I once read an interview with a white hat hacker. He said that people expect him to try to remotely connect to their network and try to brute force his way in. The first thing he actually does is put on a suit, visit the company’s headquarters, walk in the front door, start a conversation with the receptionist, and see how far he can get.
I think there’s a few reasons behind the slow-tracking of processing asylum claims.
One is that they were just cutting anything they could in the name of Austerity. Just another way to funnel money from the poor to the rich.
But the other is I think the same reason why the right-leaning press have had small boats on their front pages for years at this point, despite the reason for small boat crossings being a lack of safe legal routes and accounting for a small percentage of immigration - to make people hate immigrants.
Why? Because the right mostly do well amongst the older generations. However, the Boomers are dying off, and younger people aren’t moving to the right the way they used to because they don’t have the assets to make that a sound financial choice.
So the choice for the right becomes between changing your policies to appeal to more people, or creating wedge issues which you can make your entire election platform. And they’re not going to go to the effort of working out policies which would help people, are they? So create a “crisis” involving “those people” and be the party who’s against “those people”, and you should do all right.
Unless an even more racist party comes along, of course…
Okay. Commentators have been saying for a while that a victory for him could be a signal of the American left learning that actually progressive policies and candidates can be successful and on the Democrats as a whole actually moving to the left. Let’s hope that that’s actually true, rather than it being dismissed as “New York’s different”.
Hopefully, the recent buzz around AOC will help, too. I’ve been seeing more of Crockett in the news, as well.
We’ll see. This is definitely a very positive move, though.
I tend to use perplexity now. It gives me useful results maybe 80% of the time. That’s a low hit rate, but for many queries it’s better than other search engines.
Or i just search a dedicated site. If I’m looking for an overview of something i search Wikipedia directly. If i want to know what an actor has been in i stretch IMDb directly. And so on.
Say what you want about the man, but he’s got stamina. There’s hardcore gooners who wouldn’t manage 10 waifus a day, 4 days in a row.
Halloween has literally just happened. How many demons did you slay?
It also puts pressure on non-AI companies to integrate AI into their products, regardless of whether or not it improves the product. If you can say “look, we’ve got AI” then you’ll find it easier to attract new investors and keep your current ones happy. If you don’t have AI, then you risk looking behind the curve.
Microsoft just had a push for CoPilot in Excel. Its own promotional material said that for the tasks it was most suited to it had a success rate of 56%. For other tasks the success rate was 20%.
Imagine relying on that for anything even halfway important.
They’re useful, but not anything like to the degree that’s being claimed. It’s being pushed as if it’s going to be able to do everything.
For one example, does generative AI have a use in coding? Absolutely. If you’re a coder who knows what they are doing, it can help you have ideas and it can do some of the tedious stuff. But you still need to know what you’re doing, use it as a tool, and absolutely do not use its code without checking it all. And that’s not how it’s being pushed. It’s being pushed as if you can just type in “pretend it’s 1999 and code me a Doom sequel” and you’ll get a full, working programme out.
Even getting it to do things in chunks seems to be a trial. There’s a video I watched a day or two ago (if you’re interested, I’ll look for a link when I’ve got more time) where a guy tried to get ChatGPT to code for him. He had a specific end goal in mind and asked it to do things step by step. While there were several occasions that he was impressed by what it produced, he kept getting stuck because it would seemingly only fix problems in one area of the code by eliminating another area entirely. He found that most of his time was spent going round in circles trying to ensure that it actually did what he was asking of it. It hallucinated, too, and at one point he had to solve the problem for it by referring to a specific repository, which he said he himself only knew about because he’s got more than a decade’s experience.
That’s the biggest issue - what LLMs are capable of is far, far below what they’re sold as.
Streamers were definitely a thing back then. The name iCarly is almost certainly a deliberate riff on iJustine who at the time of the show’s premiere was broadcasting her life 24/7 on what was then Justin.tv and who was easily its biggest star.
UBI doesn’t prevent you from earning money. It’s just that, no matter what, you get x amount of money every week/month.
Ireland is not part of the UK
I didn’t stop and verify, but I’ve literally just seen a post on here which says that Israel has violated the ceasefire 3 days running at this point.
There was a story a couple of years ago about corporations trying to get people to work unpaid hours while working from home. The logic, such as it was, went like this: if you live an hour’s commute away from work and you work an 8-hour day, then you’re actually spending 10 hours of your day dedicated to work because the travel time isn’t time you get to do whatever you want in. Therefore, since you’re used to work taking up 10 hours of your time, you should also spend 10 hours working while working from home.
It’s astonishing, really.
For a serious answer WRT the people who genuinely didn’t think this administration would act the way it is - in his first term, he was mostly surrounded by people who were competent and who respected the law & checks & balances. When they got told “kidnap people off the streets” they said “I can’t do that, that would be illegal”.
So the fact that these things weren’t done in the first term made people think they wouldn’t be done in the second term.
Couple that with the fact that the vast majority of people are incredibly uninformed about politics.
I mean, I do believe that Joe Rogan is both ignorant and stupid, so…
I don’t have a problem with the idea of a digital ID. I’ve been saying for years that it’s ridiculous that any time you want to do something even vaguely official you have to take a gas bill with you to prove your address.
What I worry about is the implementation. It seems like it’s going to be a government app that stores everything. What company is going to develop that? Where’s the data going to be stored and how? What vulnerabilities does it have, and how has this been tested? Is biometric data going to be stored anywhere? etc.
If they were to let me store my ID in my phone’s built-in wallet, then I’m happy. I know the security and I’m content that my data is safe and recoverable.
But it doesn’t seem like that’s something that will be possible. So I’m going to object strongly.
If you like facts then you should know that “Autist” Is a rather controversial term in the autistic community, with many finding it dehumanising, and with a significant proportion of those who use it themselves doing so to “reclaim” it in an n-word-like “it’s okay when i say it, but not when you say it” way.
And if you really do have an autistic daughter, then you might want to do some internal reflection on why you think being “surrounded by […] autists” Is negative enough to use as an insult. Those kinds of attitudes can have negative impacts on children and can lead to internalised ableism. And if it’s not the kind of attitude you would show around her, then it’s worth asking yourself why not.
There was a story a few years back about a casino getting hacked through a smart thermometer in a fish tank.