I’m not sure I buy the McDonald’s worker story, the whole narrative of the arrest seems really bizarre. (Not that I eat their shit food, one way or another.)

Hic tamen vivit.

It’s from here:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:British-Library-Arundel-127_Le_trois_morts_et_les_trois_vifs.jpg#/media/File:British-Library-Arundel-127_Le_trois_morts_et_les_trois_vifs.jpg

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Three_Dead_and_the_Three_Living

Something like this maybe? https://www.katom.com/338-C2RHC.html This one is massive, you could get a smaller one and a chest freezer and still be at or under $3500. Maybe something like this: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B085489JZ2

The only downside is they are a little louder and use a bit more power because they’re meant to be opened 100 times a day and cool down food really fast (for safety). You also have to measure your space because these come in a lot of shapes and sizes compared to residential models.

When I needed a new fridge I went with a “garage” model for similar reasons. It’s meant as a second fridge people keep in their garage, so it doesn’t have any extras. Not even an ice maker, which was fine for me since those commonly fail.

Holy shit, for that much money you can get a commercial grade refrigerator that’s built like a tank and has none of this crap.

They are, if you scroll to the bottom of the github repo that OP posted there are some examples of what works and doesn’t work to break it.

Watermark data like this is stored in the least significant bits of the pixels themselves, or in the case of OPs example, they do a frequency decomposition on the image then store the watermark data in the coefficients. Basically you have to trash the pixel data at least a little bit to defeat it. So cropping or flipping the image won’t do it, but resizing or rotating with some kind of filtering will.

I have no idea how the machine-learning technique listed there is working, and their documentation link is broken :(

Also Dr Who. Our school had a kid who wore a big Tom Baker scarf and hat everyday. I hope he’s doing well.

I’ve tried, it sucks. Each broker has their own process, often several steps, and often a step is broken (like server errors, can’t get past a captcha, “try again later”, etc). You end up not just having to do the process, but also follow up with many of the ones that are ambiguous or returned server errors or whatnot. I did the top 8 or so brokers and then stopped.

I was in a waiting room recently and the TV was tuned to “Nick at Nite”, and they were showing Friends. Nick at Nite shows old shows, like Andy Griffith and Green Acres. Not shows I remember from childhood…

Not from this year specifically (but I only saw it this year): The Polish hackers who uncovered the train manufacturer’s repair shenanigans.

• Part 1: Breaking “DRM” in Polish trains – Reverse engineering a train to analyze a suspicious malfunction (2023)
• Part 2: We’ve not been trained for this: life after the Newag DRM disclosure (2024)

No ticks is pretty great.

I was listening to a best-selling author’s recent audiobook, and the professional voice actress messed this one up. So you’re in good company. Really, who can we blame but the Greeks?

Mastodon.art has a small but nice community. AI art isn’t allowed. Someone could always lie, I guess, but the community is small enough that engagement bait isn’t really a thing, there’s much larger mastodon instances those people would probably use. They also aggressively defederate fascists.

YouTube offers random A/B testing of titles and thumbnails now, and unfortunately the clickbait/red circle/soy face stuff absolutely does work. Everyone seems to agree that the “metric has ceased to be a good measure” when it comes to the algorithm, but it’s so opaque and omnipotent that people who can’t afford for their videos to be buried have no choice.

YouTube doesn’t just reward you for doing it, you are actively punished for not doing it. The same way one “underperforming” video can have cascading negative effects on your entire channel.

I can’t imagine relying on it for my family’s income. Google basically has hundreds of thousands of people doing spec work for them.

They really desecrated Dungeon Keeper. IIRC it was so filled up with mobile game, microtransaction garbage you couldn’t even dig blocks of dirt more than once a day without buying “gems”.

Pre-COVID. I wonder what it’s like now. Anecdotes from people who work in education seem to say it was pretty devastating for child development, but it’s hard to tell if it’s above and beyond the perennial “this new generation is totally fucked” sentiment.

Firewatch. I liked the visual style but everyone raved about the writing specifically and I thought it wasn’t great. I don’t want to shit on them too hard because they did try, and you can’t control how other people hype your work, but I found the characters really flat.

I think it’s possible that Robert Trump, Donald Trump’s younger brother, was an early victim of COVID. He died suddenly and was “very ill” but no specific cause was ever mentioned AFAIK. I think this was covered up because it was politically inconvenient for his brother.

I have nothing to really base it on except the timing and reaction was suspect.

If you’re into visual arts, “The Art Spirit” by Robert Henri is pretty great.

So I quickly gave myself diabetes…