tal

looks at MEGA hat in image

I distinctly remember, back with early Trump, when the MAGA thing was being done, joking about how people could do it in Europe and call it MEGA. I did not expect it to actually happen.

Well…

From an evolutionary standpoint, we’re basically the same collection of mostly-hairless primates that, 20,000 years ago, hadn’t yet figured out agriculture and were roaming the land in small groups of maybe 100 or so at most, living off it as best we could.

From that standpoint, I think that we’ve done pretty well with a brain that evolved to deal with a rather different environment and is having to navigate a terribly-confusing, rather different situation.

I mean, you see any other critters that have been outperforming us on improving their understanding of the world?

The Russian government, at least as it exists in 2025, isn’t going to run around killing every random person who publicly criticizes the government. In terms of political repression, it’s gotten worse, but it’s still not that bad.

Willing to assassinate people on grounds that that most other governments would not? Yes. But that’s not “the government sucks, I’m leaving -> execution” territory.

At least some of this is due to the fact that we have really appallingly-bad authentication methods in a lot of places.

• The guy was called via phone. Phones display Caller ID information. This cannot be trusted; there are ways to spoof it, like via VoIP systems. I suspect that the typical person out there — understandably — does not expect this to be the case.

• The fallback, at least for people who you personally know, has been to see whether you recognize someone’s voice. But we’ve got substantially-improving voice cloning these days, and now that’s getting used. And now we’ve got video cloning to worry about too.

• The guy got a spoofed email. Email was not designed to be trusted. I’m not sure how many people random people out there are aware of that. He probably was — he was complaining that Google didn’t avoid spoofing of internal email addresses, which might be a good idea, but certainly is not something that I would simply expect and rest everything else on. You can use X.509-based authentication (but that’s not normally deployed outside organizations) or PGP (which is not used much). I don’t believe that any of the institutions that communicate with me do so.

• Using something like Google’s SSO stuff to authenticate to everything might be one way to help avoid having people use the same password all over, but has its own problems, as this illustrates.

• Ditto for browser-based keychains. Kind of a target when someone does break into a computer.

• Credentials stored on personal computers — GPG keys, SSH keys, email account passwords used by email clients, etc — are also kind of obvious targets.

• Phone numbers are often used as a fallback way to validate someone’s identity. But there are attacks against that.

• Email accounts are often used as an “ultimate back door” to everything, for password resets. But often, these aren’t all that well-secured.

The fact that there isn’t a single “do this and everything is fine” simple best practice that can be handed out to Average Joe today is kind of disappointing.

There isn’t even any kind of broad agreement on how to do 2FA. Service 1 maybe uses email. Service 2 only uses SMSes. Service 3 can use SMSes or voice. Service 4 requires their Android app to be run on a phone. Service 5 uses RFC 6238 time-based one-time-passwords. Service 6 — e.g. Steam — has their own roll-their-own one-time-password system. Service 7 supports YubiKeys.

We should be better than this.

should have been a red flag for someone who literally works in an authentication role.

Maybe. But the point he was making is that the typical person out there is probably at least as vulnerable to falling prey to a scam like that, and that that’s an issue, and that sounds plausible to me. I mean, we can’t have everyone in society (a) be a security expert or (b) get scammed.

The first comment in response is probably the most important bit:

In addition: trust no inbound communications. If something is in fact urgent, it can be confirmed by reaching out, rather than accepting an inbound call, to a number publicly listed and well known as representative of the company.

I’m not sure if it’s what was used here, but a lot of areas have some kind of generic “nuisance” law, which basically serves as a general purpose “someone is doing something obnoxious that affects us and we want to provide law enforcement with a way to make them stop” tool.

kagis

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuisance

Under the common law, persons in possession of real property (land owners, lease holders etc.) are entitled to the quiet enjoyment of their lands. However this doesn’t include visitors or those who aren’t considered to have an interest in the land. If a neighbour interferes with that quiet enjoyment, either by creating smells, sounds, pollution or any other hazard that extends past the boundaries of the property, the affected party may make a claim in nuisance.

Legally, the term nuisance is traditionally used in three ways:

• to describe an activity or condition that is harmful or annoying to others (e.g., indecent conduct, a rubbish heap or a smoking chimney)
• to describe the harm caused by the before-mentioned activity or condition (e.g., loud noises or objectionable odors)
• to describe a legal liability that arises from the combination of the two.[2] However, the “interference” was not the result of a neighbor stealing land or trespassing on the land. Instead, it arose from activities taking place on another person’s land that affected the enjoyment of that land.[3]

The law of nuisance was created to stop such bothersome activities or conduct when they unreasonably interfered either with the rights of other private landowners (i.e., private nuisance) or with the rights of the general public (i.e., public nuisance)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuisance_in_English_law#Public_nuisance

EDIT: Okay, found a news article that mentions what they’re being investigated for:

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/four-arrested-uk-projecting-photos-trump-epstein-windsor-castle-rcna231804

Thames Valley Police said in a statement Tuesday night that they arrested four adults “on suspicion of malicious communications following a public stunt in Windsor.” The police added they will conduct an investigation into the incident, and that all four people arrested remain in custody.

