Feudalism

Year One

Your lord owns two hundred cows. You're required to milk them sun-up to sun-down 2-3 days a week. The lord gets the milk. You're not paid for your labour. You don't own any land of your own, in fact, you don't own anything. You're allowed to live on your lord's property, and not allowed to leave it. You're considered to be "tied to the land". On the days when you're not required to milk the cows you're allowed to work a small plot of land which you can use to feed yourself. Your lord gets a cut of anything you grow for yourself too. If your lord's eldest daughter gets married, you're required to pay your lord a customary fee. Since you don't own anything, you'll likely have to contribute some of your harvest which you were planning to use to feed yourself and your family. If your own daughter marries someone from outside the estate, you're required to pay the lord a fine. If your lord chooses, you can be sold to another lord, and then you'll move to their land and milk their cows instead.

Year Two

See Year One.

Year Two Hundred

See Year One.

At least it adds noise to the system. It's better than the people who are happily training the AI.

The article talks about how Republicans are alienating virtually every woman in the country. So, to appear electable, they're having their wives and kids do the ads, so that out-of-touch women will see a woman in the ad and decide that the candidate is a good guy.

But that, and the whole focus on "traditional family values" and everything boxes them into a certain image, that you're not a real American man if you're not married with kids by the time you're in your 30s or something. So, even if he had a picture with his fiance and dog, it would prove he's not a "traditional family values" republican. So, better to pose with a friend's wife and kids than prove that he's not "normal".

Because it's virtually impossible to buy a non-smart TV these days.

It's not the real name for the crime, obviously. But, it's true that section 1201 of the DMCA makes it illegal to bypass "access controls", which are so loosely defined that just about anything qualifies. As a result, any device with "access controls" gets to define how you're allowed to interact with it, and if you interact with it in the wrong way, even if you own it, you're committing a felony.

What's ironic is that the main purpose of reCAPTCHA v2 is to train ML models. That's why they show you blurry images of things you might see in traffic.

AFAIK the way it works is that of the 9 images, something like 6 are images the system knows are True or False, and another 3 are ones it is being trained on. So, it shows you 9 images and says "tell me which images contain a motorcycle". It uses the 6 it knows to determine whether or not to let you pass, and then uses your choices on the other 3 to train an ML model.

Because of this, it takes me forever to get past reCAPTCHA v2, because I think it's my duty to mistrain it as much as possible.

Do you still, in 2024, not understand how airborne illnesses like COVID spread?

And, even if you do lobby the government full time, what if you're a lobbyist who works on behalf of environmental groups. If the Sierra Club wants to alert politicians about a secret clause snuck into a new bill regulating coal mines, they can hire you to talk to the right people. If a town like Flint, Michigan is having trouble with contamination of their water supply, they can hire you to find the right people to talk to.

Maybe in an ideal world every politician would have enough time and enough staff to fully investigate things on their own. But, in the real world, we're probably always going to need people to talk to the decision makers and advocate on our behalf.

What we really should have is good oversight and tight rules to ensure it's just talking and not doing favors, giving money, etc.

What about a lobbyist who works for say the Electronic Frontier Foundation? Or a nurses union. Or who works for the Sierra Club, or some organization trying to protect the environment?

"Lobbying" is just talking to a politician on behalf of a person or group. If the Hollywood studios all hire lobbyists to talk to representatives about why copyright terms should be longer and DRM should be mandatory, doesn't it make sense that there should be people telling the other side?

I get that too often lobbyists overstep ethical boundaries. Often, they either effectively bribe politicians, or they write up laws allowing the politician to just rubber-stamp them. But, you could shore up and/or enforce laws restricting that kind of thing, while still allowing a representative of a group to meet with a politician and explain their point of view.

Unfortunately, where I live it's very hard to find a well-made apartment or townhouse. I love the idea of an apartment or townhouse where I couldn't hear the neighbours no matter what they were doing, and I couldn't smell their cooking, or be exposed to smoke when they're smoking, and so-on. But, that just isn't realistic. Even if laws were passed to make that a requirement as of today, it would be decades for the existing housing stock to be sold off.

I just wish someone put serious effort into a microphone that worked with a mask so people wearing masks were easier to understand.

There are a lot of people who speak at conferences who still wear masks. I get it, even if you weren't worried about COVID, in the pre-COVID times a lot of people were out for a week after going to a conference / convention because of all the germs being passed around.

But, even with professional speakers and professional microphones, the audio just sounds muddy when the speaker is wearing a mask.

Mmmmmmm baking engineer...

