qingcharles

Eh, there's no humans any longer IIRC. It's all down to whether their support AI blesses you or not.

I got banned for trying to move my chats from Android to iOS using the app rather than the special tool I didn't know you were supposed to use. I was lucky I eventually got unlocked.

I want a decent WhatsApp client that doesn't crash constantly and where you can search properly, but it's not worth the risk of getting banned again.

I guess the real solution is to make an almost-identical look-a-like version with a new name, thus avoiding enough of the trademark and copyright issues for the publishers to leave well alone.

Fire me an email (on my profile).

That shit is wild. Especially them mailing boxes unsolicited to people working on power utility projects.

I couldn't figure out why my PC was lagging so bad the last couple of days, then I remembered I left it running in a tab.

Yeah, I'll be on ancestry.com and it says "We found this article about your great-grandfather!" and then you click it and it's newspapers.com and I have to close the tab.

What's the solution, though? All these newspapers won't scan themselves. I'm setting up a non-profit right now to deal with the magazines. The rights issues are both better and worse with magazines. "Better" in that most magazines have gone out of business and the rights are cheap. Worse in that most of them are orphans and the rights are very hard to track down.

Yeah, that's what they did with Kevin Fox who spent 9 months in the jail getting regular off-camera beatings from the guards, because he'd been charged with raping and killing his own daughter, before the prosecution admitted they'd been hiding exculpatory DNA evidence.

https://chicagojustice.org/inside-kevin-foxs-appellate-court...

After winning a $16m verdict against the corrupt cops and prosecutor he moved to Alabama where he was hit in a head-on collision by a car in the wrong lane and perished.

Definitely not newspapers. I would love to, but the scope creep would kill me. I estimate there are 100 million magazine issues published over the last 200 years across the world. That will keep me busy enough :)

Overdrive has a pretty limited amount of back issues for magazines, which is why I generally ignore it, except if I want to quickly read something on my Kindle.

Do you have a plan for all the data once you have it?

I've known many dozens of murderers. Some double murderers. Some triple murderers. Almost all of them are completely ordinary people, and there is nothing that would suspect you of their deeds if you met them on the street or at a party.

I was just thinking of one right now, after reading the article, who had allegedly bludgeoned their wife to death with a barbell while their toddler was with them. Looking them up, though, seven years after their trial their appeal went through, it looks like they are getting a retrial. "Defendant convicted of first-degree murder was entitled to a new trial to determine whether he was insane or guilty but mentally ill at the time of the offense because the prosecutor misstated critical evidence and made several other improper and prejudicial comments that deprived the defendant of a fair trial."

Can't speak for everyone. I'm very gently scraping a lot of libraries for public domain periodical scans. The scans often exist nowhere else, or not in the same quality. Sometimes I find a certain library has perhaps the only known remaining intact copy of a periodical or a specific page.

The problem with the libraries is that all these scans are behind walls, so while the texts are public domain nobody can easily access them. I'm trying to liberate them and re-upload them outside the walls.

Until recently a lot of libraries would allow you to remotely sign up for a library card, but in the last 12 months almost all of them have reverted to having to bring ID in person to the library to validate your account, which puts the brakes on things.

Most people plead guilty to it.

Let's say the sentencing range after trial is 20 to 60 years (typical across the USA).

Let's also say you killed someone with a gun. That might add 25 years onto the base sentence (e.g. Illinois).

The prosecutor comes to you and says "If you go to trial you're facing 45 years minimum from the judge. Might be 50, 60, 70 years. Trial is a lot of work from my office, and a lot of money. We're going to have to bring in forensic experts and go through reams of police reports. I have a lot of other criminals that need my time, so I'll do you a favor. Plead out for 30 years today."

Also, murders can easily take five years to get through to disposition. Look at Cook County, you have Augustin Toscano who still hasn't got to trial after 15 years.

In that time you are sitting in a county jail. County jails generally have, by far, the worst conditions of any institution a prisoner can be held in. I deposed a warden once to ask him why. "Because these are short term facilities. The average stay is under 30 days. In fact, most people stay less than 48 hours." This is because they bond out, so the stats are skewed and don't provide for the edge cases.

Everybody in a county jail wants to get out of a county jail at almost any cost. I remember a case from a few years back when a homeless guy was snatched up coming out of a food bank with a bag of white powder. He was charged with possession of cocaine and he plead guilty and was sentenced to ten years. Just before shipping out to the big house the test results came back: it was powdered milk. The judge asked him why he plead guilty. "Because I couldn't stand another day in the county."

Even now it has a rogue "VPN Providers" link in the footer stuck there to redirect 31 years of link juice to a single affiliate-spam page.

RIP Salon. When it launched in 1995 it was a total breath of fresh air and it launched at a time when the optimism for the future was through the roof.

There's a lot of people with a lot of undiagnosed mental illnesses.

