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Facebook Cares About Fake News
The central message of the film is that Facebook really does care profoundly about false news. The company was slow to realize the pollution building up in News Feed, but now it is committed to cleaning it up.
Not only does Facebook care, it’s got young, dedicated people who are on it. They’re smart, too. John Hegeman, who now runs News Feed, helped build the Vickrey-Clark-Groves auction system for Facebook advertising, which has turned it into one of the most profitable businesses of all time.
See? It's like if the LAPD was shocked, SHOCKED I say, to discover police brutality was real, so they appointed Daryl Gates to oversee human rights. (My other considered analogies went even further into war crimes territory)
Facebook sells ads. Lurid yellow journalism and propaganda from Republicans and their foreign owners buy those ads. Facebook promotes those ads to make more money. Putting the ad guy who made this shit happen in charge of cleaning it up is (more war crimes analogies).
WIRED was always the slick advertising/design corporate sellout end of cyberpunk 'zines, as opposed to the sex-and-drugs-and-wires end of Mondo 2000, or the neurotic basement h4xx0rz of 2600. But even for WIRED, this is an unusual level of corporate fellatio.
More Sword Art Online:IF
The game progresses VERY quickly at first, such that in 5 days of light playing I'm Level 50, geared up nicely, about ready to do the 5F labyrinth and boss, and then I expect 50-60 grind to be harder, since 6F is I think the top currently. The game devs have a lot to work on, since there's 100 floors in Aincrad.
I spent quite a few hours this morning grinding very difficult 5th floor mobs from 40-50 to get the mats for my level 50 armor and level 45 weapons, which didn't help me at all until I hit those points; it would've taken another day to get everything at 50.
Where the gear says "Lv1" or "Lv20", that's the experience level, which is unrelated to the gear level. While that's obscure, it's kind of interesting, lowbie gear with high experience can be nearly as good as high-level gear with no experience, but won't have as nice a set of "random bonuses".
Why does my heavy chestplate look like it has boobs? The other armors are more angular. I'm using costume pants to cover up the ugly jodhpur lower armor, but I don't have a costume shirt yet.
There's a lot more gear and skill depth than you'd ever expect in a mobile game, it's more like a desktop MMORPG. The fighting game is somewhat simpler, since the tiny UI and a few touch buttons limit it, but positioning and teamwork (even with your invulnerable NPC partner) matters, there are boss mechanics, and even normal mobs can be complicated. Poison and paralysis are incredibly dangerous, as seen in the books and anime; I just swapped out a skill with a good defense bonus for a poison reduction because I want to survive.
The only thing that I'm much disappointed in is, they didn't do permadeath even tho that's the premise of Sword Art Online. When you die, you can use up a (somewhat rare; I have 5 left) recovery crystal and instantly revive, or just return to 1F city. You should be deleted and have to make your character from scratch. If they wanted to be nice, they could let you keep your gear, but lose all experience. As it is, it's like any MMO where you can die a few times.
Only 1F is even slightly detailed, with a city of 3 areas, a town of 2 areas, and 3 fields of easy monsters; floors 2-6 are 2 areas each, but I expect 10F will have another city and multiple fields, since that's how the books and anime are structured. But it is very lovely:
Because I've forgotten a lot of side characters who are showing up in the game, I started reading all the light novels from the fan translations. I'd previously just seen the anime and read the first few manga adapted from the novels, but now I am a bona-fide teenager reading trashy pulp novels, oh, wait, that's exactly what I've always been.
Silly Rat. Vegans don't have the energy to jump.
The HTTP Sky Is Falling, Says Chicken Little
Dave's explanation is just absolutely wrong, and he has to know this, he's lying to frighten you away from security; I don't know why. Google's not planning censorship, just a warning being provided that a site taking your personal information is not secure.
Will this break plain HTTP sites?
No. HTTP sites will continue to work; we currently have no plans to block them in Chrome. All that will change is the security indicator(s).
