odd_primes
2mo ago
B) is the most surprising, in my opinion. I guess they pulled it off by buying out an established SFW business, switching it over to NSFW, then hoping that they could become "too big to fail" before the credit card companies and app stores caught on. They did eventually get banned from app stores, but amazingly they still apparently use Stripe for credit card processing.
odd_primes
2mo ago
Not surprising at all. The guy embodies a whole bunch of negative stereotypes - a Jewish pornographer and AIPAC donor who became a multi-billionaire thanks to somehow maintaining access to mainstream credit card processors. Then there's all the ongoing issues with alleged minors on OF, or teens doing releases on their 18th birthday... It's like a perfect storm of Zionism, porn, and finance. Maybe he could have had a Bill Gates style redemption arc if he had lived another 30 years and donated a bunch of money to charity, but it would have taken a long time and a lot of work to rehabilitate his image.
odd_primes
2mo ago
If the intent is to use the phone as an alibi based on location data, the issue is that modern phones track a lot more than just rough location. Eg. unlock/lock events, movement, checking notifications, etc. For a habitual phone user, a gap of a few hours with absolutely no activity in the middle of the day looks pretty odd. Especially when a digital forensics expert could compare it to the pattern of life for the last six months or something.
And if they get any indication that the suspect left their house (eg. vehicle GPS, red light camera, neighbor's Ring camera) now they are caught lying, plus leaving the phone at home looks like preparation for an illegal act.
I think the Liberals have managed to somewhat skillfully defuse immigration as the bomb around their neck, at least for the present, by simultaneously addressing the most negative elements of the system they had set up (while also not telling anyone they are doing so, as to avoid blame).
The big question is going to be how they deal with the bubble of post-COVID migrants as their visas start to expire. Canada does not have the law enforcement capacity or legal infrastructure to carry out a deportation program at any meaningful scale. If people simply overstay and refuse to leave until they have exhausted all possible remedies including bogus refugee claims, it will create a decade-plus backlog of appeals in a system that is already not fit for purpose. An illustrative example of this is the Indian migrant who killed 16 members of a hockey team in one of Canada's largest mass casualty incidents. He pled guilty and was sentenced to seven years in prison, which should have triggered automatic deportation after his release. Now years later, he is still in Canada filing appeals, and using the anchor baby he has post-conviction to argue for humanitarian relief. What's even more insane is that legacy Canadian media appears to be supporting this push for his deportation to be waived. If they can't manage to deport this particularly heinous criminal, do they really expect to be able to process 100k+ deportations per year?
odd_primes
2mo ago
For delivery apps like that, it's effectively a bidding system. Drivers see the estimated payout for a trip that includes the advance tip amount, so they are a lot more likely to take a trip with a decent tip. $0 tip trips sit in the queue getting rejected until a driver takes it because it's convenient or they are desperate. Worst case, if it sits for long enough, the app will increase the driver payment by a bit until someone takes it. So it's really not ensuring good service, just faster service.
odd_primes
3mo ago
It feels like basically the same dynamic as software engineering. It's a force multiplier for more senior staff who have good intuition about the problem space and can use agents as an army of extremely fast but error-prone interns. Cybersecurity is a very diverse field as well - the guy who sits at a desk watching a dashboard is probably screwed, while experienced vulnerability researchers are having fun being more productive than ever, plus with a whole new set of poorly secured targets in the form of vibe-coded projects.
odd_primes
3mo ago
Unfortunately your competitors are in the top 1% at better schools and also did grad school or a specialized masters degree in the field. You can argue that it's unnecessary credentialism, but they are spoiled for choice when the salaries are high and supply vastly outstrips demand. If this is something you are genuinely interested in and you have the intellectual horsepower, why not go back and do grad school? Do a bit of research and find a research group with a track record of placing grad students at quant firms if they don't end up going the academic route. It's that or find some other way to distinguish yourself from the crowd.
odd_primes
3mo ago
Perhaps the less triggering way to describe it would be "traditional" and "non-traditional". I know a couple people in the field who got in by doing a math PhD, deciding academia wasn't for them, and then getting referred by their advisor. That or specific quant finance programs seem to be the traditional pipeline for the industry. You aren't going to get your foot in the door without either that background, someone willing to vouch for you, or specific skills they need that aren't provided by their existing hiring pipeline (eg. hardware, high-performance computing, security, etc). The signal to noise ratio would just be too low if they interviewed anyone with a CS degree.
