Behringer WING – A complete overview – YouTube

Looks like Berhinger has done it again. This board looks like it would be even more of a pleasure to run than the Allen & Heath D-Live, has at least as much capability and capacity, and it’s still less than $4,000.

They reference “mid/side” recording a couple of times. I looked that up. Very interesting. I want to find an excuse to try that out.

Even Behringer’s own video, above, has a lot of technical difficulties, and several sections where the audio from the 2 cameras overlapped. I should have watched this Sweetwater video. Everything they do is awesome.

ADL International Leadership Award Presented to Sacha Baron Cohen at Never Is Now 2019 – YouTube

It’s time to regulate Facebook, Twitter, Google, et. al.

I love just about everything about this, but the money quote, for me, is this, at 15:40…

“… when discussing the difficulty of removing content, Zuckerberg asked “where do you draw the line?” Yes, drawing the line can be difficult. But here’s what he’s really saying: removing more of these lies and conspiracies is just too expensive. These are the richest companies in the world, and they have the best engineers in the world. They could fix these problems if they wanted to.”

In the past couple days, I was mocked on Twitter for making the same argument. I’m convinced there is a small army of astroturfers working for Facebook, who run around telling people that we just don’t understand how hard it is (to remove garbage from the platform), and that it simply can’t be done, and we just have to live with the resulting dumpster fire.

I still say: Bologna.

What needs to happen, and SBC alludes to this in his speech, is that all postings should go through a sanity check before going live. As a 40-year, veteran programmer, I stand by my assertion that it would be possible to scan for a lot of stuff that should just be weeded out: pornography, violence, gore, racial slurs, and knowingly-inaccurate conspiracy theories, like anti-vax, flat earth, faked moon landing, and holocaust denial. The filters could catch 90% of that garbage, especially the egregious stuff. The rest could be marked for further review by human beings, which wouldn’t have to deal with the truly horrific stuff any more.

But here’s the rub: it would take another data center’s worth of kit to do this, which would be bad enough on its own for the sake of cost, but putting all posts through a “cool off period” while they were scanned would also be disastrous to “engagement,” which the company cannot abide, because it would be a massive hit to the bottom line.

That’s why it will never happen on its own. It must be regulated. The problem, of course, is regulatory capture, which is trivial, when you’re one of the 10 largest companies in the world. That’s a whole other ball game, which probably has to be fixed first. Sigh.

Send us your naked photos: An inside look at Facebook’s misunderstood efforts to tackle revenge porn

“What you see is that we will shut this type of content down on our platform, but then people will hop to other platforms and spaces,” Davis said. “What would be great across industry is for us to share intelligence to disable someone from moving from one platform to another.”

Source: Send us your naked photos: An inside look at Facebook’s misunderstood efforts to tackle revenge porn

The very last line should be the takeaway. There are times when I feel I’m too cynical, but life has taught me that I’m usually not cynical enough. And, right now, my spider senses are going crazy.

As a lifetime computer programmer and administrator, I don’t think identifying explicit images is a difficult thing. It’s perhaps one of the most-researched topics in machine learning. Telling me that Facebook can’t identify naked bodies before the images have even finished uploading is ridiculous. Telling me that they won’t deploy another data center’s worth of computers to do so, and instead using idle time when the existing servers aren’t doing anything else… that I’d believe.

Reducing “mistakes” like revenge porn would reduce clicks, and spending money on more computers, and reducing ad impressions, are simply not conducive to making next months revenue predictions, and that might impact someone’s bonus. So it just isn’t going to happen. At this point, they’re doing just enough to avoid lawsuits.

It’s almost like they’re letting their lethargy in dealing with this create a power vacuum where they intend to be the central image warehouse for all of these decisions. Like, if they let this problem metastasize to get the press coverage, then, once they get serious about it, they’ll be able to sell their image-checking solution to other web sites, and become even larger, and responsible for more of the internet’s infrastructure.

It’s almost like Facebook won’t stop until they, or one of their subsidiaries, becomes the internet, and there are no other sites of any importance to visit.

Truck Spills Dice, Deals 216,000d6 Bludgeoning Damage to Atlanta Freeway

Trivium Games claims that this spill amounted to the largest dice roll in history, a record previously held by the United Kingdom for Brexit.

Source: Truck Spills Dice, Deals 216,000d6 Bludgeoning Damage to Atlanta Freeway

This article wins the internet for today. Maybe the week. Heck, maybe the year.

