Typing of the dead

Still my favorite example of gamification: take a useful task and make it so fun that people will gladly devote hours and hours of their time to it.

If you you blow the guts out and faces off Russian soldiers by more traditional means they are just as dead

I (and all the people and organizations that have worked throughout the last century to get incendiary weapons banned as anti-personnel weapons) generally feel that the method of killing matters, and that some methods are excessively cruel or represent excessive risk of long term suffering.

The existing protocol on incendiary weapons recognizes the difference, by requiring signatory nations to go out of their way to avoid using incendiary weapons in places where civilian harm might occur. Even in contexts where a barrage of artillery near civilians might not violate the law, airborne flame throwers are forbidden. Because incendiary weapons are different, and a line is drawn there, knowing that there actually is a difference between negligently killing civilians with shrapnel versus negligently killing civilians with burning.

There are degrees of morality and ethics, even in war, and incendiary weapons intentionally targeting personnel crosses a line that I would draw.

I imagine it’s just a form they fill out with a few fields: city, number of shooters, number of dead, number of wounded. The rest of it stays the same each time.

The moral high ground is absolutely critical in war. War is politics by other means, and being able to build consensus, marshal resources, recruit personnel, persuade allies to help, persuade adversaries to surrender or lay down their arms, persuade the allies of your adversaries not to get involved, and keep the peace after a war is over, all depend on one’s public image. There are ways to wage war without it, but most militaries that blatantly disregard morals find it difficult to actually win.

In this case? The entire military strategy of Ukraine in this war is highly dependent on preserving the moral high ground.

The United States and the UK successfully blocked attempts to outlaw all use of incendiary weapons, and all use of incendiary weapons against personnel, and all use of incendiary weapons against forests and plant cover.

This is an area where it’s perfectly reasonable to disagree with how the US watered down this convention, to push for stricter rules on this, and to condemn the use of thermite as an anti-personnel weapon and the use of incendiary weapons on plants that are being used for cover and concealment of military objectives.

So pointing out that this might technically be legal isn’t enough for me to personally be OK with this. I think it’s morally reprehensible, and I’d prefer for Ukraine to keep the moral high ground in this war.

Wait is there a way to invent awful things and then patent troll so that nobody can actually bring them to market?

Twitter has accounts that Brazil says violates Brazilian law.

Brazil took steps to shut down those accounts in Brazil.

Twitter refused to cooperate, going as far as to fire all of its Brazilian staff, so that it can’t be reached by the Brazilian courts.

The Brazilian courts ordered all of Twitter be blocked until they comply with local law that they designate a corporate representative who can be served by court processes.

Brazilian ISPs complied with the court order to block Twitter.

Starlink did not comply, and Brazilian courts froze SpaceX’s Brazilian assets, including bank accounts, and started making moves towards de-licensing Starlink, including its 23 ground stations located in Brazil.

The issue escalated to the full Brazilian Supreme Court, who ruled that the assets should remain frozen until Starlink starts complying with court orders.

Now Starlink says it will comply with the court order.

There’s that one game that censored “Nasser” to “N***er” which made it much worse.

This is exactly backwards. People in cities consume fewer resources per capital than people in rural areas, who can’t take advantage of the same economies of scale when it comes to transportation infrastructure, energy infrastructure, public utilities, physical supply chains, and all sorts of services in modern life, from seeing a doctor to repairing a broken window to borrowing a library book to getting a babysitter.

It’s rural areas that destroy more land, consume more water, generate more pollution, and emit more greenhouse gases, on a per capita basis, than dense areas.

The a few accusations that make this worse, and probably illegal if proven:

• This software doesn’t just use public data. It uses the private data of multiple landlords who submit their private/proprietary data to be used by all the competitors.
• The software, and the company’s contracts, prevent the landlords from actually deviating from the formula, through a combination of a hostile interface and contractual requirements.
• The software encourages landlords to do non-pricing activity, like taking units off the market, to feed into the algorithm for everyone else.

What a weird question to ask, NYT

It’s an article about the stats of vaccination rates, and a lot of structural explanations for why those rates have dropped (mostly loss of funding for covering the uninsured or paying for getting the vaccines to nursing homes or the disabled). It’s an important discussion.

During World War II, the telegraph interception guys would figure out which enemy units were where, even without having broken the codes, because each telegraph operators each had their own “fist,” or distinct patterns in how they punched in the Morse code, and people listening to the signals day in and day out could learn to distinguish them even when dealing entirely in encrypted text.

In modern times, attribution of hacker groups include other indicators include what time zones certain people seem to be active in, what their targets are (and aren’t), hints about installed language support or keyboard layouts or preferred punctuation or localized representations of numbers. For example, you can tell here on Lemmy when someone uses different types of quotation marks a decent indication of what country that person might be from, even in a totally English language thread.

And that introduces a specific type of supply chain threat: someone who possesses a computer can infect their own computer, sell it or transfer it to the target, and then use the embedded microcode against the target, even if the target completely reformats and reinstalls a new OS from scratch.

That’s not going to affect most people, but for certain types of high value targets they now need to make sure that the hardware they buy hasn’t already been infected in the supply chain.

I still think it’s bullshit that 20-year-old photos now look the same as 20-second-old photos. Young people out there with baby pictures that look like they were taken yesterday.

They literally are already doing that.

Person, Woman, Man, Camera, TV.

Ok, nailed it, gimme the nuclear codes

The first Rambo was definitely about PTSD and how the act of killing fucks up American soldiers.

Where did you learn to write such shitty code?

I learned it from watching you!

Yes, that’s in the picture.

pronounced “Kam”

C’mon we all know the first syllable of “chameleon” is pronounced “cum”