gattsuru
1d ago
... there's a fun story from the criminal justice sphere, and by fun I mean incredibly depressing.
It's an old Freakanomics bit that drug dealers don't actually make that much money, but despite being in Freakonomics, it's actually true. The distribution agents and runners make peanuts, even mid-level dealers that handle a lot of cash end up spending a lot of that to replace stock, and you have to get real close to the top of the chain to break into high five figures or low six. Now, admittedly, that's tax-free and you don't have to deal with McDonald's customers, but there's a whole new level of problem when 'can't leave work at work' goes from late-night on-call to slightly more energetic concerns, whether from police or from other criminals.
Why would people accept a risk of 45 calibre wakeup calls for less than they could make sllepping fries ends up one of the big driving questions for criminology, and unfortunately there's a ton of different partially-right answers : lack of access to conventional employment, cycles of poverty, casual users making a little bit of money on the side, yada yada.
If you ask the actual people, though, a very common answer (especially once you get away from the casual users) is that they don't plan to stay at the entry-level. After all, it's not like the people at the top now have been there very long, and turnover for the mid-levels is often ridiculous. They're always hiring!
It seems stupid, from the outside view. They're jumping to get into the shoes of imprisoned (or dead) men, with at most vague motions about how they won't step into whatever trap got the immediate previous owner and not the thirty other previous owners. Maybe it is stupid.
They're still always hiring.
gattsuru
1d ago
In a mainstream story, not a ton, and most of the cases I can think of it's at least arguable that the writer believed the character to be a hero or 'conflicted', all evidence to the contrary aside. For a male example, Aizen from Bleach (not recommended) or Jacen Solo from __ or Anton Chigurh from No Country For Old Men for a more entertaining version; for female ones, Kreia from KOTOR2 is probably the best-known among readers here, most others usually fall around into genres (romantasy and college drama stuff).
Actual Mary Sue turns evil stories are rarer. Kreia and Jacen fit, but only marginally.
Stories where a powerful Chosen One ends up turning to the Dark Side -- without being flat characters that wrap the story around themselves -- are a little more common, but usually different, not least of all that they typically have the actual protagonist take the center of the narrative away from them. Tai Lung from Kung Fu Panda, Dylan from Control. Arguably Wanda from the DCAU kinda straddles these two positions, but she's a pretty unusual case.
Fanfiction, everywhere. Quirrelmort from HPMOR was pretty overtly intended as a send-up of the concept, and succeeded so aggressively that even after the story's conclusion a lot of people didn't get the joke, but original characters, Draco, Hermoine, or Harry made far more competent (or faced off against dumber authorities) taking out their frustrations on random characters or fictionalized versions of real-world targets happened a lot. MLP had Gilda, Trixie, and Princess Celestia as pretty common go-tos, Transformer fandom's got a lot of people who love the Decepticons, yada yada. They're not always Sues, but they tend to be less considered stories, so not a surprise that they're common.
gattsuru
2d ago
Jedi Knight had some at-the-time impressive FMV bits, but the story was not exactly the core of the series. Knights of the Old Republic is much more heavily on the RPG side with correspondingly deeper story, and a lot of KOTOR 2 and especially its end boss in particular is focused on questions about the Force and its Dark Side and what that means to individual people force-sensitive or not (along with a bit of theodicy and anti-theism).
Pretty good game, too, if you're into the genre.
gattsuru
2d ago
I'm... kinda confused by the window example. I can go down to the hardware store and buy pet-resistant screen door mesh that can protect against a hundred pound dog lunging and clawing for thirty-plus minutes, or chicken-wire grid that block less air intake and is designed to protect a chicken coop against invasive predators for weeks at a time; both will cost less than thirty bucks. Even if we presumed Safety Above All, there are simple solutions that would be as or more effective and allow much better airflow (and be compatible with boost fans).
