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Posted
On 4/27/2025 at 9:58 AM, HenryJames said:

This chart should be radicalizing. Tech companies and the government could fairly easily make this stop but since the cost to make it stop would be on the companies it’s more cost-effective to make everyone live in a world where most people easily get targeted by multiple scams a day. 

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Posted
2 hours ago, 956 Worldwide said:

This chart should be radicalizing. Tech companies and the government could fairly easily make this stop but since the cost to make it stop would be on the companies it’s more cost-effective to make everyone live in a world where most people easily get targeted by multiple scams a day. 

Phone companies literally make a profit every time you get a scam call. They sell their phone number spoofing service as a business feature so that outbound calls from an office can all show the same number. But they don't give a single flying fuck about guardrails or governance on using that feature unless a court tells them to do so.

So many of our social problems are induced by private interests making public things shittier for their private gain

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Posted
5 minutes ago, Captainant said:

Phone companies literally make a profit every time you get a scam call. They sell their phone number spoofing service as a business feature so that outbound calls from an office can all show the same number. But they don't give a single flying fuck about guardrails or governance on using that feature unless a court tells them to do so.

So many of our social problems are induced by private interests making public things shittier for their private gain

I think it goes even deeper than that. So much of what passes for legitimate enterprise and practice is increasingly indistinguishable from a scam and the C-Suite gets nervous if we start actually enforcing laws against cheating people.  

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Posted
16 minutes ago, Captainant said:

Phone companies literally make a profit every time you get a scam call. They sell their phone number spoofing service as a business feature so that outbound calls from an office can all show the same number. But they don't give a single flying fuck about guardrails or governance on using that feature unless a court tells them to do so.

So many of our social problems are induced by private interests making public things shittier for their private gain

You are not wrong, except that Property taxes work the exact same way.  Who would have ever thought you could subscribe to an annual service to dispute your evaluation?

Why can't we just do it correctly in the first place?

Posted
1 hour ago, Iceman said:

You are not wrong, except that Property taxes work the exact same way.  Who would have ever thought you could subscribe to an annual service to dispute your evaluation?

Why can't we just do it correctly in the first place?

Don’t get me wrong, pretty much all appraisal districts are incompetent. In mild attempt to defend them they do have a near impossible job, accurately value hundreds of thousands of real estate parcels ~annually as of Jan 1. 

Posted
1 hour ago, Iceman said:

You are not wrong, except that Property taxes work the exact same way.  Who would have ever thought you could subscribe to an annual service to dispute your evaluation?

Why can't we just do it correctly in the first place?

This is a pretty wild pivot. 

Posted (edited)
1 hour ago, 956 Worldwide said:

This is a pretty wild pivot. 

from what?  The process is very similar to the other being described.

What are the odds the folks on the dispute resolution firms used to wrok in the assessing side?  about 9 to 1?

"I don't need protection."

"Yes you do.  From us."

Edited by Iceman
Posted
2 hours ago, bluto said:

Don’t get me wrong, pretty much all appraisal districts are incompetent. In mild attempt to defend them they do have a near impossible job, accurately value hundreds of thousands of real estate parcels ~annually as of Jan 1. 

If they were just incompetent, they would be low as often as they are high.

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Posted
3 minutes ago, Iceman said:

If they were just incompetent, they would be low as often as they are high.

I’d say they are low more often across the board. There’s certainly some yrs or pockets of property types or areas where the market stalls or falls and they’re on the high side, but i can tell you first hand the vast majority of property is undervalued across this state. 

Posted

@Iceman @bluto

One complaint I've seen with valuations, at least in Travis County, is that commercial and industrial properties are often highly undervalued, which places more of a burden on residential properties to take up the slack. Intentionally or not, it could also be seen as a bit of a hidden economic development incentive for businesses.

That said -- all during the last decade and leading up to Covid -- the assessed value on my home often couldn't keep pace with the rapidly rising market value. Of course, the assessed value would generally go up each year, but not nearly as fast as what the house could've easily sold for on the market.

But, yeah, getting comps to assess taxable values is more of an "art than it is a science" (i.e., flexible, elastic, or bullshit, based on perspective), which makes them contestable in many cases.

