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YouTube will use AI to monitor your viewing habits to determine if you're under 18 and require an ID for you to view certain content, yes even if you're in the US.

Now. I have some questions. Like if I watch kids shows from the 90s is that a mark for me being over 30 because it's an old TV show? Or under 30 because it's a kid's show?

Okay question aside.

There's legitimate reasons to have "odd" viewing habits. I for one have chronic fatigue. I've fallen asleep with Youtube's autoplay on and will wake up 3 hours later with the weirdest shit playing (sometimes it's kids stuff).

I'm learning 2 languages. I will watch kids shows in those languages to help me practice and pick up the language. (Muzzy in Gondoland is SO CUTE). But it's really helpful to watch shows that are like "Red orange yellow green! One two three!" To learn the basics like your colors, numbers, days of the week.

Also. Bronies... adults like kids shows. Sometimes they got a really good message like MLP. Sometimes for Nostalgia, I mean Pokémon is still going, and I watch that for nostalgia.

"No, but AI would be smarter than that!"

Is it? Is it really? Bitch if kids want to watch YouTube, that's what YouTube Kids is for. We don't need your 1984 bullshit monitoring our fucking watching habits.

"I don't understand why you're so upset. Just give them your ID." Because I'm a developer. I watch programmers increasingly use AI to fucking program their goddamn software every fucking day. And the thing is AI is really fucking bad at it. It leads to issues like the Tea app leak.

The Tea app was an app where women warned other women in the dating scene about red flag men in the area and they could ask other women if the guy that were dating was a red flag. That app had women upload their Drivers Licenses, and they recently had a leak due to shitty security protocols caused by AI coding causing a legacy database to literally be open to the public, with so security features to keep any old random person from accessing it. All of the data in that database what just... dumped to the open internet. Location data. IDs. All of it.

So, no... I'm not gonna me uploading my ID anywhere BECAUSE I'VE SEEN HOW POORLY SOME OF YOUR ASSHOLES CODE. And by "how poorly you code" I mean you don't fucking code. You just give it to AI and the fucking dumbass system wouldn't know a security feature if it punched it in the face.

Suck my dick. You're not "keeping the kids safe" you're exposing everyone to identity threats.

-fae

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okay, thank you for cooperating. we're gonna need to put you in witness protection. *propositionally truncates you*

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We all have that one mutual that doesn't follow us

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to those who know anything about characteristic classes: i am LOSING my MIND rn

like ok there are about 20 different definitions of chern classes and stiefel-whitney classes. and none of them make sense, they just EMERGE from nothing (yes it is very nice that you can construct cohomology classes from symmetric polynomials in the curvature of a connection but that tells me nothing about what it IS)

well... except for one definition i found recently. turns out, the integral cohomology of BU(n) is just the unital ring generated by the chern classes of the universal bundle; that means you can just define the chern classes over an arbitrary U(n)-bundle to be the pullback of the generators of this cohomology (under the corresponding map f: X -> BU(n)). same thing for BO(n), but for Z_2-valued cohomology and the stiefel-whitney classes instead.

but then, huh? when were y'all going to tell me??? i feel like i stumbled over this by accident, why is this not just what the chern classes are DEFINED to be???????

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fun straightforward way to prove that this is, in fact, mathematically impossible to untwist:

look at the boundary! and notice (by your favorite projection, perhaps) that the boundary contains two linked unknots (and two unlinked), whereas the boundary of the untwisted version contains four unlinked unknots.

note: some comments suggest that shirts are made like this, but apparently the poster called the manufacturer. so. idk.