- Truce at Bakura has the Resistance and Empire join together to fight off space dinosaurs that powered their machines with the tortured souls of harvested force-sensitive species, and really played into the Jedi as warrior-monks in the western-religious sense. Only mention of the Emperor is that he sold out the titular planet; Anakin Skywalker shows up as a ghost looking for forgiveness... and Leia tells him to fuck off. It was such a bold new direction that a lot of writers pretty carefully tiptoed around the whole thing for about a decade after.
- Crystal Star is so weird that the only other EU book to mention it is only did so to glass the main planet involved. Weird cult sacrifices people to summon an extra-dimensional entity. Pretty sure it started out as a Star Trek novel and got lost somewhere. Not good, but definitely nothing like any movie.
- I, Jedi focuses on an ex-cop-turned smuggler Force Sensitive working undercover to track down his disappeared wife and facing off against a pirate gang, while he Forrest Gumps his way through a bunch of post-Endor events. It's... actually a bit of a fix fic for the (tbf bad and very Empire Builds Another Superweapon) Jedi Academy Trilogy, so it's not the most accessible for people who haven't read others parts of the Expanded Universe, but it's a major point getting away from a lot of the trite Rebellion V Empire and Big Superweapons Go stuff.
- Rogue Squadron (and the imo even better Wraith Squadron) books are a bit of a The Expendables: the stories are military fiction with high body-counts and more focus on intrigue. They're set against the Empire in most books, but the commanders are drastically different, and the closest thing to a superweapon is a not-very-special biological weapon more notable for its political impact.
- New Jedi Order set a New Republic - which was mostly at peace with mostly-run-out-of-evil-people Empire since the end of The Hand of Thrawn series - against extragalactic invaders who were both religious fundamentalists and cut off completely from the force. About the only Original Series bit is the increasing use of planet-destroying superweapons, but that's a bit like complaining about oversized guns in Warhammer 40k given the topic focus.
- Legacy of the Force falls after that, with the son of Han and Leia facing a force vision of the future holding that the only way to protect the galaxy and his daughter was to turn to the Dark Side and become a Sith Lord. Controversial, but there were some interesting bits: Jacen's a byronic hero/villain who genuinely struggles against the easy routes of power and hate and pride, and it's not a battle he can ever win... and then there's an Evil Bigger Badder Plain Evil Guy.
These aren't always good (I really dislike both NJO and LOTF for pretty dumb canned heat), and the ones that are good aren't always original (The Thrawn Trilogy's a send-up of the very 'Empire Reborn' stuff that you're criticizing and has to invoke it to deconstruct it, Wraith Squadron has a few comedic bits that are basically Down Periscope In Space). Sometimes they're even just plain weird: I'm not recommending Darksaber when I say it's the best Kevin James Anderson work, but it actually does pretty a good breakdown of why the Empire's whole philosophy is so fucked up even if it's so deep in Bathos that there are Austin Powers jokes.
gattsuru
3d ago
In addition to WhiningCoil's complaints, I'd point out how badly what they've done as updates and upgrades has gone, where they have done any work.
If you have access to a Win11 machine, compare the old network configuration interface with the new one. There's an absolute ton of space for improvements and better usability, here! And they've skipped almost all of it; even ignoring uncommon (but not exactly rare!) things like handling multiple IP addresses on a given physical interface: why does it only accept IPv4 subnet masks in (bastardized) CIDR notation (without a combobox wtf?). Worse, if you used dotted decimal notation, why does it just give "Can't save IP settings. Check one or more settings and try again." without explaining what error or even highlighting the 'wrong' entry?
gattsuru
4d ago
Yeah, his discussion around 1I/‘Oumuamua was one of my examples for crank-on-organization wars, and while that doesn't mean he's wrong (of other examples, Hirsch ended up winning his fight pretty clearly), it doesn't give a ton of strength on its own.
gattsuru
4d ago
This is a nitpick, and you're definitely right for the start menu; the real problem is probably something to do with network latency and poor caching and software design.
