ricecake

@ricecake@sh.itjust.works

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Iraq War was preceded by the largest worldwide non-violent protests in history and the war happened anyway.⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I was a bit skeptical as well, but there’s at least one seemingly reputable academic researcher who says as much: en.wikipedia.org/…/15_February_2003_anti-war_prot… (first citation).
  So even if it wasn’t, one could easily be forgiven for the mistake.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Judge Rejects Sale of Infowars to The Onion⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  The estate has a duty to maximize the value of the liquidation, and pay back creditors as best it can. Specifically to settle the debts.

  While a creditor can’t dictate the value of the estate, they can offer to forgive debt, which is the same for the purposes of the estate.

  If the cancelled debt would have been worth more than the cash, then the creditors would be rightfully furious if the state instead sold the asset for less cash and paid them that way.

  If you owe me $50k, and I tell you your watch is worth $5k to me, and instead you sell it for $250 and give me that while declaring bankruptcy so I don’t get anything else, that’s a terrible outcome for me, and great for you if you sold the watch to your friend who then gave it back to you in exchange for $250 later.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Judge Rejects Sale of Infowars to The Onion⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  No, that’s actually still the market deciding. It’s a perfectly standard type of auction that discourages low-ball bids. Bidding is secret, you only get one bid, and you don’t know who or if anyone else is bidding.
  If you want it, you make your best offer for what you’re willing to pay for it, and if someone else bid more they get it. If you would have been willing to pay more with more rounds of bidding, you should have bid that from the start.

  Open-bid auctions get better prices for sellers when there are a lot of bidders, and better prices for buyers when there are few. Given there were two bidders, it’s fair to seek the most either party will bid, rather than seeking $1 more than the maximum the loosing party will pay.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Judge Rejects Sale of Infowars to The Onion⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  So it’s unfortunately not actually a sale until the judge approves it, it’s just an accepted bid.
  Sorta like when buying a car. The salesman tells you the price for the vehicle, overpriced perks, and how much your trade in is worth, and you accept the final price. Then the salesman has to get the floor manager to agree, which they always do, because they’re the ones with authority to approve the sale. Then you can sign the paperwork and exchange money and you’ve actually processed the sale. Until then either party can walk away for any reason.

  In this case, it’s like the floor manager rejected the sale because the cash part of the sale price was less than MSRP, and they didn’t think the trade in value mattered.
  It’s not common for the sale to get rejected, and it’s even weirder for them to reject “not cash” instead of paying attention to value.

  The judge saying the estate can’t accept debt forgiveness in lieu of cash is just odd, since it reduces the debt more than the cash would.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Judge Rejects Sale of Infowars to The Onion⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Sealed buds are usually better for that.

  www.investopedia.com/…/sealed-bid-auction.asp

  Each party is incentivised to make the highest offer they’re willing to pay from the beginning, as opposed to negotiating the best price they can get.

  Additionally, the families forgiving a significant amount of money as part of the bid should factor in, since the responsibility of the estate is to get the best deal, not the most cash.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Petrichor⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s worth remembering that evolution doesn’t select for the best as much as it selects against the worst.

  The reason we have such sensitivity doesn’t have to be particularly game changing as long as it doesn’t make us less likely to reproduce.

  You can plainly see our big niche adaptations being used everyday. We think good. We recognize patterns. We use tools. We walk a lot, efficiently and upright. We communicate with high precision. We have a surprisingly efficient digestive system.

  We’re not busting out the ability to smell rain super often, which hints that it might be more in the “doesn’t hurt” category instead of being a big advantage.

  My guess is that being able to smell disturbed soil is helpful for tracking, either where an animal has run or where something has been buried. Our ancestors were not above digging up a fresh-ish dead animal a canine had buried for later.
  But it could just be that rain sense slightly more accurate than looking towards the horizon was as useful then as it is now: vaguely, I guess? It just doesn’t hurt anything.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨turned them into their final form!⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  And they’re delicious. ~Although usually not just plain meat, but filled with wonderful spices~

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I just WON'T⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  We colloquially call a lot of things I’ve cream that aren’t labeled ice cream, and aren’t legally ice cream.

