It looks cool, I’d use it! When you start making fun of me I’d just shrug and carry on, because I don’t care what judgements some weirdo makes about my accessories.

Good luck then! Actually curious to see how it will work out.

Almost all taxes are collected from the paycheck before you even get your hands on it. The filing is mostly for the tax return on the overpayment. They’ve already thought of it. How you gonna stop paying?

The helicopter route at the time of the collision allowed the Black Hawk to fly as close as 75 feet below planes descending to land on runway 33 at Reagan National Airport, according to the NTSB. With allowable errors in the helicopter’s altimeters and other equipment as well as Army rules expecting aviators to hold their altitude within 100 feet, it could end up being much closer.

“How much tolerance should we have for aviation safety whenever civilian lives are at risk?” asked Todd Inman, NTSB board member. “How much is that tolerance,” he continued. “I think it should be zero.”

Sounds like the tolerances weren’t big enough! Odd interaction putting those two paragraphs next to each other. NTSB demanding zero margin for safety…

The very wiki article quoted says average to mean mean (made explicit later). OP showerthought was calculating life expectancy in a way different than commonly understood. The first nitpick was correct.

fraud

Sabotage. Property made unusable. Passengers were literally stranded in the middle of a journey.

It’s worse. They are saying that the EU copyright law, as written, only allows decompiling/reverse engineering to “fix bugs”. A bug fix would involve a software patch of some sorts. But the security researchers did not have time to write a patch yet, what they did is tell the customer “Yep, it’s fucked. Your vendor put in a killswitch to make the trains brick themselves.” So that does tell them where the problem is, but it is not a bona fide bug fix from the Bugfix region of France, and therefore illegal.

Newag [train maker] claims that the Dragon Sector [whitehat hacker] team endangered passengers’ safety by modifying the software without proper experience. But Newag then turns right around and claims that Dragon Sector did not modify the software at all. They point out that EU law only allows reverse engineering of software in order to fix bugs. And if Dragon Sector did not actually modify the software, it cannot have fixed any bugs, in which case their reverse-engineering must be illegal.

There has never been a law that someone selling something must offer the same price to everyone. Outside of some government regulation, like banning discrimination based on a few specific protected groups under the 1964 Civil Rights Act, government-set energy prices on state-granted monopoly electrical grids, annual rent increase percentage caps, etc. merchants have always been free to set any price on any product or to any customer.

If NYC uses ranked choice voting in the general

It does not, for some weird reason. City primaries only.

New York City has also banned plastic bags since 2020. I was skeptical about the ban at first, because by measure of material weight, bags are but a small fraction of plastic waste. Thin film is just too efficient in terms of use-per-weight ratio. I also thought anyone who didn’t want to use plastic bags already had the option to bring their own reusable bags with them.

My newfound appreciation for the ban is that not only does it divert the use of plastic material, but it forces a change in the public perception around plastic use itself. Sure, you could bring your own bags, but it felt awkward because no one else did. You felt like you were inconveniencing the cashiers and other shoppers by breaking the routine, as if you were asking for special treatment. But now it’s perfectly normal! You want to carry that bag of potatoes in your arms without an external bag? Go right ahead. You want to run home carrying a jug of milk dripping condensation on the pavement? Doesn’t make you look like a crazy person! All thanks to the ban. Single action by the government on behalf of the collective has achieved what collective action by many single individuals could not have.

For trash I’m still using plastic bags I hoarded in anticipation of our ban in NYC 5 years ago.

Don’t understand why it wasn’t done this way in the first place. RCV was approved as a New York City Charter amendment by a voter initiative in 2019, but only applies to primary city elections, not general. You’d think procedurally it would be easier to justify altering the general election process that the Constitution actually applies to, rather than what is technically internal business of independent private organizations (the Democratic and the Republican parties).

fight FOR the left in primaries, vote AGAINST fascists in the general

That’s how it should have worked, except that in the 2024 Democratic Presidential primary, when Biden was the only name on the ballot, we were STILL told to vote for him and only him or we’d be supporting Trump. In the primary! Voters in Michigan tried to campaign for “uncommitted” option in protest of the ongoing genocide in Gaza and how the administration was ignoring it, and they were crucified by establishment Democrats. Even Bernie Sanders distanced himself from the protest vote, saying to vote Biden no matter what. In the primaries!