((Though there are some things separate from typical performance that can be Bad: Electron is just 'heavy' as an environment, so even were it perfectly performant, you just have to deal with it loading from disk and RAM, and that can be expensive. C# has similar problems at a smaller scale but made worse by repeating them per thread, hence the kinda goofy task not-threadpool thing. And the Start Menu in 11 is React Native, which is unlikely to have these particular problems but probably has its own instead.))
I'll caveat that memory-managed environments can have some foundational performance problems in some specific use cases: (esp nested) array access is extremely expensive in managed environments, and I've gotten three or four-fold improvements by merely changing to pointer access, and I'm sure someone who cares (and is smart enough to care) about cache locality could have gotten close to an order of magnitude out of it.
You can work around this by either having that language allow programmers to pin memory and use pointer-like features, have ways to pass data to unmanaged-memory languages, or have prebuilt tools that do these under the hood, and a lot of higher-level languages do (eg, python is three C++ wrappers in a trenchcoat at times). But if you have to actually touch a bunch of individual bytes, the difference can be a big deal.
gattsuru
4d ago
Before doing anything else, make sure you have backed up your phone and any vital information (esp things like 2FA keys).
I've done it pretty regularly, both for my own phones and for others at my workplace. That said, it is difficult and sometimes even dangerous: I've lit off one battery on an older iPhone removing it, and while that's mostly a result of that particular aftermarket battery being crap and badly swollen, it's definitely not a surprise most people want to deal with. iPhones are definitely worse than most Android phones I've worked on, but none of them are fun.
((Screen damage can fall into a similar boat; replacement (Non-OLED) screen modules are typically under 30 USD for a plausibly-legal model and replacement gasket, and it's step 1 of getting to the battery for most phones. But iPhones can be a particular pain in the ass, with the TouchID modules on iPhones gen5-9 being extremely fragile and impossible to replace and extremely unpleasant to repair if damaged.))
The iOpener is nice, but it's just a glorified non-condensing heat/ice pack (buckwheat with a mixed additive, maybe?), and in a pinch you can just use a hot air rework gun or hot air gun. Would not recommend a hairdryer. You definitely need something like it; most phone faces are hard enough to remove with heat, and impossible with it. The AntiClamp is more a convenience thing; it's mostly just giving you more space to hold the phone while . Almost all of the other tools will come with any Amazon-grade vendor's battery (even the crappy ones), and if you do phone repairs a lot you'll end up collecting a ton of these stupid weirdo screwdrivers.
While not listed on the iFixit guide, I would recommend a silicone work mat; you can buy repair-specific ones (personal recommendation, but discount stores like Five Below or Dollar General will often end up with cooking or art-intended ones that work and can be cheaper. The screws here are tiny and often not magnetic, so having a clean, uniform workspace is a must Grab something with individual cups or marked areas, or grab some small disposable shotglass-sized cups, because a lot of the screws look identical but have slight differences that keep them from being interchangeable (tbf, less a problem on Pixels than on iPhones).
I've mostly been happy with it. Screen and especially battery quality can vary heavily, especially if you're going to Amazon and sorting by price, but even the worst I've gotten have still keep the phone running for a couple years more, it's more a matter of whether if it lasts three before battery life falls off a cliff or if the screen's backlight has a hotspot. Tablet screens can be prone to getting dust specs or hair in them, so there's been one or two times I thought I was done and had to start over again. Do expect worse water intrusion resistance unless you're absolutely neurotic about gasket placement.
Again, damage or destruction is possible, but a manageable risk and you have to be doing something kinda stupid for it to happen. Don't pry on batteries with screwdrivers, be careful with ribbon cables, essentially.
