Cycl0ps

Anyone who sincerely believes any story starting with "$Group not $X because $Y" is part of the problem.

Really? Let me try

https://www.reuters.com/article/factcheck-vaers-deaths/fact-...

The only e-reader I've had is an old Kindle Paperwhite I got secondhand. It's dumb enough to not get in my way and lets me transfer all my various pdfs and mobi files from my PC via cable. It's due for replacement but I have zero trust that newer models would let me use the thing how I want.

>fully autonomous, no driver vehicles like freight, mail, hell even passengers. maybe that means one lane ... and predefined gas station stops and/or some other requirements. I bet the government could even subsidize with an infrastructure spending bill, politics notwithstanding.

Yup, that's a train. I really do wish US rail hadn't been turned into what amounts to private property. I live along the Amtrak Cardinal line and would love to use it to travel. But the low speed and frequent stops for higher-priority freight mean a trip takes longer than driving and usually costs more than I would pay in gas.

>Cellular phones such as iPhones cost hundreds of dollars. To make the phones more affordable, during the relevant time, AT&T subsidized the purchase cost of phones or sold phones to customers under installment plans. Unlocking a phone effectively removes it from AT&T’s network, thereby allowing the account holder to avoid having to pay AT&T for service or to make any payments for purchase of the phone.[0]

That's the argument from the DOJ. ~1.9M phones were unlocked and losses were estimated at $200M in unpaid fees. Back of the napkin math, but that would mean around 15-20% of users had balances owed on the phone. The rest were people just trying to make the thing functional.

I've been looking at the Surface Duo because I really need a pocket-sized tablet more than I do a cell phone. It recently went on sale, but locked to ATT's network. Legally, they are obliged to unlock the device on request. They can charge a fee if the hardware was intially subsidized, but they must unlock it. I was more than ready to pay full price for the phone until I saw what it would take to legally unlock the phone. Call agents didn't understand the process, there was conflict on whether ATT or Microsoft would have the ability or obligation to unlock. It would require multiple tickets and weeks worth of waiting, and you may end up with an unusable phone. If I hadn't done my research and was left with an non-functional device I definitely would have looked for alternative methods.

[0]https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/fraudster-sentenced-prison-lo...

I think it's worth pointing out that those threats of legislation are what led to the ESRB, which was created to show the industry could self-regulate without government intervention. While that system is outdated for modern game design it served it's purpose. These calls for regulation are leading down the same road. They tell companies ike Facebook, "This is problem, solve it before we're forced to."

A quick search shows average returns across the market sit around 8-11%. If we say 5% to be conservative, 1M returns $50'000 each year. That's not bad. That's a house in a quiet neighborhood with no worries about food, or debt. You're not living without a budget, but you could live without working.

Since it's effectively the same anatomical structure, presented in a grayscale image, I think bone density would change the average color of the image regardless of what level of pixelation was applied. The chance of detection through some other method isn't ruled out though. It could be hitting off of something mundane like the margins on the edge of an image, how centered the torso is in frame, foreign objects in the body from procedures, any random thing that could bias the data can also lead to false positives. The only way to verify would be to use a new data set, ideally from new hospitals, and see if it has similar results.

Would it be unethical to start dosing Ivermectin with the Pfizer vaccine? Sort of like hiding your dog's pills in a rolled up piece of ham. The anti-vaxxers get to think they pulled one over on "them" (whoever that may be this week) and I get to leave the country again. Everyone wins!

I'm hesitant on any type of synthetic fuel creation. Marketing says it's greener but it burns the same and almost by necessity is a net negative in energy costs. Instead of comparing to fossil fuels it should be compared to other energy storage and transmission solutions, that's what it's really doing here.

Certifications that require lab work tend to be more valued because they show applied knowledge, unlike multiple choice exams where you could cram for the test without applying any of that knowledge. As for requirements the only thing that comes to mind is DoD requirements in the US, a job I worked required me to get Sec+ before they'd give me network access

https://public.cyber.mil/cw/cwmp/dod-approved-8570-baseline-...

I think it generally depends on whether or not you're downwind of Pripyat.

I'm curious to hear opinions on this. Like the author says, young workers are underrepresented in the public sector currently. Is a program that seems to cater exclusively to them problematic?

Who cares? I read through the entire thing, I followed up with the BMJ article linked by another poster. That's the end result that comes to mind, who cares? Why do I need to waste my time playing detective?