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i'm going to push back a bit on the doomerism (just for my own sanity) and suggest that it will indeed probably get worse for a while, but I think that there will be—will eventually be—sufficient effort by enough people to get us out of the situation we're headed for.

it's not going to be an easy, glorious revolution; it's going to be a relentless game of cat-and-mouse, a difficult landscape of fits and starts as community-made FOSS replacements are attempted, fail, gain acceptance, are thwarted and shut out by hegemony in the systems they interact with, are resurrected when alternative paths are figured out, etc. And all the while, the dominant forces of tech will continue consolidating, continue making moving away from them more difficult, less convenient, as they entrench themselves in more and more processes.

but corporations fail, too. something changes, they don't adapt; they eat themselves from within; they make a string of poor management choices; they bite off more than they can chew. and at those points...are the people ready to step in?

it's hard to see that happening when so many people are...well...just so fucking stupid. sorry! it's true. loads and loads of people voting for Trump and other far right parties globally, disbelieving climate change, cheering genocide, distrusting vaccination, thinking that illegal immigrants are monsters, and so on, without a care for whether they're correct before they feel they are right. but being stupid is not innate. being stupid is a changeable state, for better or worse. and what if they figure out how to keep enough of us stupid forever?

I don't know. I think if "they" can manage to secure all this power by exploiting people's fear and selfishness, can manage to construct systems which reinforce that power, etc., and they can do it in relatively small numbers, then we likewise shouldn't think it necessary to have a large, mythical number of people pushing things the other way to succeed. maybe a relatively small number of people will be sufficient to make the world better; it doesn't need to be everyone. it just needs to be some of us. some of us who are ready to step in and create those new systems when the opportunity arises, to put sand in the gears until it does, to plan, to keep on creating luck by starting to work on the future now, when there are no clear opportunities. i think this goes beyond tech. i think we should not give up on the future. and i think the number of us who care might be enough to change it.

YouTube on Tuesday announced it’s beginning to roll out age-estimation technology in the U.S. to identify teen users in order to provide a more age-appropriate experience. The company says it will use a variety of signals to determine the users’ possible age, regardless of what the user entered as their birthday when they signed up for an account.

When YouTube identifies a user as a teen, it introduces new protections and experiences, which include disabling personalized advertising, safeguards that limit repetitive viewing of certain types of content, and enabling digital well-being tools such as screen time and bedtime reminders, among others.

97% of this website is about to become a teenager in the eyes of Big YouTube. it was always about control. it was never about anything else. i’m sure there will be ways to appeal that involve non-invasive measures such as giving them a picture of your license and a 3D scan of your body.

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For years, there have been rumors of shady and illegal activity taking place in North Carolina's Fort Bragg, the world's largest military installation. A suspiciously large number of special operations soldiers have died there, but there's never been much of an explanation for what tied them all together.

I've been following journalist Seth Harp for a few years because he's been following this story closely. I'm now looking forward to reading his soon-to-be-released book, "The Fort Bragg Cartel," which offers an attempted explanation: there is a secretive drug and weapons trafficking operation run out of the base by a group of active duty soldiers and military officials. Here's an excerpt he's published in Rolling Stone.

Of all the drug cartels in Mexico, Los Zetas was by far the most feared. They were not just narcos. They were real soldiers, elite ones, trained in the United States. The cartel traced its origins to a joint project between the United States and Mexico to create a Mexican commando unit modeled on the Green Berets, called the Grupo Aeromóvil de Fuerzas Especiales, or Airborne Special Forces Group. The original members of the GAFE, as the unit was known by its initials in Spanish, were schooled in irregular warfare at none other than Fort Bragg, North Carolina, as well as Fort Benning, Georgia, and also received instruction from Israeli trainers. Around the year 2000, the majority of the unit defected from the Mexican state and went to work directly for the Matamoros-based Gulf Cartel, a powerful smuggling mafia that controlled the underside of the Texas border, serving as its armed wing and enforcer corps. Not long after, the rogue commandos again betrayed their employers, struck out on their own, and formed a rival cartel. “Los Zetas” was a reference to the alphanumeric call sign used by the group’s first boss, a Mexican special forces officer named Arturo Guzmán Decena.

