Russia has messaging for useful idiots on the right and messaging for useful idiots on the left. To the right they’ll say stuff like “America should stay out of foreign wars”, “we should make Ukraine pay for the assistance”, “the price of oil will go up” blah blah. To the left it’s shit like “Ukraine are Nazis”, “America is perpetuating this war”, “NATO are the aggressors” blah blah

The goal either way is to sow division, doubt, demoralise, create instability, create distrust and sap European & US power’s resolve to support Ukraine. And also to devalue information with false, misleading and contradictory information. It’s not hard on social media to see how this shit spreads around with insincere actors pumping false news and misinfo into the feeds that gets picked up by the useful idiots.

Yes I know. I’ve was there for it too mocking these dinguses. But it only became mainstream with COVID when it sort of metastasized and merged with a bunch of other deranged conspiracy nonsense via MAGA & QAnon.

I certainly am. I also got blocked by Kirstie Alley, Rudy Giuliani and Michael Avenatti for criticizing their cult, grift & grift respectively. I’m sure there are a few others I don’t know about.

The Cybertruck is a fail on so many levels that I wonder why anyone wants one. It’s not a good EV, it’s not a good truck, falls short on price & range, is prone to corrosion, looks stupid, is totally impractical, and lethal to pedestrians & cyclists. The thing violates so many EU regulations that it will NEVER be on sale there and anywhere else that doesn’t like murder machines.

Sounds to me like shareholders should call his bluff and be rid of him. Maybe then the company won’t be wasting money on boneheaded vehicles like the Cybertruck.

I got blocked by him on Twitter (in 2012!) for mocking his whackjob antivax views. He was espousing shit headed antivax nonsense long before it was fashionable.

He’s been saying variations of this shit for years. If you listen to the Knowledge Fight podcast there is scarcely a week when he hasn’t invoked some schtick about how this could be the last broadcast.

Of course, if this dumpster fire has genuinely stopped paying the bills and the creditors are changing the locks then boo hoo for Jones. I’m sure he’ll weave it as a conspiracy but this asshole has had it coming and then some.

This guy seems to be taking safety slightly more seriously with his sub plans than the last guy. Which is unfortunate for people looking forward to more billionaires transforming themselves into paste.

I know tar zxf and xjf off by heart. I probably do 100x as many extracts as creates. Tar is a stupidly antiquated command though.

They have to have a human respond to each and every complaint about that ad. Seems more sensible to automate and flag suspicious ads before the complaints happen.

There are other considerations here though. Google suffers reputational harm if users become victims through their platform. It becomes news, it creates distrust in users, it generates friction with regulators and law enforcement. Users may be trained to be ad averse or install ad blockers. In addition, these ads generate reports which costs time to process even if the complaints are rejected.

At the end of the day these scammers are not high profile advertisers and they’re not valuable. They’re burner accounts that pay cents to deliver their ads. They’re ephemeral, get zapped, reappear and constantly waste time and resources. Given that YouTube can easily transcribe content and watermark it, it makes no sense to me that they wouldn’t put some triggers in, e.g. a new advertiser places an ad that says “Elon Musk”, or “Quantum AI” or other such markers, flag it for review.

Body worn cameras stop a lot of cop abuse (and also false accusations of abuse) since in the aftermath of some incident the footage often speaks for itself. As is the case here.

Policing in the UK is based on the principle of public trust and approval. i.e Peelian principles. That doesn’t mean there aren’t terrible racist cops or thugs in the ranks because there are, but generally it means cops aren’t on power trips, recognise they are the public and there to serve the public, not just arrest people, and they also exercise discretion and common sense. Again, not perfect and there are rotten apples, but there is that ethos in policing.

I think that is lacking in US forces. They’re more like a civil military, separate from the public in mentality and adversarial. That said, I think US cops are also burdened with societal problems that shouldn’t be theirs to deal with - mentally ill, homeless, addiction, guns. I’ve seen enough “officer involved shootings” to realise most were justified in the moment. More than half are straight up felons getting into gun fights with cops. Others are gray though - e.g. a crazy homeless dude pulls a knife and charges a cop and of course they shoot the guy - which is justified - but why did society care so little that it came to this? Money spent on programs for addiction, homelessness and mentally ill would pay off in terms of less criminality and less shootings. As would changing policing to be more Peelian in nature.

I’ve disabled personalised ads on YouTube and I see this sort of shit all the time. I’ve given up reporting them because 90% of the time the report is rejected. I don’t even understand the rationale for rejecting it because it’s an obvious a scam as a scam can be - ai impersonation, fake endorsement, illegal advertising category. It’s a scam YouTube.

I don’t even get why these ads even appear. YouTube has transcription & voice / music recognition capabilities. How hard would it be to flag a suspicious ad and require a human to review it? Or search for duplicates under other burner accounts and zap them at the same time? Or having some kind of randomized audit based on trust where new accounts get reviewed more frequently by experienced reviewers.

Protectionism only works in the VERY short term. If the USA doesn’t pull its finger out of its ass and make affordable good EVs, then its automotive industry will crash and burn. Because the rest of the world unaffected by tariffs will be buying Chinese (or Korean / European) EVs and not American ones because they’ll be expensive and suck.

I hate local file search in Windows. So many times I’ve wonder why my machine is crawling and I go to the taskbar and discover Windows search indexer is killing my machine.

For the other stuff in Windows 11, I wonder if it knows I’m in Europe because I’ve not seen any egregious advertising - it has the default shit they set up for you like the MSN home page in Edge which is annoying but it can all be changed.

I have Windows 11 on a couple of machines and honestly it’s just Windows 10 with a somewhat slicker taskbar and control panel. Functionally it is almost identical. I’m sure there is a random bunch of changes on the periphery but it’s really not a compelling proposition if someone has Windows 10 and is happy with it.

When you have a narcissistic sociopath for a boss don’t expect job security. All these layoffs and his insane letter will do is cultivate toadying, fear, distrust, cliques and a culture of backstabbing within Tesla.

If they weeded out some of the shittier ideas they’d be one in nine or eight.

I saw the Marquess Brownlee review of this thing last night and I wonder why companies make this crap and who is fool enough to fund it. It’s obviously doomed to fail, as are most “smart” gadgets & devices. The best that can be said for it, is at least there is no subscription to use it and it’s not outrageously expensive but that’s damning it with faint praise.