* Posts by imanidiot

4405 publicly visible posts • joined 19 Mar 2012

YouTube loves recommending conservative vids regardless of your beliefs

imanidiot Silver badge

The YT algorithm vastly out-recommending thumbnails with a wacky face and clickbaity titles is a well documented fact by this point. Plenty of youtube video's about it too. You CAN break through this though, I hardly get any clickbaity titles with stupid thumbnails because (by-and-large) I ignore them at all times.

As to the gun thing, it seems that YouTube tried something silly like screening off anything gun related into a separate bubble, but the end effect of that is that once you (or the algorithm) accidentally stumble over the (very low) garden fence and into the moat around the pit, you're suddenly trapped in there.

imanidiot Silver badge

I'm unclear on the exact methodology used from the article and I can't be arsed to read the entire actual paper but I see some enormous glaring holes in this study. Enough to make me consider it utter bunk.

It already starts at their subject group: "1,063 adult Americans, recruited via Facebook ads" --> All facebook users, all americans, with seemingly no check on their political affiliation, nor a check on how long they've had their google ad-sense profile for instance, and the sort of people that would notice and respond to an ad on top of that = Holy selection bias Batman!

The research method is also utter crap. They start on a random video and basically have the user select a random recommended video. That's not how the algorithm and human users work though. You start at a video that for some reason drew your interest and you keep clicking on the video that draws the most interest. This will already give a very different response and input to the algorithm than this random clicking would and I strongly suspect it would re-enforce the ideological leaning/echo chamber effect tremendously.

Put on top of that the simple fact that the researchers themselves determine what is left- or right-leaning with an opaque "new methodology" based on smegging REDDIT!!! (from the paper: "Specifically, we use the observed behavior of sharing YouTube videos in the domain of ideological subreddits to calculate each video’s ideology that appears on Reddit. This set of more than 50,000 videos with an ideology score are then used as training data for a natural language classifier, which is then used to predict the ideology of any video on YouTube.) And people wonder why proper engineers laugh at the social "sciences".

This is imho utter garbage and it is my opinion the Reg should be ashamed of publishing such an uncritical article on it.

Children should have separate sections in social media sites, says UK coroner

imanidiot Silver badge

Re: As an adult….

Discord, IF properly monitored by the parents can be fine. I don't know if it has parental controls (like locking which discord groups the sprog can join) but if it's just a limited group of classmates or friends it's probably easier to monitor their activities on that discord than it would be if they were hanging out somewhere IRL. It's only a cesspool if the groups the child is in is a cesspool, making it potentially less harmful (or more so, since peer groups amongst kids can be brutal) I understand the caution but Discord nowadays seems to be the digital equivalent of hanging out at the local playground for many kids, so preventing them from joining might make it more difficult for them to socialize with their peers.

I see far fewer redeeming qualities, if any at all, in the majority of the other "social" media platforms.

Too bad, contractors: UK government reverses decision to axe IR35 tax reform

imanidiot Silver badge

Re: Screw them

"That's what happens when we keep voting for Tories."

No, that's what happens when all you have to vote for is idiot career politicians who have no idea how the real world works. Tories might be a tad worse for one fraction of the populace, while Labour is a tad worse for a different bit of the populace but overall the message is always "bend over and take it pleb". No matter the political affiliation.

SpaceX reportedly fed up with providing free Starlink to Ukraine

imanidiot Silver badge

Re: Russian appeasement

Crimea was Ukrainian from the moment Ukraine became independent. Russia further affirmed that when Ukraine gave up the nuclear arsenal within it's borders after the fall of the USSR. The only bit of Crimea that Russia controlled by lease/treaty was/is the naval base in Sebastopol.

imanidiot Silver badge

Re: @Neil Barnes

As said before, even if it's not a reason for Russia to invade, Ukraine's extremist Nazi/nationalist problem is real

imanidiot Silver badge

Re: It's really easy to spot Putin's shills after they get going

"why would they not let Putin bring himself down?"

