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merc

@ merc @sh.itjust.works

Posts
4
Comments
1674
Joined
3 yr. ago

  • Flock Says Its Cameras Worked 'Correctly' When Police Tracked and Ambushed Me for No Reason

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  • It makes me wonder if politicians, celebrities, etc. have their plate numbers already entered into Flock as a whitelist of people not to pull over.

    The story makes it pretty clear that the cops are, as usual, not doing any independent thinking. The system says to pull that car over, so they do what the system wants. They don't double-check to see if what the system is telling them to do is reasonable. If someone fat-fingers some data entry and the plate for the governor of California gets added to the system, the cops might charge up and box him in and jump out with their guns drawn. That might result in someone with actual power getting mad about Flock. So, maybe they prevent that by pre-loading the system with a whitelist of plates that are assumed to be in the clear.

  • Flock Says Its Cameras Worked 'Correctly' When Police Tracked and Ambushed Me for No Reason

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  • four cop cars came flying out of nowhere and boxed us in. The officers jumped out and started shouting.

    So, 4 cars, who knows how many cops.

    Really, this is a story about how absurd cops are in the USA.

    At no point in this tale was there ever a car reported stolen. It was only a set of license plates that went missing. So, at no point was there a car thief, you can't have a car thief if there's no stolen car. Obviously, if there's no car thief, there can't be any reason to assume that the person in the "stolen car" will be violent. Yet, somehow the police charged up aggressively, boxing him in using 4 cars, jumping out and shouting, hands on their guns.

    The cops even claimed that their reaction was "lucky" for the guy:

    “You’re lucky we’re in Plymouth. If you were in Minneapolis, they definitely would’ve come at you with guns drawn.”

    And the guy considers himself lucky too:

    And the more I’ve sat with the aftermath, the more I’m thinking about how, with a different set of officers in a different city, or a different unsuspecting driver with 34 ## DTM New Jersey plates who was a little less collected, this could’ve ended so, so much worse. Thank God our kids weren’t with us. I’m not sure if I would’ve been able to react as calmly.

    If he hadn't been as calm, he might have been killed by the cops because he might not have reacted as calmly.

    The fact that this is being framed as a "Flock" issue is absurd. It's like a story about a sensor in front of the orphan crushing machine which sometimes misidentifies normal people as orphans and throws them onto the conveyor belt. Sure, that's an issue, but let's focus on this orphan crushing machine first.

  • More people around the world now favour China over the US, Pew study suggests

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  • Pretty telling that Canada and Mexico, the direct neighbours to the USA, have a more favourable view of China.

  • If you could see one statistic above every person's head, that is updated in real time and never goes away, what would you choose?

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  • Luckily, you can just see if they drive a truck or not.

  • S&P downgrades Oracle stock to BBB-

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  • Just convince Ireland to enforce it... and thereby piss off the tech companies that are the basis for their economy because they pretend to be Irish. Or, convince the tech companies to move from their safe haven of Ireland to somewhere else in the EU where the GDPR is actually enforced.. something they'd gain nothing from doing.

  • Have you ever been disappointed with Linux?

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  • Hmm, yeah, if it is the desktop environment that's having issues, that could be hard to recover from. I've never had that happen, or even heard of it happening. Maybe try out Gnome? Or try reinstalling? it doesn't sound like a normal problem, and if it's not a driver issue it could be just reinstalling will be enough to get things working.

  • Where my iT’s A fEaTuRe homeys at?

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  • Robertson wanted to be paid for his good design. Henry Ford didn't want to pay, even if it was a tiny amount.

    Ford was willing to use an inferior screw design that could cause production issues rather than pay a license to use the superior design. And, even though the patent expired a long time ago, these decisions have momentum.

    I would bet that Torx is more popular than Robertson even though it's a much newer design. Is it a better design? To me, Robertson seems to have the edge when it comes to simplicity, but Torx could be better for industrial applications because multiple lobes that have a surface perpendicular to the direction of torque probably gives it more control. Also, thanks to Ikea, I'd bet that hex-head bolts are incredibly common. They share most of the benefits of Robertson. I suspect they're a little less efficient though because the closer you are to a circle shape, the less the faces of the screwdriver tip align with the direction of torque. I wonder if there are advantages of hex over square, since you see hex so much more often.

  • Where my iT’s A fEaTuRe homeys at?

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  • It wasn't an intentional feature. But, when they realized it happened it became a feature that they thought was useful.

    There are a lot of things like that, where something has a design quirk that people come to rely on. The quirk is so useful that people assume it was designed to work that way intentionally, but sometimes it was just coincidence.

  • Deleted

    Permanently Deleted

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  • I wonder what the limiting thing was. Was it your body's ability to process the water you were drinking? So, if you'd had more to drink, it might not have been safe? Or was it that your body's thirst signal was turned off, but you still could have processed more water, it just wasn't necessary?

    Do you remember if that one piss was dark yellow? I wonder if you were sweating so much that your kidneys were making very concentrated pee because the amount of "unclaimed" water in the blood was low, and most of it was going towards sweating.

    That reminds me of going motorcycling in the summer. I was sweating buckets, but as soon as my body squeezed out a drop of sweat, it was immediately whipped off by 100 km/h winds. I remember drinking crazy amounts of water, and being surprised that I didn't pee nearly as much as I was drinking. But, I still think I was peeing more than once per day.

