AnAmericanPotato
@AnAmericanPotato@programming.dev
- Comment on Is thinly-veiled political whinging really a question just because you used a question mark? 1 day ago:
- Comment on people who drink, how long do your hangovers last? 1 week ago:
About half a day. If it’s really bad, a full day.
But I don’t usually let it get that bad. Hydrating and eating properly before, during, and after a night of drinking will do wonders. Ideally, you should be hydrating all through the evening, not just chugging a liter or two at the end.
- Comment on Does Gmail have more spam now? 3 weeks ago:
I’ve noticed an uptick as well. This isn’t the first time it’s happened over the years, though. Spam is a cat-and-mouse game. Every now and then spammers learn how to break through, and it takes some time for Google to adapt.
I’ve been surprised by the latest wave, because it’s so obviously spam. Mostly phishing attempts full of misspellings and even numbers in place of letters, like F1del1ty instead of Fidelity. Should be pretty easy to filter.
- Comment on Is there anything my girlfriend and I have to consider when traveling to America based on our skin differences? 4 weeks ago:
Racism in America is real. Anyone telling you otherwise is probably just living a charmed life and incapable of accepting that their personal experience is not universal.
I don’t have the time or energy to prove this exhaustively, but here’s a starting point: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Driving_while_black
And here are a few choice quotes.
In 2019, as reported by NBC, the Stanford Open Policing Project found that “police stopped and searched black and Latino drivers on the basis of less evidence than used in stopping white drivers, who are searched less often but are more likely to be found with illegal items.”
Please refer to the citations on that page for more details. Lots of studies in various states showing the same thing. The fact that the mere existence of racial profiling in America is still debated, when it has been consistently proven again and again for decades, is itself a clear indicator of a different kind of racism.
Here’s a little story that stuck in my memory, about how a white woman finally came to realize that racial harassment by police was a real thing. It’s kind of hilarious, in a dark, face-palmy kind of way. franklywrite.com/…/a-white-woman-racism-and-a-poo…
- Comment on Is there anything my girlfriend and I have to consider when traveling to America based on our skin differences? 4 weeks ago:
It’s explicitly forbidden for anyone to discriminate against you based on your race or ethnicity
Ironically, it’s very common to be asked for this information specifically because of anti-discrimination laws, so they can demonstrate statistically fair practices. I always see a box for this on medical forms, new-hire paperwork, etc. I believe the law requires it to be optional and only used for regulatory reports. So that’s probably what OP heard about.
- Comment on If AI spits out stuff it's been trained on 4 weeks ago:
which would indicate that it’s somehow needed to generate AI-generated CSAM
This is not strictly true in general. Generative AI is able to produce output that is not in the training data, by learning a broad range of concepts and applying them in novel ways. I can generate an image of a rollerskating astronaut even if there are no rollerskating astronauts in the training data.
It is true that some training sets include CSAM, at least in the past. Back in 2023, researches found a few thousand such images in the LAION-5B dataset (roughly one per million images). 404 Media has an excellent article with details: www.404media.co/laion-datasets-removed-stanford-c…
On learning of this, LAION took down their database until it could properly cleaned. Source: laion.ai/notes/laion-maintenance/
Those images were collected from the public web. LAION took steps to avoid linking to illicit content (details in the link above), but clearly it’s an imperfect system. God only knows what closed companies (OpenAI, Google, etc.) are doing. With open data sets, at least any interested parties can review, verify, and report this stuff. With closed data sets, who knows?
- Comment on How do I realistically get out of the US? 5 weeks ago:
Sorry, it looks like the real estate option in Portugal is no longer available. :( Now it would take a €500K investment in a local business or €250K in a nonprofit. If you’re that stinkin’ rich, you probably have better options already.
According to globalcitizensolutions.com/real-estate-citizenshi… , Cyprus offers a citizenship path with real estate purchase of €300K. Greece and some other countries do, as well.
- Comment on How do I realistically get out of the US? 5 weeks ago:
Are you able to spend a lot of money on it? Last I checked, there were a few places in the EU that had a citizenship track if you purchased substantial property. So if you’re in position to buy a nice house, that’s an option. I think Portugal is the most approachable cost-wise. But it’s been a while since I looked at this so I’m sure things have changed.
Several countries will allow extended student visas, even if you only speak English. I think Sweden allows this.
Then of course there’s the easy way: marry a Canadian.
- Comment on [deleted] 4 months ago:
30 years ago, maybe. Post-Napster, not relevant. Most online piracy is non-commercial now, and it’s still illegal across most of the world.
- Comment on Are jabronis a necessity for a social media platform to be successful? 7 months ago:
- Comment on Is cloudflare breaking the internet or fixing it? 8 months ago:
If you have your day ruined by Cloudflare, I’m going to either assume you run a bot network, you’re trying to do something incorrectly, or you are part of the dark web.
Or you are unfortunate enough to share a subnet with someone who got on Cloudflare’s bad side, in which case there is basically no recourse.
There are a million legitimate reasons to use a VPN, for example, but Cloudflare doesn’t care.
