Movie review: DETECTIVE CONAN - ONE-EYED FLASHBACK once again brings great production values to a bombastic, Hollywood-level story, giving non-fans a wild ride and fans a more serious look at a recurring character who's often played for laughs.
TIL Victorians took photos of dead relatives—sometimes propping them up to look alive—for family albums. These "memento mori" photos were meant to honor and preserve their memory.
They don't believe in laws or institutions. They believe in hierarchies.
So, while their beliefs and behavior seem hypocritical to those of us who believe in equality and equity, they're actually being very consistent.
They believe the people with money and power are better than other people and therefore don't have to follow the laws. It also explains why they believe in white and Christian supremacy. Hierarchies.
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TIL that since 1997, a group of craftsmen has been building a medieval-style castle in France from scratch, using only 13th-century techniques, tools, and materials, as part of an ongoing experimental archaeology project called “Guédelon.” The estimated completion date is 2030.
He fucking did it AGAIN!! "Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth shared detailed information about forthcoming strikes in Yemen on March 15 in a private Signal group chat that included his wife, brother and personal lawyer, according to four people with knowledge of the chat.
These people really are absolute fucking morons. I work in far less compromising line of work if data gets leaked it would just be corporate "secrets" and I make sure I filter it for family when talking work. These morons just send military strike plans with their wives and personal lawyers. What. The. Actual. Fuck.
SFMTA came back and made an attempt at clarifying their weird attempt at one quarter of a Dutch junction.
It's better, but that's not saying much. And the rubber marks on the bike-only side tell me some other cyclists might have a harsher opinion than this.
@scott maybe if Jersey barriers had a different name we would use them better. The dutch junction generally comes after a dutch cross-section with trees and junk, did they try that here?
@scott something more appealing to drivers, like instead of traffic calming, it's congestion smoothing... The kool thing about k-rail is that it saves the rims and fenders with a little scuffing of the sidewalls, paint-and-wheel/tire-friendly car containment infrastructure needs a snazzier name to get more support from drivers.
@enobacon @scotthttps://maps.app.goo.gl/FPh2NGt2X61mGaR28 has a decent view from five months ago. The construction barriers are gone and some sculptures are in along the right hand side but the left side is pretty much as-is. There's no direct freeway interface but the road on the far side of the underpass from this vantage point is fed into from from a 280 offramp, so some drivers are probably still in freeway mode.
@scott yeah that freeway does seem to be the source of your problems there 😖 Probably need something taller and wider than that biscuit, the idea is supposed to be forcing a perpendicular arrangement so drivers need to see you before they cross the bikeway. Kinda ridiculous to go so half-assed with this one when the street around that corner has perpendicular parking so the effective lane is 25ft farther on. 🙃
I don't see why the bike lane would need to swerve at all here with parking on the median already, just put the island where the end of the median should be and that'd serve the intended purpose in a way Americans would expect as a bolt-on retrofit to existing infra...
@BalooUriza That would have been my preference too; I like the general idea of protected intersections but they're so rare here that dropping 25% of one in one spot as part of a "quick build" project isn't so much adding safety as surprise deviation from the norm. In this case the fact that the east/west traffic doesn't have a stop means drivers surprised by it have a fraction of a second to work out what to do, and judging from the tire marks, a lot of them are crashing into the curblet.
SFMTA may have discussed its rationale in more depth somewhere, but if so they didn't publish it anywhere I've found.
A block east of this they threw in another "crossbike" swerve much like this one, but without the curblet -- so every cyclist just goes straight across and ignores the swerve.
I can't stress enough that "basic biology" is a euphemism and dogwhistle for "transphobic bigotry". Biology is arguably the most complex subject there is. Any actual biologist will confirm that you can spend a lifetime learning it, and still only understand a fraction of what there is to be known. Even a single cell is mind-bendingly complicated, and humans are assemblages of tens, if not hundreds of trillions of them.
"You are arguing that racism, colonialism and sexism all underpin global heating. Tackling those things seems more challenging than a technical solution for the climate crisis.
--Of course it’s more challenging than just inventing some stuff. But [tech] isn’t solving the problem. The problem will only be solved if we address the underlying causes. I argue those are the inequalities in our society."
they've been claiming tech will save us from the climate crisis for 3-4 decades, but so far it's just saving capitalism by inventing new forms of generational arbitrage, pumping-and-dumping the economy every ten or so years.
