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cucumber3732842

938 karma · joined January 20, 2026

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cucumber3732842··on Starlink ground station in Poland hit by fire in suspected arson attack
Absolutely, but there were several instances where the US, regardless of how disparate the interests in it are, was more or less at the negotiating table and then Israel started blowing stuff up.
cucumber3732842··on Starlink ground station in Poland hit by fire in suspected arson attack
On the flip side, when your allies know they can count on you you stuff like them picking stupid fights because they know you'll back them up. Israel dragging us further into Iran during the first ~third of the conflict when the US was trying to find a clean place to stop the escalation is a pretty good example of that.
cucumber3732842··on Montreal adopts bylaw banning insults against police, municipal employees
It always starts that way so the useful idiots can feel right.

Give it a decade and they'll be using it for everything.

cucumber3732842··on Montreal adopts bylaw banning insults against police, municipal employees
While it's not pleasant angry people who are wrong or unjustified doesn't burn out employees.

Angry people who are right burn out employees.

Nobody likes being a human shield for their employer.

cucumber3732842··on Woman Arrested, Dragged Away After Speaking About Flock at City Council Meeting
>It's not open Q&A. There's nothing preventing them from speaking on their preferred issue online, or even outside. Otherwise public meetings quickly devolve into anarchy. If a specific time was allocated to talk about speed limits, do you think it's fair game for TERFs to use that time to complain about gendered bathrooms?

Bring on the TERFs. Better it be a dumpster fire that get's DOS'd from time to time than people not be allowed to speak their minds.

cucumber3732842··on Woman Arrested, Dragged Away After Speaking About Flock at City Council Meeting
>Violent threats only sound like a good idea if you can only imagine them being used by people you agree with.

You mean like how they used the "you can't speak on an issue because we've decided we're not talking about that" rule to have this lady hauled off?

cucumber3732842··on Woman Arrested, Dragged Away After Speaking About Flock at City Council Meeting
Gather up a dozen friends, dress like Indians and throw the politician in the harbor. Yes I know I'm mixing and matching historical references, that's the point. Have one guy dressed as Elizabeth Warren, another guy like the redskins mascot and a third guy as Abu from the Simpsons like they didn't understand the assignment. The point is to maximize the meme-ability of it so that you get a court of public opinion trial and not the usual kangaroo court trial that people who thumb their nose at government get.
cucumber3732842··on Woman Arrested, Dragged Away After Speaking About Flock at City Council Meeting
Flipping various members of your government the bird has probably been ruled free speech up and down every federal district in the country at this point. The Supreme court affirmed it at least once, maybe two or three times now.
cucumber3732842··on Montreal adopts bylaw banning insults against police, municipal employees
I don't think it's even that the service that is delivered is unsatisfactory. I think it's that what the government is engaged in actively runs counter to what the people broadly want.

Like when people say we need better sanitation, there's too many tent cities, this needs to be fixed, etc, etc, and the city goes and hires a bunch of employees who then get to work fining residents for trash bin violations no shit they get heckled even if they solve some token amount of the core problem (invariably just enough to let the liars in the comments go to bat for them without the lies being obvious). And you see this kind of thing on damn near every axis of government enforcement and social services these days.

cucumber3732842··on Montreal adopts bylaw banning insults against police, municipal employees
> This bylaw is probably targeted toward citizens that come in and berate staff because they find out they have an unpaid parking ticket from 2 years ago that they have to pay before renewing their license (for example).

That's how the (evil) people who support it will construe it. In reality that kind of stuff doesn't really bother employees all that much because it's just part of the job, they knew it going in and everyone agrees those sort of people are out of line.

What bothers employees is when they get heckled for doing (in the course of their job) stuff that just about everyone agrees is wrong, bad, stupid or heavy handed, because most of those employees know deep down they're in the wrong, and having it pointed out and having enough of the public agree with the hecklers in message if not in delivery is a real morale killer. And then your burnt out employees stop giving a shit, do a bad job, get caught on camera enforcing the "you had to lie through your teeth to defend it to begin with" policy in a way that lays bare how f-d up it is. And that's what they're trying to avoid by threatening to fine any peasant who opens their mouth.

cucumber3732842··on 'We hacked the FBI:' Hackers say they have data on all FBI employees
I've just been calling them gay (because fed cops are famously secure about their sexuality) for years. Is there a meme I'm missing?
cucumber3732842··on Stanford R&DE Uses AI to Race Swap Students for Advertising
You cannot use stand ins for the product being sold. You can photograph your cereal in glue because milk makes cereal soggy or you can drizzle your chocolate syrup over mashed potatoes because ice cream will melt but neither of those examples would be legal if you were selling the milk or the ice cream. There's some gray area at the margin but this is how the law has been interpreted and what has been enforced for decades.
cucumber3732842··on The End Of Upward Mobility – AI is coming for the meritocracy
>I suspect a lot of the malaise afflicting the Rust Belt today is that most of the smart people left, leaving the social infrastructure strained by their absence.

