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downandouton Twitter set to accept Musk's $43B offer – sources

I characterize the organizations he creates as pragmatic. They exist to objectively look at problems and solve them. You cannot solve hard engineering problems in any other way.

downandouton Twitter set to accept Musk's $43B offer – sources

Exactly this. Musk doesn't seem to have any patience for political nonsense - from either side of the political spectrum. The kinds of employees that would do this likely aren't a culture fit in a Musk-run operation, where pragmatism is the order of the day. You can always find another employee who isn't a PIA.

downandouton The day Steve Jobs dissed me in a keynote (2010)

The difference is that the pregnancy doesn’t affect the lives of all the people on Twitter. This guy was communicating with his clients, who had to respond to the news by working to prepare their albums for upload to iTunes. He had a perfectly legitimate reason for posting this on his website.

downandouton YouTube suspends The Hill for playing clip of Trump denying election results

They couldn’t control January 6 either. Literally the only people charged with sedition - those who had a plan - were part of an extremist organization that coordinated in person.

downandouton YouTube suspends The Hill for playing clip of Trump denying election results

War being threatened by a nuclear power like Russia carries with it the “catastrophic risk” of the end of the world, with billions of people dead. Even if one were to wholeheartedly believe that the hyperbole in your comment was an entirely plausible outcome of January 6, the Russian tweet is far more dangerous than anything related to the Capital riot.

It’s outrageously hypocritical that the Russian official’s account is alive today. They didn’t even slap a warning label on his tweet.

downandouton YouTube suspends The Hill for playing clip of Trump denying election results

Agreed…the hypocrisy of these decisions grows increasingly outrageous each day. For example, the reasoning behind the banning of Donald Trump from Twitter was that his rhetoric was “dangerous,” in that it may have encouraged/not discouraged the January 6 riot. On Tuesday (March 1), a Russian official threatened actual war over the economic sanctions the world is taking against his country [1]. His account is still active and the tweet is still up.

[1] https://twitter.com/medvedevrussiae/status/14986197503347507...

downandouton YouTube suspends The Hill for playing clip of Trump denying election results

It’s sad that youtube can choose what content to host?

As I suspect you know, his point was that it’s sad that YouTube is making politically motivated censorship decisions, just like China would. While we all know that Silicon Valley leans left, I think that those of us who want good things for the world would like to believe that these companies can check their politics at the door when it comes to running platforms that serve people across the political spectrum. Sadly, that’s not the case.

If YouTube identified itself as a partisan platform where speech that is not left leaning is in danger of being curtailed (which is what it is), I wouldn’t have a problem with these actions. But it masquerades as a neutral platform that is open to all, in the same way that CNN, MSNBC, and Fox masquerade as news outlets. That is a threat to democracy, because it creates the impression that only content which aligns with the platform owner’s political ideology is newsworthy or acceptable for viewing, and anything else is fringe.

downandouton Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2021 – Show and tell

You can contribute mining power to a large network of miners and get a percentage of the profits. They are called mining pools. These exist for virtually all currencies. Here's a list for bitcoin: https://www.buybitcoinworldwide.com/mining/pools/

downandouton I resigned from Twitter

Interesting take. I do think that social media is driving the selection of increasingly unfit political candidates worldwide, which is a big problem. In an environment where the objective is to share things that get the most “WTF” comments from those with whom you disagree and the most applause from those with whom you do agree, only the most extreme and/or inept candidates wind up getting attention and the resulting votes.

downandouton Making the dislike count private across YouTube

The issue with depending on comments is that the next step is to disable them whenever the sentiment turns decidedly negative.

Your use of the word "frightening" is an understatement in my opinion. Using the dislike button to add to the dislike count is a form of speech, and YouTube is silencing it. Given the growing disconnect between reality and content produced by the mainstream media, politicians, etc., YouTube should be increasing options for the masses to warn others about content, not decimating them.

downandouton The U.S. Treasury is buying private app data to target and investigate people

Oh I don’t think anyone would know about the government being behind it. They could do it through front companies. The government already does all kinds of other activities through front companies.

downandouton The U.S. Treasury is buying private app data to target and investigate people

If SCOTUS outlawed buying the data, they’d just find ways around that too. Maybe they’d just start creating apps and directly monitoring people. With an unlimited marketing and development budget, they could wind up on the majority of Americans’ phones pretty fast. Depending on the kinds of apps they created, they might get warrantless access to millions of bank accounts, text messages, emails, video conferences, full real-time location tracking, and more.

downandouton This word does not exist

Given the rise of Loot and other text-based NFTs, you might want to NFTify this too. I know Loot does this by creating a URL with the text in it that points to a text image generator.

downandouton YouTube deletes rapper's 'Let's Go Brandon' song claiming medical misinformation

Yes, it’s worth noting that this town hall was also a CNN affair, and the only full video I was able to find was not posted by them. It’s on some other random channel. Someone at CNN and/or YouTube decided this was bury worthy.

