Jerry2

The lack of open-source animation tools is really concerning to me. I've been looking for a way to animate some text and graphics for a series of training presentations that I was making and I couldn't find anything suitable. Open source tools are either geared towards animation of cartoons or they're so rudimentary that they're not really valuable to invest the time into.

Anyone have any recommendations for animation tools? Something that works either on macOS or Linux? If only paid solutions exist, what's out there (besides After Effects)?

>I don't quite understand how an opthalmologist would be equipped to identify Coronavirus.

A patient could have come to him with symptoms of a conjunctivitis [1]:

> As explained by Dr. Ignasi Jürgens, medical director of ICR, some reports suggest that the virus can cause conjunctivitis and be transmitted by aerosol contact with the conjunctiva. Therefore, patients who go to the ophthalmologist for conjunctivitis and have respiratory symptoms, in addition to having traveled abroad, especially to China, could be suspected of having the virus.

[1] https://icrcat.com/en/coronavirus-and-conjunctivitis/

From the article:

>The nine-count indictment alleges that Wu Zhiyong (吴志勇), Wang Qian (王乾), Xu Ke(许可) and Liu Lei (刘磊) were members of the PLA’s 54th Research Institute, a component of the Chinese military.

How were they identified exactly? I'm always fascinated with these DOJ indictments of foreign state actors but I'm always left wondering how they managed to narrow it down to a small group of people. I'm guessing that "PLA’s 54th Research Institute" employs thousands of people so how does the FBI/DOJ identify the culprits so precisely? Is it through CIA/NSA spying and moles inside the PLA?

You don't see foreign governments identifying individual NSA employees when the NSA hacks into something... so how does the DOJ do it?

Apparently, there were two companies in the US that produced the lacquer but then consolidation happened and Apollo bought out the competitor and shut it down. [1]

>Gil Tamazyan, the owner of Los Angeles record pressing plant Capsule Labs, said he's been concerned for the industry since Apollo purchased competitor Transco in 2007.

>"The worst case from (the fire) would be if Apollo doesn't plan to return and doesn't share the intellectual properties with another new willing company. We all agree there needs to be more than one supplier for these materials," Tamazyan said. "All my industry colleagues are worried this might take a long time to figure out and, in the process, major delays may arise in the vinyl production market."

So now only the Japanese company, MDC, remains as the sole producer of the lacquer. Lacquer is basically a formulation of nitrocellulose and is highly flammable.

If you've never seen a lacquer master being cut, give this vid a watch [2]. Not surprisingly, the audio engineer uses the Apollo lacquer master in the video.

[1] https://www.desertsun.com/story/life/2020/02/07/apollo-maste...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pl8bhzob0fQ

Previous administration had a rotating door with Google executives. It's as if Google was running the WH. This is how they managed to avoid all of the FTC investigations. [2][3][4]

This is usually what 3rd world type "banana republic" corruption looks like.

[1] https://theintercept.com/2016/04/22/googles-remarkably-close...

[2] https://www.wsj.com/articles/inside-the-u-s-antitrust-probe-...

[3] https://www.wsj.com/articles/google-avoided-ftc-probe-but-ot...

[4] http://graphics.wsj.com/google-ftc-report/

I was curious who the people behind Practice Fusion, the company in question, were so I did some digging:

Executive team: https://web.archive.org/web/20131108114711/http://www.practi...

Board of directors: https://web.archive.org/web/20131022222205/http://www.practi...

They've removed all this information from their website.

I wonder how these people can sleep at night knowing what kind of crimes against innocent people they've (allegedly) committed.

> Well, that in my eyes is a very solid advertising in favour of ProtonMail.

... if you live in Russia.

Epic is probably one of the biggest enemies of Linux since they're killing Linux support of every game/product they buy [1]. And while games aren't as important as some business/productivity applications, people do get lots of enjoyment from playing an occasional game. It's a great stress relief. And now even those little indulgences are being taken away.

Epic's CEO, Tim Sweeney, is extremely negative on Linux if you check out his Twitter feed [2] and I get a feeling from reading his comments that he despises Linux with passion.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19844241

[2] https://twitter.com/timsweeneyepic/status/964284402741149698...

This is what Basecamp has been complaining about for a while now too [1]. They even testified in front of Congress about it [2].

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2019/09/04/google-paid-search-ads-shake...

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/17/technology/antitrust-hear...

With each AdWords display change, Google's been adding billions of dollars to their revenue by confusing and fooling their users and blurring the line between the content and ads.

A visual guide: "A (mostly comprehensive history of Google's ad shading and labeling" https://i.imgur.com/0RxdzBE.png

From TFA:

>Fortunately I have some friends and ex-colleagues who work at Facebook so I reached out to them and asked for help, some of whom were kind enough to submit internal support tickets on my behalf. I wasn’t sure that was going to help so I fired off more emails and uploads of my ID but heard nothing. Thankfully 3 days later, I got a very terse email — “We unlocked your account”

This is a common refrain that I see in all these FB/Google "locked out or banned" horror stories. Unless you have some friends at high places at FB/Google, you're SOL if you ever get locked out of your FB or Gmail account.

This part of the explanation of what happened to it is extremely unsatisfying:

>As of April 3, 2006 the DriverStudio product family has been discontinued because of "a variety of technical and business issues as well as general market conditions". Maintenance support was offered until March 31, 2007.

From reading about SoftICE, it seems to have been doing what other debuggers could not. So how could they not find enough customers to keep it going? Does anyone know what actually happened?

'Cancel Culture' strikes again.

