After setting up a blog for someone 12 years ago and learning about how cross site tracking, cookies, etc... all work... I went into Facebook and asked them to purge all my information (I know but you take what you can get). Now I have a browser that gets used ONLY for Facebook and a few other odd things. Plus I'm big on private windows in all 3 of my regular browsers.
I DO get to MFA when logging into banks more than most folks.
]]>True - but usually if you're at the opera, you're there for the music so it's really easy to not read the lyrics.
Okay - so what interesting surtitle snafus have you seen? Some of the SKorean and Japanese musical theater videos on YT have subtitles which is useful for unfamiliar foreign language musicals. I'm guessing that most such subtitles are phonetically based automatic translation (AI?) systems because some translated words don't fit the meaning I'd expected based on the musical score and translated lyrics up to that point. Even so - after a while my brain becomes adjusted to that and comes up with the likeliest word via homonyms. Anyways, folks who are easily annoyed by translation errors would probably stop reading the surtitles early on.
waldo @ 1239:
re: 'hacked router'
Thanks - hadn't considered that.
EC @ 1235:
Re: 'crests - feudal system'
Had to look up when the feudal system ended in Scotland - 2003?! Wow!
]]>The "people's church" keep removing memorials, and are trying to get the public celebration banned, and the other side keep replacing the memorials and gathering to remember.
Twitter video sorry: https://twitter.com/PPantsdown/status/1620550491276181504?t=nX90z7JtAv3yieBy7kku_g&s=19
IIRC the form submitted is a "notice of intention" and can't be refused, hence the plod asking for a separate court order prohibiting anyone and everyone from gathering... legal fun times, but then that's what the deceased was known for in its later years.
(Also, it's not just the gays, it's a whole lot of people. The deceased offended against so many different groups that when they bury him it's going to be "take a number and get in line"... and the grave is going to need a connection to the literal sewer system as well as the metaphorical one)
]]>Re: 'Russia is trying to undermine or evade sanctions. I doubt they're going to recruit that much cannon fodder manpower out of Africa ... but raw materials OTOH ... or western "tech" the African nations could buy & resell to the Russians ...'
Good point - but my impression is that contracts under which any advanced US (or EU) tech is sold expressly forbids resale to specified (unfriendly) countries. I think this came up during some of the media coverage re: sending German-made tanks to Ukraine.
True. That mainly applies to major end items (weapons & such), but how do you enforce it against someone buying "duel use" electronics for the domestic manufacture of "smart" appliances. Maybe someone buys a million components & manufactures 900,000 TVs & refrigerators (and 100,000 components go unaccounted for ...)
Buyers in "third world" countries will sometimes comply with U.S. laws & sanctions. Sometimes they WON'T & Russia is always ready to exploit that.
]]>The local agency of an international paedophile gang are having a Streisand contest over whether a recently deceased gang official should be commemorated for his offending rather than for his protection of gang assets from those offended against.
What is a "Streisand contest"? Google was no help.
The "people's church" keep removing memorials, and are trying to get the public celebration banned, and the other side keep replacing the memorials and gathering to remember.
I wonder what they'd say if it was Westboro Baptist Church protesting some LGBTQ+ person's funeral?
]]>If the QUILTBAG in question had raped and tortured several members of the church and then used their wealth and power to both avoid consequences and further punish the victims, while denying guilt and fleeing the country I have a feeling that a lot of people would be really torn between their dislike of the how the victims behave and intense dislike of the crimes. Much as many of those who remain Catholic despite the church do.
(there are, of course, people who actually do support the paedophile gang and have no qualms about its actions, just as there are supporters of any other organisation and/or ideology you can think of).
]]>SFR
Richard Strauss - "Der Frau ohne Schatten"
Surtitle: The King/Emperor is turning into stone
Direct translation: The K/E is becoming stone
Moz
Ah another, erm "mistranslation" eh?
The local agency of an international paedophile gang - The Roman Catholic Church - oops.
LURVE it, incidentally.
Count me as an early adopter of that. After years of skepticism I had to accept that it was the 21st century and I couldn't buy everything by going to a physical location and trading colorful paper for the stuff I wanted - but I also wasn't going to trust financial information to some random wifi connection or even on a potentially stealable laptop. I've got a desktop computer plugged into a wired connection which is the only device that makes ebay purchases (or whatever). I'll still window shop on other devices, often in private windows, but none of my laptops will ever see a credit card number.
]]>Boy, oh boy! ... are you ever nitpicky! Suggestion: Don't ever use Google translate. :)
Scott Sanford @ 1246:
Re: 'desktop ... purchasing'
Haven't used a desktop in a while. At this point a 'computer' is like my coffee mug: I carry it everywhere with me.
]]>Getting back to the original blog post, this isn't science fiction but reality.
Leaving aside the negative effects of algorithm-driven social media, things like the availability of credit, sentencing of criminals, hiring for jobs, and more are all driven by algorithms now. Even if a human is in the loop, the safe choice is always to go with what the algorithm recommends — because if they don't, they can be blamed for any negative outcomes (even if the negative outcome is just 'algorithm predicted a better result').
Cathy O'Neil won the Euler Book Prize for Weapons of Math Destruction, a book on this topic.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weapons_of_Math_Destruction
She's done a TED talk, for those that prefer watching to reading:
https://www.ted.com/talks/cathy_o_neil_the_era_of_blind_faith_in_big_data_must_end
]]>As someone who plays the credit card points / rewards game, algorithms are big in getting and keeping cards. I can apply for credit via a major bank web site at 2am and get approved or denied within 90 seconds. Less than 30 seconds most of the time. For a credit line of $4K to $20K. There just can't be a person involved given that time window. Less than 1 in 15 to 20 times the application will get held for a person to review. Now my and my wife's credit rating is in general impeccable and has been for a while now. Someone with a history a missed payments or frequent job hopping might be algorithmically denied or just always referred to a human for review.
]]>I think I tripped the SPAM filters with my last comment. It was about algorithms and how the CC industry works.
]]>"But if I just look at it and say, if 10 years from now, we have ‘universal remote employees’ that are artificial general intelligences, run on clouds, and people can just dial up and say, ‘I want five Franks today and 10 Amys, and we’re going to deploy them on these jobs,’ and you could just spin up like you can cloud-access computing resources, if you could cloud-access essentially artificial human resources for things like that—that’s the most prosaic, mundane, most banal use of something like this. "
]]>