commandar

@commandar@lemmy.world
0 Post – 114 Comments
Joined 1 years ago

This is ridiculously well trod ground, but Prey also wasn't at all helped by Bethesda's marketing.

They had what is probably the truest successor to System Shock 2 that's been made on their hands and Bethesda made Arkane use the title of a 15 year old portal based shooter that had absolutely no relation to the game and didn't do particularly well because they owned the IP.

The entire Bethesda-Arkane relationship has been pretty thoroughly mismanaged.

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lol and this is exactly why that decision was so baffling.

The game has absolutely nothing to do with the 3D Realms Prey game. It's truer to System Shock than the Bioshock series ever was. It routinely goes on sale for next to nothing -- highly recommended if you're a fan of SS2.

Because Google holds a monopoly position and Epic doesn't.

That said, the irony didn't escape me either.

According to the affidavit, Prieto said: “The reason I say Atlanta. Why, why is Georgia such a f------up state now? When I was a kid that was one of the most conservative states in the country. Why is it not now? Because as the crime got worse in L.A., St. Louis, and all these other cities, all the [N-words] moved out of those [places] and moved to Atlanta. That’s why it isn’t so great anymore. And they’ve been there for a couple, several years.”

Yes, black people have only been around in significant numbers in Atlanta for a couple years.

Certified stable genius.

I don’t like him at all, but he was articulate and not at all unhinged.

I get what you mean here, but it's also what makes Vance and whatever else comes after Trump so dangerous: the bar has been lowered so far that people now view "able to form coherent sentences" as "not at all unhinged."

The man stood there and repeated the bald faced lie about Haitian migrants' legal status and then had a temper tantrum that the rules said he wasn't supposed to be fact-checked.

The substance of what he was saying was absolutely unhinged. But the Overton window has shifted so far that, because his delivery was neatly packaged, it doesn't look that bad compared to what we've gotten used to.

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We also have real world examples like Alabama passing a voter ID law and then almost immediately turning around and closing DMV offices in poor, black counties, making getting an ID even more difficult for at-risk communities:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-10-01/alabama-closes-dmv-offices-a-year-after-voter-id-law-kicks-in

Voter ID laws are very much about cloaking intentional disenfranchisement of legal citizens in a veil of preventing virtually non-existent voter fraud.

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This matches the broad strokes of the approach I favor as well.

There are 13 Federal circuits. Expand to one justice per circuit, then double that.

But the core of the approach, regardless of the exact number, is to shift to having cases heard by randomized panels of judges. The amount of power wielded by individual justices right now is just insane. Dilute it down so that the power rests with the body rather than individuals.

Further, randomizing who hears any given case would help curtail the current environment where test cases get tailored to the idiosyncracies and pet theories of individual judges.

SCOTUS should be deciding cases based on rational reading of the law, not entertaining wing nut theories that Thomas or Alito hinted at in previous decisions. That sort of nonsense becomes a lot less feasible if there's no guarantee a case will actually end up in front of Thomas or Alito.

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Standard procedure literally nationwide is that normal officers are expected to go in with what they have. That's exactly what happened in Nashville less than a year later:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Nashville_school_shooting

The body cam video is public. Officers responded with what they had. Yes, there's an officer with an AR. There are also officers clearing rooms with handguns and in plainclothes. And one of the officers that engaged the AR-wielding shooter did so with their duty handgun.

Body Armor, AR15s.

They absolutely wear the former every day and many these days have either an AR or a shotgun in the trunk of their patrol vehicle.

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Would be rather funny to flip the right's obsession with with weaponizing Section 230.

It strikes me as rather arguable that this is evidence that he's acting as a publisher rather than a platform.

There are definitely solutions but they all involve giving a Russian agent direct knowledge of troop movements.

Starlink terminals are activated using a unique identifier. It's how billing works.

SpaceX knows which terminals have been provided to Ukraine. We know they can geofence service. Geofencing the Ukrainian theater to terminals that were provided to Ukraine shouldn't be a massive technical leap and doesn't provide any information they don't already have.