  • Have you ever been disappointed with Linux?

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  • Hmm, I don't have any experience with USB speakers. I wonder if it's using a standard driver or a custom one.

  • Have you ever been disappointed with Linux?

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  • Snaps, and things like it, are really the only one I can blame on "Linux" (or at least Linux distributions).

    I've had annoying headaches with drivers for 20+ years, but I expect that because Linux just doesn't have enough users for most companies to bother making sure they have working drivers for Linux. I've been annoyed when some software or some tool or process isn't as polished as the Windows version. But, mostly that's something I got for free thanks to someone donating their time and effort, so I don't want to complain about that.

    But, I hate it when a major Linux distribution decides they're going to ignore the standard way of doing things and only do things in their unique way. It often seems like one vendor / distributor is trying to build a walled garden and lock people in. It's similarly annoying when vendors try to funnel people towards their "enterprise" version by making it harder to install certain apps that are "enterprisey".

    I get that it's hard to make money selling Linux distributions. But, that's what you signed up for. You don't get to start behaving like Microsoft because it turns out to be hard to sell open source / free software.

  • Have you ever been disappointed with Linux?

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  • Is it a bluetooth issue itself, or an issue with the drivers for that particular bluetooth hardware. Imperfect drivers has always been an issue under Linux, and will remain an issue as long as Windows has over 90% market share.

  • Have you ever been disappointed with Linux?

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  • Is it your display driver that's freezing? I've never had issues with one thing freezing the PC. The only time I've had it seem like that was the case was when it was the nVidia drivers that were having issues. But, that situation is much better than on Windows because I was able to SSH into the machine and everything seemed normal over an SSH connection. It meant I could shut things down gracefully and then eventually do a clean reboot. Meanwhile, the screen still looked as if the computer was locked up.

  • Have you ever been disappointed with Linux?

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  • That's weird. What kind of speakers do you have? Ye Olde Fashioned analog speakers tend to be hardwired for left and right. Of course, you can flip that in software, but unless you've touched that setting it should just work.

  • Future

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  • True Names (1981), Software (1982), Neuromancer (1984), Hardwired (1986), Wetware (1988)

    Cyberpunk is lowlife and high tech. It's completely dystopian. The early 1980s was the height of the Cold War with Reagan in power. People were not optimistic about the future in the 1980s, they were just hoping that it wouldn't end in a nuclear war.

  • Because Google cares about us

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  • I'd guess 99.9% of Android users have only ever used the Google Play store.

  • Correlation implies causation

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  • Correlation causes causation.

  • Trump tries again to delay $5m sexual abuse payout to E Jean Carroll

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  • IMO, this case is a kind of "canary in the coal mine" for whether or not the US can maybe return to a country governed by laws. Trump is massively corrupt. He has been pardoning all kinds of criminals. His justice department has been jailing innocent people and refusing to investigate obvious crimes. He has openly admitted to crimes in press conferences, and that's just becoming normal now.

    But, despite all that, this judgment is out there and he can't seem to make it go away. If this were Russia, E Jean Carroll would have "committed suicide" by now, maybe leaving a note behind about how she was so sorry to have falsely accused Donald J. Trump, and how he was a tremendous, so tremendous leader, and man, some people are saying maybe the best that has ever lived. The judge that ruled against him would have accidentally fallen out of a window.

    So, this might be a kind of Hungary situation, where there's a leader who has warped the entire country and seems all powerful, but who is simply voted out of office and is no longer driving the headlines.

  • Trump tries again to delay $5m sexual abuse payout to E Jean Carroll

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  • The estimates of Trump's net worth are much less reliable than most net worth estimates. For example, a big chunk of his net worth is now in meme coins. They tend to calculate his net worth by saying each coin is priced at $X and he has Y coins, so his net worth is $X*Y. But, the second he starts trying to sell those shitcoins, the price will plummet. There's nothing backing those shitcoins, there's no real demand for them. People are only holding onto them because they think maybe other people will believe they're valuable. If Trump sells them, the game is up and everyone knows they're worthless, so the true value of what he owns in coins is a tiny fraction of that.

    People have been trying to bribe him in various ways. But, again, that's often through crypto, so it's not like real money you can spend. Most of his net worth used to be in the supposed value of having his name on various properties. He didn't own the building, but he'd slap "Trump" on it and collect royalties. But, right now, for most of the world slapping "Trump" on something decreases its value.

    People who are rich via huge amounts of stock in a company they started are sort-of in a similar boat, but to a lesser extent. Elon Musk is worth, on paper, nearly $1 trillion. But, that's due to comically ridiculous overvaluations of Space X and Tesla. He can sell a bit of his stock without triggering a massive sell-off. But, if he wanted to sell every share he owns and convert his money into cold hard cash, he could only get a small fraction of $1T because selling off big amounts of his companies would cause other people to sell off too, and the value would tank. In the mean time though, he can still go to a bank and borrow money against the supposed value of his shares. That's something Trump can't do because banks have realized that he can't be trusted to repay his loans, so they won't loan him money.

    So, Trump could pay off this $5m judgment, but not without it seriously taking a bite out of his actual, liquid net worth. I'm sure a lot of the reason he's refusing to pay is that he doesn't want to, or doesn't want to set a precedent, or just likes getting away with not paying his bills. But, another reason is that for him $5m really is a lot of money because his supposed billionaire status is with a lot of asterisks.