well clearly they don't think so and no doubt you agree that doesn't make it the right opinion it just makes it yours.
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marypcbuk.bsky.social
Passkeys are better because they can’t be replayed on another device. All the OSes and browsers support them as will more and more sites. You get convenience AND improved security. Normies absolutely need passkeys and they are designed for them
marypcbuk.bsky.social
Passkeys are device specific so they can’t be reused on another device by an attacker, they are usually managed through biometrics or other more cryptographically secure methods and they are intended long term to replace not supplement passwords
marypcbuk.bsky.social
Replying to an email about unintended continuing access in less than three days might be a start…
marypcbuk.bsky.social
Ruby Central look more and more clownish; people who don’t know how to audit permissions are not likely to be good at governance
Reposted by Scary Mary Branscombe
marypcbuk.bsky.social
Don’t miss the big number that closes the show!
Reposted by Scary Mary Branscombe
chriswarcraft.bsky.social
Everyone, I’m just <sniffs> I’m just so proud of us all.

We finally did it.

LibsOfTikTok finally targeted me.

<single tear rolls down cheek>

I’ve been waiting for this moment for so long <unfolds acceptance speech> and first I want to thank everyone who made it possible: Harambe, Kony2012, my fa
A post from failed real estate agent and local ghoul Chaya Raichik aka LibsOfTikTok targeting me. Text of the post reads:

“Leftist CA State Assembly candidate Chris Kluwe, who promotes the harassment of ICE online, was ARRESTED at a Huntington Beach City Council meeting earlier this year.

Chris was protesting a proposed library plaque that featured a phrase similar to ‘Make America Great Again’

Chris called MAGA a ‘Nazi movement’ before leaving the podium and approaching the council member, where he was grabbed by police and carried out.

This unhinged lunatic wants to be an elected official…”

Thanks for the free advertising, Chaya!
Reposted by Scary Mary Branscombe
tkingfisher.com
This is true and they are super endangered by poachers who shovel them up by the hundreds and sell them at flea markets and shit. You should not buy the plants and if you happen to kick the poacher in the shins on accident, no one will hear about it from me.
mossworm.bsky.social
still amazing to me the number of movies, games, etc. which have Venus Flytrap-based creatures in some form compared to the actual native range of Venus Flytrap, which is like, the great untamed jungles of a few wet pine savannas in North Carolina
map illustrating the native range of Venus Flytrap plants, just a little half circle around coastal North and South Carolina in USA
Reposted by Scary Mary Branscombe
saskajanet.bsky.social
Look at her go!
#invertebrates 🌿
Screen shot of Project Monarch app map of progress of a monarch butterfly from southern Ontario to Oklahoma.
Reposted by Scary Mary Branscombe
magnificentlycursed.com
I think this happens because power users become grievance collectors and each decision is an opportunity to relitigate and propagate the whole circle of grievance
Reposted by Scary Mary Branscombe
laurenshof.online
my current thesis is also that social networks based on open protocols that are in active development freeze user expectations for how moderation systems work early in the life cycle of the network, which prevents evolution of moderation systems that are necessary to happen
Reposted by Scary Mary Branscombe
questauthority.bsky.social
Judge:
"All y'all need a banana and a nap RIGHT NOW."