For shops, Google does have an authorized repair program and that puts an effective cap (as does the iStore 'repair' system), albeit a pretty high one. Sticker prices usually start around 100-150 USD, depending on exact model; some smaller (non-authorized-by-google) mall stores will squeak under that a bit, but I'd be surprised by anyone going under 80 USD these days. I've heard they're pretty reliable and fast from people who do use them, although they tend to be normies only using recent phones.
I'm generally a fan of keeping older equipment running, but do be aware it comes with costs. The Pixel 8 is supposed to keep getting security and software updates until 2030, so you're good for probably two battery replacements... and some other software might not keep up with that. That's gonna depend a lot more heavily on what you use your phone for, but I've seen a few pilots who were forced to update not because of hardware but because of Foreflight, as one example.
gattsuru
6d ago
There was a short period in 2005-2012ish where FPGA programming languages like VHDL and Verilog had to work on so badly constrained environments that octal bases were worth the obnoxious overhead, but either none of them retained support or no one uses that support for normal code this decade.
gattsuru
8d ago
When I receive these emails, I open up my computer and phone, load the PDF on my computer, scan the QR with my phone, load the site, copy the URL, email the URL to myself, then open it on my computer. Am I missing something essential about how this is supposed to work?
There are a tiny number of use cases where it makes some sense. If you're expecting students to receive e-mail through school accounts only accessible from (public) school computers, you don't want them putting private or especially financial information (b/c PCI DSS almost universally prohibits that) on those computers no matter how sure you've keylogger-proofed them, and you can't trust students to transfer even prettified URLs from one computer to another by mark I eyeball. Then your workflow, stupid as it seems, makes sense; the only trusted computer most people bring with them is the phone, and scanning a QR code in is the only viable way to pull the URL in.
In rarer cases, the school (or vendor) might be required to pretend that's the use case, either by regulation or internal norm, even if nobody does it.
Of course, if you were building such a system and not hilariously incompetent, PDFs support links, and you can just offer both. In many cases, the IT administration, or their leadership, is just incompetent. It's a funny joke, but it's not a joke.
But instead of using Square or something that charges 3% or so, they use a payment processor I've never heard of before that charges $1 per transaction, mostly for transactions of $5 - $10. Is it providing a real service of protecting the schools from liability somehow?
Most vendors have a minimum flat fee; the difference for a 10 USD transaction would be closer to 0.4 USD at current fees. Sometimes this can have better processing, or review standards on chargebacks, or have given them a good enough deal on payment processing systems or security reviews that it's worth the slightly higher fee, especially if the school uses the same system for large transactions for non-physical goods or for some (overtly) credit-like system, which can get messy from the lowest-overhead-common-denominator. PoS systems in particular can be very expensive (>1k USD/unit, usually need to be replaced every 2-5 years depending on use levels), which can be a massive hassle and expense for an organization that has to authorize individual purchases in a slow method but can get a contract with service requirements through at the same rate. This can even pop up if you aren't seeing those point of sale units: I've seen a volunteer org that only used a physical payment processing system once a month for sports game consumable sales have to do some very complex math to figure out what made economic sense.
But if they're charging you for the fees, it's as likely or more likely that they like the system because it lets them pass the charge onto purchasers explicitly, which ranges from disfavored to banned by terms of service to potentially illegal depending on payment processor and state (and even type of card). Officially, this can get into somewhat gray areas really quickly, but it's very rare for the rules to be enforced and a lot of actual accountants don't know the rules.
gattsuru
9d ago
Alternatively, distribute the stories as 'by' a collective name.
gattsuru
12d ago
gattsuru
12d ago
The Blaze better be extremely certain, or they're gonna get a 100m+ civil judgment. The risk that Baker's gone off the deep end isn't trivial, and he's been very maximalist in reporting before. That said, the pipe bomber has been one of the more severe of many misses when it comes to the law enforcement response to
I'm generally very skeptical of gait analysis. Human-brain gait analysis has been extremely limited: open in scihub, and you'll find that the 'experts' got 71% and the randos 64%... when scoring one of six potentials in the training set). CNNs have done much better, but they still have problems with training data or large numbers of classes. That's not as bad as outright frauds like bite mark analysis, but it's one of the places both prosecutors and juries both seem to take that error rate seriously. And "he personally pegged the match at closer to 98%" makes me think this is the sort of human-lead that leaves a lot of space for thumbs on the scale.
