The best thing about Khan is that there’s nothing quiet about her work.

You’re right, but it probably also means she’ll keep FTC chair Lina Khan as chair of the FTC

I really hope so, but we’ll see. There has been a lot of pressure from rich democratic donors to dump her.

Trump’s niece doesn’t know anything more than the rest of us. And, even if Trump did “promise” Musk a key government role, we all know how likely he is to keep his promises.

But, what Musk is doing is clever, though evil. He’s ingratiating himself to Trump. If Trump is elected, he won’t consider Musk an enemy which is absolutely key, and might throw Musk a bone. If Harris is elected, she’ll govern using traditional norms and values, which means not vindictively prosecuting people who helped her political opponent, even a guy who went right up to the line of what’s legal in trying to get Trump elected.

Heads Musk wins. Tails he doesn’t lose.

If you can’t hold a security clearance, you shouldn’t be able to run for any office, let alone POTUS.

It’s 2019. Biden is running against Trump. Trump arranges for Biden’s security clearance to be revoked. Trump is now running unopposed.

Unless it’s ruled and a precedent is set, the statement is false.

They believe that the users agreed to a contract that specifies that in any dealings with Disney they’ve agreed to binding arbitration.

What’s the “false statement” there?

It could be changed at any time, it might not resolve properly, the page could be hijacked, an ad blocker could decide it’s an ad and show something else instead…

That was something Disney Lawyers claimed, but was never actually agreed/enforced.

Disney backed down. They still believe they have that right, and no court has ever said they didn’t, but the bad publicity was too much for them in this case. They’ll wait until there’s a case that doesn’t get that kind of publicity before they try to establish that precedent.

You aren’t internet.

The EULA isn’t null and void, but it’s pretty meaningless. Not because you can’t reasonably be expected to copy that link into a browser to read it, but because there’s no indication that you should or even must do that.

The EULA contains no terms, it doesn’t contain any wording saying what you can or can’t do. It doesn’t say what your rights are. It just contains something that looks like a URL. So, you’re still bound by the terms of the EULA (as much as you’re bound by any EULA) but the EULA doesn’t permit or forbid anything. It’s effectively the same as if it were blank.

They’re bound to the EULA, but the EULA is meaningless because it’s just a URL. They’re definitely not bound by whatever’s at that URL.

This would be like having someone sign a contract when the contract was just a shopping list. Sure, they’re bound by the “contract”, but the contract doesn’t specify anything they can or can’t do.

Reddit has shown they’ll replace mods when they actually need to (or want to).

But, their business model doesn’t work unless those mods are working for free. So, while they may replace mods, unless people keep signing up to work for free to help a for-profit company deliver value to its shareholders, eventually it’s going to collapse.

It’s amazing to me that so many people are willing to work as unpaid moderators so that Reddit’s investors can make more money.

At least it adds noise to the system. It’s better than the people who are happily training the AI.

What’s ironic is that the main purpose of reCAPTCHA v2 is to train ML models. That’s why they show you blurry images of things you might see in traffic.

AFAIK the way it works is that of the 9 images, something like 6 are images the system knows are True or False, and another 3 are ones it is being trained on. So, it shows you 9 images and says “tell me which images contain a motorcycle”. It uses the 6 it knows to determine whether or not to let you pass, and then uses your choices on the other 3 to train an ML model.

Because of this, it takes me forever to get past reCAPTCHA v2, because I think it’s my duty to mistrain it as much as possible.

Mmmmmmm baking engineer…

You would also think that Rockstar would want to stop those kinds of cheats just for greedy reasons. If there is some kind of ultra-powerful flying saucer item available, it’s probably something that they sell to players for money. At the very least, when someone spawns something like that, check to see if their account purchased it.

So much of the rest of the stuff could be handled using heuristics. The average player gets X headshots an hour, this player is in the 99.9th percentile. Maybe they’re just very good, but let’s flag that account and see if there’s anything else suspicious about their playing. That’s the thing about an MMO, you have vast amounts of data about players so there’s a lot of stuff you can use to see if something is normal.

I guess if they’re not doing it they’ve done some business calculations and decided that investing $X in techniques to ban cheaters won’t result in at least $X more in revenue from happy players who want to play more now that the cheating has been reduced. I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re counting on making money off the cheaters somehow – maybe they periodically do get detected and banned and have to buy a new copy of the game. So, the math now says you don’t want to be too aggressive about the cheaters because they’re a good, reliable source of revenue.

It’s amazing to me that Blizzard spent 15 years with the PvP realms in such a broken state. It was only when they introduced “war mode” and the option to turn it off that people finally had some relief.

What finally made them address the problem was that many PvP realms had become 95% one faction and 5% the other faction. That meant that any PvP encounters were very one-sided, and they were also very rare, because the outnumbered faction just avoided any areas where they might be attacked.

Even if you lived for griefing, being on the dominant side in a 95% your-side realm sucked because there weren’t enough victims to pick on.

I guess they wanted to make griefers happy because making the game fair for people who enjoyed PvP but didn’t want to grief others would have been relatively easy.

I knew Palestinians were suffering in this war, but I didn’t realize how bad the Israelis had it! They have brand new electric school buses, but the children aren’t going to school so they can’t use them! Some evacuated people have to live in a hotel with a well-decorated lobby. The hotel has a swimming pool but they’re not allowed to use it. And the death toll! 26 civilians have died and 22 IDF soldiers and reservists. That’s almost 50!

From the video:

“Let’s talk about eggs, Because these guys actually eat about 14 eggs every single morning.”

There’s just so much that’s weird about that. “These guys” are his 2 sons Ewan (6) and Vivek (4). You’re saying these kids each eat 7 eggs every morning? That’s a lot of eggs. Think about it. 7 fried eggs? Or 7 hard-boiled eggs? If you’re scrambling them, you lose track of the individual eggs, but what, he’s cracking 14 eggs into a huge bowl, then scrambling them? Do you know how much scrambled eggs that’s going to make?

If his boys were teenagers, maybe I could see it, though eating that many eggs every single day would still seem weird. But, at least teenage boys are known to have big appetites.

Even if you include him, his wife and their 2-year-old, roughly 100 eggs a week every week seems odd.

Then there’s just the weirdness of saying “about 14”. We’re talking eggs. Why not “about a dozen”? Slightly more believable, and a more common number to use when talking about eggs. I mean, surely if your kids really loved eggs you’d try to reduce it to a dozen eggs per day just so you’re using one full carton every morning. Then again, if you’re buying hundreds of eggs per month, maybe they come on a pallet, not by the carton, so “a dozen” doesn’t mean much to you.

The egg shortage has enabled record quarterly profits and sales at Cal-Maine Foods (CALM), the largest producer and distributor of eggs in the United States. The company produces brands such as Farmhouse Eggs, Sunups, Sunny Meadow, Egg-Land’s Best and Land O’ Lakes eggs.

https://www.cnn.com/2023/01/13/business/egg-prices-cal-maine-foods/index.html

The problem, once again, is monopolies. Not enough competition means one company can jack up prices.

It’s not clear if Harris will continue Biden’s policies, but one of the best things Biden’s admin has done is to actually go after monopolies for the first time in decades. Under a Trump / Vance presidency, I don’t think that’s very likely.