In other news, its been over a decade since Facebook started selling user data to Cambridge Analytica, who used it to massively target and proliferate polarizing political advertising during the 2016, greatly contributing to Trump’s win and the proliferation of QAnon insanity and general political diviseness and radicalization in the US.

I’d call that quite an ‘experiment’, but sure, Facebook is still definitionally doing a massive psy-op campaign, all the time, with new tech too, yep, that’s bad.

=P

If you go back far enough, you’d be coding the ENIAC via punchcards.

… Or maybe today you could write code on paper and have an AI augmented OCR system try to run it?

I mean, the entirety of Steam’s code could maybe be described as an obfuscated version of

while(true){ print(money); }

Exactly.

Trump is what everyone who voted for him aspires to be.

A giant, petulant manbaby that’s ‘allowed’ to bully people.

I am honestly surprised so many other Americans did not realize that so many of their fellow countrymen are vindictive, incompetent little shitheels who get off on bullying people.

sigh

This has also been my experience with non profit c suite.

I used to be co-lead of the data department for a non profit that dealt with PII… including medical data… spent a lot of time making sure we were doing things right.

… And then one day, one of the board members asked me to implement blockchain security on our postgres databases, in an in-person meeting.

I buried my head in my hands, looked uo, and told her “No, the blockchain is insanely insecure, its easily de-obfuscated… and it would make our systems run somewhere between 10,000 and 100,000 times more slowly… if its even possible to implement postgres running through or on … some kind of blockchain.”

She did a fake corpo smile and ‘politely’ ended the meeting.

… I wanted to strangle her to death.

No, that is not how statistics nor language work.

1 in 15 means that out of all American adults, 1 in 15 have been on the scene of at least one mass shooting.

Its a broad overview, and says nothing about your or any particular person’s chance of then knowing someone who’s been at a mass shooting within a tiny sample size of 15 people.

You are inserting more complex kind of analysis about demographic / locale / social network specificity into a statement that does not actually imply that, at all, and you seemingly don’t understand the concept of sample sizes and statistical significance: You need a very large, unbiased sample set to be able to draw broader conclusions… a sample size of 15 people is not sufficient.

The chance that any random person in a large and varied population knows someone with green eyes is not the same calculation or chance a random person in that same large and varied population will have green eyes.

Go look at the paper and you can find Table 3, which actually looks at the likelihoods, broken down by varying demographic factors.

There was no investigation into ‘how many people do you know who’ve witnessed a mass shooting’.

That was not a question that was asked, the study did not investigate that.

It is 1:30 AM and I am too tired to give your a crash course on statistics, maybe try SkillShare or find a textbook or wiki page or community college course or something.

Further:

A few years ago, I was walking along a side walk near a gaggle of 10+ people, late at night, maybe 100 ish feet from them.

Car screeched in, did a drive by with a krink, an AK pistol, shot a bunch of them.

That was a mass shooting.

Congrats, you presumably know 15 or more people, one of them is now me, I was present at a mass shooting, you now know someone present at a mass shooting, as does everyone reading this comment.

No, the title is completely accurate.

7% of living American adults have witnessed a mass shooting at least once in their lifetimes.

Mass shootings are increasingly common, all over the US.

The paper the article is based on defines a mass shooting as 4 or more struck by a bullet, which is roughly a compromise, average of widely used but not perfectly standardized definitions of a mass shooting.

This study was concerned with direct exposure to mass shootings, which were defined as “gun-related crimes where 4 or more people are shot in a public space, such as a school, shopping mall, workplace, or place of worship.” This definition was a compromise between the Congressional Research Service’s definition of a mass public shooting17 and the Gun Violence Archive’s mass shooting definition,2 designed to be inclusive of individuals who were injured and accessible to the public.

Here’s the paper, two links deep from the article.

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2831132

Here’s the study, if you bother to click two links deep from this posted article.

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2831132

They define a mass shooting as 4+ people struck with a bullet.

2% of people report being injured because being trampled in a stampede or struck from a ricochet or bullet fragment counts as an injury.

Stampede and ‘crowd-squeeze’ / ‘crowd-crush’ injuries are quite common in densely crowded areas where a shooting, or fire, or something incites a general panic and rush to flee, and can cause as much or more deaths and injuries in very dense crowds than the actual immediate danger being fleed from.

…

Maybe actually read the methodology before constructing a strawman version of it and then tearing that down because your personal experience doesn’t match broader data.

Your caricatured criticism of how they obtained the data, how they structured the survey, is completely baseless and innacurate.

You say you’re 54, so by the study’s definition, you are Gen X, and are thus about twice as likely to have never been present for a mass shooting as a Millenial, about three times as likely to have never been present at a mass shooting as Gen Z.

See Table 3.

…

You’re doing the stereotypical boomer thing, making up baseless nonsense critiques and assuming everyone involved is comically incompetent to justify your gut reaction.

The reason surveys are done is because you can’t actually have any idea about broad social patterns when your only actual data point is the anecdote of your single life and its experiences.

What’s actually sad is how confident you are in your own baseless, made up strawman criticisms and personal incredulity.

If you think your criticisms have merit, I look forward to your own academically published paper taking down the specific methodological flaws you seem to think exist in a paper written by 3 PhDs in the fields of Sociology and Criminology, who are well trained in statistics and survey methodology.

