wildzzz

There are already HIPAA-compliant AI systems in place. My doctor uses an AI transcription service for her patient interviews.

Waymo has very little market penetration where I live. I've only seen a handful of them driving around. When I went to visit San Francisco last month, I never realized how prevalent they are.

I'd say that only some places have seen city drivers replaced by Waymo to such an extent. As for self-driving semis, the market penetration is near zero. Maybe the tech is good enough but no one is buying it.

I like what Rivian does, an EV skateboard where different bodies can be bolted on top with little design modification. I could see them moving into the crossover market just by shortening and lowering the frame.

I'm sure there's a carve out for academic purposes or when produced under a proper government license.

What's ebay supposed to proactively do here when every product they list is not in their possession? Car parts don't exactly come with certificates of authenticity. At best, it's a box that's either been reused or reprinted by the counterfeiter. They do offer an escrow service for things like sports memorabilia, things that have authentication experts. The most they could really do is ban sellers with repeated reports of selling counterfeits.

Someone presented a passive radar system using an RTLSDR receiving TV broadcasts reflected off of nearby planes at a 2017 GNURadio conference. If amateurs can do it, you can bet the military has already designed, built, tested, deployed, and retired a similar system.

This isn't exactly a new subject, the same concept powered the first radar guided missiles in the 1940s (enemy is illuminated by a ground or airborne radar, missile tracks the reflection).

I'm fairly certain I've already read an article in an IEEE magazine talking about this topic (passive radar via cell towers) a few years ago.

My grandmother had a ladies Rolex cocktail watch where the case was about the size of a dime.

Agents vs informants is a venn diagram. Some informants become active participants under orders of an intelligence officer, they are instructed to use their access for further tasks. Some agents infiltrate groups and inform their handler on group activities and membership. Not all agents inform (they may perform things like sabotage or murder) and not all informants are instructed to do anything (they are paid and never contacted again).

Informants are often compensated in a variety of ways. Maybe you get some cash or maybe you avoid arrest or torture in exchange for giving up someone else. Or maybe becoming an informant was a criteria for government sponsorship in academics or sports or to keep their position in a high profile career. Although some informants just do it for ego or ideological reasons. Is your neighbor annoying you with their late night clandestine meetings? Rat them out! It's unfortunate that these records don't include reasons as to why someone became an informant and what information they actually contributed, if any.

Name one domestically named phone other than a Purism Liberty.

I got stuck in a room once the ball got too big

I don't read nearly as much as I should but I do listen to a lot of audiobooks. My wife scoffs at my collection, a lot of spy or military thrillers like Mitch Rapp and Jack Ryan (The Company is one of my favorites) but also Bobiverse and Expanse are great. Meanwhile she buys lots of books but reads none of them. Audiobooks aren't a perfect substitute for reading but they do stop me from doomscrolling or listening to stupid podcasts.

As for podcasts, Hardcore History and Blowback are my favorites that aren't political junk. I know people have their opinions on pop history media but it's interesting content and entertaining.

I like using the Apricorn keypad flash drives. Like this Lenovo, it's doesn't connect until you unlock it. Password entry is via the built-in keypad so no software is necessary. It's also got a small battery so you can unlock it before you plug it which could prevent someone sniffing the USB 5V rail for any noise. Needing an app makes the Ironkey useless for anything that isn't running a normal desktop OS.

My first ever electronics project was an altoids tin with two 9Vs, a 7805, and a USB port on a piece of protoboard I found in my grandfather's old electronics parts bins. I followed an Instructable to make it. After that, I was hooked. My next project was a dice roller I got from a copy of Make magazine. I ordered most of the parts off digikey. I loved the little projects in Make magazine, I thought it was so cool that you could just build your own electronics.

My tinnitus requires loud fans. Also fan noise is always a good indicator of power.

When I was in highschool, I bought a secondhand Poweredge 1800-something hoping to make it my new home server after the Pentium 4 desktop I had been rocking. It was so fucking loud, I couldn't find a place to keep it that wasn't audible throughout the house. My parents were not happy.

Lol the vast majority of pirates are not paying for anything. Maybe a very wealthy and ethical person is fine paying for something after they've sampled the pirated version but a good chunk of the world never had the money to afford buying it in the first place. There's plenty of ways to sample media nowadays that doesn't involve piracy, there's infinite review channels on YouTube and you can often listen to new albums for the price of watching ads. Sure, I'm sure there are many pirates willing to see a movie in theaters or attend a concert because those are experiences you can't get at home. But for something like a PC game or application, the paying customer and pirate have an identical experience (excluding online multiplayer, that often doesn't work for pirated games).

More data can support changing performance limits. They also may have been more conservative in the past when the rover was new because they wanted to ensure it met its mission requirements. Since the rover has long past its original mission duration (1 year, it's been 5), they can relax a bit more and take bigger risks to achieve bigger goals.

Ingenuity does have an RT ProASIC3 (an older rad hard FPGA) on board so presumably that could be what's handling the voting. Since the Snapdragon was originally used for navigation and operates much, they could be voting at a higher level rather than actual CPU output. When it was still a helicopter, the various sensors and actuators all connect to the FPGA so the voting could be based on commands to the actuators (turn left, reduce power, etc.)