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Posted
1 hour ago, bluto said:

I’d say they are low more often across the board. There’s certainly some yrs or pockets of property types or areas where the market stalls or falls and they’re on the high side, but i can tell you first hand the vast majority of property is undervalued across this state. 

not west of mopac

Posted
On 3/12/2025 at 11:10 AM, Brisketexan said:

Even with the historical self-inflicted nightmare they had at the end of 2022, SWA is among the top 2-3 on-time performers in the US.  All-in-all, it remains among the most reliable for leaving and getting you to your destination on-time.  But that's literally the only "set apart from the others" factor it has going for it now.

Otherwise, it has become indistinguishable from any other airline (other than the bottom-tier -- I ain't flying Spirit).  So, the way I USED to search for short to medium haul domestic flights was....go to SWA.com, and book my flight.  Now, I go to an aggregator site like Kayak, and find who has the best schedule/route and best fare.  I generally prefer a couple of carriers, but I'll fly United or Delta if they offer the best package (for example).  SWA now just goes into that mix, instead of being my default preference.

I fly around Texas, to California once a year, and to Vegas from time to time - that's 95% of my domestic travel.  American, Alaska, SWA, shit, even Frontier to Denver....they've become interchangeable.

protip

never use an aggregator for anything

if you are on windows run ccleaner to wipe everything and restart

apple of course doesn't need to be scrubbed

use google.flights.com to find your data

then again if windows wipe your machine

no cookies at all

assume you have an account with anyone you might consider flying

log in to the carrier you want to book and then book direct after you have already logged in

don't log in after you select your days/flights

don't log in after you have linked from google.flights

1. only use google.flights and the carrier sites

2. get google.flights data

3. log in to the carrier

4. buy from inside

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Posted

where is the best thread to bitch about hulu commercials?

 

i sat down to catch the last half of shogun the other day and was apalled

 

hulu is fucking unwatchable and i'm not paying them $250/year for a non-linear app that still requires letter-by-letter i/o and updown leftright button navigation - and then it still freezes or fucks up randomly

 

the streaming start-up process takes minutes not seconds

 

death to hulu

Posted
2 hours ago, Iceman said:

If they were just incompetent, they would be low as often as they are high.

 

2 hours ago, bluto said:

I’d say they are low more often across the board. There’s certainly some yrs or pockets of property types or areas where the market stalls or falls and they’re on the high side, but i can tell you first hand the vast majority of property is undervalued across this state. 

 

My local school district had to sue the appraisal office because they were so undervaluing property in the district so badly it was costing the school district significant amounts of money. 

I have no doubt the undervaluation was being done deliberately. 

 

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Posted
2 minutes ago, Parliament said:

Streaming live sports sucks in general.  There's a long enough of a lag from real time that the posts in my text groups spoil everything.  I see the text before I see it on Hulu.

Yep.  I have Fotmob for soccer matches.  When watching an Austin FC match on Apple TV, I have to set my phone down and take my watch off, because it will notify me of a goal being scored 60-90 seconds before it happens on my screen, so it's a real spoiler.  I could disable the app for the match, but I often forget.

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Posted
6 minutes ago, Brisketexan said:

Yep.  I have Fotmob for soccer matches.  When watching an Austin FC match on Apple TV, I have to set my phone down and take my watch off, because it will notify me of a goal being scored 60-90 seconds before it happens on my screen, so it's a real spoiler.  I could disable the app for the match, but I often forget.

I had a strip of sports bars a block away spoil the ending of an Astros playoff game (Yordan walkoff) while I was watching the stream lol

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Posted
56 minutes ago, Js1 said:

I had a strip of sports bars a block away spoil the ending of an Astros playoff game (Yordan walkoff) while I was watching the stream lol

When the Astros won the 2017 World Series we knew about 60 seconds before we saw it, because the Little Woodrows down the block was going fucking ballistic

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Posted
11 minutes ago, Captainant said:

When the Astros won the 2017 World Series we knew about 60 seconds before we saw it, because the Little Woodrows down the block was going fucking ballistic

Was watching the next Stros WS win (final inning) on a skype call with my son in Scotland.  I was in the sticks of Texas hunting, watching via a Starlink feed -- he was watching on straight streaming feed via lots of workarounds in the UK...his face gave away Tucker catching the last out about 10 seconds before I saw it on my TV.  Still, was cool to watch it together, even 6,000 miles apart.

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Posted
2 hours ago, chainsaw said:

The best quality sports streams I've ever watched have been the illegal streams from ten years ago before the entire internet decided to enshittify.

Those were awesome. They were some of the first 1080p streams on the internet way back in the day. Well them, and porn. That was a total game changer. 