Untill then, I’ll be laughing at the horseshit level critique you’ve thus far presented.

Good luck finding a used one that isn’t barely on its last legs from being poorly OC’d/cooled, or is just an outright brick that burned out in a crypto mining farm and is now being resold by a shell entity of a shell entity of a shell entity on Amazon or Ebay.

Semi-Related:

Kathy Lueders used to be a high up at NASA.

She personally chose to make Starship HLS variant be the thing that delivers Artemis astronauts to the lunar surface.

https://www.nasa.gov/news-release/as-artemis-moves-forward-nasa-picks-spacex-to-land-next-americans-on-moon/

She also wildly misrepresented SpaceX’s capabilities and rigged the ‘request for proposal’ process heavily in favor of SpaceX a few years later.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=hAEYtaB3R7Y

https://youtube.com/watch?v=NSZlZegPnl4

… And now she works for SpaceX.

https://www.space.com/spacex-hires-nasa-human-spaceflight-chief-kathy-lueders

It’s basically a comedic parody of the kind of regulatory capture process, the incestuous relationship of people jumping between the private and government sides of a public/private partnership… and its all right in the open, actually real.

This kind of shit is the actual deep state, the actual unelected, quid pro quo, ‘subject matter expert’ asshats that cause waste fraud and abuse.

That is fucking amazing.

Please tell me this ‘cybersecurity manager’ was… fired, or drawn and quartered, or something.

I didn’t say these were at feature parity and frankly I don’t care for half those features.

I’m fairly sure you can still set up a TS channel to automute everyone and have that act as a chatroom or chat channel, and I’m also fairly sure you can ping user groups with a pop up or TTS message for announcements, unless TS has radically changed.

You can also set up small html/xml pages per channel if you want to keep some pertinent info posted, and ping people when an update to one of those pages occurs.

There is media viewing in the client itself.

Host an image somewhere, throw it in a channel or server page description.

Yep, there’s no built in, automatic, free image hosting in the chat feed or video livestreaming.

Discord is enshittifying and mtx monetized because it has massive serverside costs from hosting everything, streaming everything, and thus must seek revenue in increasingly shitty ways to pay for it.

They’ll be selling all your data, introducing advertisements, monetizing even more, and moderating/censoring within a year or two of going public on the stock market.

If you want to host a teamspeak server, you pay the basically negligible cost of running your own server, and you make your own rules.

I’d say this is more like pitching a motorcycle to someone who takes the bus to work, but the busses are all getting privatized and will have their fares go up by 500% and they’ll require a blood sample upon every embarkation and debarkation.

Reminder that TeamSpeak still exists.

https://www.teamspeak.com/en/

Windows, Mac, Linux clients for TS6, Win, Mac, Lin, iOS, Android clients for TS3.

https://www.mumble.info/

Mumble also still exists, less official support for mobile clients tho.

You probably mean this tongue-in-cheek, but…

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/openai-valued-157-billion-isnt-140006588.html

https://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/4914320-hurricane-helene-damage-estimates/

The market cap of OpenAI and total estimated damage of Helene…are actually comparble.

If OpenAI went to 0, that would be roughly as much first order financial damage as Helene.

I keep fucking forgetting 404 media is a legit news source and I’m not actually looking at a parody news/onion style community.

Currently, each generation of executives doesn’t come from within the company.

This in particular I find to be just the most astonishingly duplicitous, completely full of shit thing about American Tech Corps.

They are masters of lying to you and telling you that if you work hard, perform well, blah blah, you’ll adcance through the ranks.

All outward oriented ‘how to be a good employee’ type media propaganda says you need to be loyal and stop job hopping.

All these motherfuckers job hop all the fucking time and they know they do!

EDIT: After a decade in the tech industry, I got assaulted and just give off of disability now, basically in poverty.

There is literally no amount of money you could pay me (lets be real, promise to pay me and then not actually pay me that much) to get back into the tech industry.

My QoL is 100,000x improved not having to deal with the constant deceptive office politics, utterly incompetent managers and useless projects.

You’re 100% right about ‘what even is a career path’.

They don’t exist.

Barring super basic stuff like an A* or whatever to be a basic network techy, certs are required or desired certs are constantly changing, as are required skillsets and experience in general.

None of the HR people that write job descriptions have any clue what the words theyre using mean.

They kept inflating ‘required years working with X program or language’, and everyone just started lying on all their resumes.

The hiring process is a theatre of the absurd.

AirBnb has gone so hard into gentrifying areas that it is now literally genocide.

I tried telling people who were buying homes just to AirBnB them 15 years ago that what they were doing could only possibly lead to a massive rise of income disparity, and thus suffering.

The liberals would give some kind of self pitying, dodge response about how sad it is, but that’s the only way they can get ahead.

At least the conservatives were more straightforward: ‘Do you think I care?’

Landlord lives don’t matter.

This has always been the case, but in the US, basically no tech employers actually treat their junior employees as apprentices, they treat them as temporary contractors, and are thus unable to maintain any consistent kind of institutional knowledge, which then reinforces the loop of relying for contractors for everything a small level of hierarchical steps under C Suite.