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Also worth noting: 2K is incredibly toxic and regular paint filter masks are useless for preventing it from getting into your lungs. It's supposed to be used while wearing positive pressure ventilated PPE.

Probably not the best choice for redecoration on the move.

A lot of other models were saying something ridiculous like Clinton had 95% chance to win or something. Nate Silver’s model seems better than others based on this, if anything.

The constant attacks on how 538's model performed in 2016 says more about statistics literacy than it does about the model.

There is plenty to criticize Nate Silver for. Take your pick. Personally, the political nihilism that's increasingly flirted with "anti-woke" sentiment is good enough for me. Some people might prefer taking issue with the degenerate gambling. The guy has pumped out plenty of really dumb hot takes over the years, so you have your options.

But his models, historically, have performed relatively well if you understand that they're models and not absolute predictors.

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Crowdstrike is very entrenched in healthcare. Hospitals were routinely at capacity in 2020.

The outage this weekend probably killed some people due to disruptions in delivering care. It definitely would have then.

Also worth noting: Wray's statements were made in response to questions asked by Jim Jordan.

This isn't something Democrats went looking to dig up. It got stirred up by one of Trump's frothiest allies.

Clover is so beneficial that pre-WW2, grass seed mixes almost always explicitly advertised clover content. If you look up 19th or early 20th century catalogs, etc, listings for grass seed will nearly always not only mention that they contain a clover mix, but tout its benefits.

As you note, it was only post-war with the creation of modern herbicides that clover stopped being the norm. There was more or less a DeBeers-style PR campaign to convince people that clover is a "weed" since it can't survive weed killers.

In a vacuum, sure, but it also completely tracks with Sam Altman's behavior outside of OpenAI.

Employees at previous companies he's run had expressed very similar concerns about Altman acting in dishonest and manipulative ways. At his most high profile gig before OpenAi, Paul Graham flew from London to San Francisco to personally (and quietly) fire him from Y Combinator because Altman had gone off the reservation there too. The guy has a track record of doing exactly the kind of thing Toner is claiming.

What we know publicly strongly suggests Altman is a serial manipulator. I'm inclined to believe Toner on the basis that it fits with what we otherwise know about the man. From what I can tell, the board wasn't wrong; they lost because Altman's core skill is being a power broker and he went nuclear when the board tried to do their job.

Kurt Cobain has been dead longer than Kurt Cobain was alive at this point.

Spoliation can be grounds for the judge to give the jury adverse inference instructions. i.e., the jury is allowed to assume that whatever was info was destroyed would have been damaging to the defendant's case.

As for having an interest in guns, he owned an AR-15, so must have had some interest there.

He was wearing a Demolition Ranch Tshirt. It's a popular YouTube gun channel.

vi isn't a text editor as much as it's a text manipulation language.

It has a syntax, grammar, idioms, and, yes, a learning curve.

But once you learn it, it's as close to a brain-computer interface as I've experienced. You start thinking about edits as chainable operations and it literally becomes muscle memory -- if you ask someone experienced with vi how they just did a complex sequence of edits, chances are they'll have to stop and consciously walk through it because they literally didn't have to think about it the first time.

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It is. And the price of ESUs goes up each year that a product is EOL.

It also helps that their attempts to redirect back mostly serve to highlight their weird preoccupations.

Things are happening like a former Trump speechwriter posting "Emmett Till was weird" on Twitter because they can't comprehend just how unhinged and generally weird saying something like that is to a normal person.

Or they think they're being clever flipping the script and ranting about "boys saying they're girls is weird." "Why do you spend so much time obsessing over what children have in their pants? That's really weird."

It all puts them in a bind. If they try to defend what they're saying as normal, it's very clear that it isn't. If they try to deflect with what they think is weird, it just shows how detached they are from normal reality. It's a surprisingly effective line of attack that largely neutralizes their normal gish galloping.

Searches are supposed to be fast at giving you the answer you're looking for. But that is antithetical to advertising.