Because the people waiting in the wings to put the dagger in his back are probably far worse. NATO's interest stop at making sure Russia will not get any bright ideas about invading NATO countries. Backing Ukraine with weapons and materiel helps make sure Russia loses much of it's teeth with (comparatively) little cost to NATO countries (Not counting the Ukrainians ofcourse) .

imanidiot Silver badge

Re: Russian appeasement

If the Russia has 1000 nukes (they have more but anyway) and only 10% of them works that's still 100 nuclear explosions. Certainly not a prospect that falls under "we could risk it" in any way.

imanidiot Silver badge

Re: Russian appeasement

" Ukraine has to content itself with shelling an NPP instead"

Both Ukraine and Russia have been firing on NPPs. Russian forces in all their well-trained wisdom even dug trenches (by hand) and other fortifications around Chernobyl, probably giving a lot of them radiation poisoning in the process. Russian forces also seem to have no qualms about hiding equipment and possibly even firing artillery from the grounds of Zaporizhia which is just asking for trouble too.

"Russia's last demand was for Ukraine's neutrality, and setting up DPR & LPR as autonomous regions". And if Russia hadn't been threatening Ukraine continuously with invasion and feeding weapons and funds to radical independence groups/rebels in said regions Ukraine might actually have remained neutral. Right up until the last invasion (even after the unlawful annexation of Crimea) most of Europe (and Ukraine itself) wanted to remain neutral. But Russia had other plans. Even if DPR and LPR had become autonomous regions Moscow would just have continued stirring shit until they "voluntarily" fell under Russian control.

There isn't going to be peace by acquiescing to Russias demands and feeding the beast. It's about time the EU frees itself from the clutches of Russia and the USA, but I doubt that's going to happen (Few seem to realize the influence of the US). And yes, it's going to be a painful, potentially deadly to some process. We're going to end up in a war otherwise, which would be worse.

imanidiot Silver badge

Re: Nice one, Zelensky and Putin. Well Played, Sirs. We thank you for your Service

The only thing that economically killed Greece is Greece. Economically Greece is now in a far better and far more stable place than it has been for decades and it's no longer even one of the nations I'd be worried about bringing the collapse of the EU and Euro zone (Italy, Spain and France will get us there probably).

There was plenty of solidarity from the EU (and still is) with untold billions from those bail-out packages and the economic funds set up to bail out Greece and other nations now weighing on the economic necks of EU nations like a mill stone. But somehow saying: "You can get the money only if you get your shit together so we won't have to do this again" makes it a "piranha infested toilet bowl"...

imanidiot Silver badge

Re: Nice one, Zelensky and Putin. Well Played, Sirs. We thank you for your Service

US lend-lease was by no means as magnanimous as you make it out to be. It purposefully indebted nations to the US so they couldn't be an economic threat post war.

imanidiot Silver badge

gemeinnützig -> "For the benefit of society" is probably the closest english translation afaik

Phishing works so well crims won't bother with deepfakes, says Sophos chap

imanidiot Silver badge

So he's saying we shouldn't worry about it for very low level, low effort crimes where simple social engineering techniques such as phising work fine. I don't think the majority of security conscious people are very worried about that. It's the high value, high effort targets where this can make a massive difference and I for one do still think there's plenty of organisations that SHOULD worry about the risk and agree on verification methods if high-value deals/transactions have to be discussed or authorized via video chat.

Confirmed: Asteroid shoved by Earth crash probe DART

imanidiot Silver badge

The problem with that approach is that you need to bring along an enormous boatload of fuel to slow down and then move the object. Whereas due to the wonders of the Oberth effect it's possible to impart a lot more kinetic energy into your spacecraft for the fuel burned.

There is also the problem that most of these space rocks aren't really hard rocks but more like giant gravel piles floating through space. There was even some worry that Dimorphos might have been too loosely bound for the impact to work and that the probe might just blow straight through. Certainly if you were to attempt a "land and push" approach you'd have to take into account that you need a lot of surface area to avoid the probe from burying itself deep into the surface potentially damaging itself in the process. Alternatively it's been proposed that doing so on purpose might allow the probe to fire a lot of surface material along with the exhaust gas of the thruster, increasing it's impulse and making it more effective, but if we're talking a (very near) earth impactor then this might just result in a long term hail of smaller rocks raining down into our planets atmosphere. Potentially (slightly) better than one huge big honking one, but certainly not going to be enjoyable.

imanidiot Silver badge

Re: Has anybody thought..

