vaguerant

I like how the author says Google killed the Fitbit Sense so they could sell an inferior product without having to compete … then said author reluctantly buys and recommends that inferior product. I’m way pettier than that. I’d use anything else, even if it sucked, rather than directly reward a company for fucking me over.

It’s a very weird case. ABC Australia had an article on her hospital stay as it was ongoing which raised some questions without definitively answering them.

While Giuffre had posted about going into kidney failure, ABC reported:

The family of Virginia Giuffre, a prominent accuser of Jeffrey Epstein and Prince Andrew, says she remains in a “serious condition while receiving medical care” after a bus crash in Western Australia.

But the Perth hospital where she’s staying denies that characterisation, as police maintain the crash was “minor”.

Giuffre was later discharged from hospital after treatment. Reading between the lines, it seems that she wasn’t going into kidney failure when she posted to Instagram about it.

Whether that means she was incorrectly informed that she was dying, or was confused due to sedation, or was suffering from poor mental health, etc. is not reported.

If she has now committed suicide, that would seem to make it more likely that mental health had a role in the initial post about her physical health.

In addition to any ongoing trauma relating to her abuse at the hands of Jeffrey Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell and Prince Andrew, Giuffre no doubt had additional strain due to her recent separation from her husband and estrangement from their three teenage children.

He plans to run for governor of Florida (against Ron DeSantis). The article also quotes Florida Democratic Party chair Nikki Fried, who gave her reading of the reason he left:

“Jason’s failure to build support within our party for a gubernatorial run has led to this final embarrassing temper tantrum. I’d be lying if I said I’m sad to see him go, but I wish him the best of luck in the political wilderness he’s created for himself,” Fried said. “The Florida Democratic Party is more united without him."

I don’t know these people, no idea whether either of them is trustworthy. Funny burn, though.

Good news but also butterfly meme.

Did somebody say “DOGOON”?

(Violence Fight, Taito, 1989, arcade.)

Both things are technically true: the article is primarily made up of content literally written by the company or people contracted by them for PR purposes, and it is a Good Article (Wikipedia jargon for having passed a review of certain quality standards around writing, coverage and sourcing, but not the higher standard required to be classed as a Featured Article).

How much of a problem this is probably depends on the subject. Does Juniper Networks have any bad practices which the article omits because the people who researched it (i.e. Juniper Networks) didn’t think they needed to go in the article? You’d basically need an independent observer to research anything that potentially should be in the article but isn’t there, but how many people that aren’t getting paid are invested in researching a corporate networking business?

There’s absolutely merit to Wikipedia having articles that are written by people paid to write them by their subjects, because a lot of it would otherwise be missing from Wikipedia entirely. But it’s also good to know that many articles are not necessarily written by impartial authors.

I don’t know about Wisconsin specifically, but some jurisdictions legally classify explosives as WMDs, alongside all the nukes and chemical weapons and stuff that people think of ordinarily.

There’s a bug where edited link posts don’t propagate to Mbin, so for any other Mbinners, the new link is https://apnews.com/article/idaho-police-autism-shooting-teen-d9eef615233c7e95d4fa3ee8a627f7d2

It’s not so much that they object to hearing those opinions, it’s that major news organizations’ opinion sections have a noticeable impact on the opinions of the wider public. Jeff Bezos probably doesn’t care that much about his staff’s opinion of him, but he would sure like it if they would make it their job to push 340 million people toward sharing his opinions.

Mate, wtf is an old carburator?

Our country’s gonna boom.

The big headline is understandably that it crashes into a fake painted wall like a cartoon, but that’s not something that most drivers are likely to encounter on the road. The other two comparisons where lidar succeeded and cameras failed were the fog and rain tests, where the Tesla ran over a mannequin that was concealed from standard optical cameras by extreme weather conditions. Human eyes are obviously susceptible to the same conditions, but if the option is there, why not do better than human eyes?

“We’re getting these babies now–strong, American babies–these babies are at temperatures, big numbers, numbers we haven’t seen for 60 years here. Yesterday I had… a baby came to me, tears in his eyes, he said ‘Sir’–these tough babies call me sir, have you noticed that?–he said ‘Sir, you’re giving us something in this country that we haven’t had in generations.’ People are saying they’ve never seen this before. We brought it back.”

Just for reference, while it has been edited, the comic is by Stan Kelly, The Onion’s resident cartoonist. Kelly is fictional, a satirical stereotype of a right-wing newspaper cartoonist. His signatures are over-labelling everything, gratuitous self-inserts, and framing the wealthy/other advantaged groups as morally upstanding patriots unfairly victimized by their inferiors. The latter is usually accompanied by them crying a single tear.

All that to say, in the context of a Kelly comic, “Honest Tesla Salesman” is definitely meant ironically.

The Leta FAQ confirms this:

Did you make your own search engine from scratch? We did not, we made a front end to the Google and Brave Search APIs.

Our search engine performs the searches on behalf of our users. This means that rather than using Google or Brave Search directly, our Leta server makes the requests.

Searching by proxy in other words.

And specifically, a reference to It’s the Sun Wot Won It, a headline in the Murdoch press, not-good-enough-to-be-toilet-paper tabloid rag The Sun, crowing that they had enough influence in the 1992 general election to secure a win for the Conservatives.

I feel like Google would tell you the same thing if asked.

The article never suggests any physical violence, though. The problems he reported to CBS are a “hateful sticker”, “threats online”, “somebody tried to cut me off” and “three guys pointing the middle finger and […] screaming at me”. Not super cool either, but they’re not physical violence. Those last two might even be legal, depending on the circumstances.

For anybody curious, since the article doesn’t mention what the “hateful sticker” was, from a quick search it was: “NAZIS FUCK OFF”.