—Chromium: Marking HTTP as Non-Secure
Even if Google Don't Be Evil was Evil, you could still use Free-as-in-Drugs Firefox or whatever, and can just use curl to archive sites, or even by hand:
% telnet example.com 80
GET / HTTP/1.1
Server: example.com
(hit return twice, ctrl-D to end)
But you shouldn't be trusting anything you see or entering anything on an HTTP page.
If you connect to a site over HTTP and you do not fully control the wires from your computer to the server, that site can be spoofed and spied on. If you use public wifi to talk to HTTP, your logins and credit cards WILL be stolen. Guaranteed, some jackass in your Starbucks is wiresharking your connection.
Even if you think you have a secure connection, anyone on the routers between you and the server can read your connection. Routers are not secure, they have been routinely compromised.
The only protection you have against these "Man in the Middle" attacks is TLS (successor to SSL), using HTTPS instead of HTTP, SSH instead of telnet, SFTP instead of FTP, emailing with MIME and SMTP over TLS instead of unsecured ports, iMessage or Signal instead of IRC or Twitter & Facebook "direct messages" (which have bever been hidden from their staff).
In the early days of the ARPAnet and Internet, there was no security and we couldn't do much about it, but to resist warning people about insecure sites now is irresponsible.
Deadpool 2
I don't bother to see Star Wars or anything else opening night in theatres anymore, just Deadpool, Guardians, and Tarantino if he ever releases again.
SPOILERS? Not really but I'm gonna talk about themes which you should've seen coming.
PRO:
- Mr Pool saves the Marvel Universe by undoing all MCU movies from Avengers Colon Civil War and X-Men Colon Apocalypse on. Pity it's not canon, right?
- Domino is cute AND effective.
- X-Force 1.0 "because someone couldn't draw feet!" is hilarious.
- Fight scenes are creative and fun, just like the first.
- Broader but not as iconic musical selections as the first movie.
CON:
- Women in Refrigerators score: 3! If you know a Hollywood writer, kill their girlfriends/spouses/any female relation to motivate them to more creatively deal with female characters.
- Drink every time they say "faaaamily" and you'll be 99% alcohol by volume. I hate all this family shit and I blame the corpse of Paul Walker. I'd kill him again if it'd stop this "find your family" Gen-Whine shit. I also blame the rise of step-sibling/parent porn on Gen-Whine's family fetish (literally).
- Long stretches of unfunny dramatic shit, calling someone's name instead of making an argument (I refer to this as Heathcliff/Catherine syndrome).
- Obvious solution to kid's problem is obvious but no, then you'd be just like bad guy.
★★★½☆, it's not a great movie like the original, but sequels rarely are.
Engineering has determined that your bug report is a duplicate of another issue and will be closed
Filed a Radar (bug report) about Safari on Feb 28. They respond with the stock request for a sysdiagnose report. 10 weeks later, Apple sends the stock response that it's a dupe.
Apparently this mechanical conversation is under NDA, but I'll risk their wrath by saying I ended my bug report with:
Hi, Radar, it's been a long time since we talked, and it wasn't great last time, but I'm giving you another chance. Does anyone at Apple actually use Safari like real people use Safari, with multiple windows full of tabs? Maybe there's nobody left on the Mac/Safari teams, and I'm talking to the ether here.
The entirely automated responses don't disabuse me of this notion. Everyone in Apple may be WestWorld-style robot duplicates by now, for all I know.
Almost every other big company has a public bug-tracker; sometimes under NDA, sometimes "fuck it, we're doing it live!". I don't see how this wall of fear and ignorance Apple uses helps anyone; every Android sweatshop just copies the superficial elements of iPhones; Chrome is an awful, unusable pile of shit good only for playing Flash, but Google already copied and forked the open-source WebKit engine, there's no secrecy to be had!
Sword Art Online: Integral Factor
I hadn't realized this got released already! Why didn't you tell me?
A few hours in, I'm just about to start doing the dungeon floors at Level 10. I'm going for spears, but may have to respec for swords if I don't get more skill cards; I think it's lame to "reroll" a character for better starting loot, you take what you get.
Naturally, I named my NPC partner Black Rose, but she's toting a 2-handed axe since there's no 2-handed swords. Need to customize her appearance if I can.
If you want to send me a friend request, I'm ID 635575026.