Russia has messaging for useful idiots on the right and messaging for useful idiots on the left. To the right they’ll say stuff like “America should stay out of foreign wars”, “we should make Ukraine pay for the assistance”, “the price of oil will go up” blah blah. To the left it’s shit like “Ukraine are Nazis”, “America is perpetuating this war”, “NATO are the aggressors” blah blah

The goal either way is to sow division, doubt, demoralise, create instability, create distrust and sap European & US power’s resolve to support Ukraine. And also to devalue information with false, misleading and contradictory information. It’s not hard on social media to see how this shit spreads around with insincere actors pumping false news and misinfo into the feeds that gets picked up by the useful idiots.

Yes I know. I’ve was there for it too mocking these dinguses. But it only became mainstream with COVID when it sort of metastasized and merged with a bunch of other deranged conspiracy nonsense via MAGA & QAnon.

I certainly am. I also got blocked by Kirstie Alley, Rudy Giuliani and Michael Avenatti for criticizing their cult, grift & grift respectively. I’m sure there are a few others I don’t know about.

The Cybertruck is a fail on so many levels that I wonder why anyone wants one. It’s not a good EV, it’s not a good truck, falls short on price & range, is prone to corrosion, looks stupid, is totally impractical, and lethal to pedestrians & cyclists. The thing violates so many EU regulations that it will NEVER be on sale there and anywhere else that doesn’t like murder machines.

Sounds to me like shareholders should call his bluff and be rid of him. Maybe then the company won’t be wasting money on boneheaded vehicles like the Cybertruck.

I got blocked by him on Twitter (in 2012!) for mocking his whackjob antivax views. He was espousing shit headed antivax nonsense long before it was fashionable.

He’s been saying variations of this shit for years. If you listen to the Knowledge Fight podcast there is scarcely a week when he hasn’t invoked some schtick about how this could be the last broadcast.

Of course, if this dumpster fire has genuinely stopped paying the bills and the creditors are changing the locks then boo hoo for Jones. I’m sure he’ll weave it as a conspiracy but this asshole has had it coming and then some.

This guy seems to be taking safety slightly more seriously with his sub plans than the last guy. Which is unfortunate for people looking forward to more billionaires transforming themselves into paste.

I know tar zxf and xjf off by heart. I probably do 100x as many extracts as creates. Tar is a stupidly antiquated command though.

They have to have a human respond to each and every complaint about that ad. Seems more sensible to automate and flag suspicious ads before the complaints happen.

There are other considerations here though. Google suffers reputational harm if users become victims through their platform. It becomes news, it creates distrust in users, it generates friction with regulators and law enforcement. Users may be trained to be ad averse or install ad blockers. In addition, these ads generate reports which costs time to process even if the complaints are rejected.

At the end of the day these scammers are not high profile advertisers and they’re not valuable. They’re burner accounts that pay cents to deliver their ads. They’re ephemeral, get zapped, reappear and constantly waste time and resources. Given that YouTube can easily transcribe content and watermark it, it makes no sense to me that they wouldn’t put some triggers in, e.g. a new advertiser places an ad that says “Elon Musk”, or “Quantum AI” or other such markers, flag it for review.

Body worn cameras stop a lot of cop abuse (and also false accusations of abuse) since in the aftermath of some incident the footage often speaks for itself. As is the case here.

Policing in the UK is based on the principle of public trust and approval. i.e Peelian principles. That doesn’t mean there aren’t terrible racist cops or thugs in the ranks because there are, but generally it means cops aren’t on power trips, recognise they are the public and there to serve the public, not just arrest people, and they also exercise discretion and common sense. Again, not perfect and there are rotten apples, but there is that ethos in policing.

I think that is lacking in US forces. They’re more like a civil military, separate from the public in mentality and adversarial. That said, I think US cops are also burdened with societal problems that shouldn’t be theirs to deal with - mentally ill, homeless, addiction, guns. I’ve seen enough “officer involved shootings” to realise most were justified in the moment. More than half are straight up felons getting into gun fights with cops. Others are gray though - e.g. a crazy homeless dude pulls a knife and charges a cop and of course they shoot the guy - which is justified - but why did society care so little that it came to this? Money spent on programs for addiction, homelessness and mentally ill would pay off in terms of less criminality and less shootings. As would changing policing to be more Peelian in nature.