If we ever encounter space rocks moving at relativistic speeds we'd certainly have a lot of problems (or never have problems again probably). At those speeds even a tiny bit of rock can be a planet killer.

imanidiot Silver badge

Re: Has anybody thought..

It's not even an 18 second change on the orbit of 770 days I think as most of the velocity change of dimorphos is it's orbital velocity around the parent body, for the total system I think that only equates to a small change in angular velocity so likely it'll only change the rotational speed or wobble of Didymos. It's orbital period is probably less affected.

imanidiot Silver badge

Re: Follower pics?

You're thinking of LICIAcube. The first pictures have been downloaded but it's a slow process and only a few of them have been released at this time

(https://www.nasa.gov/feature/first-images-from-italian-space-agency-s-liciacube-satellite). Due to the small size of the cubesat and the distance involved, downlink speeds are very low and it'll take a few more weeks to get all the data back.

PayPal decides fining people $2,500 for 'misinformation' wasn't a great idea

imanidiot Silver badge

Re: Probably was a mistake

Hanlon's razor works perfectly well when applied to individuals or very small groups. When applied to large corporations it simply doesn't work. One must simply assume that in the chain of events of "the thing" happening SOMEONE must have been competent enough to spot the problem. It is very very likely for a singular individual to do a stupid and make a mistake without forethought or malice, it becomes much harder to excuse such things when applied to a long chain of individuals ALL of whom must be idiots for it to happen. The pattern for Paypal simply leans way too far towards this being a repeating pattern of actions by a corporation that deems they own the funds until they deign to grant your request to please have your money. When dealing with large corporations like Paypal, malice and forethought must always be considered, possibly even assumed.

imanidiot Silver badge

The problem is that lately it seems like payment processors (like Paypal or credit card processors like Master and Maestro) are starting to band together and coordinate such things, which makes it basically impossible for some even legit businesses (like porn producers) to find a non-sketchy payment processor to do business with.Such coordinated actions basically make it impossible for groups to operate. Right now its mostly fringe loons like those FSU and UST, but it sets a precedent and a very slippery slope I for one would prefer we didn't tread on.

Business can't make staff submit to video surveillance, says court

imanidiot Silver badge

It keeps amazing me just how absolutely shitty US employment laws are. And how seemingly amazed US companies are when workers have zero loyalty for their employer. Not that I have THAT much but enough to trust that shit like this simply will not happen.

imanidiot Silver badge

Re: Good luck getting another job

In the Netherlands this sort if thing is pretty normal, it happens more often. His name isn't widely out there to find attached to the case like it would be in the US (because we have sensible privacy laws) and even if it was, unless his next employer is planning to break the law in the same way they have nothing to fear. The vast majority of dismissals happen more or less amicably without the courts involved, but if a company pulls a stunt like this a fired worker isn't usually blamed for getting what he is due under the law.

Also, asking about or even using something like this against a person when hiring is also considered unlawful discrimination so... few companies who actually now how to operate in the Netherlands would even consider it.. Easier and cheaper to just stick to the law

NSA super-leaker Edward Snowden granted Russian citizenship

imanidiot Silver badge

If Putin and consorts keep going the way they are in Ukraïne and with the conscription going on, it remains to be seen just how long Putin and his FSB keep power and whether what comes after is better or worse (I'm betting far worse personally).

IBM: Hey Joe, we make chips, too. How about some of 'em subsidies?

imanidiot Silver badge

Re: Memory problems

One can do a lot of R&D without owning the actual production fab equipment though. I've been to their research fab in Albany and it's a pretty impressive facility. Apparently IBM simply wasn't making enough chips for it to be worth running their own fab lines and it made financial sense to sell the fabs and pay someone else for part time use of them instead of having to pay for a fab that wasn't doing anything part of the time..

Delivery drone crashes into power lines, causes outage

imanidiot Silver badge

If the plane was controlled the whole way it probably WAS a PCL to begin with, but it ended in a controlled flight into obstacles/terrain. That's still a crash, not a landing.

imanidiot Silver badge

Because they haven't bothered to map power lines nor implement any system to avoid them probably

Update your Tesla now before the windows put your fingers in a pinch

imanidiot Silver badge

Re: Beauty

Where in the world am I saying anything like that?