The metro card is more interesting. I'll admit I have a lot less knowledge about the internals of those systems, so there might be well-known vulnerabilities re: spoofing, and there's always a genuine possibility that the original owner just dropped it somewhere. The FBI response seems extremely basic But it a lot of winking toward circumstantial evidence that, if weak, would at least narrow the search area much more for the gait analysis to not just be hilarious fraud -- though in turn, it would point to either unprofessional or nonprofessional planning for the bomber even if true, which I don't think the Blaze wants to recognize.
gattsuru
13d ago
You should have told that to Miyares before the election because that's what he campaigned on.
I don't have his phone number, but the Supreme Court did tell him, directly, and the concertina wire case he's left on his website lost too.
I can litigate the rest if you want, but even taking everything you've said as true, he's still just a replacement-level Republican. If your defense is that Democratic party members will hold to their claimed principles only when they can get someone with the exactly same politics in instead, that's definitely a claim, but it's a long way from what we had everyone arguing here or in the mainstream media for literally a decade now.
But if that expense is too high, thankfully there's another off-ramp coming up. Spangberger could literally name Jones' replacement if he abdicated. That's not just a low-cost opportunity, it's nearly free: she could pick any Dem, even one more extreme, without having to worry about the scandals hanging around her AG's neck for every single policy proposal she gives. Do you want to make any bets on whether it happens? Whether anyone high-profile in her admin even calls for it?
Do you seriously think that if similar texts from Trump came to light a month before last year's election that the GOP establishment would be tripping over themselves to endorse Harris? Do you think his voters abandon him en masse? Do you think Trump even apologizes? I think you know the answer to this one.
Trivially, I did, for far less. Hell, I committed to not vote for him before the election.
Less trivially, Democratic posters in this community made a big deal about moderation and enforcement, both as a portrayal of why Democratic people were better and as why they themselves were taking the high road and were better than the Republican tolerance of Trump, and then doing nothing. A moderator on this forum said that "I'm optimistic that Biden might use it responsibly, and at the times he doesn't I'm prepared to kick and scream and shake my fist impotently at the sky before casting a meaningless vote against him. I have only supported them, and will only support them, provided I see serious attempts at deescalation." and then went on to absolutely not cast a meaningless vote against him or even argue any "serious attempts at deescalation”. The same man is now conveniently incommunicado and unwilling to even give a sha256 about political assassination fandom.
And no, we have examples. In some cases, the comparisons are hilariously on-point: contrast the aftermath of Gossar's anime meme violence to Ilhan Omar's Kirk Deserved It poasting. That's why you have to propose hypotheticals that are not merely untested, but untestable; that's why you have to draw to obscenely dissimilar comparisons, that's why you have to litigate how 'oh this is bad, but it's not so bad as allow people to overlook <Mainstream Political Position A>', that's why it'll always be "This isn't a change in anything." as it goes from crabby old guys in bars to senators to state AGs.
Republicans are well past the point where they can credibly say that this is the point where they draw the line.
Other than the people who did, perhaps. And now Democrats are past that line, and no one cares, and no one will ever care again.
gattsuru
14d ago
That's just saying 'no one cared about cheering for the blood of children' with more steps.
gattsuru
15d ago
so silence looks like complicity.
That's a defense that would undermine Spanbergler, nevermind Jones, and notably it didn't. Neither could forcefully define themselves as the not-killing-kids (and committing hilarious frauds, if we're going to pretend 'rule of law' matters).
