wat10000 (u/wat10000)

wat10000 commented on Discord will require a face scan or ID for full access next month theverge.com/tech/875309/... · Posted by u/x01

Saline9515 · 12 hours ago

I was talking about the cause of the protests, which are primarily about the deportations, and started before the abuse took place.

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

As I explained before, two movements are at play: a drastic ramping up of the ICE, with some unexperienced agents behaving unprofessionally, and at the same time, billionaires funding NGOs to organize protests, coordinate media and harass the agencies in charge of the deportation.

Things such as blowing a whistle when ICE agents are intervening, doxxing agents or following their cars aren't going to help desescalate the situation or help create a sane culture in those agencies.

wat10000 · 11 hours ago

Which is it, did the protests start before the abuses, or are the abuses just a continuation of the Obama years?

It's not supposed to be up to the public to deescalate. Law enforcement needs to behave professionally even when facing people who don't like them. That is literally their job. If they can't handle it without committing some murders, then the agency should be torn down.

wat10000 commented on Jury told that Meta, Google 'engineered addiction' at landmark US trial techxplore.com/news/2026-... · Posted by u/geox

nmeofthestate · 14 hours ago

My YT Shorts experience: absent-mindedly watch a few, eventually think "damn, these things suck", tap the "show fewer shorts" link to reduce the chance of absent-mindedly clicking on them again soon. The format, with all its annoying little stylistic cliches, is just too irritating to be addictive. (modern Facebook is even more absurdly un-addictive).

wat10000 · 13 hours ago

Facebook has figured out that I really like videos of people removing rust from badly corroded metal. If they don't mess up and show me something else, then it takes some serious conscious effort to stop.

wat10000 commented on Jury told that Meta, Google 'engineered addiction' at landmark US trial techxplore.com/news/2026-... · Posted by u/geox

cm2012 · 14 hours ago

Advertising is just companies saying "This is what you can purchase from me - it's awesome - please consider purchasing it". I have managed hundreds of millions in ad spend for major brands. None of them rely on weird ad magic to persuade people secretly - just showing off different aspects of the product or service.

wat10000 · 13 hours ago

I can't remember ever seeing an ad that was just showing off different aspects of the product or service, outside of things like Craigslist.

wat10000 commented on Discord will require a face scan or ID for full access next month theverge.com/tech/875309/... · Posted by u/x01

account42 · 17 hours ago

It is well known that news and social media is biased towards outrage. Most issues people get upset about are really not that big in reality and quickly forgotten once the public consciousness moves on to the next thing. If there is someone yelling "look out for the truck" all the time no matter what the rational choice is to ignore them.

wat10000 · 14 hours ago

Ignoring them means not letting them influence your opinion either way. You should still allow yourself to reach the same opinion they're espousing by your own means, otherwise you're letting them control your opinions just as much as somebody who slavishly agrees with them.

Ignore the boy crying wolf, but you should still watch for wolves. If you don't want to, fine, but "I don't look for wolves and my sheep are fine" is not a very good argument.

wat10000 commented on Discord will require a face scan or ID for full access next month theverge.com/tech/875309/... · Posted by u/x01

Saline9515 · 15 hours ago

Regarding deportations, it's not "also bad stuff" - it's just an application of the law.

I don't see the problem with pointing out the hypocrisy where very wealthy democrat donors fund activist organizations to disrupt the ICE/Border patrol activity, while looking away when their guy is in power. Protests evolved as well, organized by professionals with the aim to escalate and disrupt ICE's activity, which leads to such tragic events.

In France, we are accustomed to the same kind of escalation, where antifa black blocks commonly throw molotov cocktails, leading to more violence and so on. Thankfully the riot police is well trained to avoid fatal incidents, which is clearly not the case of the current-day ICE (and generally in the police forces in the US).

After all the complaining, the solution is likely either to desescalate both sides, and ask for accountability and more training - bodycams are a good tool, for instance. But I guess that "better training for ICE" isn't a very entertaining slogan ;-)

wat10000 · 14 hours ago

Why are you talking about deportations again? The problem is the associated abuses.

What is the purpose of telling me that the same stuff happened under Obama? Let's say just for a moment that this is true, and that the difference in reactions is driven by some hypocritical activists. What sort of change are you hoping to induce in my mind by saying this? If that really was true, then the correct reaction would be to continue to be appalled by and oppose the current administration's actions, while also being careful to watch out for such things in the future by other administrations. But I'm going to do that anyway, so there isn't even any point to that.