  The US has tediously long definitions for different foods, and ice cream needs specific proportions of milk products, as well as limits on other physical properties.

  www.accessdata.fda.gov/scripts/…/cfrsearch.cfm?fr…

  www.accessdata.fda.gov/scripts/…/cfrsearch.cfm?fr…

  www.accessdata.fda.gov/scripts/…/CFRSearch.cfm?CF…

  So while I might pick up some sherbet and say “I got ice cream”, and people would know what I meant, it would never be labeled ice cream.
  I also like oat milk ice cream, but it’s actually labeled “frozen dessert” because it doesn’t contain dairy.

  The company isn’t allowed to use a term that might mislead a unwitting or uninformed consumer, but the consumer is free to have a more relaxed definition, and stores can put things where you would expect.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon questions our energy sector⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Not sure I get what you mean by “slow”.

  And it’s not entirely shocking that we have more of the power source we’ve been building and less of the one we stopped building.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Onion buys rightwing conspiracy theory site Infowars with plans to make it ‘very funny, very stupid’⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Ha! I didn’t see that at first. I love “fuck you so hard that we can and will put a significant dollar value on it being more humiliating”.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Onion buys rightwing conspiracy theory site Infowars with plans to make it ‘very funny, very stupid’⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  The assets were auctioned off to pay his debt to the families of the Sandy Hook shooting.
  So effectively they gave money to the families of children killed in a school shooting that he slandered in cruel and vile ways.

  Given that the families pretty reasonably dislike him, the added bonus of his creation being used to openly mock him and promote a message they endorse is quality icing on the cake.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨These Guys Hacked AirPods to Give Their Grandmas Hearing Aids⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I can actually forgive this one. A lot of medical devices regulations require that if you function as something or make it available, then you need to pass the certification for offering it.
  You can’t just relabel a device as something else if you clearly intend for it to be used as a medical device. Shady Bob’s emergency electrical heart massager isn’t going to fly.

  In the US, hearing aids required a prescription until 2022. What I can glean from translated sites is that India still has that requirement.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is there a way to precisely locate a Qi charging coil on a device?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Your easiest bet is to find a teardown video and pause when they have the case off.

  Image

  The coil is the coil shaped bit in the black plastic on the left.

  Technically, you could get one of those meters that measures the power draw of a device, hook it to a wireless charging puck and slide it around. The power draw will be higher the more closely aligned the two coils are.
  Going that far is going to be really fiddly and probably not worth the trouble though.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Not allowed to work from home⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Eh, it doesn’t need to be, you just need to do the work of putting together granular access controls that can account for your risk profiles.

  The risk isn’t much different between a company owned telephone and a personal telephone.
  They’re both susceptible to most of the same attacks, or being left on the bus.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Not allowed to work from home⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  A totally reasonable stance.

  For clarity, the android feature essentially makes a work dedicated partition on the phone. Their management app can manage that partition, and for the purposes of data movement it’s essentially a distinct phone.
  If they’ve set it up correctly they can do a remote wipe without touching your personal data.

  support.google.com/work/android/answer/7502354?sj…

  In a lot of cases the drive to have users use their personal devices rather than employer owned ones comes from the users, not the workplace. Only needing to keep track of one device is easier in many cases.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How does US "early voting" works logistically speaking ?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  What county is that? That sounds like the type of discrepancy that you don’t hear about often.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How does US "early voting" works logistically speaking ?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I have an assigned voting location, but there are several in my district that are all “valid”, and I was just assigned the one closest to my house. If I were to be confused and go to a valid location I wasn’t assigned to, I’m still in the ledger. Since I’m attempting to vote in the correct district, they don’t really have grounds to turn me away.

  If I were in the wrong district, I’m still allowed to cast a provisional ballot, which lets you vote but they sort it out later.

  You can also vote absentee and then also in person and not disclose that you need to invalidate the absent vote. Here that’s automatic, but in some places it’s a crime.

  You’re also allowed to go to a clerks office, which has the equipment to print any ballot and handle it correctly.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How does US "early voting" works logistically speaking ?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  The exact specifics vary based on the state, but it’s roughly the same in each of them.
  You track the voter, ballot, collection and counting.

