TikTok itself is banned inside China. Many western social media and news organizations are also banned there. The precedence is already there.

The difference between trolls and bot farms and manipulation directly from the social media platform is gas lighting is significantly easier. The platform has all of a user's graph data and can directly measure engagement with manipulative content. If they detect any engagement they can push less subtle manipulative content and accelerate as they measure increased engagement.

Trolls and bot farms don't have the same level of feedback. They're certainly not ineffective but their targeting is not nearly as precise. TikTok in particular is problematic in that Chinese intelligence services have direct access to and influence on the platform.

This is concerning not just with telemetry and graph data but also influence campaigns. Because the weighs in "the algorithm" of any social media feed are completely opaque to the end user there's no way to know the difference between organic content, stuff the user engaged with knowingly, and content inserted to wag the dog. This is used by platforms for advertising but works the exact same way for manipulating for any reason.

The problem with that whole talk is it pre-supposed the observed phenomena are in fact objects. If the "Nimitz" UFO was indeed an object it had 5000Gs of acceleration and used a terawatt of power. If you pumped a terawatt of power into an object the size of an F/A-18 it would turn into plasma.

So your hypothetical object has completely unsupported "engineering" requirements to simply exist. You don't need to understand all "physics" to know that your hypothesis that a UFO is an actual object and not a mistaken measurement is unfalsifiable. It's basically saying a UFO is magic. Further such hypothesis is not skeptical. It makes unsupported assumption ls because an observation doesn't match an expectation.

It's far more rational to approach UAP from the position that they're measurement error. Instead of crazy logical leaps assuming these objects run on essentially magic, it only relies on a much more prosaic understanding of the mechanisms of measurement.

A reflection inside a telephoto lens can look like all sorts of things. The depth of field further transforms in-lens illusions. Lenses designed to correct chromatic aberrations can have an effect on the transmitted image. The projection onto the flat plane of a CMOS sensor further amplifies the odds of optical illusions. Also the fact many cameras are monocular again increases the odds an optical illusion being seen in the output.

An out of focus moth close to a camera moving at very boring moth-like speeds can look like a much more distant object moving at ludicrous speeds. Camera movement can make a close stationary/slow object appear to be moving quickly. A distant object moving at boring speeds relative to a moving observer can appear to be making crazy movements.

At the core of these illusions is the fact a monocular lens is projecting rays from any numbers of things at a variety of distances onto a single flat sensor plane. The rays aren't tagged with a distance value. The planar sensor has no idea where a photon originated from. Without good references it's hard to judge the actual size and distance of objects. There's precious few good references in the sky for judging the size of distant objects.

Jumping to conclusions phenomena are in fact objects is not scientifically rigorous and intellectually lazy. Assuming an observation must be some unknown physics is just god of the gaps logical fallacies. A jillion measurements of different phenomena doesn't really help since the same type of sensors (monocular CMOS cameras with refresh rates of tens or dozens of Hz) will just misidentify the same class of phenomena the same way.

The police can't "trace ballistics" of jack shit. That whole concept is a bunch of pseudo-science woo. At best it might be able to correlate a bullet having been fired from a particular model of gun. The idea that a bullet can be reliably traced to a particular gun is fantasy. Even when a particular gun model can be identified with ballistic tests those tests can't reliably differentiate between two individual guns of the same model.

The only way ballistic pattern matching might ever work is if a particular gun had a defect that left a specific telltale on a bullet. Even then you'd need to identify how likely that defect would be in the population of that model gun or manufacturer.

Most police forensics tests are pseudo-science with ballistic analysis being one of the worst and least statistically sound.

The whole concept of "ghost guns" is absolutely filled with cop math. Regular guns with the serial number filed off get lumped into "ghost guns" as do ones with home-milled lowers. The danger of 3D printed guns effectively zero. If this bill was in any way trying to deter the construction of illegal guns it would try controlling mills and drill presses rather than 3D printers.

No, Python is readable.

The Monster of the Week episodes of X-Files were afforded by 20+ episode seasons. A lot of serialized shows today have half the number of episodes per season. They play for a few weeks, go on hiatus, and then come back for sweeps. Even streaming-first shows do 12 episode seasons.

There's no longer space in schedules to tell MOTW stories. These sort of side tracks were where a lot of character development would happen. B-stories could be told. Even recurring characters could get an entire episode of their own, e.g. Musings of a Cigarette Smoking Man.

That isn't to say 26 episode seasons are unalloyed good. There's plenty of shows that stretch six episodes of meaningful story into twelve episodes. There's a happy medium between overly long seasons resorting to clip shows and bottle episodes and padding a mini-series into a "season" that's still only a dozen episodes.

Back when I ran a computer BBS in the late 80's and early 90's, this came up and it was generally believed you gave up ability to claim immunity from what your user's posted when you started censoring it.

