Leaving the moral arguments aside, there were also massive campaign failures on the Yes side. No had two clear cheerleaders with an absurdly simple catchphrase: “If you don’t know, vote No”. Meanwhile Yes didn’t have a star for the campaign and had made the amendment way too simple/general so there weren’t any included details of the practicalities. So they ended up with 100 people having to re-explain their plans every campaign stop and occasionally tripping over each other’s messages. As a result, the complicated sell from Yes played right into No‘s hands.

And the original story is that:

On Nov. 16, Reuters published a special investigation under the headline “How an Indian startup hacked the world,” detailing how Appin allegedly became a “hack for hire powerhouse that stole secrets from executives, politicians, military officials and wealthy elites around the globe”

Just fyi, it’s “incumbent”

Humans and Neanderthals were neighbours for longer than previously thought. Also, we’re maybe back to humans making more tools.

…the discovery of more of its remnants alongside human fossils points to Homo sapiens inhabiting central Germany at the same time.

“It turns out that stone artefacts that were thought to be produced by Neanderthals were in fact part of the early Homo sapiens tool kit,” says Jean-Jacques Hublin, a professor in palaeoanthropology at Collège de France.

“This fundamentally changes our previous knowledge about this time period: Homo sapiens reached northwestern Europe long before Neanderthal disappearance in southwestern Europe.”

Is there more?

It’s not a secret, just hard for amateurs to do. No doubt states with space monitoring equipment always knew. He just did it with a camera in his backyard and his laptop.

Also, he’s Finnish.

Amateur observations of the spaceplane indicate it is flying in a highly elliptical orbit ranging between 201 and 24,133 miles in altitude (323 and 38,838 kilometers). The orbit is inclined 59.1 degrees to the equator.

This is not far off the predictions from the hobbyist tracking community before the launch in December. At that time, enthusiasts used information about the Falcon Heavy's launch trajectory and drop zones for the rocket's core booster and upper stage to estimate the orbit it would reach with the X-37B spaceplane.

I’d not heard of this before but it’s hilarious: The name comes from a joke about a Texan who fires some gunshots at the side of a barn, then paints a shooting target centered on the tightest cluster of hits and claims to be a sharpshooter.

Check your axes. You have 2x 25,000s. I genuinely want to know how on someone can create a chart with this kind of error these days. Surely you’re not adding axis labels with a graphics tool after the initial generation. Right?

This is much the same as Calibri, Arial and other bundled fonts. Even Times New Roman is meant to be licensed for commercial work.

Cool post though I’m not fully onboard with the map implying the modern words came into form in America.

Nah. It already applies to everyone else - this is maybe just about limiting the pool of challengers.

From the Florida Government site :

Who Must File Form 6: All persons holding the following positions: Governor, Lieutenant Governor, Cabinet members, members of the Legislature, State Attorneys, Public Defenders, Clerks of Circuit Courts, Sheriffs, Tax Collectors, Property Appraisers, Supervisors of Elections, County Commissioners, elected Superintendents of Schools, members of District School Boards, Mayor and members of the Jacksonville City Council, Judges of Compensation Claims; the Duval County Superintendent of Schools, and members of the Florida Housing Finance Corporation Board, each expressway authority, transportation authority (except the Jacksonville Transportation Authority), bridge authority, toll authority, or expressway agency created pursuant to Chapter 348 or 343, F.S., or any other general law, and judges, as required by Canon 6, Code of Judicial Conduct.

Not sure if 100% a joke or just partly but Volkswagen was probably providing the mechanical engineers who were retrofitting Lexus vehicles of the project as they had for the already-deployed driverless vans. See NYT & MacReports

Additionally, it’s just a limit on how much you can download. You can still get 10 subtitles a day for free.

Your consumer can query the API on its own, and download 5 subtitles per IP's per 24 hours, but a user must be authenticated to download more. Users will then be able to download as many subtitles as their ranks allows, from 10 as simple signed up user, to 1000 for VIP user.

And machine-gunning the Doc.

The key for all the top answers is that they imply the chopping board has moved of its own volition. This is what adds the subtle emotion to “Where is the chopping board?” without the stronger anger, hostility or suspicion.

You’re communicating that it’s not where it’s expected to be and that you’re concerned about the reason that as well as finding it.

It does match passwords https://haveibeenpwned.com/Passwords

Full text:

The Taylor Swift Album Leak’s Big AI Problem

Apr 19, 2024 9:06 AM

When The Tortured Poets Department leaked, some Taylor Swift fans swore it must be AI. Expect that to be a common refrain.

Photograph: Neilson Barnard/Getty Images

On Thursday, Taylor Swift did a very Taylor Swift thing: She posted an Instagram story with a link to buy “Fortnight,” the first single off of her new album, The Tortured Poets Department. It was cute, maybe even unnecessary. Taylor Swift is one of the biggest recording artists in the world. She announced TTPD in February while accepting the Grammy for best pop vocal album for her last record, Midnights. Swift sold 19 million albums in the US alone last year; she doesn’t have to post IG stories about a new single. Yet there she was getting the internet all frothy like it was 1989.

As she posted, though, something else was agitating her massive fan base: The Tortured Poets Department had leaked, allegedly spreading thanks to a Google Drive link that made the rounds online. (Piracy is back, baby!) Almost immediately, there were two camps: One said true fans would wait until the album’s official release, at midnight on Friday. The other couldn’t wait and pressed Play anyway. Among that latter group was a subcamp: people who thought the leak—or parts of it, at least—were the product of artificial intelligence.