Probably this law, though it doesn’t sound to me, on the face of it, like it’d qualify:

Malicious Communications Act 1988

It addresses communications “in electronic form”, but I don’t think that in the everyday sense of the word, a projection would count.

EDIT2: I also wouldn’t be terribly surprised if they don’t wind up with this actually going anywhere, and just wanted some sort of legal rationale to make them stop it for the moment.

I recall reading that one application of sentiment analysis in voice recognition — like, determining what a speaker’s mood is — is that if someone gets upset on a call talking to a computer, the system will route them to a human.

Have Trump act like Biden did.

George W. Bush was a Republican president and didn’t get anything like the flak that Trump does. He also didn’t behave like Trump does.

I remember reading someone on some service…maybe it was Steam?..saying that some wildly disproportionate percentage of their users had January 1 as their birthday. As in, people didn’t even want to bother setting the month and day, which defaulted to January 1, just cranked the year back to whatever was required to avoid age-restriction hurdles.

Altman said in a statement accompanying the announcement, adding that the company is “building an age-prediction system to estimate age based on how people use ChatGPT.”

I suppose our theoretical teenager could get an account on, say, Grok and ask it to rephrase all of his prompts as if they were written by a 30-year-old and then send the output of that to ChatGPT. Let the models fight it out based on their profiles of what constitutes an adult.

I’m sure that you could use MetaPost to procedurally generate a frame, then merge them into an animation.

A newer, similar language is Asymptote, and it looks like it has animation support.

This might be too far into the “watching gameplay” side of things or not up your alley, but I remember watching through some Arma II videos by Jester814 on YouTube and enjoying them.

He was one of a number of members who play in a group that tries to stay in-character, act as if it were a real Marines operation.

https://www.506thir.net/

The 506th Infantry Regiment Realism Unit was founded in late 2014 by former members of the 15th MEU(SOC) Realism Unit. Many of our members are veterans and active duty military from around the world. The primary focus of the unit is light infantry combat in Arma Reforger utilizing real to life tactics, techniques, protocol, and communication.

While I do like some military history, I’m not really all that interested in light infantry tactics, so the content itself wasn’t an immediate draw…but I wound up finding it fun to watch through the videos.

One of his ArmA II playlists:

• ArmA 2 - 15th MEU Official

He’s also done ArmA III videos, which are obviously graphically-prettier, but at least in the few I watched — and I haven’t gone back and looked recently — he didn’t have larger numbers of coordinating players acting as larger, hierarchical military units, just a squad or maybe a couple of squads, and I didn’t find it as interesting.

That being said, it’s not something like Red vs Blue, which is content scripted purely for the viewer, not the people involved.

EDIT: Actually, I do remember a couple of large-scale ArmA III operations that he did. Just that there was a lot of smaller-scale stuff mixed in. That being said, could have been that when he was recording them, people hadn’t switched to ArmA III yet — it was still a pretty new game then. I should really go back and see what the situation is now.

Not exactly what you’re asking for (specifically episodic) but relevant, and might be that this tweaks someone’s memory if they’re familiar with such a series and it’s listed here:

Wikipedia: List of machinima works

Red vs Blue (their channel is locked behind some kind of ‘join’ thing… wtf…),

I think that they went commercial at some point, stopped just being a for-fun project on YouTube, and I assume that that’s what happened. Wikipedia doesn’t have anything clearly indicating the transition, though.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_vs._Blue

Although it is distributed serially over the internet, Red vs. Blue is also one of the first commercially released products made using machinima, as opposed to a product merely containing machinima. DVDs (and later Blu-rays) of every completed seasons are sold through Rooster Teeth’s official website, as well as at several retailers in the United States, such as Target and Wal-Mart. Rooster Teeth claimed in 2017 that Red vs. Blue has sold more than 1 million DVDs of individual seasons and box sets.[76]

kagis more

Hmm.

https://old.reddit.com/r/RedvsBlue/comments/1ct84yj/rooster_teeth_shutdown_red_vs_blue_and_where_to/

With the final closure of the Rooster Teeth website, and RTs insistance on removing much of their content from YouTube, many may be wondering where you can watch that once popular web-series: Red vs. Blue.

I intend to keep this post as a repository, cataloguing public archives of RvB and RT content. There are of course still legal ways to acquire the show via YouTube, Amazon, Apple. However with that money no longer supporting RT, I can only recommend them on a convenience basis and instead offer some free alternatives.

