Uriel238 [all pronouns]

  • 0 Posts
  • 430 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 25th, 2023

help-circle







  • Every search engine I’ve encountered is weird about porn. At first it decides whether or not you’re looking for porn or not looking for porn. If it assumes you are then all the actual porn hits are promoted to the top, where non-porn hits are down-ranked. Vice versa, if it decides you’re not looking for porn.

    Once of the fun search engine games is to find out what sets of ambiguous words trigger the porn flag. Pure tended to be one due to a brand name, even when I was looking for pure minerals at the time. Siri created some conflicts, since there’s both a well known LLM digital assistant, rule 34 for the same and a popular porn star.

    I’d really like a search engine that let porn sites fall in the hit list without deciding first whether I was trying to look for porn, since I sometimes do metasearching.


  • As a fiction writer, I do research on espionage, sabotage and even methods of assassination all the time. But I’m not going to make a salted bomb and nuke Jerusalem even though that is an entirely viable evil plot that may even create a net negative death toll.

    True poisoners, as Agatha Christie notes, use thallium, not arsenic nor cyanide (though ricin is good if you can get it.) Thallium assassins are also self-regulating, like demolitions experts, killing off those insufficiently careful when handling the stuff.

    Modern police are lazy until enough of a stink is made to find a culprit for a specific incident, which is why modern assassins targeting VIPs will find a self-radicalized desperado and point them toward the target. This is the sort of thing FBI is looking for in the investigations of Crooks and Routh. They are likely just blue suicides (or green suicides in this case) but finding a operative pointing them towards Trump would indicate an actual plot. But even if those tracks are found, it would unlikely lead to a specific identity.

    I know about this not just to write fiction, but also to understand how things happen, how our fall into one party autocracy and societal collapse plays out. And yes, it means I do a lot of web searches that might excite an onlooking behavioral research agent. Sadly, they’d find I’m yet another boring false positive, though if the nation does succumb to autocracy, I’d certainly write for the resistance. FBI may not care so much about that.

    We often look up creepy things just so see if we can, and we do that a lot more than because we’re eager to build a bomb or fast-track our inheritance.








  • I’d expect the Waymo video to have captured footage of these guys. It might not be that difficult to track them, and street harassment might well qualify as assault if the DA of San Francisco were interested in prosecuting.

    That said, it’s telling that they freely and openly harassed a strange woman on the street once the threat of being run over was not a factor.

    ETA: One short-term workaround is to tint the windows so that passengers cannot be seen from the outside, but there might be causes to harass occupied Waymo vehicles regardless of the passenger (say, to mug them). I’m curious if this is going to lead to equipping autonomous vehicles with anti-riot ordnance.