Was it made in a lab? Is it engineered from a SARS strain found in a copper mine? Was their GoF testing done in WIV? Will any of these questions being answered improve my life in any meaningful way? The answers are: Maybe, maybe, maybe, and a hard no.

I cut politics out of my life and it improved my outlook dramatically. I think it's time I do the same with Covid. I'll worry about the people around me in my community, and in a decade or so I'll watch the documentary on this mess when the dust settles. Until then I'll let the politicians, journalists, and scientists fight amongst each other all they want, and I'll be happier for it.

If that sentence isn't a moment of clarity in American politics I don't know what could be.

This is all to negate a further rise in temperature. I still believe that long term correction would involve carbon sequestration, literally burying carbon by the ton to remove it from the carbon cycle entirely. Something like project vesta on a large scale

https://www.projectvesta.org/

You've made good points on this. My concern would be that police officers have an obligation to gather this information as it states in the article, and that they would lean on their powers to detain and arrest in order to coerce that information.

Let's run through a hypothetical. Routine traffic stop. Cop pulls out one of these cards and asks for your handles. You refuse, claim Miranda rights, or something similar. Cop says you, "match the description of a known suspect" (in a city as large as LA everyone matches a known suspect) and this is part of the ID process. "Of course, we can do a check using the computers at the station but you'll need to come with us until we confirm your ID ..."

Now, following through on that threat is an arrest, but under California law police have 48-hours to investigate before either charging you with a crime or releasing you. I doubt most officers would use the entire time, but letting someone stew for the afternoon in a drunk tank seems entirely within reason. During that time their car has been impounded and they're either missing work or missing time with their loved ones. Refusing to self identify could carry an effective fine in the hundreds of dollars, and that worries me.

Failure to comply with commands given by an officer. Suspicious activity. Belligerent conduct. Whether these are actual charges or not don't even matter, as officers aren't legally required (by supreme court decision) to understand the law they enforce. If they want to arrest you they can.

So to restate your question: On what basis do the police think they can arrest you?

Ha! I like that! Yes, I guess in a way we are. These models are always being evolved in their own version of 'natural' selection. They go through tens of thousands of mutations before finding one that guesses well enough to be pushed to production. This is just another stage of that algorithms life cycle I suppose. If you want to take an optimistic view of it this is just another part of the tuning process. The AI can train for as long as it likes, but the real thing it's being weighted against is public outcry.

By the sound of it this is a problem that neither entities nor their moniedness can solve. I'm sure these companies watch each other, and when one steps on a metaphorical rake the others are likely taking notes on how to avoid it on their future attempt. And yet rakes are still being stepped on.

When you have an automated system that has irregular behavior to a given input, we call that a bug. Bugs exist in all software, not always unique, but always present. This software is no different than any other. It will have errors. Because the software is categorizing faces, its errors will result in miscategorizing them. The only relevant questions to this are how frequent these errors are and how disparate they are across racial lines.

Another reference: this one is a Tool-Assisted Speedrun of a game that relies on basic image recognition software. While not entirely related, it does show how error-prone these algorithms can be. It's also fun to watch. https://youtu.be/mSFHKAvTGNk

I don't like these stories. It always trends towards the most inflammatory arguments, those being inherint bias and unconscious racism put upon our technology. Real issues in those topics aside, are any articles like this doing anything but feeding flames and generating ad revenue?

Instead, I want to talk about pareidolia. Humans are social creatures. We have evolved to identify others of our kind and read their expressions. This was important to us, as we evolved alongside gorilla analogues as well, and the few of us that couldn't discern one face from another didn't usually last long.

I think we're trying to place too much of a human expectation onto these machines. I think that human features and primate features are strikingly similar, and it's our specialized brains that let us so easily discern. Yes, with enough data and training we could have more accurate models, but we can't cry foul everytime an algorithm doesn't behave like a human does.

Reference: https://www.reddit.com/r/Pareidolia/

Paywalled but I think I get the gist. The main problem with cases of (I'm presuming) civil forfeiture is that the assest is what's being accused of involvement in crime, not the person. As assets have no rights the police can essentially do as they please with it.