It's the same issue as with FAANG companies - sure, there are brilliant students who go to average CS colleges, but for them it's not worth the effort of interviewing dozens of duds to find an occasional hidden gem when sifting through applications for junior positions.
odd_primes
4mo ago
Fanficfare works pretty well to create an epub from most popular story hosting sites. I believe it also has a Calibre plugin. It has worked pretty well for me in the past to download from ao3, ff, etc.
odd_primes
4mo ago
The AI-airbrushed photos thing did happen apparently:
odd_primes
4mo ago
The demand for labor at $0 is infinite. No matter what you set your immigration target at, companies will still kick and scream about having a "labor shortage" by which they mean a shortage of labor at the price they want to pay. Taking their claims at face value is ridiculous. They are optimizing for their company's own individual benefit, ignoring externalities that impact the public. Low-wage workers have a massive burden on social services like medical care, schools, welfare programs, etc. For some farmer to get a $7/hour agricultural worker, everyone else is paying tens of thousands of dollars per year to subsidize their ongoing existence in the US.
I also think that it is in everyone's interest to argue for efficient and well-ordered, predictable governance, even when they don't agree with the policy goals.
I think most people here would take issue with previous governments intentionally turning a blind eye to illegal migration, rather than the current administration's effort to actually enforce federal law as intended by Congress.
odd_primes
4mo ago
The way they implemented blocking is completely idiotic. The one thing you are still able to do is edit your own posts in the thread and add something like "lol this loser blocked me" which helps a bit at least.
odd_primes
4mo ago
The problem with that is it eliminates the price incentive to find better ways of doing those shitty low-wage jobs. No VC will invest money into a startup trying to replace sub-$10/hour migrant hotel maids with robots. At $25/hour? Suddenly that's a lot more space to capture value.
Just as an example of this dynamic, look at touchscreen ordering in fast-food restaurants and self-checkout machines. The technology had been there already for 10+ years, what made it finally hit mass adoption was the point where the marginal hourly cost of a unit and its maintenance went below the cost of a worker by a significant enough margin that stores were willing to annoy their customers for a bit as people got used to it. I'd personally rather have an economic makeup that has fewer low-wage jobs and more engineers figuring out automation rather than an underclass of serfs that are paid so poorly (yet subsidized by the taxpayer) that they are impossible to displace.
odd_primes
4mo ago
That's how modern propaganda works though. In a country with 340 million people, you don't need to make things up whole cloth. Just find that one outlier incident that suits your narrative and blast it out for weeks until people are suitably outraged.
There's a reason normies were blasted with the George Floyd footage for weeks, but not the Irina Zaretska video, which was arguably even more horrifying.
That seems like more of a media control problem. Right now an illegal immigrant who murders someone typically gets called a "Texas man" with no photo and a stub of an article in the local newspaper. Rare exceptions exist, but they are usually because Trump forced the story into the national conversation, and the national media coverage is to "debunk" whatever he said. Meanwhile these ICE incidents get weeks of breathless coverage by national media, orders of magnitude higher than comparable police shootings that happen every day. It's easy to give normies the ick, the problem is that the right doesn't own the propaganda apparatus.
odd_primes
4mo ago
Yes, the terms and conditions they put on access to the data includes a prohibition on the use of the data for studying verboten topics like race and IQ. The "scandal" is that they apparently got access to the data second-hand via another researcher and used it to do science.
odd_primes
4mo ago
The military has dereliction of duty - if you refuse to perform your duty or are willfully negligent, that's a UCMJ charge. I think you could apply a similar argument to police. This is not slavery or conscription. A soldier who voluntarily signs up for the military, knowing what it entails, can do a significant amount of harm by simply refusing to do their job in a critical moment. The time to make that call is before enlisting, not months or years later when lives are on the line. By commiting to performing an action and then intentionally failing to perform it in a way that cases harm, that creates liability, potentially criminal liability.
