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Joined 5 months ago
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Cake day: April 24th, 2024

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  • Thats … amazing.

    Reminds me of when someone figured out that a huge part of the reason Halo Infinite takes so long to load and go between various menu screens was something like the game redownloading hundreds or thousands of the same exact image, in very high resolutions… basically instead of just pointing multiple instances of the image being used to a single file and directory, for some reason each distinct usage of this same image had its own unique directory…

    Its the kind of oopsie daisy you expect from a first time modder, not some of the most expensive dev teams in the world.

    Also along those lines, kind of: BF2042 has had and still does have a fundamental flaw with the engine level code for fucking mouse movement interpolation.

    They never fixed it. They admitted it exists in their bug logs, but they never managed to fix one of the most fundamental parts of a shooter game, how aiming itself works.


  • Sex trafficking is basically when you break immigration laws and/or forcibly transport people against their will, or in some kind of unescapable debt/slavery type of arrangement, where you yourself know that the people you are illegally moving are going to be forced into sex work, often for little to no pay, often with the sex trafficked people having no practical ability to leave due to withholding their passports or bank accounts from them.

    Its human trafficking + facilitating or operating a business of prostitution or non consensual pornography production.

    Unless you are going to be forcing your gf into prostitution as her pimp following your out of state dinner, then no, what you have described is not sex trafficking.

    If she is unhappy with going to an out of state restaurant but ultimately consents to this, and then consents to sex afterward, this is just an awkward relationship with you being pretty weird and controlling, but its probably not a crime.

    If, however you threaten her or force her or drug her to get to this out of state dinner, and the do the same to coercively have sex with her without her consent, then that’s interstate kidnapping and rape… still not sex trafficking though.



  • Its broken in the sense that it doesn’t work, but it isn’t broken in the sense of oops we accidentally broke something.

    They added BattleEye anti-cheat to online, without bothering to support linux.

    Even though BattleEye can and does support Proton compatibility, and has for years, the developers of the game have to request or opt-in to this functionality.

    But uh, Rockstar didn’t, because they don’t give a shit about linux players.





  • This has utility as a reverse turing test.

    Seriously, get 1000 people, do a double blind experiment where they get a remotely controlled phone, tell them they’re part of a market research project for a new social network.

    Have one group always in real new social media app one group always in fake new social media app, another group that starts in real, switches to fake, visa versa.

    Mandate they all have to post something 3 times a day and view the app for 2 hours a day, run this for a month or two, then explain the actual experiment to them and question them as to which app version they thought they were in at what point time.

    The ‘real’ app has real people and no bots, the ‘fake’ app has just the isolated user talking to bots, and when you switch one group from real to fake, well the ai was training on the real people and now attempts to emulate them in the solipsism mode to keep up the illusion, and for switching from fake to real, just match what were bots to their LLM nearest real person, but keep giving the now real people the already established bot names.

    All of the versions have a variety of seeding from news sources to kick off discussions.

    Something like that, this isn’t a totally exhaustive experiment design, but something like this might show whether or not people can even tell when they are or are not talking to bots.




  • According to a recent FD Signifier video, they have already purged him and a whole ton of other people (cough probably black people cough) from voter rolls in Georgia, he said that hadn’t happened to him in nearly a decade, gotta re register, and of course they don’t tell you if you’ve been purged, that onus lies on you to figure out.

    Its already illegal to hand out water to people in line for polls.

    I would be entirely unsurprised if say I dunno maybe your scenario happens… or maybe they just call in a bunch of bomb threats to polling locations in blue areas, seems to be doing a good job of shutting down Ohio at the moment.


  • Judging from what I’ve seen so far from reports which are early and incomplete, I would eduguess that Mossad basically intercepted a particular brand of these ‘pagers’ known to be used by Hezbollah, put small bombs in them and wired them in such that they could be activated by a broadcast signal, and probably a lot of non Hezbollah people who just happened to buy this model of ‘pager’ in the target areas and timeframe for introduction of these tampered device onto the market also got an exploding hot pocket.



