Technology

• Sundar Pichai said Google cut manager, director, and VP roles by 10% as part of an efficiency drive.
• Google has sought to boost efficiency by reducing layers and reorganizing teams.
• The company has been facing challenges from OpenAI and other AI rivals.

Between January and October 2024, the service monitored 2.47 million posts. From these, around 12,000 posts and comments were verified as abusive (i.e., regarded as breaking social media platform community guidelines) and referred to social media platforms for removal of the abuse, or, in serious cases, the entire account. Key trends, insights and action include:

• Abuse from 15 accounts was regarded as having breached criminal thresholds and was passed to the relevant national law enforcement for action
• A small number of accounts were the source of prolific abuse. 52 accounts sent 10 or more abusive posts/comments, 26 of which have now been suspended following referral by Threat Matrix with the remaining cases under platform review.
• ‘Angry gamblers’ are a significant motivation of abuse, accounting for 48% of all abuse in the period under review.
• Sexist remarks and sexually explicit or inappropriate content were the most common categories of abuse.
• 5 scams, in which player accounts were cloned, were detected, and reported to local authorities
• Increased volumes of abusive content, which correlate with heightened visibility and interest in tennis, were noted during periods in which Grand Slams were held.

The link is not paywalled and does not require JavaScript.

A lawsuit arguing that Snapchat helped dealers sell children deadly counterfeit drugs could change the internet as we know it.

Like a phoenix rising from the ashes, WOPR has been reborn and is intent on world domination. With a Raspberry Pi upgrade, it might succeed.

blurb:

So apparently buying a high speed camera wasn't enough, because after two videos with it I decided to build my own, but 5 orders of magnitude faster…

In this video I'm filming the motion of light as it flies across my garage at… well, the speed of light! It's fast. So fast that even with my best setup so far, I get 18 frames of video from one end of the room to the other, and those frames have a lot of temporal blur so realistically each "frame" is actually kind of an average of the information that by right should belong to 5-10 frames. It's a mess, but it works.

I'm using the technique from the electricity waves video where I used repeated oscilloscope measurements synced after the fact to produce "videos" of electricity moving down a wire. The only difference is that instead of measuring electricity waves, I'm measuring light emitted by a laser, bouncing off the wall, traveling to my camera, and landing in the window of a photomultiplier tube. UNLIKE the electricity waves video, this setup (thankfully) is automated, and an optics assembly slews across angle space, building up a 3d dataset of video, collecting all the time information from each pixel sequentially.

It's a really fun project that I've wanted to do for a long time, and just recently got pulled together.

What is Grayjay?

Grayjay is a cutting-edge app that serves as a video player and source aggregator. It allows you to stream and organize videos from various sources, providing a unified platform for your entertainment needs.

It's mostly used as a YouTube frontend^. However, it is now launching as a desktop app for Linux, Mac and Windows.

As many folks here now recognize, the story about Backpage was grossly misleading. While the narrative pushed by politicians and the media was that the company was engaged in sex trafficking, the DOJ had actually commended the company for being a strong partner in the fight against sex trafficking. Indeed, the eventual takedown of Backpage days before FOSTA went into effect (which we were told was necessary to shut down Backpage) has been shown to make life more difficult for law enforcement trying to stop sex trafficking.

But I thought politicians told us the truth? /s

Big Mama VPN tied to network which offers access to residential IP addresses.