The advent of Los Zetas inaugurated the darkest era in all of Mexican history. Trained in marksmanship, rapid deployment, ambushes, surveillance, and psychological operations, Los Zetas used overt military force to consolidate control over most of the Texas border and the Gulf Coast port of Veracruz. Augmented by the state and local police forces that they co-opted, as well as an endless supply of short-lived hit men recruited from the lumpen class of the northern borderlands, Los Zetas wore paramilitary uniforms, drove around in homemade armored vehicles called monstruos, and, to sow terror, filmed themselves committing sickening atrocities. Countless thousands died in their raids, assaults, and sprees of arson. Countless thousands more were abducted and disappeared...

That an Anglo who spoke only broken Spanish and lacked any familial ties to Mexico could simply approach an exceedingly dangerous transnational crime syndicate like Los Zetas and arrange to become one of their distributors in the United States would seem like an implausible plot point in an unrealistic movie, yet that is exactly what [former police officer] Freddie Wayne Huff did, court records show. From 2016 to 2021, he was Los Zetas’ main man in the Carolinas, with an operation extending into Georgia and Virginia. He went on running his appliance business, which was profitable in its own right, and used it as a cover for trafficking cocaine. He rented a warehouse in High Point, a muggy, traffic-ridden suburb of Greensboro and Winston-Salem, bought moving trucks and tractor trailers, and hired employees. At the peak of his criminal career, Huff was moving 50 to 100 kilos of cocaine every seven to 10 days, putting him in the top tier of all traffickers in the United States. “You’re the most badass white boy I ever met,” Huff proudly recalled [Los Zetas drug lord Miguel Ángel] Treviño Morales telling him.

Drawing on his past work as a K9 officer, Huff helped Los Zetas’ border smugglers understand how to pack and conceal shipments to thwart drug-sniffing dogs by wrapping the kilos in shop towels soaked in ammonia, vacuum sealing them in plastic, and then repeating the process, enveloping the bricks in multiple fail-safe layers of a sharply pungent chemical that dogs will do anything to avoid. To defeat X-ray machines, he procured a tractor trailer whose rear differential axle had been hollowed out and lined with lead, a custom job that cost $50,000. “It took 13 bolts to take apart, but it looked much more complicated,” said Huff, who understood how to exploit the ordinary human laziness of customs agents, among other weaknesses in the narcotics-interdiction apparatus. He also advised the cartel’s couriers on how to hide money in cars. “It was like I was teaching a fucking school,” he said...

It’s one thing to traffic drugs internationally and smuggle them across the country undetected. It’s another, often more fraught thing to convert stacks of bulk cocaine into cash. What made [Chief Warrant Officer and drug trafficker] Timothy Dumas such a valuable partner to Huff was that he could liquidate wholesale product at an incredible rate. The secret to his mercantile alacrity was Fort Bragg.

“Tim told me about basically a gang,” said Huff, “a drug-trafficking organization within the military,” made up of “an unspoken group of soldiers that policed themselves.” The bricks of coke that he passed off to Dumas were in turn distributed among the group, a confederation of semi-independent dealers in and around Fayetteville [the city where Fort Bragg is located].

The core members of the underground military mafia, in Dumas’ telling, were Special Forces soldiers who had gone over to the dark side during deployments to Afghanistan. The main players were “guys that are trained killers, that have already killed people,” Huff said. As such, they played by cartel rules. In order to settle debts and resolve disputes, they “would resort to anything,” Huff said, “including murder.”

Besides dealing drugs on base and off, “they were taking grenades,” Huff said, “taking automatic arms,” stealing them from Fort Bragg armories, and reselling them on the black market. Dumas’ role in the gun-trafficking portion of the conspiracy, before he was kicked out of the Army, was to falsify entries in the property book accounting system to keep anyone from noticing the disappearing items. “That was his job,” said Huff. “Maintaining records.”