And we have evidence that this is exactly why it happened, too:

https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/

While I'd highly recommend giving either the article a read or the companion podcast a listen because Ed Zitron did some fantastic reporting on this, the tl;dr is that a couple of years ago, there was direct conflict between the search and advertising wings of Google over search query metrics.

The advertising teams wanted the metrics to go up to help juice ad numbers. The search team rightly understood that there were plenty of ways they could do so, but that it would make for a worse user experience. The advertising team won.

The head of the advertising team during this was a man named Prabhakar Raghavan. Roughly a year later, he became the head of Google Search. And the timing of all this lines up with when people started noting Google just getting worse and worse to actually use.

Oh, and the icing on the cake? Raghavan's previous job? Head of Yahoo Search just before that business cratered to the point that Yahoo decided to just become a bing frontend.

Zitron is fond of saying that these people have names and it's important that we know who's making the decisions that are actively making the world of tech worse for everyone; I tend to agree.

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The entire system is deeply corrupt beyond false positives.

We know for a fact that Russia was systematically cheating testing and the grand sum of the punishment they faced for it was having to compete as "Olympic Athletes from Russia" for two years.

I think you're missing the point.

As things stand now, you get cases that are tailor made to the whims of specific people because there's a 100% chance it ends up in front of those specific people. That's an absolutely massive problem.

The point is that you're less likely to have cases that are specifically aimed at stroking any given individual's brand of crazy when there's only a ~1 in 3 chance they'll even hear it. A panel of 9 from a pool of 26 means that you go from a 100% chance that, say, Alito and Thomas, hear a case together to around 12%. That's a huge gamble when it takes years and a massive amount of money to get a case in front of SCOTUS.

No, it doesn't solve all conceivable problems with the court. But it'd help address the fact that SCOTUS justices are entirely too powerful as individuals and it can be done via simple act of Congress.

Appointees should just be subject to term limits and yearly affirmation votes by members of the BAR association to renew or revoke their qualifications

Not going to happen. SCOTUS terms are life appointments constitutionally. That means you've gotten into amendment territory which just plain is not realistic right now.

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This comment coming from someone on a .de instance is just icing on the cake.

And, based on recent events in Crimea, may be of limited effectiveness in any future conflict.

This is yet another example of our system fundamentally being incapable of dealing with someone like Trump willing to deviate from all established norms.

Legally, POTUS is the classifying authority. They can give clearance to whomever they want.

That's worked mostly fine since the classification system was established in the early 1950s because the assumption has always been that POTUS isn't wildly compromised and completely surrounded by compromised individuals.

Oops.

But he determined the direction and scope of Democratic policy almost in its entirety

I wouldn't agree with this.

In terms of the progressive wing pushing the agenda under Biden, Liz Warren has had far more direct impact.

Warren was rather famously successful in landing allies into key positions in banking, education, and labor regulatory agencies. These are the sort of moves that are less flashy, but have played a large part in why we've seen things like debt cancellation pushes and a resurgence in antitrust action since Biden took office.

they didn't want their non-political national brand associated with extremely politically decisive right wing media

Worth noting: Dunkin is owned by Inspire Brands, who went out of their way to toot their own horn about how they were successful in lobbying to kill inclusion of a minimum wage hike as part of COVID relief:

https://www.newsweek.com/this-fast-food-giant-bragged-about-killing-15-minimum-wage-1579273

So they're perfectly happy to take political positions; they just recognize these platforms are even more radioactive than bragging about opposing living wages for their workers.

Further, Inspire is owned by Roark Capital -- a company literally named after an Ayn Rand character. That's how far out in the loonie bin these folks are. And the MAGAs are too far over the line even for them, lol.

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This is really the point to open a second front and start openly, explocitly calling him a coward.

Weird is effective at highlighting how far outside the mainstream these people are.

Coward directly pokes holes in and deflates his strongman image. It hits enthusiasm within the cult.

