Jerry2

>But now the trend seems to be reversing and everyone wants that yearly numbered announcement with the hype that comes along with it.

And promotion and bonuses! This is the major impetus for these efforts.

You can try the live simulation here: https://www.metabunk.org/gimbal/ It's amazingly well done!

Quick inspection shows that it was done with tree.js. Neat!

Hmm... be careful not to use that locking feature when 'locking' it to a regular sign post. When I lived in NYC, my roommate's bike was stolen when a thief just removed bolts holding the sign and then he just lifted the whole bicycle and the lock over the post. He then bolted the sign back on. We saw the surveillance video from a neighbor's surveillance camera and the whole thing took under 3 minutes. We initially assumed the lock was defeated but this was a much more ingenious way.

If anyone wants to go down the "lab leak" rabbit hole, check out Charles Rixey's Substack [1]. He's assembled a massive database of articles and a complete timeline of events [2] that lead to COVID-19 pandemic. He's one of the members of DRASTIC which is a loose group of researchers looking into the "lab leak" hypothesis. [3][4][5]

Even Moderna's CEO Stephane Bancel does not discount it and say's "it's possible" after researchers found a genetic sequence in SARS-CoV-2 virus which was patented by Moderna three years prior to pandemic. [6]

[1] https://prometheusshrugged.substack.com/

[2] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/353547700_SARS-CoV-...

[3] https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/06/the-lab-leak-theory-...

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRASTIC

[5] https://drasticscience.com/

[6] https://youtu.be/YcgE-5a1Ztc?t=436

Given the dire situation and prospects for the future, doubling of the wheat prices is completely rational. Some countries are now also imposing export bans. [1] That won't stop price increases but at least they'll still have wheat and will be able to use it. Another crisis to keep an eye on is the global fertilizer shortage [2]. Near future looks pretty bleak.

[1] https://uk.finance.yahoo.com/news/hungary-ban-grain-exports-...

[2] https://www.wthitv.com/news/global-nitrogen-fertilizer-short...

Prof. Sabine Hossenfelder has a great article on the lack of progress in fundamentals of physics: "The present phase of stagnation in the foundations of physics is not normal " [1]

Choice quotes:

>We know this both because dark matter is merely a placeholder for something we don’t understand, and because the mathematical formulation of particle physics is incompatible with the math we use for gravity. Physicists knew about these two problems already in 1930s. And until the 1970s, they made great progress. But since then, theory development in the foundations of physics has stalled. If experiments find anything new now, that will be despite, not because of, some ten-thousands of wrong predictions.

>Ten-thousands of wrong predictions sounds dramatic, but it’s actually an underestimate. I am merely summing up predictions that have been made for physics beyond the standard model which the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) was supposed to find: All the extra dimensions in their multiple shapes and configurations, all the pretty symmetry groups, all the new particles with the fancy names. You can estimate the total number of such predictions by counting the papers, or, alternatively, the people working in the fields and their average productivity.

According to her, and many other physicists, there hasn't been any major progress in phenomenology since 1970s when Higgs boson was postulated.

[1] https://backreaction.blogspot.com/2018/11/the-present-phase-...

The oldest one I know is PDP-11. It's still being used in nuclear power plants and many plants will continue using it until at least 2050 (maybe even longer if they remain working). [1] PDP-11 was released in 1970 so your TSOS find is even older. I'm sure there's something even older than these two that's being used by various gov orgs and industrial systems. There's plenty of small consulting firms that support ancient systems. These contracts provide them with steady and stable income.

[1] https://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/06/19/nuke_plants_to_keep...

>Both Russia, Ukraine and Serbia have a Neo Nazi problem

So does the US. But in the US, neo-Nazis are not in our government, the Congress and in top military positions. They are extremely powerful in the Ukraine and are dictating policy.

>Mearsheimer has been proven wrong

Everything that Mearsheimer stated would happen to Ukraine has now come to pass. He predicted it perfectly 7 years ago. He was not wrong. Neocons and Liberal Imperialists, as he calls the "war party", have now sacrificed Ukraine and left them to be massacred by advancing Russians. If you want to debate any of his arguments, please do so.

How is AZOV battalion not a neo-Nazi outfit?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azov_Battalion

There are photos of them doing the Nazi salute [1] and videos of them flying the Nazi flag on the front lines. Even human rights groups have complained about the arms sales to neo-Nazis [2].

https://ukraineatwar.blogspot.com/2014/11/nazis-in-azov-batt...

https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/rights-groups-demand-isr...

