1080p stream in acceptable bitrate is around 1MB/s.

I think most of the privacy-violating and abuse-facilitating scenarios that we’re all too plausibly imagining could be served by the transmission and storage of even a single photograph per drive.

Why would car manufacturers even consider doing that? What is the purpose?

All of the existing consumer-surveillance tech seems to be focused on 1) Finding ways to make your attention more valuable to advertisers and 2) Selling information on your movements and proclivities to interested governments.

Pictures from inside a car could fit right in with those priorities. They could tell car makers, advertisers, insurers, and governments a lot about who really drives the car the most, that person’s demographics, taste in clothing, driving ability, distractability, fatigue levels, health issues, etc.

I should be clear: I’m absolutely speculating. But I don’t know how anyone might look at the landscape that exists today, with surveillance in our phones, our televisions, our music players, and our cars, and think that such speculation is far-fetched or unrealistic.

Her kids died over a year ago. Police said “the incident is being handled as a homicide” at the time. The kids’ autopsy was scheduled for over a year ago.

They only arrested her last week.

Maybe you’re being facetious, but everyone should know: Dictionary words make really bad passwords. And including real words as part of a password makes the password much weaker.

Biff Tannen vibes on that Dear Leader picture.

Dear Leader’s first term saw a lot of new flagpoles installed in the suburbs. Spindly, short, ultra-cheap poles, placed way too close to the street or sidewalk. With flags so large that they nearly touch the ground. Flag in your face, flag as a confrontation, as a challenge. Those flags are red flags for sure.

Also a bad sign: households who feel that one flag is good, but a dozen miniature flags are better, and both is best of all.

Traininisation

Russia’s war in Ukraine, which has dominated international perceptions of the country since 2022, does not appear to be a decisive factor for many of those making the move.

I’m going to go out on a limb here and guess that those Westerners moving to Russia aren’t terribly reflective, imaginative, or as plugged-in to world events as they might think they are.

An online ecosystem of relocation agencies and influencers promote Russia as a place where family values remain strong and everyday life feels safer … Within weeks of arriving, Leo says they were defrauded of 5 million roubles – about £52,000 ($66,000) – by a contact they trusted, leaving them homeless.

I was explaining to a young person today that totalitarian societies have always portrayed themselves as safe, orderly, and free of crime, supposedly because of the iron grip their law enforcement has on the public. That has never been true, though. Totalitarian societies have always been full of corruption and grift, and have used the image of draconian, ruthless, theatrical, arbitrarily-arrived-at punishments as a cover story to distract the people from that reality.

I used to do this but I got burned once or twice, wound up with cracked eggs that hadn’t leaked enough to stick or hadn’t stuck, for whatever reason.

Chernobyl painted a vivid picture of a time and place, but it was fictionalized, sensationalized, too. Pripyat didn’t really exist under an oppressive green fog, and the Soviet Union of the day wasn’t the Stalinesque nightmare the show suggests.

By all means, enjoy the show, it’s awfully well-done. But I beg you to bear in mind that:

1. It’s not a documentary, because
2. none of those based-on-a-true-story shows are documentaries.

These are some of the lamest insults I’ve ever heard. You can’t even explain to someone how dumb they are, because you’ve already forgotten what they were.

Maybe ChatGPT should take Cheung’s job.

I’m sympathetic, I think media that can be borrowed, lent, sold and otherwise transferred is better. But I’ve given up on video games being that way years ago. I don’t have a “collection” of video games any more than I’d have a collection of used chewing gum.

The other side of that coin, though, is that I never pay more than $20 for a game. Almost everything I buy is even under $10. (I think the Orange Box was the last time I paid anything like a retail price for a game. And that was three games.) The games are ephemeral, they could stop working at any moment for any of a million different reasons, and I’d have no recourse. So I’m not going to pay crazy archival prices.

Even if we gave him the benefit of every doubt, we’d still be left with a situation where

1. He commissioned a $15 million pubic-works project that
2. could be completely ruined in minutes by any nut with a $2 box-cutter

“Put the president on experimental drugs” is completely bonkers. Never would have been contemplated in other administrations in my lifetime. Obviously, the simplest explanation is that the patient is someone else.

But it’s so much fun to speculate: Maybe someone in the king’s court is hoping to fill him up with so many drugs that he collapses.

It’s easy to imagine scenarios where something like this could be useful. Sometimes very, very useful. “Hey Google, I spent the last 20 minutes speaking to a police officer, be sure to keep and transcribe all that.”

But no one’s going to trust it (no one should trust it) because it’s offered by a big tech company. “Of course this new service is designed to be used against us,” we correctly assume.

Nope, you definitely have plausible deniability

I guess the one thing that really gets my goat is when other people read the words that I chose so carefully disingenuously or dishonestly.

Demanding that he change what he has written

I’m not doing this.

He took shortcuts because he wants to spend time sailing his boat instead.

I say: Go sail your boat then.

He would need to spend more time working on rsync to make you happy.

This is called “putting words in my mouth” and it is the reason you’re an asshole.

You’re complaining about the quality.

Show me.

You’re looking in the mouth of a gift horse.

Show me.

Every time something like this happens, there’s a community outcry: “What a shitty thing to do!”

And every time, there’s a chorus of wannabe libertarians that come crawling out of the woodwork shrieking “HE HAS EVERY RIGHT TO SCREW US OVER.” As if that’s a counterpoint to anything at all. As if that’s making a contribution to any conversation.