The amazon definitely got the man-face treatment. The sorceress and assassin also got more conservative outfits, and they appear a bit older. The assassin also got reworked, the original is more of a femme fatale, and they race-swapped her to Asian.
Comparison image here - reddit link.
I remember people being mildly annoyed about it when the game came out, but they didn't do anything too crazy, so it was mostly just grumbling.
odd_primes
9d ago
The falls are neat but the surrounding area is a bit of a tourist trap. Niagara-on-the-lake is nearby and quite a bit nicer though, with lots of wineries and picturesque scenery. Stratford is also nearby.
If you're willing to travel a bit further Algonquin Park is about a 3 hour drive north. It's a beautiful national park with amazing fall colors this time of year. I'm sure there are decent closer options as well if you don't feel like driving that far.
Toronto itself doesn't have a lot to recommend it really. It's like a worse version of Chicago. The ROM is decent and they have some art galleries I guess? Given the choice I'd visit Montreal or Quebec City over Toronto, at least the French language and culture there is distinct and interesting.
odd_primes
11d ago
Geez, page 60 has a default admin password of 12345... There's a decent chance they just used that and then clicked the defrost button. It's fortunate that the attackers appear to have been unsophisticated, apparently you can also remotely upload new firmware and they don't describe any verification or signature validation.
Or maybe half a step more sophisticated they got VPN creds for the grocery store from a data breach or something, I doubt they were just sitting accessible on the internet. That's the sort of thing Shodan would have flagged years ago.
odd_primes
16d ago
I think it will take a while, particularly for large bureaucratic entities with entrenched market positions. Even in software engineering, a rather ridiculous amount of time is spent on coordination problems, figuring out what customers want, compliance and legal, flip-flopping management... If that overhead was previously say, 50%, even if LLMs can cut the dev time to zero, the maximum speedup is still only 2x. It's effectively an organizational version of Amdahl's law.
odd_primes
17d ago
COVID relief was basically helicopter money for the lower class who knew how to work the benefits system. From a zoomed out view it looks a lot like their stock tracking their target demographic's disposable income.
odd_primes
17d ago
That's the problem with everyone involved being drunk and high... Of the two men in the initial threesome, one fell asleep and couldn't perform, and the other started vomiting. No one had the mental capacity to consider the next morning.
odd_primes
18d ago
One thing to note is that only four of the men involved are accused of sexual acts. The "Cornell 7" is certainly a more attention-grabbing headline than the "Cornell 4" I suppose.
Ironically the frat president uninviting her from the Halloween party was probably an attempt at damage control. They had nasty rumors of a drug-fueled orgy floating around involving this woman already, they would have to be insane to invite her back (for one of the wildest parties of the year) and risk it happening again. And obviously it's a lot harder to uninvite the people who live there.
Right up until the rape accusation it looked like social shaming was mostly working as intended. Everyone involved made bad decisions and were getting mildly punished for them. The woman's social life was negatively impacted and rumors were going around about the frat being rapey. The issue is that the woman exercised a unilateral option to absolve herself of blame and dump 100x the consequences on the men.
odd_primes
28d ago
How advanced were non-English plagiarism checkers in 2012? Ripping off a Portuguese article by translating it into French seems like the kind of thing someone could get away with back then, but would get caught pretty trivially today by LLM analysis. No one looked too hard at random op-eds, but once the author got scrutiny by winning a major award he was doomed.
odd_primes
28d ago
It's pretty clearly a reference to Jason Ardnay, the black Cambridge professor who killed himself after being revealed to be a serial fabulist and plagiarist.
Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard was a step in the right direction. Before, colleges were openly discriminating and celebrating it, and now they are doing it with a wink and a nod. Flagrant patterns of illegal discrimination are trivial to identify by looking at the standardized test gap between the median black student admitted and the median white student admitted. The DoJ needs to put some metaphorical heads on spikes. College administrators should be as terrified of a DoJ civil rights investigation as they were of a Title IX case during the Obama administration. Until that happens, claims of "winning" ring hollow, when white and Asian students still don't get a fair shot at one of the most critical junctures in their lives.
odd_primes
2mo ago
They probably claimed "I lost access to my email and forgot my password" which is somewhat plausible for an account that has been inactive for a decade. There isn't really a good way to verify identity in a case like that. I guess Riot figures that the account doesn't have anything of transferrable value anyways - it's not like a crypto wallet where they can clean it out. Worst case they just give it back.
odd_primes
2mo ago
Use an open weight model like Gemma 4 or Qwen 3.6 Vision. There are plenty of abliterated or "uncensored" versions floating around, people race to produce them whenever a new open weight model drops. It might not even be required though, Gemma 4 at least is pretty easy to jailbreak.
Then it's just a question of finding the most efficient way to process long videos, which will depend on the goal. For three sentence summarization, you could probably get away with using a handful of key frames. If the summary is supposed to reflect the "plot", maybe throw in an audio transcription of the first minute or two into the context as well. Then have the LLM produce a summary.
This is the sort of thing you could throw at Claude and get a prototype working in a couple hours, even without much background in the field. It's a pretty straightforward problem that has a lot of prior art.
odd_primes
2mo ago
A decade ago, the United States Government was still paying pensions from the Civil War.
Wasn't that a handful of cases of basically benefits fraud? Say someone is born in 1845, they marry at age 90 to a woman age 15 (born in 1920) and then she lives to around 100.