  Voter A issued ballot 3. Ballot 3 collected Ballot 3 counted.

  The counting phase involves removing the tracking number from the ballot before removing a cover that keeps the vote private.

  You can’t slip an extra ballot into the box because then the totals don’t add up, and you know where in the process the discrepancy occurred.
  Making sure there are multiple eyes on issuing and counting means it’s hard to create or count a fake ballot.
  When not observed by multiple people, the containers are locked with multiple locks with keys held by different people.

  It’s why most voter fraud is a voter going to multiple valid voting locations to vote multiple times. Once the tabulations begin, you see you counted the number collected, collected the number issued, and that you issued one ballot to each voter except one, who got three.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Horrors We've Unleashed⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Most modern plans for eradication involve creating a virus that handles it, rather than a pesticide.
  Have the virus introduce a gene that takes a few generations of breeding in the impacted population before it starts to debilitate or sterilize the mosquitoes. That way your virus can start to kill the population even as it spreads to areas that were missed.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Horrors We've Unleashed⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  All of our best data on the impact says that it really wouldn’t matter. Sometimes a species is a linchpin for the ecosystem, and sometimes it isn’t.

  Sucks for mosquitoes, but there’s a very real chance that we’ll smallpox them, and the biggest concern will be our confidence that the virus we use doesn’t impact other species unintentionally.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Phonebooks⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah, and it’s not like you want the information out there, it’s just that in my opinion it’s not something I would pay money for. Having the authority to make the request doesn’t mean that the party on the other end is obligated to comply, or in some cases even legally permitted to.

  I’ve used Google’s service where they send you an email to review results if they find something, and my Google results for my incredibly distinctive name are basically only professional resources that I kinda want to be findable.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Phonebooks⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Honestly? It’s not something I would pay for. Google has their own service where they’ll let you know if they find your information and you can ask them to remove the search result.
  Beyond that, there’s some information that you just fundamentally can’t make private and no service can get taken down.
  Most data mining sites just collect those public records and put them next to each other, so they get a pile of your name, birthday, where you were born, how active you are as a voter and all that stuff.

  Removing your address from Google maps just seems silly to me. That there is a residence there is fundamentally public information, not being on maps doesn’t make it less public it just probably causes issues for delivery drivers.

  Anyone who has your data and is going to be a jerk about it isn’t going to listen to a request to take it down either. They’re just going to send you spam messages.

  The odds of being Targeted by a determined individual who’s focused explicitly on you is low. They tend to target a broad swath of people, and then dig in on people who take the bait a few times.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Phonebooks⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I have never felt so old.

  Name, address, and phone number of the account holder used to be published in books that got sent to everyone in the city and also just left lying in boxes that had phones in them if you needed to make a call while you weren’t home, because your phone used to be tied to a physical location.
  You also used to have to pay extra to make calls to places far away because it used more phone circuits. And by “far away” I mean roughly 50 miles.

  It’s not the biggest thing in the world, privacy wise, since a surprising amount of information is considered public.
  If you know an address, it’s pretty much trivial to find the owners name, basic layout of the house, home value, previous owners, utility bill information, tax payments, and so on. I looked up my information and was able to pretty easily get the records for my house, showing I pay my bills on time, when I got my air conditioner replaced and who the contractor who did it was.

  As an example, here’s the property record for a parking structure owned by the state of Michigan. I chose a public building accessible by anyone and owned by a government to avoid randomly doxing someone, but it’s really as easy as searching for public records for some county or city and you’ll find something pretty fast.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How can I keep my forwarded port secure?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah, it’s definitely faster, but I’m not sure it’s going to make too much of a difference for a Minecraft server.

  With setting it up being a bit annoying by hand, I’d still rank the router option higher even if it’s a worse VPN. Otherwise you risk ending up in that yak shaving situation where you’re fighting with routing tables and DNS when you wanted a Minecraft server.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How can I keep my forwarded port secure?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Oh for sure. What I meant was “check router for a built in VPN and use it if it has one, otherwise use wireguard because it’s the easiest”.