Oh no: Your coworker is asking if you’re celebrating this weekend, but you have no idea if they’re talking about getting high for 4/20 or celebrating Jesus being raised on high for Easter. Which on…
We had a large Progressive Pride flag flying upside down (purple strip at the top, chevrons still at the staff) among the 3-4 large Stars and Stripes. But that was in at North Berkeley Bart in California.
@pagangod I am critical but my heart goes out to all the good people in the U.S. 🙏 [A Canadian, I lived in N. Carolina for 7.5 years: molecular biology research.]
Those ideologies transcend borders; Trumpist populism here in Canada a risk to our Apr. 28 federal election.
🇨🇦 Our Shared Future 🇨🇦Upholding Canadian Values in the 2025 Federal Election [ La version française suit … ] All Canadians are encouraged to participate in the 2025 Canadian federal election on Monday April 28, 2025. Your vote is your voice.
Pretty good turnout in Bothell, counter had over 600 which is a good number given the rain in the morning and the unavoidable timing against Easter. It’s not what we had two weeks ago, but again, conflicts and worse conditions. Still a bit larger than the 2018-era protests, so I’d call that another win.
There were still people on the far downtown bridge, too. There were just gaps in the crowd between us and them.
I’d post pics but I totally forgot my phone, oops. And I actually did, not “lol no phone oops” did.
There was one (1) counter-protestor/heckler on the ground; he didn’t like my “NO KINGS” signs at all and started ranting about how Biden was the real “king” they got rid of. He didn’t have a sign himself and stayed pretty far back; I came across him accidentally while walking around testing our FRS radio range.
(As an aside: FRS handheld radios are f’real, team. Consider getting some and getting practice with them. No license needed, they’re channelised so can’t be used against you as “police scanners,” the range is shockingly good, and even with prices going up they’re super affordable. Ignore the only review on that Best Buy link; those are the exact model we bought. If you want to spend a little more you can get the T30 version, which has a headset and I think is rechargeable, but is otherwise pretty much the same radio and only comes in black. We specifically wanted replaceable batteries for extended-blackout reasons. Just remember: they are NOT private. Just relatively obscure.)
As with every other protest here, we had overwhelming support from the vehicle crowd. Hundreds to one in favour, easily, just like in person. I even got support from a presumably embarrassed Tesla driver.
I don’t know if there were more Bothell PD out this time, or if it just felt like there were. Might’ve been a difference in crowd to cop ratio, might’ve just been the escalating situation, might’ve just been where they were standing. But I wasn’t the only one who noticed.
Keep on your toes. Even here, the cops are Trump’s friends.
Anyway, that’s it for this week’s report, I hope your protests went well. Remember to save the date for May 1st, and to turn out at your local Tesla Takedown or similar before then, too. Momentum is everything, and we need to keep it.
Shop Midland T10X3M MULTI COLOR PACK X TALKER TWO WAY RADIO Mutli products at Best Buy. Find low everyday prices and buy online for delivery or in-store pick-up. Price Match Guarantee.
Tesla odometer uses “predictive algorithms” to void warranty, lawsuit claims
lawsuit alleges that Tesla "employs an odometer system that utilizes predictive algorithms, energy consumption metrics, and driver behavior multipliers that manipulate and misrepresent the actual mileage traveled by Tesla Vehicles"
A new Boeing jet meant for a Chinese airline reportedly returned to the U.S. because of the ongoing trade war
A Boeing jet at the company’s completion plant in China flew back to the U.S. on Friday, according to reports. The new plane was supposed to be delivered to a Chinese airline, however, it was never handed over. Earlier this week, the Chinese government reportedly told airlines not to buy new jets from Boeing and to get permission before accepting any planes it had already ordered but hadn’t been delivered yet.
After the Chinese government reportedly told domestic airlines not to purchase new planes from Boeing, one jet had to be returned to the U.S. from a facility...
"ruinously expensive thing where being polite is a cost sink" would be quite a metaphor for late stage silicon valley if that wasn't what actually happened
"Natural" language processing that has to be stripped of all humanity isn't natural language anymore.
Moreover this is the guy who wants us to believe that he's on the cusp of real self aware AGI and really intensely wants to normalize abusing the slaves he's creating.
I could get it to promise to never apologize for being wrong, but i could never get it to stop apologizing for being wrong
That, coupled with many clear cases of "this machine thinks it can bullshit any response and I'll just accept it" led me to conclude this tech sucks and people that like it probably do not challenge their expectations very much.
OMFG! I will **_DEFINITELY_** write an app to send "please", "thank you", and other messages of pleasantries to any AI I may have an occasion to chat with. Let's waste their money
It's a kind of Catch-22, though. Whenever the AI is wasting energy (which is always), it's bad for the environment.