Fairly poor management to run damage control on a story very few are familiar with. And how exactly is the theory dangerous to "them"? If true, they have the keys to power, they have the financial and political capital needed to weather any culture war, and a literal army of bots to make sure they win. If the dead internet theory is true anyone promoting it is powerless to change things, so why would those in power waste time fighting them?

Linux has been my daily driver for the past month, let me tell you why it shouldn't be.

20 mins ago I was getting Steam set up. I want to try Protons experimental features on Battlefield 4 to test for any glaring issues before the new game releases. Proton switches over, I go to install, and I'm told I don't have execute permissions on the disk I want to use.

Okay, I did have some issues with that disk initially, I probably messed with a setting that needs changed. Let me check folder permissions. Those looks good, let's check the partition itself. Yup, still a colored rectangle. Everything looks like it always does. I get to Googling and see someone on the AskUbuntu forums mention that my config should look like theirs with, "Show in user interface" checked off for that partition. I'm not using Ubuntu but it seems like a general fix and I didn't see an AskManjaro in the Google results, so I do that and reboot. No joy.

Keep digging at Google, find a Steam forum post about this. user notes that for security the disk would not be able to execute programs by default. Okay, sure, that makes a kind of sense. I follow his instructions and tag the drive as "users, exec, {something I've forgotten and will likely bite me in the ass in a weeks time}". and I go to reboot to make sure everything is on the same page. That's when the problems started.

FATAL ERROR. My first, yippie. After slamming my forehead against the keyboard in the correct pattern I was able to enter my root password and get to work. reading through the one-thousand-and-thirty-five lines of the journal file, I found the error around line 900. To paraphrase: disk don't mount no more. Out of pure luck I remembered that someone in the forums mentioned /etc/fstab, which is the text version of the config I'd been screwing with. I erased everything but "user" in the field I changed before and rebooted and managed to get myself in. The keen eyed among you will have seen that I had spaces in the field the first time I put it in. I think that fucked me.

On boot I licked my finger and stuck it back in the light socket, changing the field again to "user,exec" and mounting. Well praise be to Jesus, Allah, and whatever the hell Tom Cruise got roped into, because not only did the drive actually mount, Steam stopped whining at me and started a download.

I have no idea if the game will work, the download has another hour to go as I write this. Earlier today I saw this post and wanted to talk about how I've enjoyed Linux so far, and I still do! But Linux isn't built for users, it's built for technicians. You don't run Linux, you maintain it. I like this, but that's because I want to learn more about Linux and these miniature trial by fires force me to. If you're the kind of person who just wants something to either work or not, and can't be bothered to deal with an hour of 'maybe', stick with Windows.

Anecdotally, there's at least one instance of a ratings change altering the label on the box, Halo 2. A dev buried a photo of him mooning Steve Ballmer in the source code, and the ESRB changed the rating to reflect the newly found nudity. This caused a recall and the game box had to be updated with the new rating.

https://www.polygon.com/2015/4/14/8382089/bungie-butt-micros...

The ESRB should have a stronger stance on the issue, but they've been pretty lax. The most recent thing I found was them stating loot boxes would be specifically listed under in game purchases, backing April 2020. If the general consensus is that more restrictions are needed and the ESRB doesn't act, federal government is likely to step in. For example games that allow for gambling with real currency should be rated AO according to their guidleines. At best they could be no lower than T.

Most games, and specifically games that want to sell in China, do disclose the odds of any specific item being gotten by random chance.

That was actually staged. They built the walls as a floating frame that could be moved around him. It wasn't until a decade later that we started seeing prototypes for roomscale treadmills like these:

https://youtu.be/dTAAsCNK7RA

If we take this heresay as gospel we have a situation where an on duty officer would have shot the dog, had they thought they could get away with doing so. Additionally they admitted as much in conversation, and I consider speaking about wanting to discharge your weapon during a call to be an action worth note.

Let's raise the stakes for another example. If a cop does a debrief after a routine traffic stop and says, "I was waiting for a reason to shoot this man where he stands", that's a matter of concern. It doesn't matter that the cop did the correct thing this time, because they're showing that the desire to kill someone is the driving force in their actions.

Obsidian uses markdown files stored in a folder, so any fileshare should work fine. There's no account management or permissions needed, either you have the .md files or you don't. I use Dropbox to carry notes between my PC and laptop, but I've seen a lot of talk of hosting on GitHub or similar services as well, which would give you revision history and authoring if you needed to know who did what