Claims of “gotta be AI” come from several corners, but many seem to stem from one particular line, in the album’s title track, in which (alleged) Swift sings, “You smoked then ate seven bars of chocolate / We declared Charlie Puth should be a bigger artist.” (The rumor mill is speculating it’s a line about her ex, Matty Healy.) The audio has since been removed for copyright violation, but when an X user posted that snippet online, the suggestions that it was AI-generated quickly followed.

Upon the album’s release, everyone learned that the song was, in fact, real. They also learned the tracks that had been circulating before the album's release were only part of the package. Swift returned to Instagram at 2 am Friday to announce that it was actually a “secret DOUBLE album”—The Tortured Poets Department: The Anthology—31 songs in total. But the “must be AI” reaction remains a complex one.

Online life is awash in AI-generated fake-outs. Just a few years into the LLM revolution, the need to not believe your lying eyes is a given. Same goes for your lying ears. The bigger problem is that while skepticism and fact-checking are, generally, always a good idea when getting information online, AI has become so prevalent that it can also be a cop-out. Don’t like what your honest eyes see? Convince yourself it’s AI.

What makes this all even trickier is that AI is progressing to the point where composing something like The Tortured Poets Department doesn’t seem too far out of its realm of possibility. An AI version of Johnny Cash has already covered Swift’s “Blank Space.” “Heart on My Sleeve,” an AI-generated song from 2023 that sounded shockingly similar to one actually made by Drake and the Weeknd, was close enough to the real deal that some folks thought it might be a promotional tactic.

When the frenzy around The Tortured Poets Department finally dies down, this will all likely end up looking like a minor distraction. But it does say something uncomfortable about online fandom: There are a great many people who will rush to the defense of their fave, even when the criticism is valid. As my colleague Jason Parham wrote recently, Beyoncé’s internet isn’t exactly utopia. Swift TikTok—especially now that her songs are back on the platform—has its delightful turns, but watching people squabble about her talents isn’t one of them.

This becomes particularly tiring because it’s a reminder that the interdependency between the internet and artists like Beyoncé and Swift has never been greater. In many ways, neither of them really needs the support of online hordes protecting their good names and hyping their music. They’re internationally known superstars. People would find out about their tours, and the movies of their concerts on Netflix and Disney+, even if every word they uttered didn’t go viral.

The Monitor is a weekly column devoted to everything happening in the WIRED world of culture, from movies to memes, TV to Twitter.

Yet, watching them go viral has become a sport in and of itself. Swift’s Easter eggs (and weird Spotify pop-ups and surprise double albums), Beyoncé’s art-directed captionlessInstagram posts—these things regularly become news, and they bring in people who maybe couldn’t care less, just to see why everyone is tweeting. This is the ouroboros of modern pop music.

Even as this notoriety has made a select few artists very rich, it’s also created a series of problems. Yes, the Beyhive and the Swifties can be intense, but there are also their detractors who, in the case of Swift, promote countless dumb conspiracy theories, most of them concerning her being a government psyop to influence the 2024 US presidential election. Her private jets are now a matter of public interest.

Swift fans, though, do mobilize. When deepfake pornographic images of the singer went viral on social media in January, her fans rallied to drown them in “Protect Taylor Swift” posts. When Ticketmaster seemingly botched the initial release of her Eras Tour tickets, the fans made enough noise that US lawmakers took notice. On Tuesday, Meta’s Oversight Board announced it’s taking a closer look at deepfakes on its platforms. That same day, The Wall Street Journal reported the US Justice Department had plans to file an antitrust lawsuit against Live Nation, Ticketmaster’s parent company.

Almost makes me want to see what would happen if someone did try to pass off AI Taylor as the real thing.

【Global Launch Notice】 We are excited to break the news to you that the global version of Love Live! School idol festival 2 MIRACLE LIVE! is launching soon in February 2024. However, we also want to inform you that, the Global Version will close its doors on May 31, 2024, and… pic.twitter.com/0LYQ6YnD61 — Love Live! School idol festival 2 MIRACLE LIVE! (@lovelive_SIF_GL) January 25, 2024

For those interested in the tweet itself.

Planet names, days of the week, months, which year is zero - even that we have 7 days in the week - All of these are direct religious references that we’re fine with.

That is amazing!

Authorities initially had difficulty spotting Armstrong in Santa Teresa, a popular travel destination, as many of those in the town physically resembled Armstrong.

“I think from the get-go we were told … you’re gonna be in for a surprise, ‘cause a lot of the women in Santa Teresa look just like Kaitlin – a lot of them,” the deputy US marshal Damien Fernandez said to CBS.

Investigators even enlisted a female operative to take local yoga classes with the hopes of spotting Armstrong, a yoga enthusiast. But police were unable to locate her.

In a last ditch effort, US investigators posted an advertisement looking for a yoga teacher on Facebook.

I hate teams that say Agile says “no doco”.

The principle is “Working software over comprehensive documentation… That is, while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more.”

Agile absolutely needs documentation but it shouldn’t hold up delivering working solutions and shouldn’t be more complicated than necessary.

We don’t want the old-school projects where software was ready but not delivered until a bible of doco was typeset, printed and bound.