I’ve disabled personalised ads on YouTube and I see this sort of shit all the time. I’ve given up reporting them because 90% of the time the report is rejected. I don’t even understand the rationale for rejecting it because it’s an obvious a scam as a scam can be - ai impersonation, fake endorsement, illegal advertising category. It’s a scam YouTube.

I don’t even get why these ads even appear. YouTube has transcription & voice / music recognition capabilities. How hard would it be to flag a suspicious ad and require a human to review it? Or search for duplicates under other burner accounts and zap them at the same time? Or having some kind of randomized audit based on trust where new accounts get reviewed more frequently by experienced reviewers.

I think climate activists would just be better off doing what everyone else does - lobbying. Identify politicians who represent areas who would benefit from pollution controls, or green investment or whatever and push the message. Performative acts in front of cameras might feel good but it’s a blunt tool to change policy. Some protestors such as “just stop oil” campaigners are so stupid that they actually help the causes they supposedly oppose.

Spotify and other such services almost certainly sound worse because they are compressed. But it’s not really a like for like comparison with vinyl. Spotify is streaming audio for people who want to play music casually in cars, earbuds etc. It offers convenience, not perfect sound fidelity. FLAC / CD on the other hand could be compared to vinyl and would win hands down for better frequency and range. The only reason they wouldn’t is if the CD master sucked and the vinyl master didn’t.

And vinyl is very lossy in its own way. The (digital) master of each side undergoes dynamic range & frequency compression to fit the limitations of the format (e.g. to reduce sibilance, track width). Then the master is cut into a lacquer disc from which a “father” is made, from which “mothers” are made, from which stampers are made and from which the vinyl record is made. So the vinyl in someone’s hand is a copy, of a copy, of a copy, of an altered digital master. The stamper too wears out so if someone is unlucky they get a pressing right the end of its life. And playing the disk can cause wow, flutter, distortion and general wear & tear can cause hiss, pop, dullness and scratches.

So vinyl will never sound better unless it received a better master than other formats.

I once developed an electronic program guide for a cable TV company in New Zealand and I’d lose my mind if I had to use timezones. The basic rule of thumb was:

a) Internally you use UTC religiously. UTC is the same everywhere on Earth, time always goes forward, most languages have classes that represent instants, durations etc. In addition you make damned sure your server time is correct and UTC.

b) You only deal with timezones when presenting something to a user or taking input from a user

Prior to that I had worked for a US trading company that set all their servers to EST and was receiving trades through the system which expressed time & date ambiguously. Just had to assume everywhere that EST was the default but it was just dumb programming and I bet to this day every piece of code they develop has time bugs.

The only reason people use JS is because it’s the defacto language of browsers. As a language it’s dogshit filled with all kinds of unpleasant traps.

Here is a fun one I discovered the other day:

new Date('2022-10-9').toUTCString() === 'Sat, 08 Oct 2022 23:00:00 GMT'
new Date('2022-10-09').toUTCString() === 'Sun, 09 Oct 2022 00:00:00 GMT'

So padding a day of the month with a 0 or not changes the result by 1 hour. Every browser does the same so I assume this is a legacy thing. It’s supposed to be padded but any sane language would throw an exception if it was malformed. Not JavaScript.

What I’m alleging is it seems more than a slight coincidence that Trump hooks up with one of Epstein’s victims. That it seems like the sort of thing that journalists and investigative reporters should be taking a look at for obvious reasons. Like when did she first meet Trump, who introduced her, was she working for a “modelling agency”, when and where she met Trump, how she was present at these events, who paid for her accommodation / lifestyle etc.

Meidas Touch found and produced a contemporaneous news article a few days back that Trump was “dating” one of Epstein’s victims, Anouska De Georgiou in 1997. Seems more than a small coincidence.