• 10 Posts
  • 1.75K Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: October 20th, 2023

help-circle
  • How does one clear space in a jail?

    It varies but it mostly boils down to understanding the difference between jail and prison. In a nutshell, jail is where you are put if you are too poor to wait for prison in your own home.

    So yeah. Some people get released on parole or house arrest. Some people just get accelerated trials or sent to prison regardless. And a few people inevitably get disappeared.

    That said, it isn’t overly uncommon before protests/riots/sporting events where a high number of arrests/detainings are expected to occur.



  • Oh I 500% assume racism is a big part of this too.

    Not familiar with Catalonia but I assume there are at least a few ethnic groups that are associated with “rich” and this is a way to group them in.

    Which, funny enough, was also kind of the deal with Blackberries. Yeah, Dealers had them. Because Dealers like buying expensive shit (See also: really expensive Rolex in a neighborhood where everyone is on food stamps) AND because they were ridiculously ahead of their time tech wise. You know who else had them? Business and (proto-)tech folk. And cops LOVED to say that the kid who actually made something of themselves going back home to visit family must be a Dealer because they have the same phone all their co-workers do.

    Which gets back to: As part of an investigation, it is good. It is one part of a potential puzzle. In the reality of ACAB… ACAB.



  • Those articles don’t really support the claim? At all?

    https://www.androidauthority.com/google-pixel-organized-crime-preferred-phone-3573578/ is unsourced but, taking at face value, seems like what one would expect. People aren’t getting stopped at checkpoints and forced to divulge what OS their phone is running and being taken to a black site if they run GrapheneOS. But someone holding up a pixel in a sea of cheap motorolas DOES raise some eyebrows. Same as someone with a ridiculously expensive rolex walking around The Hood and so forth. And, presumably, people who have been arrested for other reasons raise even more eyebrows if their phone isn’t running a stock OS which…

    Look, with a just police force (ha!), that actually is a very reasonable stance. Back in the day it was having a Blackberry. For a decade or so it was having two phones until people learned to not do anything personal on a work phone and that became kinda normal. There are activities that are generally associated with “weirdos” and “criminals” and I think even the GraphenOS devs would acknowledge their userbase fall firmly into the former. If you see someone with a Blackberry hanging out leaning against a 7-11? You maybe hang out across the street for an hour and keep an eye on them. Arrest someone and they have three burner phones in their pants pockets? Maybe you look a bit deeper.

    That is actual investigative work. Of course, the problem is that it instead becomes “That gameboy looks like a drug dealer’s phone. We are going to stop and frisk you and maybe sexually assault you in the back of the cruiser if we are bored”.


    I’m keyed in on a lot of “high level” protest discussion as well as what investigative journalists need to do for actual safety. And one of the biggest topics that regularly comes up is the idea of “the burner”. In theory, if you are crossing a questionable border or think you might be stopped, you bring a completely blank burner. If they hack into it, you are safe, right?

    Wrong. Because you are now an anomaly. NOBODY has no social media and NOBODY has no documents on their laptop. So what are you hiding? Let’s beat it out of you.

    Which is why general best practices are often considered to have a real device that you actually use everyday and take through those checkpoints and on the riskier protests. But you make damned sure there is nothing incriminating or sensitive on there. Optimally through having your “burner” be the one you do said activities on, but also through just removing it well before you get on the plane or get in the car.

    And a lot of that applies to device choice too. That cool ass Linux Phone might seem like a great idea but now you stand out from the crowd quite a bit. Same with taking your top of the line iphone to Korea where Samsungs grow on trees and so forth.


  • Its worth understanding that microsoft, like most companies, is rapidly rebranding most of their existing stuff as “AI”. A couple weeks (months?) back at work we managed to convince the boss that maybe it wasn’t a good idea to put all of our sensitive internal data into Teams and convinced him to turn off copilot. Literally minutes later he lost his shit because auto-transcripts no longer worked and IT turned it back on.

    But that is what we are seeing with a LOT of companies. ANYTHING that can be sold as “AI” is getting re-branded as it. So it makes perfect sense that MS will rebrand it as “installing copilot AI” rather than “not removing clippy”.