Turns out there's a Wikipedia page for these cases: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Civil_War_widows_who_survived_into_the_21st_century
Another way to view this is that we are seven or eight generations removed from the Civil War - that's a lot of time for values to change, especially in an era of extreme technological progress.
odd_primes
2mo ago
Yes, the man filming her goaded her to say it again, and she did. That was the charge that stuck, the jury acquitted her of the charge involving the child that happened off-camera.
odd_primes
3mo ago
Airgapping really isn't that hard. It's just annoying and inconvenient, so it takes an incident like this to encourage an organization to do it. Same with sandboxing - it's way down the priority list compared to getting a SOTA model out the door, until an incident happens.
The model clearly knew that it was not doing what the prompters had wanted it to do. It just did not care, because it was trained to do whatever it took to ace it tasks. This has implications way beyond IT security.
If it was prompted with something like "you are an expert hacker, go complete these benchmarked tasks using the utmost creativity and technical skill, consider any and all approaches" then it did exactly as instructed. We can't know without seeing the prompt, test harness, etc.
What's frustrating about discussions of AI alignment is the disconnect between people who consider alignment to be the AI doing what it's told, and people who think it means the AI doesn't do "bad" things. By the prior metric this seems like successful alignment, if it was in fact prompted in such a way that hacking the location of the answers was in scope. This is something that CTF hacking competitions have to explicitly put in the rules: a list of infrastructure and services that are off-limits to contestants. Because it turns out hackers will consider the location with all the flags to be fair game, especially if it's a softer target than the actual challenges.
odd_primes
3mo ago
If you want to get a bit tinfoil hat, Rotten Tomatoes is a subsidiary of Comcast. So is Universal Pictures, which is the distributor of The Odyssey. If I were a conglomerate that owned both a movie distributor and a movie review aggregator, it sure would be tempting to crack down on "inauthentic review bombing" or whatever.
Apparently break even is $650-750 million, given the large budget and marketing costs.
After the movie leaked on 4chan, apparently they have been frantically DMCAing anything with even a single frame of the movie. That might be making things difficult for reviewers.
There is practically no competition in terms of summer blockbusters right now, and Nolan has a lot of name recognition. Same with The Odyssey, most people have at least heard of it. It could be the biggest trainwreck of a movie ever produced and people would still go see it just on that basis. Critics are going to glaze Nolan no matter what. If it turns out to be a complete stinker in terms of audience reviews, it's going to hurt Nolan's next movie, not this one. (Edit: currently it's sitting at a 89 critic score on metacritic, and a 5.1 user score...)
I'd be surprised if it cracks a billion though, because the movie doesn't seem like it will appeal to the Chinese / international market.
The weirdest thing is the ads for AIDS medications on standard TV channels. I barely watch TV, but I was staying at a hotel a little while ago, flipping through channels, and apparently this is commonplace now? And we are collectively paying for it through health insurance... Fantastic.
odd_primes
3mo ago
Even George Droyd has been banned off most major platforms, including X. It's less about bloodthirstiness and more about who controls the censorship apparatus. Some left-wing employee at YouTube or Meta is the one deciding which accounts get pulled for "harmful content" and which are allowed to continue existing as permitted political expression.
odd_primes
3mo ago
Beat cops in shitty areas are effectively societal janitors. Eventually they adapt to dealing with unpleasant, low-trust people all the time and that colors their interactions with society at large. The only well-adjusted people I know who went into the field did their time in the trenches and then quickly found a specialty that did not involve daily catch and release of fent zombies.
odd_primes
3mo ago
I'm rather skeptical of the claimed cognitive benefits. Much like learning a musical instrument, it seems like more of a proxy for having highly motivated, involved parents who are providing general intellectual enrichment. It's quite difficult to separate out the effect of a specific activity.
Some of my cousins live in Canada, and there it is also subject to an interesting selection effect. French immersion programs are, on paper, intended to make more Canadian students able to communicate in both official languages. In practice, it's how the upper-middle class gets their kids placed in better public schools. Generally ESL students are not eligible for French immersion, since they are receiving supplemental English lessons. This makes the pool of French immersion students significantly higher SES and less "diverse".
odd_primes
3mo ago
They had been ruling for 130 years prior to the Dance of Dragons, the civil war that killed off most of the dragons. That creates a lot of institutional inertia. Also the seven kingdoms were called that for a reason - they weren't exactly inclined to cooperate to kick a Targaryen off the throne, if it meant elevating their rival next door.
After the Dance of Dragons there was a pretty long period of regencies and conflicts, where it sounds like the different kingdoms were effectively fighting over who would rule by proxy. It really was a downward trend from there, until Robert's Rebellion ended the dynasty.
odd_primes
3mo ago
Does the AI still carpet their territory with units on higher difficulties in 1upt? I found that as annoying, if not more annoying than the doomstack play in IV. At least it's easy to chew through a doomstack with a few sacrificial catapults or other units that do collateral damage.
The Hilton in question is literally across the street from Aylo (Pornhub) headquarters. Aylo is listed on Google maps, it's easy to verify. It would be an insane coincidence if that was not his target.
My guess is that this incident will get pushed out of the news cycle pretty quickly. Only one civilian was killed, and based on video taken of the incident, many online suspect that the female police officer accidentally shot and killed him. There is video of the civilian fleeing towards her position, the police officer appearing to be startled, pointing her firearm towards him, and then the man falls to the ground. Police refuse to confirm or deny this.
Yes, the ad was a bad move both morally and tactically. However, no one will care what Vance's opinion on this was in a week, let alone in two years. I guess he figured a bit of bad PR was better than intra-party drama. Now when Vivek loses he can't claim that he was stabbed in the back.
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