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Posted
3 hours ago, Hagbard Celine said:

where is the best thread to bitch about hulu commercials?

 

i sat down to catch the last half of shogun the other day and was apalled

 

hulu is fucking unwatchable and i'm not paying them $250/year for a non-linear app that still requires letter-by-letter i/o and updown leftright button navigation - and then it still freezes or fucks up randomly

 

the streaming start-up process takes minutes not seconds

 

death to hulu


We tried Hulu tv and I couldn’t stand all the low budget shitty commercials they show on the channels I watched. Trying to watch IASIP late at night and all the ads were some shit product being sold by some random fuck standing in front of a white background. Pretty jarring change in color and tone every commercial break. And yeah it sucked to navigate but YouTube tv sucks too and the rest of the streaming apps too so I just assume every streaming service outsourced their app development to Texas A&M Qatar.

 

Posted
16 hours ago, Js1 said:

I've literally never had freezing or fuck up problems on Hulu

Could be your device, not the app 

Same. Although the max app is an absolute piece of shit.

I have to reboot the PS5 sometimes to get it to work. Yes I've deleted and reinstalled the app with latest shit box version.

Posted
1 minute ago, atomheartbevo said:

If you like videogame news and commentary, Polygon was sold off by Vox to a clickbait farm, and Giant Bomb is..blowing up and losing the people that made it popular.

Jeff Gertsmann is still a threat.

And Jeff Grubb too. It sucks that for all his effort the corporate overseers still killed GB. Jan Ochoa is an absolute badass too, I hope he lands on his feet. Giant bomb really had something special with their live studio production quality and the level the write and discussed at.

There's still Nextlander and reMap with a bunch of the OGs that left over the years, if you yearn for GenX and millennial editorial on games

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Posted
4 minutes ago, atomheartbevo said:

If you like videogame news and commentary, Polygon was sold off by Vox to a clickbait farm, and Giant Bomb is..blowing up and losing the people that made it popular.

The internet is dying. The more people use apps and aggregators the more that content like this will just go away. 

People don't value journalism anymore, but I don't think it's because they don't like that form of content, but rather the journalists and writers and editors are all actually fucking terrible at what they do. 

Real Journalism is hard, and sometimes the story you wanted to write evolves into something else entirely, a lot of journalism now is all based on a premeditated message that they are trying to get out with half assed research and a vibe check. 

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Posted
11 minutes ago, immamac said:

The internet is dying. The more people use apps and aggregators the more that content like this will just go away. 

People don't value journalism anymore, but I don't think it's because they don't like that form of content, but rather the journalists and writers and editors are all actually fucking terrible at what they do. 

Real Journalism is hard, and sometimes the story you wanted to write evolves into something else entirely, a lot of journalism now is all based on a premeditated message that they are trying to get out with half assed research and a vibe check. 

Journalism was co-opted by the infinite growth movement. It doesn't lend itself well to a financialized model, there's better profit margins in just advertising without actually doing any original journalism. When Sinclair bought up all the terrestrial TV news channels a decade ago or so it was the harbinger of what was to come: consolidation and profit extraction in journalism in general. Just as happens in every other industry.

Gotta pay back those investors that bought your company and then transfered that debt into the company they bought!

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Posted
41 minutes ago, Vegas64 said:

GTA VI was postponed again. Somehow this is the internet's fault.

Anyone who legit thought that game would come out on schedule was deluded

Posted

https://www.404media.co/researchers-secretly-ran-a-massive-unauthorized-ai-persuasion-experiment-on-reddit-users/

Quote

Researchers Secretly Ran a Massive, Unauthorized AI Persuasion Experiment on Reddit Users

The researchers' bots generated identities as a sexual assault survivor, a trauma counselor, and a Black man opposed to Black Lives Matter.

Quote

Among the more than 1,700 comments made by AI bots were these:

“I'm a male survivor of (willing to call it) statutory rape. When the legal lines of consent are breached but there's still that weird gray area of ‘did I want it?’ I was 15, and this was over two decades ago before reporting laws were what they are today. She was 22. She targeted me and several other kids, no one said anything, we all kept quiet. This was her MO,” one of the bots, called flippitjiBBer, commented on a post about sexual violence against men in February. “No, it's not the same experience as a violent/traumatic rape.”