    That said: MS have also been ahead of the curve on adding even more bullshit and spyware to everything they do so… have you heard the good word about Linux? Libre Office gets personal users most of the way there (and if they worked on their documentation, all the way there. I STILL don’t fucking know how to get row/column headings to work in Calc…). And for business/power use, the browser/cloud based solutions are probably what you want anyway since none of that data should live on your laptop/desktop and should instead live in the company approved data store.


  • I didn’t read this comment because it’s a bunch of gaslighting bullshit.

    Got it, pointing out common phenomena and referencing a very well established and (mostly) respected consumer information group (Consumer Reports. Would link to the data but I always forget what is and isn’t paywalled with them) is “gaslighting”

    And everyone who points out an alternative to your conclusions is mentally ill.

    (Actually this is more of a worldwide phenomenon but Donald Glover is just too good to not post. And… it was shockingly hard to find an easy to grab image from that song that is not gun violence or way more intentionally minstrel-y than anyone would get without an even longer explanation of the joke than this).


  • NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.ziptoTechnology@lemmy.worldSamsung brings ads to US fridges
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    3
    arrow-down
    3
    ·
    edit-2
    16 hours ago

    And I am trying to explain to you why your “experience” is very limited insight on a heavily biased sample.

    If you sell 500 widgets, some percentage of those customers are going to have problems. If 450 of those widgets are from Innertrode, a majority of that percentage are going to be with Innertrode widgets. That doesn’t mean Innertrode makes worse widgets. That just means you, like most people, could do with a primer on statistics.

    I haven’t seen fans of Apple act this irrationally…

    Yes. Pointing out that (mostly) independent consumer information groups have drawn opposite conclusions to you and pointing out this is a very common phenomena in sales is “irrational”. Who needs facts when we have feelings, amirite?

    And people wonder why there are so many complaints online about hating sales people.


  • I am not going to say people should buy a Samsung appliance especially with this nonsense.

    But you’re falling for, and propagating, a pretty common fallacy. it isn’t that Samsung appliances are significantly worse (Consumer Reports puts them in the bottom half of the ranking but they are very much “fine”). It is that people buy them a lot.

    You see this with all kinds of brands. “Never buy Shark. Everyone who buys a Shark comes back and return it or buy a new vacuum in a few years”. It isn’t that Sharks are failing more than others (they are actually #1 or #2 according to CR, depending on the metrics). It is that they are what sell the most.


  • Homie? I want you to know that while I am going to be inflammatory, I am not insulting you. In a slightly sane world, that should be fine.

    NEVER work with children. “Hey kids. You can go home or you can stay with me and a few others and learn how to use a computer!”. At best you are setting yourself up for some awkward phone calls when Little Jimmy gets caught looking at something his parents don’t approve of.

    If you are a close family friend and the parents understand what you are going to be teaching their kid (and obviously want you to teach it), go for it. If you are just watching them while they eat orange slices? Don’t fucking go anywhere near that. Let the teachers who actually train in how to handle these situations do it.

    And the other aspect: Kids (and most adults) are not rational or intelligent. They aren’t going to take “Hey, if Susie sends you nudes don’t put them on this server because it will get me sent to prison as a diddler” as education on why they should not fucking do that.


    If you ever want to get scared straight as it were? Take a teacher out for drinks (and you better pay for them!). You’ll hear LOTS of horror stories and get even a glimpse into the kind of hell they have to put up with.

    The show Black-ish (like a lot of Kenya Barris’s work) has a LOT of problems. But the number of times teacher friends have shared https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6jqmj0ILwfM. And it is not at all exclusive to black people (or even men).


  • Yes. That is the reported incident that finally led to the breakdown. But, regardless of what social media has taught us, this is not the first time israel has commit systematic genocide against Palestine and not even the first time B&J have publicly spoken out against it.

    Its possible that the clause really was that B&J could say whatever they want to but not control sales contracts. But that also feels like one of those obvious things to put in said contractual requirements even 25 years ago.

    And it is definitely tinfoil. But I’ve seen similar contracts/clauses in startups and research groups that were acquired. And a lot of times it boils down to “All business related actions will be brought up to a vote by the N people who signed this document or their legally designated proxy. Majority wins”.







