the game's uncommon method of generating galaxies of incomprehensible scale on device consistently for all players from a single-seed happening on a phone is remarkable for those of us who remember phones performing far behind consoles or desktop PCs.

No it isn't. Your phone is a supercomputer by 1980s standards, and seeded generation (whether from a PRNG or hashing coordinates or whatever) goes back to at least then (and probably '60s/'70s). I'm not slamming the game, and seeded generation is often a good idea, but the idea that you can do it on handheld supercomputers is not remarkable, even the tiniest little bit.

You wanna see something super-fucking-impressive on an iPhone? Go back to the very first model and behold that it runs a truly-remarkably decent web browser. That was way more futuristic than this.

Of course people should beware. Anyone who has a problem with Flock is surely aware that they are only a fraction of "the problem," though among the more visible.

I'm concerned that some Flock haters might take us down a slippery slope to where you can't have a camera in your house if it looks out onto the street, or that you shouldn't be allowed to record cops, or that I shouldn't be allowed to have a camera attachment on my Manhattan apartment balcony telescope that I normally just use to furiously goon to the good people of NYC who don't close their curtains. (Oops, forget that third example.)

I can't say I'm a fan of Flock but if their rights are infringed in a way that might possibly expand to everyone else, then they will need to be defended.

That said, I have a modest proposal for the law-enforcement-related problems of surveillance vendors. Require non-warrant sharing with LE to be unreliable. For every geo search, remove a random half of the applicable results and replace them with deliberate, randomized false positives, so that LE will know the data shouldn't be taken too seriously on its own. If cops act without confirmation while KNOWING it's _at least_ 50% likely to be wrong, that'll help with the civil suits for false arrests.

Just imagine, if you could be taxed more for unproductive infrastructure. Everything in the world would be solved, if you would just pay everything to the government, and they could re-distribute all of your income to others.

The entire reason why industrialization has delivered the promises of socialism, while socialism brought mass scarcity everywhere, is that productive activity generates resources that can be spent elsewhere.

Meanwhile taking more and more from existing industries, only to fund unproductive things (i.e. electric lines that don't allow for more production to offset their costs) improvershes everyone. It's why PRC has as many problems with useless infrastructure they built as they do. It's why their property market collapsed a few years ago.

Loudoun county is a well known example. There are several others.

https://progresschamber.org/in...

This isn't really new or interesting. If you manage to get a lot of new industry in, you can tax that industry instead of your residents. Meaning you can fund more services, while taking less tax.

HEIC is worthless because it's illegal to implement unless you get permission. Maybe in 20 years it'll be usable.

Don't like that fact? Then we need to find and support (oh no, and be?) political candidates who oppose software patents.

You shouldn't need anyone's permission to write a computer program. It's infuriating.

Air quality collapses. That's a new one. What exactly do they do to the air?

Gas turbines? Water vapor poisons the air now? Man, people living near oceans must be all dying from water vapor poisoning. Reminder that methane burns into H2O and CO2.

Chinabots are going really hard nowadays.

This is the other PRC sponsored talking point that is nonsensical. "They bring noise".

They have fans pointed upwards, and usually shielded with noise shields on the sides. As a result they emit far less noise than most industrial applications. Whatever noise they emit usually travels upwards, not sideways.

But crazy witch with 50 cats says that noise killed her latest litter. Tiktok said so, so it must be true.

Yeah, anti-datacenter propaganda really worked well in some places. Not many, but some.

In real world, data centers are currently reviving a lot of remote towns. Dilapidated infrastructure? They will rebuild it because they need it to work. Insufficient infrastructure? They'll finance the build out. Everything already fine? They will pay enough taxes to cut residents' tax bills by a significant chunk.

It's why the propaganda is focusing mainly on a handful of cases of corruption (i.e. officials getting bribed to offer better terms than necessary), as well as just blatant lying (oh my god they consume so much water, we're going to run out).

Mostly what is needed is for more small towns to realize that they can rebuild a lot of dilapidated infrastructure and lower property taxes if they make a good deal with a data center. Not to mention minor perks like fast potential to pull fast broadband access in a rural town, or build something that will be productive for a long time, like a new power plant.

Your honor, my script was a "rogue," so therefore it is responsible and I am not.

If the cops receive an anonymous tip that CowboyNeal is an insensitive clod, and then decide to arrest him without checking out any of the evidence, I blame the cops. There's plenty to bitch about with Flock but "the cops don't care about doing their job" isn't one of them. That's a cop problem.

Don't treat any stupid robots as somehow "better" than an anonymous tip called in from a payphone. It's just, like, something's opinion, man.

Thank you for sharing this meme, which is completely unsuitable for this case.

In a Free to Play game, customer isn't a product. In-game purchases are the product. To get the customer to the product, customer must first install and play the game.

We now live in a fully connected world where most users are connected through web browsers and are the intended victims.

This particular story is an exception to that. Remote software, accessed through a web browser, normally does not have read/write access to your local filesystem. But people are granting local filesystem access to proprietary AI services.

I think that granting such access is .. wow. I wouldn't do it, though I can see how if you use a specialized account for it, and if you're confident that your OS has no local user priv escalation bugs, it might be ok. In your sandbox you trust.

But GP's comment is about whose decision that is. If you use Linux, then it's your decision. If you use iOS, then it's Apple's decision. And MacOS is becoming less Linuxy and more iOSy every year. I think it makes plenty of sense for stories like this to result in people dumping MacOS for Linux. (But daaamn, their values surprise me. You wanna make your computer less secure instead of more? Oh well, like Rumsfeld said, freedom is untidy!)

No, if the state were renamed, it would be to Old America. NM might not be the true original, but if you look at it through the eyes of European colonization and continuous governance, then New Mexico has the best claim of the fifty. (Though if you take a less racist view, then I guess Alaska had the real OGs.)

Randi McGinn, a lawyer for New Mexico, said applying the full $5,000 penalty to the number of violations would create too large of a penalty under the US Constitution's protections on due process.

I ass/u/me this refers to the Eighth Amendment, but I don't remember seeing any monetary constants encoded within that text.

Google's telling me Meta is worth about $1.8 trillion so how would a mere $40B be "excessive?" It's only about 2% of their worth! Civil penalties in excess of 2% of someone's worth are routinely accepted as constitutional, aren't they? If this case were about me driving drunk and killing a whole family, I bet no one would flinch at the 8A implications of taking 2% (!?!) of my assets, and everyone would laugh at my lawyer if he brought up 8A for such an insignificant fine.

I understand why we have 8A, and everyone deserves mercy, but I don't see why Meta deserves exceptional mercy as a singular special case that we would be horrified to see applied anywhere else. Bringing up 8A for such a tiny fine would be giving Meta a very unique carve-out that we normally would not apply.

It may be that $5k is too much to charge criminals per act, in that each crime didn't really cause that much loss, but bringing up due process concerns seems like bullshit when the fine is already so small. NM and Meta had been trying to negotiate the cost of illegal business for years before negotiations failed and it went to trial. Meta decided to let a jury decide, and the jury's come up with a fairly tiny fraction of their assets.

If Meta thinks the price of illegal business is still too high, then they can lower the number of willful violations they commit per year, to optimize the advantage they gain from illegal actions at an affordable rate.

Geez, Zuck, just do less of it. If $40B seems like a lot, then maybe try only $10B worth of crime next time. What's the big deal? Live and learn. After this little fine you still have 98% of the company left to go on and incur the next wave of liabilities.

Valorant is free to play.