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This is an issue that Biden has consistently refused to understand to be a political loser well before any suggestion of a decline. He's consistently vocal on it in a way that would suggest he genuinely believes it to be a winning position.

In reality, it's practically impossible to do and mostly serves to energize the right and alienate voters in states he actually needs to win. It'd literally be better politically to say nothing on the topic, but he insists on pouring fuel on the "they want to ban our guns" fire.

I have been, on the whole, positive about Biden, but this is a massive blindspot he's held for a long time.

Wasn't this one where they just outright invented 'facts' wholesale?

Healthcare is consistently the most targeted industry for these types of attacks and it's an industry where both vendors have traditionally had very lax security postures and where IT tends to be severely understaffed and underfunded since executives have viewed it as a non-core cost center.

In reality, hospitals are extremely data heavy organizations these days, but the people running them have been extremely slow to recognize and embrace this fact. It's going to take a very long time for most healthcare organizations to get up to modern security standards and practices.

Cite NIST SP 800-63B.

Verifiers SHOULD NOT impose other composition rules (e.g., requiring mixtures of different character types or prohibiting consecutively repeated characters) for memorized secrets. Verifiers SHOULD NOT require memorized secrets to be changed arbitrarily (e.g., periodically). However, verifiers SHALL force a change if there is evidence of compromise of the authenticator.

https://pages.nist.gov/800-63-3/sp800-63b.html

I've successfully used it to tell auditors to fuck off about password rotation in the healthcare space.

Now, to be in compliance with NIST guidelines, you do also need to require MFA. This document is what federal guidelines are based on, which is why you're starting to see Federal gov websites require MFA for access.

Either way, I'd highly encourage everyone to give the full document a read through. Not enough people are aware of it and this revision was shockingly reasonable when it came out a year or two ago.

our last "just war" that was even a little cut and dry was world war two.

The Balkans were pretty cut and dry in justified intent.

It was an intervention into the worst genocide in Europe since WW2. We're talking not only wholesale slaughter of civilians, but even the establishment of literal rape camps as part of an organized, systemic campaign of ethnic cleansing. What was happening in the former Yugoslavia was absolutely horrific and the US and NATO stepping in to put an end to it was an unequivocally good thing.

That said, there were still questionable incidents like the "accidental" bombing of the Chinese embassy or the numerous cases of civilians killed by NATO bombs. But that mostly emphasizes the fact that there's no such thing as a clean war. War is always going to leave blood on your hands, even if it's being fought for the right reasons.

Depends on the department but police vests being carriers with ceramic plates is far from uncommon these days. I know for a fact that's the case for my local department.

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He came to suck years later.

At the time he was considerably farther to the left than the rest of the field short of Dennis Kucinich. Opposition to the Iraq war was central to his campaign when half the party was still trying to justify it. He wanted to push universal healthcare before that was a common position within the party. He was on the cutting edge of promoting gay rights and was extremely popular in the gay community when that community didn't have the voice it does now. His stint as DNC chair built real party infrastructure and helped set the stage for Obama's 2008 run.

The country -- and the Democratic Party -- were considerably more conservative 20 years ago and he definitely helped push things toward where we are now.

That said, he's absolutely said and done some things in recent year that make it pretty clear he's not the progressive vanguard he was back then. He's stood still, and arguably regressed, while the country kept moving. It's unfortunate. But I think it's also a mistake to dismiss him outright; he was a pretty important figure in getting the party to where it is now.

The delays are still a concern for many reasons, but as long as local post offices handle ballot delivery locally it would help minimize late ballots.

There's the rub, though: the model DeJoy is moving to is trying to remove mail carriers from thousands of local post offices. The plan is to funnel everything through centralized regional sort centers and have all routes start/end there. Even if the local post office set ballots to the side, they'd still end up flowing back through the sort center because, under the plan, many post offices will essentially be the equivalent of a UPS or FedEx retail location.

I could kind of ignore it for a while but then he started dabbling in 9/11 trutherism and I had to nope out. At that point the paranoia and politics were infecting and degrading the actual meat of the content.