A good percentage of those can be treated with medication, but also a good percentage of those will not continue any medication they are prescribed and their "evil" thoughts will resurface.

Another percent of people are born with conditions such as severe psychopathy that just seem outright evil, even though they just got given a bad hand in life.

Punishment either has zero effect, or the opposite effect on many of these people. Additionally, prison treats people so severely that they come out with a ton of side-effects which make them vastly more anti-social than when they entered.

Some people are irredeemable, but we need better systems for dealing with those. Right now we put them in mental facilities -- and they do need to be kept away from society -- but we need to take into account those people are born with those defects and they are not the product of their own making.

For the ones who are redeemable we need better support. Rehabilitation is unbelievably difficult. There is almost zero money for programs inside prisons that would help anyone on the outside. All the money goes into the punishment bit, because that is easy. The programs that do exist (cleaning, serving food, stamping license plates) are mostly "do busywork, it will make an honest citizen out of you."

Visit any halfway house where parolees are trying to reenter society and see how badly the system is stacked against their success. It's hard enough for a regular Joe to find a job in 2026, never mind someone who has no money, no phone, no bank account, no address and a criminal record.

Criminal justice is the hardest of the hard problems. Maybe ASI can figure it out...

You don't need a jury. Almost every murder conviction in the USA is via a plea deal, and another percent are "bench trials" where you risk the judge's opinion instead of the jury.

The reason so many innocent people end up with life convictions is because so many face the death penalty and take a plea for life to avoid it, even knowing they are innocent.

Convicting the Innocent: Where Criminal Prosecutions Go Wrong by Brandon Garrett (2011)

"In this unsettling in-depth analysis, Brandon Garrett examines what went wrong in the cases of the first 250 wrongfully convicted people to be exonerated by DNA."

https://www.themarshallproject.org/books?share=book-10

Amazing book on how this happens.

I managed to grab a lot of really good[0] emoji domains by bouncing between registrars until you find one that has some poor (good?) coding that lets them slip through.

Then you get stuck a year later when they've upgraded their system and now nothing you do will let you renew it or transfer it...!

[0] "good" is subjective in this context

1994 they were definitely still free[1]. I had so many good ones, but when they switched to the paid model[0] I was a broke college student and let them all go.

[0] IIRC, it was Unilever who caused it -- they mailed in something like 19,000 domain registration applications, one for each of their current trademarks.

[1] OK, I looked it up, September 1995 was when the charging started.

My next words were "You know you sent that as me, right?" :)

I was working on some Windows Media DRM stuff and would get pinged with the really loopy support emails, most of the time not to have me fix them, just more of a heads-up. One said "WHY THE FUCK ARE YOU ON MY PC EVERY MORNING GET THE FUCK OFF MY COMPUTER". I actually started to reply to this chap to see if I could get some sense, but a VP was nearby and saw my screen. They picked up my keyboard, wrote "FUCK OFF" and hit send.

I know one chap who was absolutely not notable when he paid to have his made, but I won't out him because he rode the Hollywood meat grinder all the way to the top.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50295556

I know a certain Hollywood fellow who paid to get his page written, massaged and inserted when he was up-and-coming. I didn't know that was a thing, but apparently some of the more well-regarded editors on Wikipedia take paid gigs. It's right there on their profile pages. I think some even list the pages they were paid to write. They're not technically doing anything wrong, they just know how to write the article and know all the rules for getting it through the editorial process without a hitch.

Here's an example of the tag the user has on their profile page to declare which pages they have been paid to write:

{{paid|employer=First Last|userbox=yes|article=[[First Last]]}}

This. I had one deleted because it needed more editing and I didn't get back to it in time, but you can just edit it and request it be put back, IIRC. It's like one button click.

I believe the new, new version of old Reddit that was demo'd last week is not live just yet.

Interesting. I didn't know that, thank you.

I've never met anyone who worked with him who had a single bad word to say about him. We should all strive to be Patricks.

Not only one of the nicest celebrities I've ever met, but one of the nicest people. His memory for people he met and minor details about them was fantastic. As absolutely as charming in real life as you could imagine.

The main reason to use H.264 in 2026 is legacy device support. Some devices cannot play H.265, but H.264 is playable almost anywhere, as a 20+ year old codec.

I was surprised that Twitter only lets you upload H.264 still, in 2026.

How are you determining that they have the same owner?

This sounds like the same hack that took over btdig.com -- some weird sort of region-based redirect that doesn't affect everyone.

[in fact, I just tried btdig.com and it tried to redirect me to the same site: guillible-thanks.com or whatever]

Wouldn't work on Grok, I saw it happily telling someone to fuck their mom en español today:

https://xxcancel.com/srcontento/status/2115108576536428728

They just demoed an entirely new version of Old Reddit at ModWorld. Same front-end but runs on the New Reddit backend.