Not him but the company I work for has moved most of our ML pipelines away from Python and over to Swift. We started the move after Google announced support for Swift for TF. Before the move over to Swift, we were rewriting a lot of the data paths in C++ but were generally unhappy with the state of TF for C++ libraries. The move to Swift hasn't been without hiccups, however, but the community has been extremely helpful and it was worth it overall. State of Swift for TF libraries today is quite good.

We looked at Go early on but quickly dismissed it because with the move from Python to Go, it didn't seem like we were getting enough benefits to warrant the amount of work that would be required.

Here's their investing prospectus with the complete business strategy laid out:

https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5937f2f1bebafb1297678...

Haven't seen this being discussed anywhere:

>In addition to his own donations, Epstein claimed to have arranged for donations to MIT from other wealthy individuals. In 2014, Epstein claimed to have arranged for Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates to provide an anonymous $2 million donation to the Media Lab.

From the PDF linked above: http://factfindingjan2020.mit.edu/files/MIT-report.pdf

What's even scarier is when your browser "clicks" on the link by itself [1] and you don't even realize that you've just sent a request to some 'random' server and that server now has the log of your IP. If you browse 'questionable' sites, definition of which is growing by the day, you should be careful in which log your IP might end up in.

I now disable page prefetch on every browser I use. Some browsers don't even use it (which is a sensible thing in 2020 given the risk vs rewards of having it turned on).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Link_prefetching

I saw Moxie Marlinspike's talk when it was posted on CCC's official channel [1] and was disgusted by it. The talk has been now censored and video was made private. It was one of the most defeatist talks I've ever come across when it comes to messaging and privacy. His message was basically that anything you do is pointless and that his and WhatsApp/Facebook's way is the right one.

I've used Signal on few occasions in the past but his talk made me uninstall it. I simply do not trust him after hearing his opinions. I do not support centralization and other ideals he's now pushing (including the use of a phone number as Signal's primary ID).

The talk was mirrored on few channels on YT [2] and you can still see it.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DdM-XTRyC9c (it's a private video now)

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nj3YFprqAr8 (working link, who knows for how long so mirror it).

FTA:

>Even a switch of employer, or an unexplained gap in one’s résumé, can be a giveaway to a foreign intelligence service, say former officials. In response, the agency has also shifted to recruiting individuals within the companies they already work at, and, with the approval of corporate leadership, secretly transitioning those persons onto the CIA payroll, and training them intermittently and clandestinely, far from any known CIA facility.

...

>“There is a serious legal and policy process” in place at the CIA to manage these relationships, says a former official. Otherwise, “you could break industries.”

This is going to be the end of multinational companies. Once a company starts providing cover to CIA officers, those companies will be blacklisted from many countries around the world. This policy will also raise suspicion of pretty much every US company operating abroad.

William Gibson (yes, that William Gibson) wrote an article about Singapore and the authoritarianism way back in 1993 [1]. He called it "Disneyland with the Death Penalty". WIRED mag ended up getting banned for a while after that article [2]. I guess things got a lot more dystopian since then.

[1] https://www.wired.com/1993/04/gibson-2/

[2] https://www.wired.com/2012/04/opinion-jeyaretnam-disneyland-...

Well, I guess 2019 is going to be the last year of my paid membership. I've been a member for the past 15 years. I'll send my membership dues to Sci-Hub instead.

> Let's all wait for BSD license apologists to insist true freedom is the freedom to blackmail your users.

You assume that the author would have continued working on it if the code was GPLed. If you look at the list of contributors, you'll notice there's only 4 people (besides him) who have contributed any code [1]. That means that had he not continued working on it, the project would have died long ago. GPL doesn't somehow make code write itself. Unless there are incentives for programmers, all projects can perish regardless of what license they use.

In this case, you could also argue that the sole reason why OSXFuse still exists and is being updated is because it's BSD and the author continued releasing it because it was a binary-only release.

[1] https://github.com/osxfuse/osxfuse/graphs/contributors

Problem is that the 2017 version, the last version that's open source, won't run on Catalina (or Mojave or High Sierra for that matter). The amount of fixes and compatibility patches that the author did is quite extensive. Replicating his work would be quite an undertaking and wouldn't be trivial.

This video about 33 Thomas St building was awesome:

>Field of Vision - Project X

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SOJugaGK0eU

>A top-secret handbook takes viewers on an undercover journey to Titanpointe, the site of a hidden partnership. Narrated by Rami Malek and Michelle Williams, and based on classified NSA documents, Project X reveals the inner workings of a windowless skyscraper in downtown Manhattan.

>Directed by Laura Poitras and Henrik Moltke.

>for privacy reasons

Passing just the subnet is not revealing your IP. IP reveal would have much bigger privacy implications.

Cloudflare's conflict of interest is what Archive.is is really protesting. More here: https://webapps.stackexchange.com/questions/135222/why-does-...

>Magic Leap is estimated to have over 1,800 employees and 19 office sites.

For a company that has no consumer product and has no revenue, to have this many employees is quite shocking to me.

You're probably using Cloudflare's DNS resolver.

>with a can of compressed air

If your camera has an IBIS, I'd use a blower/brush instead. A blast of air from a can is way too violent and could damage the IBIS assembly.

I always found it interesting how the US media always characterizes foreign (especially slavic Easter European) business people as 'oligarchs' and uses the term to demean them. Yet they never use the same term for Western business people and politicians who engage in the exact same corrupt practices (and often times on a much greater scale). Fair has an article on this [1].

[1] https://fair.org/home/russia-has-oligarchs-the-us-has-busine...

Where's the DoJ in all of this? Why aren't they filing criminal charges against the NSO?