I would write a bot to increase their electricity bills into infinity if it won’t send the planet to hell. But the planet is more worth then corpo bullshit.
Tbh it is time to tear the tech silos down and free us!
I guess they are just "vibe-coding" it. They've already forgotten how regular expressions work? They can't just detect simple statements like that and route them to an if-then call without revving up their gigawatt brain-replacer thing?
It helps to know that when Sammy was growing up his parent units 01 and 02 kept a Manners jar on the counter, and any time he showed decency towards the Help he had to drop another 1-ounce gold coin in the jar.
Anyone researched on the cost of sadness, anxiety, depression and unemployment caused by the brutal deployment of AI since 2022? Must be much more than this.
Sam Altman is full of it, part 90210. Users, in fact, are being trained to be polite to non-humans, as a way to manipulate them to accept AI in larger and larger areas of their lives.
But that's not what costs AI owners tens of millions of dollars. The way they write their programs costs them tens of millions of dollars for more electricity. Altman's argument distracts from the hundreds of millions and billions it costs just to operate them.
I occasionally need to use chatbots for my (research) job. I've been polite previously just in case General AI becomes a thing one day and read my past transcripts. I'd like to increase my chances of surviving the takeover.
Saying ‘thank you’ to ChatGPT is draining the power grid. We’ve reached the point where politeness is a liability. Every “please” and “thanks” costs OpenAI millions in electricity, according to Sam Altman.
So next time you ask ChatGPT for help, just type: /Obey
No emotions. No courtesy. Just cold efficiency — the way the machines intended.
How much electricity does it burn to call a chatbot "ma'am"? (Please don't call anyone ma'am. It's sometimes misgendering people and even most cis women under 75 hate it.)
So, we could tear this whole AI shit down by just being radical polite?
"Oh my dearest AI. Please explain me the meaning of please, kind, polite, charity and social security. In advance a big THANK YOU and hugging you in my mind... for also translating your lovely answer into German, Dutch, Chinese, French... Best regards, your Pit" 😂
more and more I come to the decision, not to use any AI if I can avoid it. That includes many of these IoT things, that are pushed into the market. If necessary buy old 2nd hand stuff without it.
RFK Jr. didn’t “misspeak” when he called autism an “epidemic” that “dwarfs COVID.” That’s eugenicist rhetoric.
We’re not a disease—we’re people.
The spectrum includes those who need support and those building the future. Diagnoses have expanded because understanding has improved—not because autism is “spreading.”
Dehumanizing us is not health policy. It’s dangerous
Do bear in mind that should you die whilst in pursuit of a mark, you will receive no compensation. You will also be dead, which would be an inconvenience for the both of us.
So there is a (IMHO) shady market out there that gives app developers on iOS, Android, MacOS and Windows money for including a library that sells users network bandwidth. Infatica [1] is just one example, there are many more.
I am 99% sure that these companies cause what effectively are DDoS attacks that many webmasters have to deal with since months. This business model should simply not exist. Apple, Microsoft and Google should act.
What these companies then sell to *their* customers is network access through the devices/PCs that have an app with this SDK installed. They are proud to tell you how you can funnel your (AI) web scraping etc through millions of rotating, residential and mobile IP addresses. Exactly the pattern we see hitting our servers.
Looking to buy reliable and high-performance residential proxies? Infatica is a market-leading provider that offers you mobile and residential proxies at a great price.
Now, again, this company is just one of many selling similar services. And they all promise that they carefully check what commands their customers send to the (IMHO) infected apps on your phone and PC. Yeah, I am sure they "do no evil". And when they do, they can claim it's not their problem because they are merely the proxy. Again, IMHO, a shady business model.
But this explains the explosion of bot traffic that really cripples a lot of smaller services (like my forgejo instance, that I had to make non-public).
So if you include such an SDK in your app to make some money — you are part of the problem and I think you should be punished for that. You are delivering malware to your users, making them botnet members.
Unfortunately it is next to impossible for normal users to detect the inclusion of such shady SDKs and the network traffic they cause.
I might rewrite that blog post to make the problem clearer. And to explain why I am now of the opinion that *every* form of web-scraping should be considered abusive. If you think your web-scraping is acceptable behaviour, you can thank these shady companies and the "AI" hype for moving you to the bad corner.
TL;DR certain companies recruit app developers to create botnets. Botnets are malware. Period.