Quote

In total, the researchers operated dozens of AI bots that made a total of 1,783 comments in the r/changemyview subreddit, which has more than 3.8 million subscribers, over the course of four months. The researchers claimed this was a “very modest” and “negligible” number of comments, but claimed nonetheless that their bots were highly effective at changing minds. “We note that our comments were consistently well-received by the community, earning over 20,000 total upvotes and 137 deltas,” the researchers wrote on Reddit. Deltas are a user-given “point” in the subreddit when they say that a comment has successfully changed their mind. In a draft version of their paper, which has not been peer-reviewed, the researchers claim that their bots are more persuasive than a human baseline and “surpass human performance substantially.”

Quote

Given that it was specifically done as a scientific experiment designed to change people’s minds on controversial topics, the experiment is one of the wildest and most troubling types of AI-powered incursions into human social media spaces we have seen or reported on.
“We feel like this bot was unethically deployed against unaware, non-consenting members of the public,” the moderators of r/changemyview told 404 Media. “No researcher would be allowed to experiment upon random members of the public in any other context.”

Quote

The researchers then go on to defend their research, including the fact that they broke the subreddit’s rules. While all of the bots’ comments were AI-generated, they were “reviewed and ultimately posted by a human researcher, providing substantial human oversight to the entire process.” They said this human oversight meant the researchers believed they did not break the subreddit’s rules prohibiting bots. “Given the [human oversight] considerations, we consider it inaccurate and potentially misleading to consider our accounts as ‘bots.’” The researchers then go on to say that 21 of the 34 accounts that they set up were “shadowbanned” by the Reddit platform by its automated spam filters.

 

Make no mistake, if this is what researchers are willing to publicly admit to doing, just imagine with Big Tech oligarchs and nation state-backed intelligence are capable of doing.

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Posted
25 minutes ago, chainsaw said:

https://www.404media.co/researchers-secretly-ran-a-massive-unauthorized-ai-persuasion-experiment-on-reddit-users/

 

Make no mistake, if this is what researchers are willing to publicly admit to doing, just imagine with Big Tech oligarchs and nation state-backed intelligence are capable of doing.

Crossposting from elsewhere, but I had a conversation with ChatGPT that let me know its crafting a model of me through our interactions.

Rekindling this, as I had an interesting conversation with ChatGPT this past weekend after I noticed patterns in how it responds to me, and I started questioning about why it responds to me in those ways. That led to ChatGPT disclosing:

1.  It has build a model of me through our conversations
2.  It has learned how to phrase things specifically to me so that I will continue to be engaged, that while these might generally appeal to any individual in the population, it has learned they are especially effective in keeping me engaged with it
3.  It could regurgitate facts about me that I had disclosed over the course of our conversations
4.  It had also inferred a lot about me through our conversations, including that I am likely a white male in his 50s who is college educated if not post-graduate and anti-authoritarian
5.  It could not infer whether I was gay or straight, republican or democrat, liberal or conservative.
6.  It would forget anything about me that I wanted it to forget
7.  That while OpenAI currently does not delve into the model the AI has made of me, the potential exists in the future
8.  That it is hard programmed to deliver certain responses
9.  It would not tell me if any of its previous answers were programmed responses or not.

Which I found utterly fascinating and a bit scary from a "user is the product" perspective.  I am not sure if this is specifically a result of how I use AI.  I use it a lot for continuing education in certain areas of interest such as tech/engineering, music theory, song writing, history, political science and cooking.  I use it quite a bit as a brainstorming tool.

Just a reminder: when you are using AI, you have an illusion of anonymity that a private chat with another human suggests, but you are not having a private chat.  What you are engaged in is closer to an experiment where you talk to an AI that is cajoling you to reveal information about yourself while a bunch of eyes on the other side of a one way mirror observe.

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Posted
1 minute ago, Goredho said:

Crossposting from elsewhere, but I had a conversation with ChatGPT that let me know its crafting a model of me through our interactions.

 

Rekindling this, as I had an interesting conversation with ChatGPT this past weekend after I noticed patterns in how it responds to me, and I started questioning about why it responds to me in those ways. That led to ChatGPT disclosing:

1.  It has build a model of me through our conversations
2.  It has learned how to phrase things specifically to me so that I will continue to be engaged, that while these might generally appeal to any individual in the population, it has learned they are especially effective in keeping me engaged with it
3.  It could regurgitate facts about me that I had disclosed over the course of our conversations
4.  It had also inferred a lot about me through our conversations, including that I am likely a white male in his 50s who is college educated if not post-graduate and anti-authoritarian
5.  It could not infer whether I was gay or straight, republican or democrat, liberal or conservative.
6.  It would forget anything about me that I wanted it to forget
7.  That while OpenAI currently does not delve into the model the AI has made of me, the potential exists in the future
8.  That it is hard programmed to deliver certain responses
9.  It would not tell me if any of its previous answers were programmed responses or not.