I think we expected him to be good defensively when he first arrived, after all, we were buying an Atletico Madrid player who trained under Simeone. I think what was surprising and really useful was how good he was in possession. He would relieve pressure when Arsenal was being pressed by clever passes and good dribbling. That's the part of his game that seems to have disappeared lately. He turns into trouble instead of turning away from it, and his passes are often intercepted in dangerous areas.

You would also think that Rockstar would want to stop those kinds of cheats just for greedy reasons. If there is some kind of ultra-powerful flying saucer item available, it's probably something that they sell to players for money. At the very least, when someone spawns something like that, check to see if their account purchased it.

So much of the rest of the stuff could be handled using heuristics. The average player gets X headshots an hour, this player is in the 99.9th percentile. Maybe they're just very good, but let's flag that account and see if there's anything else suspicious about their playing. That's the thing about an MMO, you have vast amounts of data about players so there's a lot of stuff you can use to see if something is normal.

I guess if they're not doing it they've done some business calculations and decided that investing $X in techniques to ban cheaters won't result in at least $X more in revenue from happy players who want to play more now that the cheating has been reduced. I wouldn't be surprised if they're counting on making money off the cheaters somehow -- maybe they periodically do get detected and banned and have to buy a new copy of the game. So, the math now says you don't want to be too aggressive about the cheaters because they're a good, reliable source of revenue.

It's amazing to me that Blizzard spent 15 years with the PvP realms in such a broken state. It was only when they introduced "war mode" and the option to turn it off that people finally had some relief.

What finally made them address the problem was that many PvP realms had become 95% one faction and 5% the other faction. That meant that any PvP encounters were very one-sided, and they were also very rare, because the outnumbered faction just avoided any areas where they might be attacked.

Even if you lived for griefing, being on the dominant side in a 95% your-side realm sucked because there weren't enough victims to pick on.

I guess they wanted to make griefers happy because making the game fair for people who enjoyed PvP but didn't want to grief others would have been relatively easy.

I knew Palestinians were suffering in this war, but I didn't realize how bad the Israelis had it! They have brand new electric school buses, but the children aren't going to school so they can't use them! Some evacuated people have to live in a hotel with a well-decorated lobby. The hotel has a swimming pool but they're not allowed to use it. And the death toll! 26 civilians have died and 22 IDF soldiers and reservists. That's almost 50!

From the video:

“Let’s talk about eggs, Because these guys actually eat about 14 eggs every single morning.”

There's just so much that's weird about that. "These guys" are his 2 sons Ewan (6) and Vivek (4). You're saying these kids each eat 7 eggs every morning? That's a lot of eggs. Think about it. 7 fried eggs? Or 7 hard-boiled eggs? If you're scrambling them, you lose track of the individual eggs, but what, he's cracking 14 eggs into a huge bowl, then scrambling them? Do you know how much scrambled eggs that's going to make?

If his boys were teenagers, maybe I could see it, though eating that many eggs every single day would still seem weird. But, at least teenage boys are known to have big appetites.

Even if you include him, his wife and their 2-year-old, roughly 100 eggs a week every week seems odd.

Then there's just the weirdness of saying "about 14". We're talking eggs. Why not "about a dozen"? Slightly more believable, and a more common number to use when talking about eggs. I mean, surely if your kids really loved eggs you'd try to reduce it to a dozen eggs per day just so you're using one full carton every morning. Then again, if you're buying hundreds of eggs per month, maybe they come on a pallet, not by the carton, so "a dozen" doesn't mean much to you.

The egg shortage has enabled record quarterly profits and sales at Cal-Maine Foods (CALM), the largest producer and distributor of eggs in the United States. The company produces brands such as Farmhouse Eggs, Sunups, Sunny Meadow, Egg-Land’s Best and Land O’ Lakes eggs.

https://www.cnn.com/2023/01/13/business/egg-prices-cal-maine-foods/index.html

The problem, once again, is monopolies. Not enough competition means one company can jack up prices.

It's not clear if Harris will continue Biden's policies, but one of the best things Biden's admin has done is to actually go after monopolies for the first time in decades. Under a Trump / Vance presidency, I don't think that's very likely.

This seems like a golden opportunity for Haitians to share their favourite recipes. Haitian food isn't as well known as Jamaican food or Cuban food, but I bet there are some really delicious things. I wonder if there's still any French influence.

I'm sure the total distance covered is going to be relatively small since Arsenal just stayed in a low block for most of the 2nd half. But, still, those explosive movements do use energy. It was nice to see him doing something so well, when recently he has been one of the weak links in the team.