If the US cuts off Russia from SWIFT, Putin has stated that it would mean war. I'm no military expert but my older brother who's an officer told me that he worries that Russia would immediately start cutting undersea cables that carry data across the Atlantic Ocean and basically cut off the US from Europe. That would cause billions of dollars worth of damage to Western economies every single day.

They already sent a message [1].

https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/43828/undersea-cable-c...

I've read a bunch of articles on this conflict and this video by Prof Mearsheimer from University of Chicago explained it the best to me:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JrMiSQAGOS4

My grandfather was in the US Air Force and has served as lieutenant general. He told me a story about the time he met Carl Sagan. He organized a conference on space for USAF officers and someone suggested he invite Sagan to give a keynote speech. My grandfather told me that Sagan was trouble from the start. He (or his office?) cancelled or delayed the conference multiple times and his list of demands for lodging rivaled those of a rock band. He also said he was rude and never smiled. After he gave his speech, one of the colonels asked him a question that my grandfather said was good and interesting but Sagan dismissed him in one sentence and didn't even want to engage him on it. BTW, that colonel is now a general and in charge of USSF!

One of the members of my team ordered a Framework Laptop, the Professional edition, about 4 months ago to replace his old Lenovo. In the first week, he had battery drain issues. Even when he put it to sleep, it would drain the battery. He had to keep it plugged in at all times. He tried few distros (including the older version of Ubuntu they recommend) and the problems persisted. His screen also had issues and colors would slightly shift. I lent him my colorimeter and he said the monitor would lose calibration after several days. He also complained about trackpad not tracking his finger properly. In the end, he returned it. I think he said you have 30 days to return it.

Hope they fix these issues.

>How

They have lobbyists [0][1], and you don't. But don't worry, "experts" and oligarchs tell us that corruption here is among the lowest in the World.

>Using lobbying, the revolving door and “dark pattern” customer tricks, Intuit fended off the government’s attempts to make tax filing free and easy, and created its multi-billion-dollar franchise.

[0] https://www.propublica.org/article/inside-turbotax-20-year-f...

>The biggest obstacle, the New America experts warn, is the lobbying power of Intuit and its allies.

[1] https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2021-10-21/california...

... or DMCA'd.

Over the past year, I've noticed that quite a few repos that I used to track have disappeared. I keep a local bookmarks list now because if a "starred" project is removed or DMCA'd, Github does not tell you about it and they remove any mention of the repo from the "starred" list.

> YT with that and ublock origin is a completely different experience.

SponsorBlock. It changed how I consume YT. It has saved me a ton of time.

> First, Firefox does ship a lot of anti-tracking tech, as much of it by default as possible without breaking sites too much.

Hi sfink. Thank you for a response. I still use Firefox myself but I've been disillusioned by the Mozilla's (mis)management in recent years. I think we will find out more about this "deal" with Meta in the next report and whether they have contributed anything to Mozilla. I find your theory about Mozilla teaming up with Meta to oppose Google interesting. But I don't see why Mozilla would rock the boat and upset their biggest customer.

As for Firefox' 'out of the box' privacy protections, please take a look at this academic paper that I've linked in another comment [1]:

Specifically, section 4.2.4 on page 238:

>Firefox is least effective at reducing third-party tracking-and-advertising requests. This is unsurprising, as Firefox’s enabled-by-default “standard” tracking protection “blocks fewer trackers”.

[1] https://petsymposium.org/2022/files/papers/issue1/popets-202...

I found this paper interesting [1] and how they characterize Firefox' behavior out of the box:

  We investigate the request behavior of each browser
  (Figure 7). Brave is the most effective at reducing third-
  party tracking-and-advertising requests; its claim to (1)
  is supported. The other privacy-focused browsers vary
  significantly in terms of reducing third-party tracking-
  and-advertising requests. Firefox Focus and Ghostery
  differ significantly in how much they reduce third-
  party tracking-and-advertising requests, but the perfor-
  mance of both supports their claims, (1) and (2). Fire-
  fox is least effective at reducing third-party tracking-
  and-advertising requests. This is unsurprising, as Fire-
  fox’s enabled-by-default “standard” tracking protection
  “blocks fewer trackers” [79]. It errs on the side of caution
  in what it blocks, focusing on restricting tracking cook-
  ies, social-media trackers, and fingerprinting scripts; it
  does not block other content (loaded ads, videos) that
  may perform tracking [78, 105]. Thus, while Firefox
  claims (2), its blocking of tracking and advertising is
  limited with its default settings.

This is quite disappointing given Mozilla's marketing around privacy.

[1] https://petsymposium.org/2022/files/papers/issue1/popets-202...

