DradisPing
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User ID: 1102
DradisPing
1yr ago
My view is that there's a small chance that a super intelligent AI will enslave mankind in eternal totalitarianism.
A super intelligent AI controlled by the intelligence community? 100% chance of enslavement.
DradisPing
1yr ago
I'm not sure either way, but some points against the accused person being guilty:
- The feds always love to lead with anti government white people as the assumed perpetrator. The actual DC snipers were interviewed by police but released because they were both black and the profile said it was a white guy.
- The National Enquirer got anthrax envelope sent to their corporate HQ. The company name is "American Media". That's the sort of mistake I'd expect to happen if it was done by someone foreign.
- The first one was mailed 7 days after 9/11, which to me fits in more with a pre-planned follow up than someone coming up with the idea and implementing it after 9/11.
DradisPing
1yr ago
Does anyone have thoughts on the Halo show? I know the fans are outraged, but I've been enjoying it.
I generally enjoy serials, space ships, space marines, and bad aliens being shot. So it's a pretty easy sell.
The writing could be better. They kind of botched the flood reveal.
The budget limits show. The first five episodes were shot in Ontario, they switched to Budapest for covid reasons for the rest of S1. You can definitely tell that they were shooting some outdoor combat scenes in stone and gravel quarries.
But they made practical spartan suits and warthogs, which is fun.
It seems fans were expecting Band of Brothers meets Lord of the Rings in space. Which was never going to happen.
DradisPing
1yr ago
There are more risks involved in giving new drugs to women of childbearing age because of unexpected pregnancies.
DradisPing
1yr ago
They've banded together and declared standard commissions, so they can't compete on price.
Given how commissions are structured they are incentivized to close deals fast instead of holding out for the best price.
Basically people want real estate agents in their network because they believe they are less likely to screw them.
DradisPing
1yr ago
One theory I've heard floated is that there are a significant number of dead French special forces in Ukraine. Putting troops into the country and staging a bus explosion or something gives Macron cover to bring them back with full military honors.
DradisPing
1yr ago
Here's a big point you're missing:
Video games stole the action movie audience. These days if a young man wants to see some explosions, gun fights, and mild titillation he's not going to go to a movie theatre.
DradisPing
1yr ago
Rings of Power was doomed to be bad. They wanted to do a prequel, but didn't have the rights to The Silmarillion. So they could use aspects that were implied by other works but had to change details to avoid infringement.
Naturally most showrunners wanted to avoid that whole mess.
DradisPing
1yr ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockbusting
from the link,
The tactics included:
- hiring black women to be seen pushing baby carriages in white neighborhoods to encourage white fear of devalued property
- hiring black men to drive through white neighborhoods with their radios blasting
- hiring black youth to stage street brawls in front of white homes to generate feelings of an unsafe atmosphere
- selling a house to a black family in a middle-class white neighborhood to provoke white flight, before the community's property values decline considerably
- saturating the neighborhood area with fliers offering quick cash for houses developers buying houses and buildings, leaving them unoccupied to make the neighborhood appear abandoned – like a ghetto or a slum
DradisPing
1yr ago
I would like to throw out all my socks and buy only one style of perfectly matching socks so I don't have to match a sock again.
For the longest time Amazon Canada would only sell packs of assorted socks, which was very annoying. Now they sell packs of Amazon Basics identical socks. The big downside is now I have exactly the same socks as some of my friends.
DradisPing
1yr ago
It's called a loose meat sandwich. They were very popular in the period after ground beef became commonly available but before canned tomato sauce appeared in stores.
DradisPing
1yr ago
In Ottawa, 20 years ago. A local pub near Parliament Hill had a special. For $200 you could get a bottle of Dom Pérignon and 12 chicken wings. It showed up on the receipt as "wing special" so customers could expense it as food.
DradisPing
1yr ago
They work their personal networks, chat with friends of friends and let people know they are available. They tend to specialize in certain neighbourhoods so they can join social groups in that area. People are a lot more comfortable if they have some social connection to the agent, or if they get a referral from someone. Some of them actually are also Uber drivers so they can chat with locals and find out who may be interested in selling.
There are also some very underhanded tactics. Back in the day there were real estate agents who paid black women to push strollers around neighbourhoods to convince people it was time to sell. Also things like talking to lonely seniors and convincing them to sell.
DradisPing
1yr ago
If the knife guy uses one arm to cover his head, rushes in until he makes body contact, then starts stabbing like a madman he'll win easily. If the knife guy tries to keep his distance and duel he'll probably lose.