The most comprehensive and accessible is: https://archiveofpimps.com/ which contains all of the main series and mini-series in both its original and remastered states. It appears to lack some PSAs but with tonnes of other RT content and a strong interface it’s currently the strongest contender.

Additionally, there is a Google Drive: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1NHnQK7-BgwaJiKJOYA7CkRQemKjTQ8Nd This also contains all of the main series and mini-series in both original and remastered formats. Individual episodes and movie edits, PSAs, Behind the Scenes, trailers and bonus material. For Red vs. Blue specifically this is the place to go.

*Our subreddit wiki also has a detailed watchlist order to help new viewers https://www.reddit.com/r/RedvsBlue/wiki/watch_order/

I urge people to maintain their own archives and if you are hosting your own public archives and wish to advertise them, let me know and I’ll add them to the post.

Thank you Rooster Teeth for 21 years of laughs. Let’s try and preserve their legacy. ❤️💙

That post was dated a year ago, so I assume that there was some change that happened around that point in time.

Honestly, it might not be a terrible idea to give them a bogus date, if you’re concerned about privacy and want to encourage poisoning data that data-miners are using.

If they require some sort of actual validation, like an ID document, then I get you.

I’d guess that the argument on natural gas is one of the following:

It’s replacing coal and coal emits more carbon

The problem is that coal-based power is rapidly declining, at least in the West, and it’s not a huge chunk of the generation mix anymore.

https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/interactive-publications/energy-2025

In 2023, the energy mix in the EU, meaning the range of energy sources available, mainly consisted of 5 different sources:

• crude oil and petroleum products (37.7%)
• natural gas (20.4%)
• renewable energy (19.5%)
• solid fuels (10.6%)
• nuclear (11.8%).

Oil is a pretty expensive way to generate power. I doubt that wood pellet power plants are very common. So if you want to reduce fossil-fuel-based generation past that, you probably do have to look at reducing natural gas.

We can use it in conjunction with intermittent renewables at lower levels to avoid expensive energy storage

Solar and wind aren’t always available when someone wants to use them; they’re intermittent. You have to fill in those gaps somehow. But energy storage is expensive and for pumped hydrostorage, the most-currently-economical form, somewhat geographically-limited. So the idea is that one uses natural gas instead of storing energy from a less-carbon-intensive source to fill in those gaps…but at least you’re using less natural gas than one would if one weren’t using renewable resources and just using natural gas all the time.

Also, one more tidbit:

Austria had sued the European Commission, the bloc’s executive, over the inclusion of gas and nuclear in the EU’s classification system for environmentally sustainable economic activities.

My guess is that Austria’s probably unhappy because Austria uses a ton of hydropower, is very mountainous and has favorable geography for hydropower, so they’d prefer to have hydropower favored.

kagis

https://lowcarbonpower.org/region/Austria

This has hydropower in Austria being 56.2% of Austria’s electricity generation.

Also, while there’s no absolute guarantee, most communities have something vaguely along the lines of prohibiting harassment, as do most instances.

That doesn’t mean that a given user’s idea of harassment and a moderator’s or admin’s idea will always perfectly line up. What you think of as being harassment might be what some other people consider disagreeing. But in general, if someone is clearly following a user around and just commenting with the aim of trying to make them miserable, rather than disagreeing with them on some point or something, you can probably report it to a moderator (or, ultimately, admin) and have them remove their comments and probably issue a ban. Brings a third party’s eyes into the situation.

And if you truly don’t feel that a given community’s moderators are sufficiently-restrictive, you can switch to a community that has more-restrictive rules.

I’m not going to watch the video — I like most context in text rather than video form — but while I will very well believe that:

• It’s possible to optimize LLMs to make smaller models more effective than they are today. It would be very surprising if they were already optimal, given that the field is immature.

• It’s possible to do a series of smaller, specialized models and keep models not-relevant to the current context unloaded from VRAM — I believe that the “splitting into smaller specialized networks” approach is referred to as Mixture of Experts. This should improve memory efficiency for many problems.

…this is countered by the fact that once you free up resources, I also suspect that you can then go use those now-available resources to improve the model by shoveling more data into the model. And while there might be diminishing returns, I very much doubt that there is a hard cap on which one can get better results by throwing more knowledge at a problem.

From the blurb:

Sacrifice them to summon a mortal or kill them and use their corpses to resurrect some zombies!

That being said:

1. I’m not totally sure that realism is necessarily the best complaint when it comes to the capabilities of a god in a god game.

2. It seems like one could issue that complaint about most games. I don’t think any, say, tennis games let you murder your opponent, though that’s clearly at least a possibility in real life.