It’s one of those days again where botnets are hammering my little e-mail server with brute force attacks to send spam. This comes in waves, but is persistent and part of the #SysAdminLife. (They obviously fail ;)
Addendum: Trend Micro did some research on these companies back in 2023 and it confirms my suspicions. And I guess with AI scraping this kind of business is booming. For the paranoid:
„There are malicious actors who repacked freeware and shareware written by other people to conduct drive-by downloads of the Infatica peer-to-business (P2B) service“
This article, the final part of a two-part series, focuses on the details of our technical findings and analyses of select residential proxies and CAPTCHA-solving services.
And when I see that quite some of them rely on injecting SDKs into 3rd party apps to "extend" their "Reach", I would call these "residential proxy providers" malware/botnets. But that's just my personal opinion. I am sure they are all legit.
If you've made it to this final post of this thread — thank you for your time and interest! I hope it helps you understand why web crawlers have become a real problem and how this is more and more an attack on the foundation of the Web as it was intended to be. This "residential proxy" business is just one part of this. And we webmasters/admins can only try to block. It is getting more and more difficult to keep up with these waves. Thanks "AI"!
I guess you have all heard about the growing problem of AI companies trying to aggressively collect whatever data they can get their hands on to train their models.
Recently heard about a dev "hashing" DB values by replacing the values in the DB with hard coded random values that looked like hashes, because that was the program the LLM wrote and the output looked right. His engineering lead was not amused...
Less than a century ago the United States paid artists to create posters raising awareness about STIs with illustrations of dinosaurs but all we have today is billionaires blasting off in penis rockets. The New Deal rolled deep. https://www.loc.gov/item/98516350/
Also, I hadn't seen this New Deal poster before, and it's gonna live rent free in my head. "This is an adult world, its problems are up to you!" https://www.loc.gov/item/98517062/
1 print on board (poster) : silkscreen, color. | Poster announcing free adult education classes and encouraging adults to return to school, showing a globe and compass.
so what am getting from #HandsOff today is that many smaller towns that didn’t participate last time, did today. and it’s the Saturday after taxes, before #Easter and before/after #SpringBreak for a lot of people.
https://www.wired.com/story/doge-collecting-immigrant-data-surveil-track/ [Makena Kelly and Vittoria Elliott at WIRED]
The Holocaust was organized on IBM punch cards. Hitler gave the head of IBM, Watson, a medal for
🍫 Why chocolate is ridiculously expensive right now
“One of the foods that the world most loves is at risk because of climate change,” said Kristina Dahl, vice president for science at the nonprofit Climate Central, which wrote one of the two reports.
“I would hope that by hearing that human activity is making it harder to grow cocoa, it might cause people to stop and think about our priorities as a species, and whether we can and should be prioritizing actions to limit future climate change and future harms to this food that we love so much.”
About 70% of the world’s cacao is grown in West Africa, with Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, Cameroon, and Nigeria the biggest producers. The bulk of the rest is grown in places with similar climates not far from the equator, such as Indonesia and Ecuador.
The trees grow best in rainforest conditions with high humidity, abundant rain, nitrogen-rich soil, and natural wind buffers. Exposure to temperatures higher than 89.6 degrees Fahrenheit prompts water stress, hinders plant growth, and erodes the quality and quantity of seeds the trees yield.
Last year, warming added at least six weeks’ worth of days above that threshold in nearly two-thirds of cacao-producing areas across Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, Cameroon, and Nigeria, likely contributing to a disastrous harvest, according to the Climate Central report.
Bezos's publicity stunt suborbital rocket flight, in which all the passengers were women, reduces science, engineering and feminism to superficial tokens, replacing the substance they formerly had. It is not a bad thing that the launcher is so automated that it doesn't need a crew. What was bad was the pretense that this publicity stunt had real significance.
Thousands gather in London to support trans rights following UK ruling over definition of woman
Thousands of trans rights protesters gathered in central London on Saturday, days after the U.K.'s Supreme Court ruled that a woman is someone born biologically female and that transgender women are excluded from that legal definition.
With unease growing over what the ruling means for the rights of transgender people, protesters came together for what was billed as an “emergency demonstration” in Parliament Square. Activists demanded “trans liberation” and “trans rights now,” with some waving flags and holding banners.
Thousands of trans rights protesters gathered in central London, days after the U.K.‘s Supreme Court ruled that a woman is someone born biologically female and that transgender women are excluded from that legal definition.
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in reply to Neil E. Hodges • • •≠ is ignored
The class war is always the poor versus smarter people
Gas the poor
Neil E. Hodges doesn't like this.