They left because they read the regulations and realized that the mills were never coming back. Sending the smart people back won't fix that state of affairs except perhaps by making formerly industrial america more uppity which may in 50-100yr time get those boondoggles fixed.

cucumber3732842··on Apple Wallet driver's licenses coming to three new states soon
We shouldn't have to carry insurance cards or copies of our registration

If the papers ever conflicts what the goddamn cop pulls up on their computer we all know what the result is gonna be so skip the stupid step and just look it up.

cucumber3732842··on What California is learning from solar panels built over irrigation canals
I've got many a sun burn standing as has anyone else who's toiled away outdoors doing something while shirtless and white...

I suspect it's more of a "hassle ain't worth it to lose 20%" type situation.

Could absolutely be worth if you can make that 20% back dodging permits because it's not flagrantly visible on the aerials like roof panels are.

cucumber3732842··on What California is learning from solar panels built over irrigation canals
>It seems like it would be more effective to simply put all the solar panels in a field, and construct a cheap shade over the entire canal no?

Yes, absolutely. But if you try and do that kind of stuff and the regulators show up and kick you right in the dick. "You got a permit to put panels on this land?" "Where's your SWPPP?" "Where's your environmental impact assessment for shading that canal?". And HN cheers.

But if you say you want to cover the canal with solar panels out comes the rubber stamp because that's what the powers that be want to "incentivize" this week.

Does the success of populists make a little more sense now?

cucumber3732842··on High-mileage electric cars are more reliable than petrol ones, study finds
Because they're more reliable or because the cars are more expensive and therefore owners are statistically richer and take nicer care of things?

Like you can see this pretty clearly with Camry people vs Altima people

And when the fanboys that pollute every automotive discussion take issue with that comparison you trot out the Crown Vic vs Grand Marquis comparison....

The rate at which you burn through brakes and tie rods and struts and bushings and all that other crap MOT complains about is gonna have a lot more to do with where, when and how you use the vehicle than the source of the vehicle's motive power. And the rate at which vehicles show up with "marginal" stuff like tires and brakes hoping they'll get a break is a straight wealth proxy.

I guess there's no exhaust to leak though which is nice.

cucumber3732842··on Stanford R&DE Uses AI to Race Swap Students for Advertising
It's considered unethical for food marketers to use marketing photos that aren't of the actual product. Sure, it's a perfect example staged under perfect lighting with perfect presentation but when you see a Dorito on the bag it's a real Dorito.

Why are photos of people any different? There needs to be some grounding of the presentation to what you're actually selling.

(It's also illegal for food, but that's beside the point, you shouldn't get your moral compass from the law)

cucumber3732842··on Texas police department ordered to close for failing to provide public benefit
Less legitimate activity to obfuscate it amongst.

You can't launder an entire cartel's worth of money through a sandwich shop.

Plenty of cities have absolutely off the rails individual precincts or specialty tax forces.

cucumber3732842··on Texas police department ordered to close for failing to provide public benefit
>I don't know how they afforded 5 police officers are all

Do they have a state or interstate highway running through? Predating on motorists and commerce that does not vote in their jurisdiction is a tried and true strategy for a "zero cost" police department.

cucumber3732842··on Stanford R&DE Uses AI to Race Swap Students for Advertising
They're related because of an ironic lack of diversity of thought.

If they could have pried any one of the dozen line cooks that Standford RD&E surely employs away from the hookers and blow or got the drunkest frat boys to put down the bottle for a few seconds to ask them they would have been told that AI replacing people with different races and slimming people up is slimy enough that you should give a black girl a free hoodie if that's what it takes to get her to be the token for your stupid staged photo.

cucumber3732842··on Stanford R&DE Uses AI to Race Swap Students for Advertising
To quote one of the most prolifically insufferable linkposters of HN: "Demographics are destiny."

So, you fill your university marketing and publication department with people who think this is ok and this is the sort of PR faux-pas whoopsie you eventually get.