downandouton YouTube deletes rapper's 'Let's Go Brandon' song claiming medical misinformation

https://youtu.be/R8R2545fHCo

Oddly, it’s pretty well hidden in search, while other, older town halls came right up. I had to select a number of specific options in YouTube’s search just to find it.

downandouton YouTube deletes rapper's 'Let's Go Brandon' song claiming medical misinformation

I think you'd be pretty hard pressed to argue that the Hunter Biden stories weren't suppressed until after the election. Those stories and corresponding evidence were around before the election. They were completely buried wherever possible, and dismissed as conspiracy theories by the mainstream media when they couldn't bury them. It was only after the election that they were forced to admit that the Hunter Biden stories were factual.

downandouton YouTube deletes rapper's 'Let's Go Brandon' song claiming medical misinformation

It's only surprising in that they have, to this point, largely shrugged off criticism. Jenn Psaki, for example, has been extremely dismissive of any criticism whatsoever. Now, I think they are realizing that the (white)house is on fire, and it appears that they feel like they have to respond and cannot dismiss/gaslight their way out of it.

downandouton YouTube deletes rapper's 'Let's Go Brandon' song claiming medical misinformation

If you're looking for one? 100%.

downandouton YouTube deletes rapper's 'Let's Go Brandon' song claiming medical misinformation

It's pretty obvious that they went out and found someone named Brandon to have a photo op with. This was an SEO play.

downandouton YouTube deletes rapper's 'Let's Go Brandon' song claiming medical misinformation

This is a fascinating tweet on many levels.

1) I think it's safe to assume that Joe Biden has no SEO expertise, which means that someone with the power to send the President of the United States out for a photo op does. They went out and found someone named Brandon for Biden to pose for a photo op with.

2) To me it's terrifying that Presidential actions are now being dictated by SEO concerns, but it is interesting.

3) I would have expected this kind of thing from Trump, since he was obsessed with his public image. But apparently Biden, or at least someone close to him, is similarly obsessed.

4) Reading between the lines, the fact they responded in this way makes it appear that the administration is becoming concerned with the the growing anti-Biden sentiment that has arisen in the wake of the Afghanistan debacle and issues with cognitive decline that are becoming increasingly harder to hide. That town hall was a disaster [1].

[1] https://www.newsweek.com/joe-biden-town-hall-strange-moments...

downandouton YouTube deletes rapper's 'Let's Go Brandon' song claiming medical misinformation

That would probably be more acceptable than the way they are doing it now, at least in my view. If they had come out and said "we are pro Biden and used our platform to get him elected, and we have deleted this video because it insults our buddy," I'd be much happier with that. It's their platform...they can try to get their favorite tree elected President next time for all I care. The false labeling..."medical misinformation" in this case...is what I have a huge issue with.

downandouton Cracking Random Number Generators Using Machine Learning

Casino owners and employees aren’t dumb

Having met a few casino owners, and many more game supervisors actually charged with understanding the math of the games to avoid exploitation, I can tell you this is patently false.

downandouton YouTube deletes rapper's 'Let's Go Brandon' song claiming medical misinformation

The CDA as we know it definitely needs to be abolished. It was written long before Facebook and YouTube became the arbiters of truth for many people.

downandouton YouTube deletes rapper's 'Let's Go Brandon' song claiming medical misinformation

It's called censorship. It rarely ends well for society.

downandouton YouTube deletes rapper's 'Let's Go Brandon' song claiming medical misinformation

I wonder if they will ban videos about them banning this. This seems like a uniquely stupid hill to die on, regardless of how biased they are toward Biden.

downandouton Cracking Random Number Generators Using Machine Learning

I was actually considering something known to be a relatively weak pRNG....card shuffling in a casino setting.

downandouton Cracking Random Number Generators Using Machine Learning

Yeah, but that's 7 shuffles of a single deck. Most casinos use 6 or 8 decks. They are certainly not shuffling 42+ times.

downandouton Cracking Random Number Generators Using Machine Learning

So building on this...many physical casinos use a manual shuffle, especially at higher limits, as bigger players tend to distrust shuffle machines. Even some online casinos with live dealers will shuffle the previous shoe on camera, manually.

Since getting a truly random shuffle would take too long, this is a poor method of getting random results. Would it be possible to, at least to some degree, predict the order of the cards using one of these models, given the order of the cards prior to shuffling? I'm thinking something along the lines of being able to say that the odds of a given card being the next one are higher than they should be, not outright predicting the full order of the cards.

downandouton Cracking Random Number Generators Using Machine Learning

So would this model be able to predict any imperfect PRNG with some degree of accuracy, or just xorshift128? For the purposes I'm thinking, even 1% accuracy above purely random would suffice.

downandouton Canada imposes Covid-19 vaccine mandate on federal workers, transportation

I think this would be a more pertinent point if the adverse event rate was higher

The point is that they are intentionally doing something to water down the stats. In the minds of the vaccine hesitant, it destroys their credibility on everything else they say, even when those other things are entirely factual. Just seems like a terrible strategy to me. They are giving their critics both the gun and the ammunition with which to shoot them.