DradisPing
1yr ago
TempleOS is real, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TempleOS
but all of the cloud management stuff seems to be a hallucination.
DradisPing
1yr ago
Perhaps the most shocking thing about the public discourse around this bill has been... the lack of public discourse around this bill. What the hell has happened to us?
The Conservatives are leading the Liberals 42 - 24 in national polls. Keep in mind that the Liberals generally poll better between elections.
So a big chunk of the Liberal voter base has given up on Trudeau. However this puts the press in a bad spot.
The Trudeau government introduces subsidies of Canadian newsrooms. It's now up to $85,000 per reporter for qualifying news organizations. The Conservatives are likely to scrap it.
So Canadian news media is in a spot where if they do their job they are likely to go bankrupt after the next election.
DradisPing
1yr ago
Adobe has been working on integrating their own AI tools for a few years now. Plus I'm sure there are plenty of plugins with exiting support.
eg https://youtube.com/watch?v=c1Z-449UIBg https://youtube.com/watch?v=pLRLJbvVUiA
I haven't found an exact video on Frankensteining people together and smoothing it out, but it seems like something AI tools should be able to do a this point.
DradisPing
1yr ago
She's probably looking tired and bloated at the moment and wanted a photo where she looks pretty and all of the kids are smiling.
She likely has her own staff, but it's a few people not some huge department. They probably hired an outside photographer who they usually work with.
So the photographer sent over the photos he took. She didn't like any of them. One of her staffers said "I know photoshop!" and did an unprofessional job comping things together.
There used to be a blog called "Photoshop Disasters" that showed bad photoshops that had actually made it into print ads. So it could have been a bad job by someone who was allegedly a pro.
DradisPing
1yr ago
What does one do with a cat? IDK, I'm a dog person
I had a black cat and I put a black throw blanked on the ledge by the window. I then got a window bird feeder.
The cat realized the birds could still see his eyes so he'd squint to watch them. Then he'd get too excited and thump his paws on the glass.
Basically cats are cute and fairly low maintenance. They don't constantly need your company and are happy to just let you pet them while you use your computer or watch tv.
DradisPing
1yr ago
If you're in Alaska then you definitely haven't been getting enough sunlight over the past few months. It's a good time of year to visit Sedona. Hawaii is close but that can be pricey. Vitamin D & SAD lights are supposed to help but never did much for me.
Try taking care of animals. A litter robot gives a cat a fantastic joy / effort ratio.
DradisPing
1yr ago
The UK has very strict libel laws, but royals don't sue because shitting on the royals is an established press freedom.
So a big chunk of what would be celebrity gossip columns in the US gets shifted to royal gossip.
DradisPing
1yr ago
The strong version gets pretty crackpotty, but in a fun way. It's a guilty pleasure to read.
However there's a weaker take. Astronomy of the solar system was developed before electricity was understood and assumes that everything is electrically neutral. The argument is that electric charges are important with things like asteroids and planetary weather can be affected.
They predicted the first astroid lander would fail due to a difference in charge and sure enough it failed due to a mysterious flash. The one that succeeded orbited the asteroid for a few days, which would have given the charges a chance to even out.
In terms of atmospheric effects it's not a well respected theory because it hasn't developed any predictive models that work on that scale.
DradisPing
1yr ago
I'm a moderate believer in the electric universe theory, to the degree that I think it can explain a lot of strange celestial phenomena. eg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1561_celestial_phenomenon_over_Nuremberg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Los_Angeles
Combine those with the fact that it's hard for people to judge the size of things in the sky without knowing what it is. The limit of stereoscopic vison is about 215m. After that your brain just making an educated guess about the size.
DradisPing
1yr ago
My understanding is that Jesus washed the feet of the apostles (his best friends) to create the priesthood. There are no accounts of him washing anyone else's feet. There's no general call for Christians to wash the feet of randos.
I think it goes back to an idea best explained by Paul Graham: https://paulgraham.com/say.html
The post 2000 academic left learned that lesson well. They fight hard against any attempt to label them. They are just a bunch of people who want "good things" not a political group with an agenda.
This flows into some other areas. For instance some people get upset with the term Democrat when discussing politics. There was a guy on HN who insisting that saying Democrat was like saying Jew instead of Jewish. Of course that leaves the english language without a verbal way to distinguish between democratic policies and Democratic policies. Which is exactly the point. It makes discussions difficult.
Meanwhile both Republican and GOP refer to a clear group.
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