  • A decade ago I was contracting for MSFT as a database admin / data analyst.

    A far older and more experienced contractor told me that he had been part of a team in Saudi Arabia, in 1990, that intercepted computer and electronic equipment bound for Iraq’s air defense command and control systems, flashing the firmware with exploits and backdoors as fast as they could before they were sent to Iraq.

    Supply chain interception has been a thing for a while.

    EDIT: This is a total off topic aside, but hearing about and seeing shit like that at the various tech jobs I’ve worked is why I laugh when people say ‘oh but alexa only activates on keywords’ or ‘no its totally impossible for phones to listen to your convos and then give that data to advertisement systems’.

    Call me paranoid, I don’t care: If you don’t have a hardware disconnect for your microphone and personally have the source code to every bit of software, at every level, then we just have to take the giant tech corpos at their word.



  • So I wasn’t there for 2042. I don’t know what the rationale was, but for me, it’s like the team tried something new.

    The rationale was to make a 128 player battle royale ala PUBG or Fortnite. You know, shameless trend chasing!

    It was supposed to basically be a spin off, non mainline BF game with the potential to be the next big thing while the next mainline game was being produced, but that only works if BF5 has staying power.

    Which it did not.

    And EA want MONEY, BIG MONEY ASAP!

    So then BF2042 got massively reworked in a tiny amount of time to try to make it into a mainline series game by throwing a ton more developers at it than originally planned, ending up as a rushed, buggy, undercooked mess with tons of crap (half baked half reworked game modes) thrown at the wall to see what stuck.

    That is why distinct armies were replaced with a cadre of mercenaries, as well as the entire 2042 timeframe setting in a world where nation states had basically collapsed already.

    It is also why the maps are gigantic and seem like they were designed for a battle royale.

    I’m guessing also their original plan was to have the much hyped dynamic weather systems serve a similar function as the the closing force fields or bubbles of death that battle royale’s have to force players into conflict and games to eventually end, but they couldn’t actually figure out how to make that work.

    Any questions Vince?



  • May I suggest you take up learning a martial art?

    Not sure what they’re like in your area, but when I learned Karate as a kid in the 90s/00s, everyone was treated according to their skill level and discipline, gender/sex is irrelevant (beyond cups for guys and thick sports bras for gals).

    Its not likely to make you bullet proof, but it does stand a decent chance at bettering your physical and mental health, give you more options when a gun is not part of the scenario.

    Also, I would second the notion of going to a range and signing up for basic pistol and rifle familiarization, as well as basic medical training, unless you legitimately are totally terrified of firearms or have some kind of trauma or PTSD related to them.

    Such courses usually provide you with firearms for the course, you don’t own them or take them home, they stay at the range. You just learn the basic principles of operation and safety and shooting technique, under hopefully an extremely serious couple of range masters who will hopefully teach you to treat all guns as if they are loaded until you have personally verified they are not, and to never, not even accidentally, point the barrel of a gun at something you do not intend to destroy.

    You don’t need to go buy a gun first and not trust yourself with it.

    In fact usually a novice shooter is going to want to experiment a bit with different calibers and guns with differing grip styles and weight distributions untill you find something comfortable to shoot.



  • The wiki article seems to list three possible causes for the attack:

    Travis was on medication for Lyme disease and was also given tea laced with Xanax before the attack. (Apparently the Xanax was prescribed by a Vet… though no source is listed for that exact claim, it showed up in the autopsy and may have been administered regularly?)

    The woman who was attacked had a different haircut and car than Travis last saw her with, and this may have confused/enraged Travis.

    A Tickle Me Elmo toy (Travis’ favorite toy) being presented by the victim sent Travis into a rage.

    In conclusion, chimpanzees should never be pets, and you especially should not give them benzos.