New York's favorite thing to do is vote in the worst people and then complain nonstop.

I like how the Special Agent's affidavit just looks like his wife caught him sports betting and he figured out a way to make it look like he was really investigating a crime.

Printers definitely do wear out. We had a very nice Canon for 10 years and slowly got out of alignment. There's a method to realign the print heads but it got to the point where it was beyond the adjustment limits. You could see the offset between the black and color inks in plain text. An interesting effect but not so much when you're trying to make something look good. Additionally, it would jam more often. The paper dust accumulation in the mechanisms seemed to be what was causing that. Everything went downhill as we were doing a lot of printing for our wedding and it was unfixable by the time we were done. It was a good printer, it deserved its place in Printer Valhalla.

Now we have a Brother that is also very nice but lacks the photo printing quality that the Canon had. We so rarely print photos anyway that it's just easier to send an order to CVS or Walgreens to have them do it.

For some of those devices, they use very bespoke CPUs that are simply not documented publicly.

It's incredible how effective those messages are for some people. Some victims emptied their bank accounts because they were so ashamed of whatever porn they were watching and possibly afraid of legal consequences too. The amount of accounts on X that purportedly sell CSAM though telegram channels seems like an incredible opportunity for scammers beyond just normal fraud. Steal the money from the buyer first and then turn around and blackmail them for more.

That's probably why the number of new questions asked dropped off. Once someone has asked "how to fizzbuzz in python", that's pretty much it. You'll get the textbook answer, the "why are you fizzbuzzing in the first place" answers, and then an answer a couple years later using the new python fizzbuzz built in library. You have a massive compendium of questions and answers and for most people, that's good enough. I don't think that stack overflow was necessarily less popular in visitors pre-LLMs but they certainly killed it off quick.

"hey there goes that guy with no plates again"

It's race in all but name. They actually get around it by specifying everything about a person other than race, like skin color, accent or language skills.

If they need a Viet person for a role in a Vietnam War movie, they'll cast for "native or fluent Vietnamese speakers". Of course it's entirely plausible that a black guy is a fluent Vietnamese speaker but auditions are very subjective so good luck proving that the black guy played the role of NVA Soldier #1 better than the actual Vietnamese guy.

There is a thing called Bona Fide Occupational Qualifications where an employer could discriminate against protected classes because the job description is so specific. Like if a church wanted to hire a new pastor, the job description requires the applicant to be Christian and likely a specific denomination, and any non-christian would be disqualified from the position. BFOQs must be spelled out in the job description to make it absolutely clear that the qualifications are necessary for the job. Also age, sex, and gender can be BFOQs like if the job description is for an acting role of a specific character. Race could potentially apply to something like an acting job too but that's a lot more of a dicey subject, like it would need to be absolutely critical to the production that a character is a specific race.

And for me, I'd rather do my own assembly than pay $1400 for five boards from Circuithub that I can get from JLCPCB for $20 or OSHPark for $50.

I see a lot of police bodycam videos on YouTube of cops stopping drug traffickers for bullshit reasons (5 over speed limit on highway, crossing the line, following too closely) and it's usually a state or county cop that's on a federal task force or they'll have a "civilian ride along" in the car that gets way more involved than any civilian would ever be. They aren't actually an employee of the FBI but they have credentials from the FBI due to their task force job, it gives them access to FBI databases and bulletins while they still maintain their normal police job.

It's really bizarre to watch those videos because they are very routine. They stop the person for marginal lawbreaking, ask them to step out and sit in the front of their cruiser, then the traffic violations turn into warnings, cop makes basic small talk while writing warning and pretty much ignores everything suspect says, cop asks about any contraband in the car and asks to search, suspect usually (stupidly) agrees to search, cops pretty much instantly find the drugs. And if the suspect says no to the search, the K9 unit is already pulling up behind them because they were called before the cop ever turned on their lights and siren.

It's incredibly obvious these are pretextual stops. There is definitely a national program tracking license plates because there's no reasonable explanation for cops getting this lucky on pulling over random people that are driving completely unremarkable.

I'm pretty sure that's how they caught that megachurch pastor smuggling drugs for the cartel, they look for travel patterns for license plates and especially look at rental car registrations. You can't pull over every car but you can definitely look for cars making repeated trips, especially those that are made to known trafficking cities.

I had a friend from highschool that got pretty involved with his mom with drug trafficking. They caught him at some Indian reservation that overlaps upstate NY and Canada. The arrest affidavit states the cops saw a car parked for a couple hours at a casino and then followed the car to the border of the Indian reservation. Then they waited for the car to leave and then pulled him over for crossing a line. Of course they found significant ketamine in the car. The cops already knew who they were looking for because a car parked at a casino for a couple hours is not suspicious and definitely not suspicious enough to follow.

Many militaries are still buying rifles that chamber a cartridge introduced in 1891 (7.62x54mmR). I'd argue a cartridge initially developed for a long bolt action rifle (Mosin-Nagant) that can now be fired out of a variant of a AK-patten select-fire bull-pup (Vepr) fits the analogy.