During the second decade of the Global War on Terrorism, criminal organizations in the United States sourced much of their weaponry from corrupt members of all four branches of the armed forces. The Florencia 13 street gang bought assault rifles from marines stationed at Twentynine Palms, California; a Navy SEAL sold machine guns to the Mongols outlaw motorcycle club; and the Gangster Disciples obtained the pistols used in Chicago shootings from soldiers at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, to name a few cases. American soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines participate significantly in that clandestine “river of iron” that keeps Mexico’s paramilitary cartels, especially Los Zetas and their progeny, better supplied than the Mexican government with military-grade machine guns, grenades, antitank bazookas, helicopter-mounted rotary cannons called miniguns, and plastic explosives, as well as advanced laser optics and night-vision goggles.

In 2018, a pair of Fort Bragg soldiers attempted to sell dozens of stolen assault rifles and blocks of C‑4 to men whom they believed to be representatives of Los Zetas in El Paso. In June 2021, Associated Press published a multipart series, the product of a decade-long investigation, on the Army’s massive unacknowledged losses of weapons, and detailed the case of a single pistol stolen from Fort Bragg that was used in four shootings in New York. The soldier who diverted it to the black market was never identified...

Although four sources independently attested to the existence of Dumas’ “insurance policy,” and described its contents in broadly similar terms, Huff alone claimed to have actually read the text. According to him, the lengthy letter was addressed to a high-ranking general and alleged that “soldiers were involved in bringing opiates from Afghanistan and distributing it on Fort Bragg.” The letter specifically identified the service members who were supposedly transporting commercial quantities of occupied Afghanistan’s marquee national product into the United States. “It names each one of them dudes,” Huff said.

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Using the details from the answer here:

I was able to write a program in Python that outputs colored images to the terminal with just ANSI escape sequences. The two dependencies are Pillow for image parsing and requests for retrieving images hosted online

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inducktion principle which says it is sufficient to define your function on mallards

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Bro why do analysts gotta be like this. Just say they have opposite sign there's no need

Like

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I have become what I swore to destroy (a math nerd)...

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I like that this suggests that he was never quite 0, either. For most of the universe’s existence, he’s been an infant. He may have even existed prior to the birth of our universe, since, unlike Charlie Brown, our universe was actually born, finitely many years ago.

How lucky we are, then, to have witnessed his aging—an exceptionally rare event on a cosmological scale!

How old is Charlie Brown?

Most children age linearly. But not Charlie Brown. In 1950, he was four. In 1957, he was 6, in 1971, 8, and eight years later, in 1979, he had only aged six months.

We can model his age with the following logistic function:

Charlie Brown will never be nine years old.

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There's an old programmer proverb, "Everybody has a testing environment. Some people are lucky enough enough to have a totally separate environment to run production in."

So yeah, you probably do want a separate production and test environment. And the test environment should be realistic, so your tests tell you something about production. But it shouldn't be too realistic. For instance, you don't want to accidentally charge people's credit cards for real during tests.

So yeah, you probably don't want the actual payments to go through in your test site. And real products shouldn't ship when orders are made on the test site. But you still have to be careful about the separation. For instance, you don't want to accidentally leave the test site accessible to the public.

And you really don't want to accidentally paste links to your test environment into a google ad campaign, thereby paying money to trick willing customers into making fake orders with real confirmation emails, that redirect them to paypal and all that jazz but nonetheless fail to charge them or send them orders.

All this is to say, I have recently been doing some uncompensated labor helping a company to debug how exactly they fucked up my wife's birthday present.

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made an irresponsible indie clothing brand purchase but in my defense it's got fun medievalisms going on and also I am allergic to spending money on myself

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a general concept in maths that i love is when the standard rules of a simple version of a structure fail, but the extent to which they fail is measurable with some other structure. e.g. number rings dont necessarily have unique factorisation, but the extent to which it fails is controlled by the ideal class group, a finite abelian group. in R^n, closed forms of nonzero degree are exact (e.g. u may know that having zero curl makes you conservative) but this isnt true for spaces with stranger topology. the degree to which this fails is measured by the de rham cohomology, closed forms mod exact forms !! great stuff