I was saying that Tesla has massive quality issues, both in software and in hardware. I can't provide a source for the software issues, but I provided an example of the well known hardware issues Tesla is having. Panel gaps being one of them. I was implying that a company building hardware such as cars being unable to get something as utterly basic as panel gaps consistently right points to an underlying lack of understanding of quality management and manufacturing that will be undoubtedly present in all layers of the company. That includes software. Obviously the existence of uneven panel gaps can't be fixed in OTA updates, but the fact cars leave the factory floor with such obvious quality defects shows Tesla quality is shit.

Boss of Chinese memory maker Yangtze departs for no obvious reason

imanidiot Silver badge

I had the same thought. Sounds to me like someone (possibly/probably the CCP) is grabbing power and ousting execs.

DoJ ‘very disappointed’ with probation sentence for Capital One hacker Paige Thompson

imanidiot Silver badge

Re: Whose fault is it?

"If I leave my front door unlocked, that doesn't make it OK for you to come in and rob the place."

It does mean that the charges would go from burglary (possibly with home invasion added) and theft to only theft with the associated drop in penalties.

Rather than take the L, Amazon sues state that dared criticize warehouse safety

imanidiot Silver badge

Re: @iamanidiot

There are some things where I'm not, there are some things where I know a little bit, there are a LOT of things where I'm an idiot and not afraid to admit it.

imanidiot Silver badge

Re: Who are their lawyers?

The problem is that if Amazon were to do a proper job in their warehouse their entire system collapses. Their warehouses are DESIGNED to destroy cheap labour because it's cheap and doing a proper job would involve a lot of investment in warehouse systems. One of the problems is that humans have to keep running across a giant warehouse to pick stuff out of bins (constantly being shifting around by robots mind). Most modern warehouses have systems to bring the items to the pickers instead of having the pickers move to the items. Making that shift however is a monumental shift in design paradigm for the warehouse and all the systems in it and it basically would mean shutting the warehouse down, stripping it down bare to carcass and rebuilding the insides from the floor up. New machinery, new control software, new robots, retraining employees for the new work methods, etc.

Amazon SHOULD be doing that, but the end result I bet will be that Amazon will move it's warehouses out of the state.

Airbus auctions off bits from retired A380 superjumbo jet

imanidiot Silver badge

Re: The party may not be over yet

VERY unlikely. It's mainly Emirates Airlines that's grumbling it wants more jets, but at the same time it's never going to commit to maybe a hundred at most more. The 251 built was already insufficient for Airbus to keep the line running and 100 more (or even 150 if other customers buy a few) will likely not do much. They need the factory space to keep up with demand for all their smaller jets as they have such backlog that airlines are choosing to go to Boeing simply because they need planes faster than Airbus can possibly deliver them.

Bitcoin worse for the climate than beef, say economists

imanidiot Silver badge

Re: Hear Me Out...

Don't listen to this bull, he's telling Porkies. I'm telling BitOink is where it's at!

China spins up giant battery built with US-patented tech

imanidiot Silver badge
Holmes

unable or unwilling?

"PNNL's lead VRFB scientist Gary Yang claimed to not be able to find a US company to invest in the technology's production"

I somehow get the feeling Mr. Yang didn't try exceedingly hard to find a US company to invest when the Chinese came knocking with a very big bag of money.

imanidiot Silver badge

Re: Torn

Patents are the exact opposite actually. If you patent something you disclose what it is you invented and how it works (or at least that is how it should work. Software patents and overly broad "generic" patents on broad concepts have thrown a bit of a spanner in those works).

NASA, SpaceX weigh invoking Dragon to take Hubble higher

imanidiot Silver badge

Re: Insufficicent

Cost. It's all about money. Keep in mind NASA is basically going to be spending nothing on this. If it happens it'll be funded by Isaacman, not NASA, so it won't take anything out of their budget for other missions. At worst if they can make it happen NASA will probably pay for the components and tools, which will be comparatively cheap.

The next scope in the line for NASA is the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. Which will be a sort of Hubble 2.0 (based on a keyhole satellite bus, very similar to Hubble but with a wider field of view) Outside of that NASA has very little budget to be building another space telescope right now. What they have is being wasted on the Artemis and SLS boondoggle.