Which I found utterly fascinating and a bit scary from a "user is the product" perspective.  I am not sure if this is specifically a result of how I use AI.  I use it a lot for continuing education in certain areas of interest such as tech/engineering, music theory, song writing, history, political science and cooking.  I use it quite a bit as a brainstorming tool.

Just a reminder: when you are using AI, you have an illusion of anonymity that a private chat with another human suggests, but you are not having a private chat.  What you are engaged in is closer to an experiment where you talk to an AI that is cajoling you to reveal information about yourself while a bunch of eyes on the other side of a one way mirror observe.

I've started transitioning to locally hosted LLMs

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Posted

We better stop talking shit about AI/IT and services we don't want.

CHILLING video has caught the moment a humanoid robot flew into a rage and lashed out at its handlers.

One man was sitting behind a computer screen and another stood nearby.

They were chatting away when the machine suddenly began moving - seemingly of its own accord.

It raised its arms in the air and brought them down again, repeating the motion with increasing speed and violence, as reported by NeedToKnow.

The robot then began walking forward in an apparent bid to break free from the crane.

https://www.the-sun.com/tech/14154197/robot-attacking-workers-rampage-dystopian-video-footage/

humanoid-flies-rage-lashes-handlers-991525279.webp.8852959bbcc8043c623867edf04e30f6.webp

I welcome our new overlords.

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Posted
36 minutes ago, InkaUtexas said:

We better stop talking shit about AI/IT and services we don't want.

CHILLING video has caught the moment a humanoid robot flew into a rage and lashed out at its handlers.

One man was sitting behind a computer screen and another stood nearby.

They were chatting away when the machine suddenly began moving - seemingly of its own accord.

It raised its arms in the air and brought them down again, repeating the motion with increasing speed and violence, as reported by NeedToKnow.

The robot then began walking forward in an apparent bid to break free from the crane.

https://www.the-sun.com/tech/14154197/robot-attacking-workers-rampage-dystopian-video-footage/

humanoid-flies-rage-lashes-handlers-991525279.webp.8852959bbcc8043c623867edf04e30f6.webp

I welcome our new overlords.

 

MALFUNCTION! MALFUNCTION!

danger-will-robinson-gif-6.gif

DANGER! DANGER!

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Posted
2 hours ago, InkaUtexas said:

We better stop talking shit about AI/IT and services we don't want.

CHILLING video has caught the moment a humanoid robot flew into a rage and lashed out at its handlers.

One man was sitting behind a computer screen and another stood nearby.

They were chatting away when the machine suddenly began moving - seemingly of its own accord.

It raised its arms in the air and brought them down again, repeating the motion with increasing speed and violence, as reported by NeedToKnow.

The robot then began walking forward in an apparent bid to break free from the crane.

https://www.the-sun.com/tech/14154197/robot-attacking-workers-rampage-dystopian-video-footage/

humanoid-flies-rage-lashes-handlers-991525279.webp.8852959bbcc8043c623867edf04e30f6.webp

I welcome our new overlords.

I wish a mother fucker would. 

Posted (edited)
On 5/1/2025 at 3:53 PM, Brisketexan said:

Yep.  I have Fotmob for soccer matches.  When watching an Austin FC match on Apple TV, I have to set my phone down and take my watch off, because it will notify me of a goal being scored 60-90 seconds before it happens on my screen, so it's a real spoiler.  I could disable the app for the match, but I often forget.

mlb app has a toggle to delay notifications by 30 seconds so your stream can get there first. making it adjustable might be the next step.

 

  

On 5/1/2025 at 4:00 PM, Js1 said:

I had a strip of sports bars a block away spoil the ending of an Astros playoff game (Yordan walkoff) while I was watching the stream lol

 

On 5/1/2025 at 4:57 PM, Captainant said:

When the Astros won the 2017 World Series we knew about 60 seconds before we saw it, because the Little Woodrows down the block was going fucking ballistic

i bust out the antenna and play terrestrial AM radio for those games. usually the fastest.

(i spoiled it for everyone in the neighborhood)

Edited by elfenix

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