adespoton

adespoton , 1 day ago to news in Canada expresses concern about human rights violations in China's Xinjiang region, groups urge U.N. human rights chief to take more action over "documented abuses against Uyghurs and other Muslims"

But wait… didn’t China say the re-education camps were a hoax, that Muslims have the same rights as everyone else in China, and that any issues they’d been having had already been resolved?

adespoton , 1 day ago to technology in Recommendation Algorithms & Advertising - Where do you draw the line?

If recommendations are being provided to me as a service and the algorithm that goes into it is relatively transparent, I have no issues.

If advertising is based on the value an advertiser sees in the product being advertised, I have no problem.

If I’m the product being sold or an ad distribution network is involved, I’ve got a problem.

adespoton , 1 day ago to nostupidquestions in Is there any real physical proof that Jesus christ ever existed?

That’s how epistemological analysis works… if the general structure is the same but everyone pulls different meaning out of an event, something probably happened. If everything lines up exactly, someone probably faked the letters. If there’s totally conflicting stories, the record has been tampered with too much to say anything. If there’s no record, there’s nothing to say one way or another.

adespoton , 1 day ago to nostupidquestions in Is there any real physical proof that Jesus christ ever existed?

You realize that a significant portion of the bible is the collected letters and works that were at the time (that it was assembled) considered credible, right?

There’s a period of around 80 years that’s pretty hard to account for, but unlike the four gospels where there’s little corroborating evidence that tracks back into that 80 year period, the epistolary works are pretty likely to be authentic. They also reference a bunch of other letters that didn’t survive, something that tends to make them more likely authentic than not. And they involve people who were eyewitnesses of a man named Jesus (or Joshua or Yeshua if you prefer) and his younger (step) brothers.

The rest of the statements about him were solidified by 80 years or so after his death, but all the accounts don’t quite line up — which is actually a good argument for them being based on actual events.

So while there may be plenty of room for debate as to how much of the biblical teachings actually originated with a man named Jesus, his actual existence seems more evident than, say, Shakespeare.

adespoton , 2 days ago to worldnews in Official bilingualism in Canada a 'myth,' says new poll

To be fair, I think Mythbusters went off the air because Discovery would no longer pay their explosives bill. The focus on sciency mumbo jumbo was secondary.

adespoton , 2 days ago to worldnews in Official bilingualism in Canada a 'myth,' says new poll

The title and the poll don’t match?

The poll was on whether Canadians think Canada should be officially bilingual. Outside Quebec, the majority of people polled don’t— which is part of the reason why official bilingualism is important.

Is official bilingualism a myth? They’d have to poll for whether those in jobs that have a bilingual requirement are actually bilingual to answer that question.

Personally, I also question the validity of the poll, as the population sample could be really easily skewed depending on how the poll was performed.

adespoton , 3 days ago to technology in Perplexity Plagiarized Our Story About How Perplexity Is a Bullshit Machine

Perplexing.

adespoton , 5 days ago to nostupidquestions in Disable windows updates

Put it behind a PiHole that drops all traffic to Microsoft servers?

adespoton , 8 days ago to nostupidquestions in Is someone safe if they report income from illegal means to the IRS?

Terrorists need funding. Doing so is illegal, and can show up in tax filings.

adespoton , 11 days ago (edited 11 days ago) to worldnews in South Australia introduces ‘world-leading’ bill to ban political donations from elections

The “Truth in political advertising” bit stood out to me.

Just like there’s a consumer protection agency, there should be a voter protection agency.

Get caught materially misleading voters? No more going on the ballot for you. Get caught pretending to be running ads for a candidate when you’re not part of their official campaign team? Go to jail for fraud. Be blocked from doing official political business in the future.

We have protections around other critical government positions; we should have them around political candidates as well.

adespoton , 11 days ago to worldnews in YouTube testing server-side ad injection to counter ad blockers

It should be reasonably trivial to programmatically watch the frames; original programming will have mastered audio levels and set video compression; any shift to an ad should stand out like a sore thumb.

So as long as things aren’t locked down to a DRM’d player, it should be possible to fingerprint the audio and video stream content and drop any inserted frames that don’t match.

If YouTube decides to mangle the original content to fight back… then maybe that’s finally the impetus people will need to switch platforms.

adespoton , 11 days ago to lemmyshitpost in Heiroglyphs

TIL acetaminophen isn’t a worldwide thing :)

The whole Tylenol thing is because they’re the ones who originally patented it. Same for Advil and ibuprofen.

adespoton , 15 days ago to nostupidquestions in Is it safe to use free movies sites on a phone, specifically iOS devices?

No, No, and Yes.

adespoton , 15 days ago to nostupidquestions in Allergy to hypoallergenic pillow?

Could be… also, the real allergen tends to show up in the essential oil, which is highly concentrated.

adespoton , 16 days ago to nostupidquestions in Allergy to hypoallergenic pillow?

I find that odd actually; eucalyptus contains an oil that quite a few people are allergic to. I’d never heard it was a rare allergy, in fact, elements of its oils are often associated with allergies:

researchgate.net/…/273331261_Eucalyptus_oil_Conta…