OK, Google: Why are you still pointing women at fake abortion clinics?

imanidiot Silver badge

Nonsensical non-sequitar is nonsensical. Entirely different issue, entirely different ethical questions.

imanidiot Silver badge

And I say YOU are wrong. Now what?

imanidiot Silver badge

Ok, fine, so you want to put the limit at 8 weeks, not 6. That argument can maybe be made. So after 8 weeks by your definition it's then a person. And post 8 weeks an abortion is then killing that person.

imanidiot Silver badge

Post about 6 weeks yes, I would argue a fetus should be considered a person for the argument of wether or not it is permissible to terminate their life.

imanidiot Silver badge

I you argue that something with feet (complete with toes), hands (complete with fingers including unique fingerprints), an identifiable heartbeat and provable brainwave patterns and all other organs to be found in a human isn't a person then when does it start being one? Only after it's born? Because if that's your argument I'd say you're the bigger idiot.

imanidiot Silver badge

Re: re: sufficient reason to kill someone

Hence my provision for allowing abortions in case of rape (or incest, which usually but not always amounts to the same)

imanidiot Silver badge

Re: re: sufficient reason to kill someone

"Buhhuhuh you must be an incel ad hominem". Real original....

If you've got a partner in a stable enough relationship that one can risk potentially having a baby (if all other defensive measures fail), fine, have all the fun you want. Having sex risks having a baby. If you can't bear the slight risk that it might happen if other measures fail, don't have sex.

imanidiot Silver badge

"a cluster of non-sentient cells"

Past aprox. 6 weeks it's not a "non sentient cluster of cells". A fetus by that stage has a detectable heartbeat, brainwaves, fingers (including unique finger prints). By nine weeks it'll have every single organ it's going to have for the rest of it's life. If your line is at "a non sentient cluster of cells" you're talking about pre roughly 4 weeks. Ie, before most women even know they are pregnant.

imanidiot Silver badge

Are you saying (past about 6 to 9 weeks) that it's not?

imanidiot Silver badge

Re: re: sufficient reason to kill someone

That depends entirely on your definition of "someone". After even a few weeks, I'd argue a fetus IS someone/a person/a human being.

This article mostly lays out the arguments though I disagree on the adoption argument. As it's very often not a good option nor a substitute in the way it's laid out there.

imho, there can only ever be an argument made for abortions in case of incest, rape or (potentially but more arguably) minors. In all other cases, if you're not ready to have a baby, don't have sex. It's not going to kill you, it's not even hard to do.

Digital Ocean won't let new customers create resources in four DCs, won't say why

imanidiot Silver badge

Energy prices?

Seems to me like they might be trying to keep energy costs down at the most expensive locations.

Ever suspected bankers used WhatsApp comms at work? $1.8b says you're right

imanidiot Silver badge

Hey ho, hey ho, back to the office they go

So now they all get called back to working in the office only and doing their chatting around the water cooler (the one with extra loud compressor and is checked for recording devices every morning)?

IT services giant Wipro fires 300 for moonlighting

imanidiot Silver badge

Re: Conflict is key

Depends very much on the something and your contract with the company. If that something is very closely related to the work you do for your employer and a clear case can be made that you would not have had the knowledge to develop that something if you had not been employed by that company or had access to their institutional knowledge during your normal job then it might very well be that the IP to your something DOES belong to the company or at the very least that you'll not be allowed to sell or disclose said something to anyone else without cutting in the company for an to be agreed upon percentage. They cannot however force you to hand over the IP for said something without any sort of compensation either (that would be theft and illegal too). Whether or not your normal job compensation will suffice depends on the something and would likely be a matter for the courts (but good luck suing them for it as it'll have the shirt of your back long before come to bedtime)

Larry Page's flying taxi startup Kittyhawk calls it a day

imanidiot Silver badge

Another one bites the dust

Shame so much money was wasted on such a stupid project but saw that coming a mile of. Now it's just a matter of time before the rest of them die too.

Datacenter migration plan missed one vital detail: The leaky roof

imanidiot Silver badge

Re: Architect Smartitect

Architects should never have a say on the interior of a building beyond a functional/structural point. Any architect that insists he needs "creative control" over how the interior should be designed needs to get tarred, feathered and run out of town with pitchforks and torches.