It really looks like you're bringing this up with the intent that I should stop change my mind about what's happening now and think it's all just fine and dandy, which is ridiculous.

wat10000 commented on Parse, Don't Validate (2019) lexi-lambda.github.io/blo... · Posted by u/shirian

seanwilson · 15 hours ago

Maybe I'm missing something and I'm glad this idea resonates, but it feels like sometime after Java got popular and dynamic languages got a lot of mindshare, a large chunk of the collective programming community forgot why strong static type checking was invented and are now having to rediscover this.

In most strong statically typed languages, you wouldn't often pass strings and generic dictionaries around. You'd naturally gravitate towards parsing/transforming raw data into typed data structures that have guaranteed properties instead to avoid writing defensive code everywhere e.g. a Date object that would throw an exception in the constructor if the string given didn't validate as a date (Edit: Changed this from email because email validation is a can of worms as an example). So there, "parse, don't validate" is the norm and not a tip/idea that would need to gain traction.

wat10000 · 15 hours ago

I'm not sure, maybe a little bit. My own journey started with BASIC and then C-like languages in the 80s, dabbling in other languages along the way, doing some Python, and then transitioning to more statically typed modern languages in the past 10 years or so.

C-like languages have this a little bit, in that you'll probably make a struct/class from whatever you're looking at and pass it around rather than a dictionary. But dates are probably just stored as untyped numbers with an implicit meaning, and optionals are a foreign concept (although implicit in pointers).

Now, I know that this stuff has been around for decades, but it wasn't something I'd actually use until relatively recently. I suspect that's true of a lot of other people too. It's not that we forgot why strong static type checking was invented, it's that we never really knew, or just didn't have a language we could work in that had it.

wat10000 commented on Converting a $3.88 analog clock from Walmart into a ESP8266-based Wi-Fi clock github.com/jim11662418/ES... · Posted by u/tokyobreakfast

tanvach · a day ago

Related - we have an atomic Seiko wall clock expecting to have the time automatically adjusted by the WWVB LF atomic clock broadcast. Turns out, the signal is very weak where we now live. Manually setting the time on these atomic clocks is a HUGE pain (beware!).

Turns out it's possible to emulate the atomic clock signal quite easily with a Raspberry Pi, or in my case I put together Arduino code that can emulate atomic clock broadcasts from around the world using an ESP32 module using NTP servers: https://github.com/tanvach/clocksync

The history of these atomic clock broadcast signals and their differences in different countries is quite fascinating.

wat10000 · 17 hours ago

Supposedly you can do it with a stock smartphone or tablet by using the audio hardware to deliberately generate RF noise that works like a WWVB signal. https://github.com/kangtastic/timestation

wat10000 commented on The first sodium-ion battery EV is a winter range monster insideevs.com/news/786509... · Posted by u/andrewjneumann

throwaway894345 · a day ago

lol that was the entire point of the analogy. congratulations, you seem to have accidentally stumbled onto the point, but at least you got there. :)

wat10000 · 18 hours ago

The point of the analogy was that these things are in no way comparable, and EVs only serving a large chunk of the population is in fact fine?

wat10000 commented on Discord will require a face scan or ID for full access next month theverge.com/tech/875309/... · Posted by u/x01

account42 · 18 hours ago

That is not the right question because a) zero mistakes is not a reasonable standard for any country-scale operation and b) legal residency does not preclude there being a valid reason for deportation such as violating the terms of that residency permit.

wat10000 · 18 hours ago

What we’re seeing isn’t mistakes, it’s deliberate abuse. You don’t accidentally tackle somebody and shoot them in the back ten times.

wat10000 commented on Discord will require a face scan or ID for full access next month theverge.com/tech/875309/... · Posted by u/x01

Saline9515 · a day ago

Obama years had also the same kind of abuse and killings by the border patrol. At least 56 recorded deaths of immigrants caused by ICE and custody[0]. Some murders were settled to avoid a trial.

Protests against ICE were much smaller then (billionaires didn't fund NGOs to organise them either), so it was easier for the agency to operate as well, and it was quickly memory-holed.

[0] https://www.detentionwatchnetwork.org/sites/default/files/re...

wat10000 · 18 hours ago

Any preventable death in custody is a tragedy, but there’s a major difference between a death due to inadequate precautions against suicide or due to inadequate medical care, and tacking someone to the ground in the street and shooting them ten times in the back. I really hope you understand that and are just pretending not to in order to score points.

Edit: also, why is it that whenever someone makes an "Obama did bad stuff too" argument, it's always with the intent of "so you shouldn't be upset about it now," rather than "you should have been upset then like I was, and I'm still upset about what's happening now"?