Dem voters just didn't care.
gattsuru
15d ago
And if my aunt had balls, she'd be trans. Virginia's not a D+3 state because of Jones, and it's not a D+3 state because of Sears. Fundamentals run the story here; anyone without a sha256 is just explaining what story they want to tell rather than looking at what gives testable predictions.
gattsuru
15d ago
Guys, are users here surprised by this outcome?
To quote myself 29 days ago:
The meme would be I'm not surprised, I'm just disappointed, but I didn't have the hope for that. I'm mostly just trying not to become a ball of rage.
Trump was not on the ballot this year. Jaye's opponent was not campaigning -- nor was -- a MAGA Trumpist. Neither would have any power over immigration law or enforcement. There is near-unprecedented access, bought at no small cost, for information outside of the mainstream media and NPR cloister, at the same time that the broader progressive movement is crowing about the importance of Not Ignoring Evil. Jone's comments even got some mainstream attention.
The best-case scenario would hold that despite all those unprecedented (and likely unstable) advantages and uniquely bad behaviors, it wasn't enough. Indeed, it turned out to be enough not enough that it mattered less than past scandals in the same state.
But, worse, that's a prediction that would predict side effects. 'If only the average voter knew' runs headfirst into what we're imagining that the average voter would do if they did know. And some of them did. Optimistically, maybe one-in-ten? Forget anyone running out into the street and screaming into the sky like a Charlton Heston outtake, forget any member of the Abundance Caucus speaking against the man without being pushed about him first. You'd expect to see someone horrified.
So then the next best-case scenario's that everyone just thought it hyperbole, or joke. But then you look at everybody that thought it funny when Kirk was murdered...
But no. They don't 'want' me dead. They don't even know me! It'd just be funny afterward.
gattsuru
15d ago
Sears as a non-serious candidate has to confront Jones winning. Without doing that, paeans to candidate quality are just post-hoc justifications.
gattsuru
15d ago
Jay Jones's win -- and lackluster to nonexistent pushback from the 'moderate centrist's -- is pretty radicalizing.
He's projected to win by more than 2%. To steelman, that's eight percentage points less than Spanberger, Virginia's early voting started before the scandal dropped, there's some questionably legal electioneering (which would be investigated by the state AG, lol), the federal government shutdown probably juiced his numbers a bit, and this did require the Democratic Party apparachinicks all the way up to Obama supporting him.
To be less naive, all of those things did in fact all happen. An eight percentage point difference means that just over one in seven Democratic voters thought it was unacceptable to call normie political opponents "breeding little fascists" and text a political opponent about how nice the death of children would be, and that's assuming that none of the many other hilariously corrupt issues weren't motivations for any of them instead. Not half bad, I guess. I could repeat this again, but between owing DrManhattan16 a relitigation of the Obama and Biden administrations and absolutely hating every single non-Schism organization I reviewed then, I'm not sure it'd be helpful or just more radicalizing.
gattsuru
16d ago
I think that you are exaggerating what the response was to Kirk's death amongst normies (I agree that there were terminally online people who actively celebrated it, but I am talking about "irl" woke people)
I'll second self_made_human and point to KendricTonn getting it in Ohio. There's more terminally online people than ever before, only some of them poast 24/7/365, and these days it's possible to invite them into your home without ever having been aware of their online presence beforehand.
I'm glad you've avoided it, but I'm finding that less and less possible.
It’s not unusual a claim, even for straights.
((Though not universal; there’s no shortage of people in that thread not noticing until much later, and I myself was a very late bloomer in both the sexual arousal and romantic attraction senses. Those I was curious about what other guy’s dicks looked like well before I wanted to do anything and that I’d assume straight guys didn’t, so maybe I was just really clueless.))
There’s an uncertain question of whether it’s post hoc hindsight, and a bigger question whether it distinguishes sexual orientation from romantic orientation. But the split attraction model is itself a controversial mess, and enough of its ‘clearest’ cases are just as clearly closeted that I’m skeptical of self-reports.
More options
Context Copy link