This is exactly what Section 230 covers. It specifically allows a platform to moderate content without automatically becoming that content's publisher and thus being liable for it. Without this protection no online platform can allow user content to be published. There's too much liability for platforms if they are suddenly considered publishers of content posted by trolls and assholes on their sites.

who cares? Downtown SF was a gentrified shithole before the pandemic. It wasn't some thriving utopia. What will happen is the tech companies that wanted to have a fancy SF office will realize what an expensive folly that is and move to more reasonable (and smaller) offices. Then market forces will take over and the landlords will need to drop their ridiculous rents until they can get tenants. Maybe the city will get wise and buy out some landlords to convert some floors of buildings to residential areas.

What the pandemic showed everyone was a huge portion of white collar work can't be done from anywhere. The useless middle manager class has gotten really upset but for a lot of ICs traveling to an office is just an expensive waste of time. It turns out the occasional dog barking or toddler opening a door in a meeting doesn't destroy a company immediately. It also turns out people get work done without their manager on some overseer platform with a whip in their hand.

Office space is not useless and there's utility in having some company owned space available for employees. What's not necessary is having a particular Zip code in the address. The office should be a tool like anything else provided for employees, something that enables them to get their work done.

AdBusters and Just Stop oil

Unless you consider power substations to be works of art I don't think there's a rational case to even bring up these groups. The power stations were shot with rifles, no one glued themselves to the fucking things.

Apple does not and has not used Ghostscript for rasterizing PostScript. So its license has little bearing on Apple using PostScript or not.

If I had to guess I'd say they dropped PostScript because the interpreter required privileged entitlements they didn't want to keep allowing. Apple's internal apps use entitlements just like App Store ones, though much more permissive. Even with more permissive entitlements there's code that needs exceptions to those. It's a major internal process to get entitlement exceptions.

The amount of work to either fit the PostScript interpreter to work well in restrictive entitlements or fix security issues was likely too high to justify keep shipping it.

Starship has yet to work without a cargo bay, let alone with an as-yet not designed cargo bay. Starship is riddled with promised features that have yet to be demonstrated even in the small scale. Adding cargo bay doors to Starship is not a trivial change to its internal structure.

Such a modification is not impossible but it's yet another promise that has yet to be demonstrated on a vehicle that is yet to fly.

System on a Chip. The CPU, RAM, and wireless baseband.

Hey now, you want the Celeron 300A, it had the 128kB L2 cache. It was a pretty big performance increase over the L2 lacking 300. The L2 cache added something like a 20% performance increase over the 300 that only improved as you overclocked.

The SLS is not meant to be economical. It's optimized for heavy lift in a single shot. SpaceX doesn't have any production rockets with its capability.

Even when Starship is out of development, it's limited to LEO without as-yet undeveloped in orbit refueling. It will be cool when it works but it's not a capability NASA should rely on it cause it's complicated and will likely take years to get right.

The SLS is also a capabilities program. Every second moron bitches that we "lost" the ability to build the Saturn V. We didn't lose anything. Congress dropped the Saturn like a bad habit and the people that built it retired or died without documenting process changes on the fully integrated systems. We could take the Saturn blueprints and build those systems today. The problem is the undocumented processes in the old systems would mean a lot of testing and reverse engineering those process changes. We in fact did this very thing with the J-2 engine for the J-2X.

Part of reusing a bunch of Space Shuttle technology in Ares/SLS is to keep the same things from happening to systems developed for the Shuttle. There's a lot of advanced engineering that went into the Shuttle over 30 years which would be criminal to lose because some engineers retired with documentation consisting of TODOs.

The ability to trade, sell, and own game items (weapons, trophies, powers, property) could be massive.

This is the dumbest fucking use for a blockchain besides all of the other dumb uses. There is absolutely zero financial upside for a developer to support some in-game item purchased from another developer. It's all cost with no benefit. Epic isn't going to spend a dime to support a TF2 hat in Fortnite. Valve made the money from the sucke...customer, not Epic, which means Epic is out the cost to support the item in their game.

If Epic charges to import the item to their game/platform, now you're paying twice for the same "item". That's worse than paying for it once.

Even if you decide to pay for all that artificial scarcity there's no guarantee an item or any in-game asset has any utility between games. A jet pack from a sci-fi MOBA is meaningless in a fantasy MMO. Mapping assets between different games would be a huge intractable problem.

That's to say nothing about the copyright issues. If a game let you import Mickey Mouse ears into a game they would be inviting a nice fat lawsuit from Disney unless they had a prior licensing agreement.

Using blockchains for in-game assets would be a compatibility nightmare, a copyright disaster, and a giant money sink for gamers. What an awesome fucking idea.