I'm sympathetic to the argument that this sort of marketing material needs as many races represented as possible so as many people as possible can at a glance see someone that looks like them and identify with it but something tells me the university isn't gonna come out and own it like that and even then using AI to make a replacement when you have a student body to pull from is kind of icky.

cucumber3732842··on People hooked on vapes try a new way to quit: cigarettes
>For the past 3 years I have replaced my ADHD stimulant medication with nicotine patches

My first thought was "That's a no brainer why didn't I think of that".

Then I remembered that I grew up during peak anti-smoking and so they made nicotine out to be some sort of borderline meth boogeyman rather than just extra addictive extra effective caffeine that comes in bad for your health form factors and that all that propaganda got sent straight to long term memory and I was indoctrinated by it at such a young age it didn't even occur to me to think outside the box like that.

Nicotine patches are expensive for what they are but they're basically free compared to meds.

cucumber3732842··on NASA’s Mars Sample Return mission is dead
I think if they had a big f-ing rocket at their disposal and could bundle a couple dozen of them MIRV style there would be no political downside if a bunch went splat so long as a bunch didn't

"look guys 9/24 of the rovers are transmitting back, great success"

cucumber3732842··on The End Of Upward Mobility – AI is coming for the meritocracy
I would. Furthermore, relatively kneecapping these people would probably be a long term good thing for our societal progress arc. The politics of people who have not known struggle for material comfort has been, to quote uncle Ted out of context, a disaster for the human race.

Like there's a reason every goddamn populist movement shits on "coastal elites" or "liberal white woman" or "wall street and the MBA banker class" some other boogeyman group that is invariably cut from a subset of these people. It's because the stuff they peddle is, typically bad if not fundamentally then the flavor they are peddling.

I'm sure this take will be wildly unpopular around here but I don't care.

cucumber3732842··on PDF Forgeries Are Surprisingly Rare (2022)
There are obscene amounts of "forged" stamped surveys and engineering drawings floating around.

Not like altering lines or anything material (I can already imagine the breathless replies being typed about how it's "antisocial" if someone's deck doesn't meet setbacks by 1ft or something) but changing text to remove references that would indicate other survey work was done that they don't wanna submit to public record, changing a labeled distance by a couple feet to make something that already exists technically compliant.

Like with everything else it's the little guys sticking their necks out. The big guys can afford good surveyors who "get it" and don't need to be told when a difference within the bounds of measurement error and will have four or five figure implications or that a survey result is so unfavorable that they should just call the client, bill whatever they would have charged as a consulting fee and not screw their client with the liability of a paper trail.

cucumber3732842··on How do traffic signals work? (2019)
A lot of lights exist not to add throughput, but to replace 2-way stops where less performant traffic (so like idiots, grandmas and heavy trucks) would have problems getting in, say fuggit (or get honked at, get flustered) and cause a near miss at least.
cucumber3732842··on How do traffic signals work? (2019)
"that's bad, peasants shouldn't do that, so we won't support it to make it suck"
cucumber3732842··on Winning the visa lottery
>it will get better in the 2nd and 3rd generation (it does but very slowly)

What about african americans?

What about african amercians?

It's like I'm the stupid goose in the meme.

African americans were on track to be more wealthy and less crimey, same as every other poor ethnic group in the US has done before. Irish, Italians, Poles, etc. Something went off the rails.

What happened? It ain't the skin or some societal factor that gets applied because of the skin. We got plenty of African and Caribbean immigrants to use as control groups.

(I don't expect you to answer this question, I expect this question to make a lot of people around here uncomfortable.)

>by for example pulling tricks like counting immigrants from India, Thailand and MENA together, or by not allowing the collection of data at all. This is really bad policy imo.

Agreed

cucumber3732842··on Probes into Toronto's shooter-for-hire network thwarted by impenetrable phone
"Hey guy's I've got a great idea, let's reframe our inability/unwillingness to do real police work as a technology problem in order to get the stupid peasants to not be too pissed off when we push a bill to snoop on them even more than we already do"

It's not like Toronto isn't already carpet bombed with surveillance. It's not like they don't have everyone's metadata. They could figure this out of they wanted.

Damn near every paragraph in this article is filled with unverified speculation "might be connected", "could be related". It's like text based equivalent of the scene in Anchor Man "the driver is on drugs", "we think he has a hostage or two". I bet there will be a dozen articles just like this from other cities over the next couple months.

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