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.

The article talks about how Republicans are alienating virtually every woman in the country. So, to appear electable, they’re having their wives and kids do the ads, so that out-of-touch women will see a woman in the ad and decide that the candidate is a good guy.

But that, and the whole focus on “traditional family values” and everything boxes them into a certain image, that you’re not a real American man if you’re not married with kids by the time you’re in your 30s or something. So, even if he had a picture with his fiance and dog, it would prove he’s not a “traditional family values” republican. So, better to pose with a friend’s wife and kids than prove that he’s not “normal”.

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.

And, even if you do lobby the government full time, what if you’re a lobbyist who works on behalf of environmental groups. If the Sierra Club wants to alert politicians about a secret clause snuck into a new bill regulating coal mines, they can hire you to talk to the right people. If a town like Flint, Michigan is having trouble with contamination of their water supply, they can hire you to find the right people to talk to.

Maybe in an ideal world every politician would have enough time and enough staff to fully investigate things on their own. But, in the real world, we’re probably always going to need people to talk to the decision makers and advocate on our behalf.

What we really should have is good oversight and tight rules to ensure it’s just talking and not doing favors, giving money, etc.

What about a lobbyist who works for say the Electronic Frontier Foundation? Or a nurses union. Or who works for the Sierra Club, or some organization trying to protect the environment?

“Lobbying” is just talking to a politician on behalf of a person or group. If the Hollywood studios all hire lobbyists to talk to representatives about why copyright terms should be longer and DRM should be mandatory, doesn’t it make sense that there should be people telling the other side?

I get that too often lobbyists overstep ethical boundaries. Often, they either effectively bribe politicians, or they write up laws allowing the politician to just rubber-stamp them. But, you could shore up and/or enforce laws restricting that kind of thing, while still allowing a representative of a group to meet with a politician and explain their point of view.

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.

I don’t know, you’d have to ask the expert.

So, have some fun with the other players at the expense of the player who refused to do even some basic work for the benefit of everybody else. It doesn’t have to be massively cruel, just give them a nudge so that next time they do put in the required effort.

Sure, but given that the player did avoid doing the work, the DM can take the opportunity to punish them for it.

because you can’t call from this thing or communicate with it any other way because it’s receive only

Yes, it’s a pager. Pagers are still useful, that’s why they’re still being manufactured and sold. Someone in IT who’s on call can have a pager set up so that an automated process sends them a notification if a system breaks. They don’t need two-way communication for that. A doctor can use one to be notified if they’re needed at the hospital. It’s more reliable than a cell phone and in many cases the battery lasts a lot longer. They could even be useful for a parent to give to a kid, so that the parent can get in contact with the kid and have the kid call home if something happens. In rich countries that could happen because the parent doesn’t want the kid using the device all the time to scroll TikTok. In poorer countries it could happen because a pager is much, much cheaper than a phone.

The fact that thousands of these devices were exploded suggests that it was a pretty wide group of people who were using them, so the odds are pretty good that at least some of them were given away / sold.

In other words, “My backstory is whatever you want it to be”.

If you were the DM and this bothered you, the player just gave you powerful ammunition.

You could even have it so whenever the player entered a shop in his home town, the shopkeepers looked at him with disgust and refused to serve him. The DM wouldn’t even have to necessarily come up with a reason. Just, that the player is extremely well known among the locals and they universally think he’s absolutely disgusting and want nothing to do with him.

If the device in my pocket started smoking like that, I’d throw it away pretty quickly. I suspect these were actual explosives, and there are almost certainly more of them out there.

The scary thing about a supply chain attack is that Hezbollah aren’t idiots. This is basically like buying a “burner phone” (that name will now have different connotations now).

In the movies, people buying burner phones go to a random corner store and buy a random phone off the shelf. That way, even if they’re under surveillance, the cops / CIA / FBI can’t pre-bug the phone because they don’t know which corner store the person’s going to go to, let alone which phone they’ll pick off the shelf.

If you’re an armed group in Israel’s crosshairs, you’re going to take similar precautions when buying thousands of pagers. The safe way to do it would be to slowly and unpredictably get a small sample of ones that are being sold to the general public. If this is true, it could mean that there are tens of thousands of pagers out there that contain explosives that were merely sold as “decoys” in order to try to make Hezbollah feel safe in buying them. In other words, there may be tens of thousands of explosives in pagers that weren’t activated because they weren’t in the hands of Hezbollah when Israel decided to hit the button.