Call me cynical but I'm guessing that Meta just made a large donation to Mozilla and in turn they're using Mozilla to whitewash this proposal. They're just buying Mozilla's reputation (what's left of it) for their purposes.

FTA: >We’ve been looking to apply privacy preserving advertising technology to the attribution problem, so that advertisers can get answers to important questions without harming privacy.

Mozilla's is basically looking for a unicorn.

If they really cared about user privacy, they would have shipped an ad blocking and anti-tracking tech in their browser by default. However, if you look at where their revenue is coming from, you quickly realize why that will never happen.

> otherwise extralegally subverted it

No, read my comment again. Every one of the links shows a completely legal way to grab someone's data from any company. The whole point of my initial comment was to point out that legal system is so well primed against any privacy pushback that it's irrelevant what data is encrypted in transit. All the repositories and databases are just one NSL away. And NSLs are so easy to get that you don't even need to convince a judge to approve one.

From EFF: https://www.eff.org/issues/national-security-letters/faq

>By using NSLs, the FBI can directly order companies to turn over information about their customers and then gag the companies from telling anyone that they did so. Because the process is secret, and because even the companies can’t tell if specific NSLs violate the law, the process is ripe for abuse.

>A judge does not have to approve the NSL or an accompanying gag order.

>Over 300,000 NSLs have been issued in the past 10 years alone. The most NSLs issued in a single year was 56,507 in 2004. In 2013, President Obama’s Intelligence Review Group reported; that the government continues to issue an average of nearly 60 NSLs every day. By contrast, in 2000 (the year before the passage of the USA PATRIOT Act that loosened NSL standards), 8,500 NSLs were issued.

> LEOs? Can only think if Low Earth Orbits.

It's a catch-all term for all the law enforcement people. There's now so many organizations that can get your data through warrants, and some even without warrants, so that's a convenient term to use. And especially if you're not a citizen/resident of the US since the Fourth Amendment does not apply to you. But it's not like the 4A has stopped them or slowed them down anyway.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_enforcement_officer#United...

> I wonder why?

NSLs: https://www.eff.org/issues/national-security-letters/faq

Dragnet/Geofence warrants: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/google-tracked-his-bike... and https://www.logically.ai/articles/geofence-warrants-on-the-r...

Dragnet/Mass-surveillance keyword warrants: https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2021/10/04/googl...

Dragnet/mass-scanning of online storage: https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2021/12/20/googl...

PRISM: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_(surveillance_program)

RAMPART-A: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAMPART-A

Forced backdoors into "encrypted" email: https://www.theregister.com/2020/12/08/tutanota_backdoor_cou...

And who knows what else is still secret. A good rule of thumb is that if something's in the "cloud" or hosted on someone's computer that you don't directly control, you should assume that LEOs have access to it.

When all the data is centralized, you don't care about the end-point encryption. All you care about is having access to all the databases.

>So only comedians and animated TV shows are allowed to be offensive?

I heard some comedians say that they don't perform in Canada because of the same type of anti-free-speech laws. Maybe some Canadians can chime in but there are cases of comedians getting charged with hate speech laws.

> Poll after poll shows that the military is the most respected institution in American life.

Not even the military is safe anymore:

>Trust in the military is dropping significantly, new survey suggests

https://www.militarytimes.com/news/pentagon-congress/2021/03...

> Elements of both exist in the modern world

You could describe the dystopian part of our condition as a blend of various dystopian tropes: https://i.imgur.com/kDo2NNr.jpg

Which of these is most dominant depends on where you live.

Heh, I had one of those players as well. A coworker of mine purchased it, didn't use it often and when he decided to use it for biking, it stopped working. In the meantime the company went out of business and he couldn't even get it serviced. So he gave it to me. I did manage to fix it after waiting for spare parts for many weeks.

The reason why it looks like a Toblerone bar is because they decided to use through-hole electrolytic capacitors (because audiophile reasons) and the battery was round too (an 18650 IIRC): http://mikebeauchamp.com/wp-content/gallery/pono-teardown/ca...

The triangular shape and inability to carry it comfortably in jeans pants pockets doomed it from day one. I'm amazed something like this passed the design stage. And first encounter with user testing would have made it crystal clear that the shape was a no-go. Yet it not only got funded but was also mass-produced. It was a massive waste of money.

Looks like a repeat of the Guinea coup from few months ago: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/10/world/africa/guinea-coup-...

Also, an interestring video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O6O2T_-4Wls

Idiocracy was not meant to be a documentary.

If you interpolate over H, you will always introduce other colors into your gradient.