legend

Let me also say this: if you think it's listening all the time and displaying ads right afterwards, it should be really easy for you to test this hypothesis and we'd also have really strong evidence of its existence already as a consequence.

I'm not a security guy either, but when you control the networking software *and* the network, you can customize exactly what is allowed and on what channels. You can even encrypt your data transfer directly to other known systems with only locally stored credentials.

I'm going to go with no *especially* not without it being extremely transparent with hard evidence being produced of its existence. There are plenty of reports of weird observations in evidence of divine miracles too

This doesn't really address my objection to it Life is filled with bizarre seeming coincidences even when there aren't reasons for them to be correlated. It would be more unlikely that you never experienced any and people are really good at noticing when they occur. Even with Mario, there is probably still better correlated information for why that kind of ad is something they would display to you, and every once in awhile a hit will feel oddly timely. Simply put, I just don't think remarking on the times you've observed something weird like that is good evidence when faced against the reasons it isn't likely to be realistic. Of course, there are plenty of other reasons we can declare Facebook a villain

This will probably clear most of it up.

I would not be surprised if they tap into phone functions they shouldn't. I would be surprised if they're actively listening all the time to parse for comments that would result in good advertisements to display to you. The amount of compute and algorithmic challenge to do that for everyone and to select what is relevant for ads is simply enormous, even for Facebook. So much so that it's deeply hard to imagine that any increase in ad revenue pays for it.

Facebook is awful, but I'm pretty skeptical that they're doing something like that, if nothing else but because of the technical challenge of what that entails. There's other reasons you seeing and ad in two places different places for the first time can be correlated.

I've just begun planning out and developing my own smart home devices using Raspberry Pis. This means my devices will be backed by Linux and I'll be able to establish my own security as needed. It also means I can fully customize how I want my smart devices to work. And it will all just be plain fun. If anyone is curious, my first project that's starting to get off the ground is building a "smart clock" which uses a very different way of presenting time, calendar, etc. information. Long-term, I'll be evolving it into my own kind of Amazon Echo, and if I can manage it, I'll give it a personality closer to GLaDOS because that's way more fun. I'll be open sourcing it and sharing it if anyone else cares.

Fake news. Bitcoin can't be traced because of math and is the obvious superior future of currency where bankruptcy is a whole bad password manager away.

Lift off in 5, 4, ...

@SoberChef FWIW, I absolutely second this. I got about half way through the first season and dropped it. People kept telling me to keep with it, so I came back months later and did and boy am I glad I did. Also the last episode was pretty great. Dat ending.

I use the probabilistic notion of a "rare event" in which a rare event is anything with a sufficiently low probability of occurring. This has the implication that for very rare events, you would need a very large sample to make any measurement at all. This might be our one!

Maybe this is one of those rare moments where Mitch's goals randomly align with what's best for the nation.

Looks amazing.

I'm hopeful that they do. Honestly, feels like they could wrap it up next season with where the characters ended up at the end of season 3 and I would be 100% okay with that.

As others said, you might need a new CPU to gain from the 120hz display, with an exception if you play a bunch of older games on your PC. FWIW, my understanding is developers expect many-core systems to be particularly useful to raytracing, but since the technology (for real-time rendering) is so new I'm not sure if that will be born out or not. So if you *had* to order it, maybe get the CPU first? But I will say, 120hz is pretty nice. When I first enabled it on my Lg TV I was blown away that I immediately noticed it just in tracking my mouse cursor movement. I wasn't expecting it to be so obvious so quickly even with something mundane.

So, are people done pearl clutching over the "basket of deplorables" comment? I mean sure, you can say it was a political mistake to say it (it obviously was), but anyone still want to argue it was wrong?

I think CK is about as good as TV fights usually gets with the exception of DD and Punisher as you noted, but I do think it's worth remarking that while I hold that true, those two shows were also on another level from CK. CK I think suffers too much from attacks that very clearly are not meant to land on their opponent; the actors are obviously throwing their punches and kicks. That's probably the hardest thing to get right in a choreography since you can't actually connect with any force but it feels very obvious fairly frequently. Consider for example the final episode when DD and Punisher are not immune from instances of that either, but on the whole they felt like they connected far more often.

Other than mobilizing Covid vaccinations and support there is nothing more immediately important than convicting Trump. Politicians fucking *love* the expression "we'll walk and chew gum at the same time," so fucking do it for once.

"It's an emergency to get him out now" is not really compatible with "Lets dismiss congress and wait to see if Pence will have spine and give Trump of a few more days before we actually take any action ourselves."

Awesome, glad to hear it!