uriel238

joined 1 year ago
[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago

I'm pretty sure here in the states, a site is obligated to identify ad content and sponsored content, so when a big company like Microsoft or Alphabet is doing it (Bing and Google) it makes me wonder if there's been a recent carve-out or relaxation of the reg.

That makes the return adversarial to the end-user, hence the point of the regulations.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago

Every search engine I've encountered is weird about porn. At first it decides whether or not you're looking for porn or not looking for porn. If it assumes you are then all the actual porn hits are promoted to the top, where non-porn hits are down-ranked. Vice versa, if it decides you're not looking for porn.

Once of the fun search engine games is to find out what sets of ambiguous words trigger the porn flag. Pure tended to be one due to a brand name, even when I was looking for pure minerals at the time. Siri created some conflicts, since there's both a well known LLM digital assistant, rule 34 for the same and a popular porn star.

I'd really like a search engine that let porn sites fall in the hit list without deciding first whether I was trying to look for porn, since I sometimes do metasearching.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (5 children)

As a fiction writer, I do research on espionage, sabotage and even methods of assassination all the time. But I'm not going to make a salted bomb and nuke Jerusalem even though that is an entirely viable evil plot that may even create a net negative death toll.

True poisoners, as Agatha Christie notes, use thallium, not arsenic nor cyanide (though ricin is good if you can get it.) Thallium assassins are also self-regulating, like demolitions experts, killing off those insufficiently careful when handling the stuff.

Modern police are lazy until enough of a stink is made to find a culprit for a specific incident, which is why modern assassins targeting VIPs will find a self-radicalized desperado and point them toward the target. This is the sort of thing FBI is looking for in the investigations of Crooks and Routh. They are likely just blue suicides (or green suicides in this case) but finding a operative pointing them towards Trump would indicate an actual plot. But even if those tracks are found, it would unlikely lead to a specific identity.

I know about this not just to write fiction, but also to understand how things happen, how our fall into one party autocracy and societal collapse plays out. And yes, it means I do a lot of web searches that might excite an onlooking behavioral research agent. Sadly, they'd find I'm yet another boring false positive, though if the nation does succumb to autocracy, I'd certainly write for the resistance. FBI may not care so much about that.

We often look up creepy things just so see if we can, and we do that a lot more than because we're eager to build a bomb or fast-track our inheritance.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago

OG Craigslist M4W

[–] [email protected] 48 points 1 month ago (1 children)

And this is why the NSA is supposed to close exploits rather than harvest them for surveillance.

This is why surveillance backdoors are always bad, and you can't math around that.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 month ago

Temporary or straw restrictions. The EU has even more byzantine IP laws as the US and they're just as draconian. Our societies teem with rent-seeking grifts and billionaires who will commit genocide to get their way.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

What tools are these? As someone who has frequently been evaluated, I've found I get different results depending on the bias of the evaluator, ranging from, functional: able to work to a danger to themselves or others, should be supervised or committed.

Now I totally agree that there is a problem with elected officials when Feinstein is still a senator when she is no longer coherent. Or when Trump's lawyers and principal staff see he has diminished capacity (the finale of Fear: Trump In the White House by Bob Woodward) they leave him in place because he remains a useful idiot. But I know our psych assessment methods are not yet able to yield consistent results, and it would be easy for political interests to game the system to keep those they like, and flunk those who are too much of a nuisance (say, those who actually want to serve the public).

(President Wilson had a stroke, and spend the end of his tenure in bed with his wife faking his signature. The US is no stranger to staffers faking it when elected officials were to incapacitated to function. )

Sadly in 20-fucking-24, mental illness remains enough of a stigma that anyone who relies on public approval just won't take the test if they can opt out.

[–] [email protected] 46 points 1 month ago (2 children)

This is old news from a decade ago, before the US public was aware how the police had long been fabricating probable cause (and gunning down Americans by the hundreds) and SCOTUS had been carving out exceptions to the fourth and fifth amendments to the Constitution of the United States.

Then Trump won in 2016 and we saw what it looked like under mask-off tyranny. And now we're one election away from one-party autocracy.

The police state is here. It always was. 🌍👨‍🚀🧑‍🚀🔫

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago

There's actually footage of Jar Jar using Jedi Mind Trick in TPM. He gave up on it by Attack of the Clones, even through Jar Jar was still capable of facilitating the fall of the empire.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago

I'm in my fifties, still dealing with major depression and suicidality on a daily basis. I get it. I, too, am not a danger to myself or others, although I've sometimes held on only by a thread.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 month ago (2 children)

Yeah. My parents, teachers, ministers, police officers, etc were glad to blame Dungeons and Dragons for my major depression and suicidality in the 1980s, because none of them wanted to look at systemic social problems that are even worse today.

So if those kids are genuinely suicidal, that means the home is not a place where they feel safe. That implies parental dysfunction.

Remember we also were quick to blame vaccines for ASD because it was too hard on parents to suggest childhood upbringing factors.

[–] [email protected] 40 points 1 month ago

Much like the twenty minutes of unskippable ads on commercial DVDs, the media companies and social media will enshittify until the general public turns to piracy.

Essentially, the sooner we all come to terms with piracy being ~~acceptable~~ necessary, the sooner they let off on their enshittification efforts.

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