Another good example is fraud. If you pay someone $10k to fix your roof, and two weeks later they "refuse to act" and keep the money, that's a crime. This case is less black and white obviously, but police officers receive pay and benefits in excess of comparable jobs because of the potential danger. Police officers who defect on this social contract should be punished accordingly, whether that's administratively or through criminal charges in the most extreme cases.
odd_primes
4mo ago
Tactically autonomous vehicles are a big problem for public transit advocates because cars are much more labor-intensive, and yet still overwhelmingly preferred. Eliminate the need for drivers and instead of cheap bus routes, you will end up with a bunch of low-cost Uber Pools outcompeting the public transit system by doing point-to-point trips more quickly and in a safer, more comfortable environment.
So for anyone who is a public transit activist for environmental or aesthetic reasons, this is a disaster because they lose their best arguments for convincing moderates (cost and efficiency).
I randomly stumbled across that series at the library as a kid and read at least the first couple books. It definitely would not get published today, just due to the premise being anathema to mainstream publishing houses. For context, the series is about a group of young Australians essentially engaging in guerilla warfare and sabotage against foreign invaders (from unspecified countries in Southeast Asia). Looking at the critical acclaim at the time is a fascinating window into the discourse in the '90s and early 2000s.
Edit: Just to be clear my recollection is that the author really tried to avoid racial and geopolitical issues to the point where I found it somewhat confusing and unrealistic. He mostly focused on the characters and their struggle to survive under occupation. The premise is what would make it unpublishable, not his execution of it.
odd_primes
4mo ago
Weird, scrolling through the best-selling books list on Wikipedia Matilda is a fair amount behind both James and the Giant Peach and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory when it comes to Dahl books, not to mention the movie adaptations for the latter.
A couple other contenders post-WW2 are Charlotte's Web (1952) and Watership Down (1972). A lot of the bestsellers in the '80s and '90s seem to be series like Goosebumps, Nancy Drew, and such.
odd_primes
4mo ago
It's kinda lame since like you said, 75% of penalties are converted. The keeper has to both guess right and commit early enough to intercept it. The trick really just relies on the fact that the keeper is in such a bad position that they have to commit early in order to have a chance.
Then again my opinion is colored by hating the dynamic where games sit at 0-0 only to be decided by a penalty shot.
odd_primes
4mo ago
Usually they can't because when they sign a contract for credit card processing, they have to agree not to offer a lower price for debit/cash. It's pretty normal in some countries like Australia to have a credit card surcharge though. In Australia the surcharge is capped at the cost for the merchant to accept that payment method, which seems pretty reasonable. That way there is actual price pressure to cut interchange fees.
odd_primes
4mo ago
I picked up MechWarrior 5: Mercenaries over the holidays, overall it's pretty fun. It's the first installment I have played in the series though so I can't really give a comparison to other iterations.
Pros:
- It's just viscerally satisfying to pilot a giant robot around and blow stuff up.
- They do a great job with the sound design and feedback from stepping on things, firing weapons, etc.
- It's fun to customize mechs in various ways, the shotgun Kintaro build is great.
- The career progression is overall pretty good, with missions unlocking new, bigger mechs in a somewhat random way.
Cons:
- The AI teammates are a bit slow in the head, they make up 3/4 members of your squad but often do under half the damage.
- The standard missions get a bit repetitive (although to be fair the story ones are decent).
- Walking distances... Bigger, more powerful mechs are slower, but the mission maps stay the same size. This started getting pretty annoying later on in the campaign.
odd_primes
4mo ago
This case looks a lot more justified than Babbitt. Accelerating a vehicle towards a police officer is an imminent threat of death or serious harm, while Babbitt was unarmed and did not present an immediate threat to anyone. The officer could have used force, but I don't think they were justified to use deadly force given the circumstances.
Wan 2.2 had the lead for a while, but LTX 2.3 came out recently and might have changed that. They are pretty impressive considering the VRAM limitations they have to work within, but definitely a ways off proprietary SOTA.
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