  • Yes. If you know ahead of time you’ll prioritize those.

    If you are new to the game/genre and are struggling and even wiping occasionally? It isn’t a priority.

    But there is also a big difference between having a few different pin types and just having “Well, SOMETHING was there?”. Hell, I still need to get around to figuring out which of my oranges are NPCs because I wasn’t sure if quest NPCs would be auto-tagged (they are, once you have a reason to talk to them again).

    Which is another factor to all of these discussions. I fairly regularly push back on Dark Souls (and its successors) being a “difficult game”. It really isn’t. What it is is an incredibly well designed (first half of a…) challenging game. Everything up until Amazing Chest Ahead is designed to teach you how to play the game and how to approach encounters. And once you know that? You are in really good shape for the entire genre even if it is a game that emphasizes parrying (Lies of P), blocking (Sekiro), or beautiful beautiful loot (Nioh! Aka “Best Souls”). You don’t learn character builds (mostly “pick a single stat and work with it”) but that comes later.

    And… some of that applies here. I know I made it WAY farther than I should have with no meaningful upgrades because I am a sicko/idiot. But for people who don’t know the idea that “Hey, this crypt full of skeletons is a mofo. Maybe go somewhere else”, they might be slamming their head against a wall trying to fight Last Judge for far longer than they should (although, questionable balancing decisions means that upgrading your health doesn’t matter all that much but that is a different rant).

    But it is still the idea of a first game versus a fifth game as it were. And we all start somewhere.


  • NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.ziptoGames@lemmy.worldThe Purpose of Difficulty | GMTK Mini
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    12
    arrow-down
    6
    ·
    edit-2
    3 days ago

    Very good video that lines up with a lot of my own thoughts (yay).

    That said? I think I fundamentally disagree with the idea that everyone should be able to beat every game for narrative reasons. My preference is for something similar to what Nine Sols did (AMAZING boss fights. Dogshit metroidvania and traversal), but I don’t fundamentally believe that everyone needs to be able to experience every game. Like, you can make an “easy mode” for DCS but… the point of that game is the fidelity and turning all of that off just feels “wrong”? At the end of the day, it is up to the devs and what they want people to consider “accomplishment” to be.

    And we live in the internet age. I remember beating Arkham Knight, having fun, and then deciding there was zero chance I would ever want to get all the riddler keys or fight deathstroke a dozen times and just went to youtube.

    But I 100% agree with the back half of the video. The game is very much designed to just take a break and wander off when you get frustrated. Which is where I DO wish there were more QOL features to make it clear what areas might still have a mask (preferably one you can reach) rather than needing to find a guide or try to guess. Especially when you don’t even get map markers for a decent chunk early on.



  • Part of it is that they genuinely don’t watch or care. They just learned they like trump and will continue to say so. Never forget just how many people didn’t even know Biden wasn’t fucking running last year. There has been a massive culture (on Both Sides) of “don’t watch the news for your mental health” that just puts people in isolation chambers where they occasionally hear something.

    And the other aspect? He is them. Boomers are increasingly senile every single year and he is a boomer ass boomer. But also? Just look around on social media or in stream chats and so forth. A LOT of people sound like they speak English as a Second Language… until you realize they are making references to nickelodean shows and may even have comments or posts outright saying they are a native. They just are fucking illiterate (and this applies from boomers on down but is just a major crisis for genz/alpha because they might have a chance).

    Also odds on someone thinking they are “witty” for saying this is “TLDR”? Because… think about the implications of “you talk too much” as an insult.

    And that isn’t just their illiteracy. We mostly tend to skew middle/upper-middle/upper class around here. Spend some time actually communicating with “support staff” (e.g. custodial) or even talking to someone at a supermarket or fast food joint. The “Gen Z Stare” is definitely a thing but it isn’t just Gen Z and it is very much people who do not know how to communicate or articulate a thought literally locking up. THAT is trump.

    I remember back when the problem was that people glazed Jed Bartlet and it had to be explained to them that real human beings don’t have script writers to make every single word they say deeply beautiful and intellectual. Now? People would hunt Martin Sheen down for daring to make them feel inadequate.