  The specific VPN doesn’t really matter so much. The built-in one would be the easiest, so checking for a solution that took a few clicks is worth it. :)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How can I keep my forwarded port secure?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I would use something like wireguard, or another VPN service you can host yourself if your router supports it natively.

  From the looks of it Minecraft servers seem to have dogshit authentication, so using some form of private network setup is going to be your best move.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Irony of 'You Wouldn't Download a Car' Making a Comeback in AI Debates⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Eeeh, I still think diving into the weeds of the technical is the wrong way to approach it. Their argument is that training isn’t copyright violation, not that sufficient training dilutes the violation.

  Even if trained only on one source, it’s quite unlikely that it would generate copyright infringing output. It would be vastly less intelligible, likely to the point of overtly garbled words and sentences lacking much in the way of grammar.

  If what they’re doing is technically an infringement or how it works is entirely aside from a discussion on if it should be infringement or permitted.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Irony of 'You Wouldn't Download a Car' Making a Comeback in AI Debates⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Basing your argument around how the model or training system works doesn’t seem like the best way to frame your point to me. It invites a lot of mucking about in the details of how the systems do or don’t work, how humans learn, and what “learning” and “knowledge” actually are.

  I’m a human as far as I know, and it’s trivial for me to regurgitate my training data. I regularly say things that are either directly references to things I’ve heard, or accidentally copy them, sometimes with errors.
  Would you argue that I’m just a statistical collage of the things I’ve experienced, seen or read? My brain has as many copies of my training data in it as the AI model, namely zero, but “Captain Picard of the USS Enterprise sat down for a rousing game of chess with his friend Sherlock Holmes, and then Shakespeare came in dressed like Mickey mouse and said ‘to be or not to be, that is the question, for tis nobler in the heart’ or something”. Direct copies of someone else’s work, as well as multiple copyright infringements.
  I’m also shit at drawing with perspective. It comes across like a drunk toddler trying their hand at cubism.

  Arguing about how the model works or the deficiencies of it to justify treating it differently just invites fixing those issues and repeating the same conversation later. What if we make one that does work how humans do in your opinion? Or it properly actually extracts the information in a way that isn’t just statistically inferred patterns, whatever the distinction there is? Does that suddenly make it different?

  You don’t need to get bogged down in the muck of the technical to say that even if you conceed every technical point, we can still say that a non-sentient machine learning system can be held to different standards with regards to copyright law than a sentient person. A person gets to buy a book, read it, and then carry around that information in their head and use it however they want. Not-A-Person does not get to read a book and hold that information without consent of the author.
  Arguing why it’s bad for society for machines to mechanise the production of works inspired by others is more to the point.

  Computers think the same way boats swim. Arguing about the difference between hands and propellers misses the point that you don’t want a shrimp boat in your swimming pool. I don’t care why they’re different, or that it technically violated the “free swim” policy, I care that it ruins the whole thing for the people it exists for in the first place.

  I think all the AI stuff is cool, fun and interesting. I also think that letting it train on everything regardless of the creators wishes has too much opportunity to make everything garbage. Same for letting it produce content that isn’t labeled or cited.
  If they can find a way to do and use the cool stuff without making things worse, they should focus on that.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why I Haven't Seen Any Trump Supporters In Fediverse (Lemmy and Mastodon)?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  You occasionally run into some disagreeable but unobjectionable “traditional” conservative opinions, usually around economics and the governments role in it, but trump shit isn’t that. We can be friends if you think a market solution is viable or better than an entitlement program. We can’t be friends if you think a significant portion of your fellow citizens are vermin or that we should just let terrible problems continue or get worse.

  The window has just shifted so far that literal objective depictions of reality are described as “left”.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Firefox rolls out Total Cookie Protection by default to all desktop users worldwide | It is Firefox’s strongest privacy protection to date, confining cookies to the site where they were created⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  So that’s what third party cookies are. What this does is make it so that when you go to example.com and you get a Google cookie, that cookie is only associated with example.com, and your random.org Google cookie will be specific to that site.

  A site will be able to use Google to track how you use their site, which is a fine and valid thing, but they or Google don’t get to see how you use a different site. (Google doesn’t actually share specifics, but they can see stuff like “behavior on one site led to sale on the other”)