• 4 Posts
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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: October 20th, 2023

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  • I would argue more that anyone grabbing this from the app store is painting a target on their back. It doesn’t matter what permissions it does or does not have: You are now giving a mega company run by a c-suite that have demonstrably bended the knee to a fascist information that you care about this.

    Push notifications are incredibly valuable. I still argue that doing it through a dedicated app at all is idiotic and it should instead be through a semi-anonymous chat system like Signal or Matrix and the like and get group blasted.



  • You, eh, ever try to lift 150-200 pounds of dead weight? while trying to make it look like that dead weight did it himself?

    One murderer puts their arms under his armpits. The other loops the noose and then ties it off.

    Could Abby Sciuto and Ducky figure out it was faked? Sure. But they aren’t getting called in to investigate a hit that was organized by the people who would be investigating the murder.

    To also then string him up, and remove whatever you need to, to make it look like suicide?

    Open the door. One guy rushes him and does a blood choke. He was old and nowhere near at his best. The other quickly throws the noose up and ties it off. They don’t have to remove anything but themselves.

    Again. I think more time is more likely. But be very cautious of “They needed way more than one minute!” because, again, even the wired article suggests it may just be overlapping clips and it would be super easy to say “Actually that analyst is wrong and it is really only one minute of lost footage so all of you conspiracy theorists are wrong and owe donald j trump an apology”


    As an example, think OJ Simpson. So much of the case became fixated on that glove. So once it was “proved” that he couldn’t wear it (because his hands were swollen and had thick latex gloves on them…) the entire case fell apart.

    This will basically never reach trial for obvious reasons. But the principle still holds. Don’t overly fixate on specific details that can be trivially refuted unless they are key details. And it is very possible, if not overly plausible, that they could have suicide’d epstein in under a minute.


  • I haven’t really looked much into the layout or video (I tend to not like staring at corpses OR rapists), but assuming it is of the cell itself or the door right outside?

    A minute is more than enough time for a couple of blokes to get in, grab someone, put them in a blood choke, loop the noose, throw it, and tie a super quick knot. Hollywood likes people to think you can struggle against getting choked. An air choke where your oxygen supply is cut off? Sure, those can take a minute or two to kill someone. A blood choke where you put pressure on the artery? They are unconscious in less than 10 seconds (sometimes almost instantaneously) and they aren’t going to wake up the moment you release. Similarly, ask any climber to tie a quick figure eight (or bowline if they are old or european) and they can do that blindfolded, in the rain, in like 10 seconds.

    So assuming even two killers? Yeah, a minute is more than enough time.

    That isn’t to say that multiple minutes is not more likely. But the article has many caveats for why that isn’t necessarily the case (overlap, basically) and there is already a massive push by fascists to somehow spin all of this as being Obama’s fault. So be wary of easy gotchas that they can introduce and disprove.



  • It depends on the size/“disruptiveness” of the company but yeah. You either have your own tape back up system or you contract out to someone who does and try not to think about what it means to be doing a glorified rsync of all your data offsite every week.

    I wouldn’t quite go so far as to say anyone doing genuine offsite backups using a spinning disc is wrong but…


    The caveat I’ll carve out is the hobbyist space where a lot of us will back up truly essential data to a cloud bucket or even a friend/family member’s NAS. I… still think that is more wrong than not but (assuming you trust them and they have proper practices) it is probably the best way for a hobbyist to keep a backup without worrying about that USB drive degrading since it gets plugged in once a year.


  • Words hard

    And I would go so far as to say that nobody who is buying 36 TB spinners is doing offsite backups of that data. For any org doing offsites of that much data you are almost guaranteed using a tape drive of some form because… they pay for themselves pretty fast and are much better for actual cold storage backups.

    Seagate et al keep pushing for these truly massive spinners and I really do wonder who the market is for them. They are overly expensive for cold storage and basically any setup with that volume of data is going to be better off slowly rotating out smaller drives. Partially because of recovery times and partially because nobody but a sponsored youtuber is throwing out their 24 TB drives because 36 TB hit the market.

    I assume these are a byproduct of some actually useful tech that is sold to help offset the costs while maybe REALLY REALLY REALLY want 72 TBs in their four bay Synology.









  • The bottle of water actually has real reasons behind it.

    For the scanners the TSA (used to?) uses, it is REALLY hard to distinguish between liquids. Water looks like shampoo looks like hot sauce looks like the magic binary liquid that Bruce Willies had to solve riddles to save Hey Zeus from. So a bottle of “water” actually is a big safety concern… yet apparently a quart of miscellaneous liquids totally isn’t and I won’t expand on that because I am already on too many watchlists.

    Which makes it kind of unique in that it is (was?) a very valid safety concern AND extra hilarious in that it highlights the theatre of it all because of that. It also gets MUCH MUCH funnier when international flights pretend it is about protecting ecosystems even though everyone just chugs their water or empties it into a bin.

    For funsies, the shoes thing will probably end up being a huge headache but has different rationales. Back in the before times, everyone had metal buckles and eyelets and so forth on their shoes. That… really hasn’t been true for over 30 years where shoes are almost all rubber and plastics. But the former would trigger the metal detector.

    That said? People who wear nicer boots still tend to have enough metal to trigger it (the bane of the pre-check line). So either they turn off the metal detector below the knee or EVERY queue is going to be the pre-check line at seatac.






  • No. They don’t need to generate data to train on data. There is PLENTY of white supremacist hate shit out there.

    The issue is one of labeling and weighting. Which is a pretty solved problem. It isn’t 100% solved and there will be isolated cases but “grok” breaks under even the most cursory of poking.

    Don’t believe me? Go look at the crowd who can convert any image or text generating model into porn/smut/liveleak in nothing flat. Or, for a less horrifying version of that, how concepts like RAG and the like to take generalized models and heavily weight them toward what you actually care about.

    Nah. This, like most things musk, just highlights how grossly incompetent basically all of his companies are. Even spacex mostly just coasts on being the only ones allowed to work on stuff (RIP NASA and, to a lesser extent, JPL) and then poaching the talent from everyone else to keep them from showing that.