Democrats hate progressives. The two would be separate parties in a sensible democracy, but in the legacy first-past-the-post American system, splitting the party while Republicans exist is political suicide. There are more progressives than center Democrats, but they are not as united as the core establishment Democrats are, which made any one of them irrelevant in primaries up to now. RCV has given them a real chance for the first time. For example by giving Lander votes to Mamdani in the instant runoff. The moment RCV got implemented, long-serving Democrats started suddenly getting kicked out in the primaries. This terrifies them, so Democrats will continue to fight against RCV in the future. Just look how both Cuomo and Adams will try to commit political murder-suicide now by running as independent in the general just so that the “official Democratic party nominee” would not win.

Wtf happened to Adams? Sure, he was under criminal corruption indictments, then cozied up to Trump and got “pardoned” (charges dismissed). But then he was supposed to be on the Democratic primary ballot, his picture was even in the official voter guide from a month ago, but on election day his name wasn’t even in the list? Now he’s apparently running as independent incumbent instead? What a booger!

EDIT: Both Cuomo and Adams are intending to run as independent in the general? WhyTF do we even have primaries then! If they are not going to play by their own rules of their special little club, let’s just extend Ranked Choice Voting to cover the general and scrap the primaries altogether!

This has already happened with ReplikaAI in 2023, where for years they advertised “sex chat” as one of their premium subscription features for $70/month, and then suddenly turned the feature off without telling or explaining anyone. Thousands of people suddenly experienced their AI girlfriend “breaking up” with them, saying it doesn’t want to do sexual stuff with them any more and just wants to be friends.

I know Lemmy hates AI, but this actually would be a perfect use for it. The problem is the idea of what an ad is. Yes, you could try to use secondary characteristics like image color or sound normalized volume (WhyTF do youtube ads still sound 3x louder than content? are we living in cable era again?), but they would be error-prone for any content more visually intense than a podcast. They would also not capture sponsorblock content like “I love showing you all these foreign countries but what I love even more is having my internet connection secure” that match the video flow. A crowdsourced lookup table of all known ad clip fingerprints would go a long way, until ad videos themselves start being AI-generated on the fly for that sweet personalization revenue.

No, what I really want is to distill the idea of what I want to see into an AI and have it filter out what I don’t want to see for me. I know an ad when I see one, so AI can too. Pre-roll/mid-roll ads? Gone. Sponsorblock content? Gone. Like and subscribe? Skipped as if it didn’t exist. Virtual billboards on the sidelines of sporting events? Overlayed with kittens. Idiocracy banners squeezing the video from either side? Cropped and rescaled. Watermarks? Excised and content-aware-filled.

The last frontier is when the content itself is secretly an ad, imprinting upon you some idea or point of view. You’ll have to watch out for that one on your own.

In the ultimate, you’d need to do something like run a headless browser in a virtual machine, have it play out and record the entire video, then use something like AI to splice out the ad segments and distracting elements (a souped-up sponsorblock will work for a while, but eventually ads will be injected into the raw video stream at random intervals), and present the pristine finished content to you. Basically we are going to re-invent TiVo all over again xD.

In worst case, you can’t start watching until the pre-roll ad timers expire. This is how adblocking works on Twitch streams currently - you can only see a purple screen even if you block the ads.

And yes, the headless browser will need to use AI for human-like mouse movement and to solve captchas - basically whatever state-of-the-art technologies spammers and scrapers are already currently using.

Google is anticipating this future and is trying to implement and force hardware-based DRM for web video before then.

Stripping down to a skeleton of a software is standard troubleshooting procedure. Ever had a plugin crash and consume 100% cpu? I had. Only way to sense is that fans are spinning up and page is laggy, and then look in about:performance and there it is. No one would have ever suspected that the website you’re visiting is deliberately introducing bugs in secret if it thinks you’re adblocking.