Spyke

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Elon's Folly

Local press and lots of people in Brazil criticize judges because, due to flaws on local laws and 80's redemocratization efforts, they have some perks, privileges and exceptional powers no democratic country would give to them. There are cases ranging from content showing them traveling overseas being not visible on local internet and TV people being given cease-and-desist orders for disagreeing with some judge decision, to people being detained by Federal Police agents for criticizing justice system inside a plane that happens to have a judge among the passengers - not to mention those FBI agents detained at Rio de Janeiro airport for containing a judge's wife who got unruly in a plane for drinking too much during the fly.

This time however he asked for it, and our justice system toke the right decisions. Elon Musk should know how ridiculously overpowered our judges are before acting like that.

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A Twitter-like app where you are the only actual user and every other "user" is an AI bot.

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That would be really cool. Problem is, conversation can get really wild because bots have a tendency to engage in folie-a-deux when interacting with each other. YouTube has videos posted by people who just put two chatbots talking to each other - with kafkian results. Maybe they could, given recent improvements of AIs, program them make one-time replies to each other, say, 10% of times?

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Smudge

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I (almost) never use a t-shirt to clean my glasses, but once tried the internal lining of my jacket since it looks like a coarser version of the cloth that came with my glasses. The result wasn't the same but it was still good.

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Give us your best infodump.

I browse Windy but don't rely on any of those 4 weather forecasting models: I take the median of predicted temperatures and rainfalls instead. Also, I predict rain only if the median exceeds 1mm, and if it's below that threshold but at least 3 models predict (some) rainfall I predict drizzle. Which is the same approach I had at my previous job, using data of doubtful quality to adjust Holt-Winters and Box-Jenkins models in order to forecast drug sales for Big Pharma.

Kaggle by the way began to demand users engaged on modelling competitions to make PDFs explaining their methodologies after learning some cheaters would just combine results from other competitors.

P.S. - Don't average results from different models unless you are really, really sure of what you're doing. Many times the models take turns on which one will output garbage, and you don't want garbage contaminating your average. By switching to median you avoid the crap they sometimes spit altogether - not to mention it's so simple you don't even need to write numbers on paper or use a pocket calculator.

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Picture this

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Worked with both marketing and tech dudes many years ago, and two things I learned were (1) marketing guys overestimate new/fad tools so badly and (2) they (in conjunction with management) can be mercylessly demanding over TI guys.

memes

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Nobody panics when things go "according to plan."

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As a Brazilian living in Rio de Janeiro (golden handcuff effect), I highly agree. My country sucessfully improved human rights but as a collateral effect, gov't refuses to build more jails so jail overcrowding resulted in de facto decriminalization of theft, and police releasing criminals just a pair of hours they get caught - and nowadays cops can't even slap a scumbag in the face because our more important TV channel witch-hunts anyone who does anything that remotely resembles a potentially mild human rights violantion without even making questions to the parts involved, so we who live in the part of the city controlled by the government sometimes try to bring some vigilante justice... out of despair!

artporn

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Saturn Devouring His Son - Francisco Goya (1820 - 1823)

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Watched a documentary about Goya on an educational TV channel years ago. The documentary tells, among lots of things, how he got progressively tired, sick of playing the role of the boot licker who would paiting anything those brainless and entitled nobles, politicians and rich merchants would want. No matter how whimsical, futile the subject. Exactly the way they wished, no matter if every brush stroke was a lie. Never putting anything shady on negative on them. Until he told his wife he was about to snap and needed to "vent the poison". He stopped accepting painting orders, locked himself at home and began to frantically, obsessively paint the "black paintings", one right after another, non-stop.

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Starlink v2 satelites will ruin science.

Starlink is ruining law enforcement here in South America already. Drug cartels and people on illegal activities acting in Amazon rainforest are getting increasingly creative at turning their starlink devices on, then off, then on again at different points. Also, such devices switch hands rather quickly - and international borders sometimes - in order to avoid tracking.