Search warrant overrides 1M users’ choice not to share DNA with cops | Ars Technica

Police in Orlando, Florida, obtained a warrant this summer to search DNA site GEDmatch and review data on all of its users—about a million people, The New York Times reports. Privacy advocates are now concerned that police will continue to get broad warrants for DNA sites, including larger peers such as 23andme or Ancestry that have much larger pools of user data.

Source: Search warrant overrides 1M users’ choice not to share DNA with cops | Ars Technica

When are people going to realize that IF a company can collect data, it WILL be sold, and it WILL be accessed by the government. Period. Full stop. No exceptions. I don’t care what the laws say. I don’t care what the companies say. If you give your data — any data — to someone else, it will be monetized and used against you. I don’t say that as anything other than what it is. Everyone must make a value judgement for themselves whether letting someone access their data is worth it. Just understand that once a company gets their hands on it, it will eventually be available to anyone who really wants it.

Addendum: Another story from Ars is really the same story:

The 22 women said they responded to ads for clothed modeling gigs. When they were asked to shoot porn instead, they initially resisted. But they went along with it after the company assured them that their videos would only be sold on DVD to customers outside the United States and would not be posted online. That turned out to be a lie, as their videos wound up on GirlsDoPorn, a website with plenty of American viewers.

Source: Feds hit GirlsDoPorn owners with criminal sex trafficking charges | Ars Technica

Christian comedian John Crist admits to ‘destructive and sinful’ behavior after multiple women come forward

Popular Christian comedian John Crist, who just landed a Netflix special, admitted to “destructive and sinful” behavior and canceled his upcoming tour after multiple accusations of unwanted sexting, harassment and manipulation.

Source: Christian comedian John Crist admits to ‘destructive and sinful’ behavior after multiple women come forward

Hey, it’s like Trump says: “Let him who hasn’t had sex with a porn star, and directed his lawyer to pay her to keep quiet, while his 3rd wife was pregnant with his 5th kid, cast the first stone.”

You can complain about Trump’s “p***y grabbing” and philandering, but I remind everyone that Bill Clinton is the one who got elected, and reelected, despite having a string of well-known, credible rape accusers, while his wife did interviews at all the major news outlets to smear and victim-blame them. We’re living in the Clintons’ America now. Trump is a symptom, not a cause. Now matter how much the media crows about their hatred for Trump, it was their utter lack of ethics in letting the Clintons slide that paved the way for Trump’s presidency.

Meanwhile, the coverup of the Epstein sex slave ring continues unabated, and the media has circled the wagons around protecting the people who took part in it, including — surprise, surprise! — Clinton AND Trump. They have only themselves to blame by lowering the bar even further, and removing any and all credibility from their arsenal the next time they want to take down a conservative over sexual morality issues.

So Goes Mobile, So Goes the Desktop

After many years of decreasing usability, and increasing-user hostility, the same annoyances making the mobile web suck have wormed their way into the desktop experience.

You know what? I’m just closing tabs like this these days. I don’t even care to find the buttons that close the interstitials, because I know I’m going to get more of them, and some gods-forsaken unrelated video is going to start playing, despite all the protections against it that are supposedly built into Safari. Just forget it.

Alright, then. Keep your secrets.

DHH “not yet feeling the awesome” of WSL

This has been one of my all-time favorite Twitter threads. David Heinemeier Hansson, creator of Rails, is trying to “live” in Windows, and set it up to do Rails work. He’s blogging the “experience,” and it’s not going very smoothly. Everyone is telling him to use Windows Services for Linux for this, but he’s “not yet feeling the awesome.” I’ve tried using WSL several times for doing development on Rails applications. I, too, am not feeling the awesome, despite the cheerleading by Windows thought leader Scott Hanselman. Despite my personal experiences with it, given how vociferously people recommend WSL for Rails work on Windows, I kept wondering if I were missing something. I’ll take this as final confirmation that I’m not missing anything, and delete the mental bookmark to go back and try this again when it becomes WSL 3.

Opinion: 50 years ago, I helped invent the internet. How did it go so wrong?

When my scientist colleagues and I invented the internet 50 years ago, we did not anticipate that its dark side would emerge with such ferocity — or that we would feel an urgent need to fix it.

Source: Opinion: 50 years ago, I helped invent the internet. How did it go so wrong?

When I saw the headline to the link, I said to myself, “You know what’s wrong with it. We all know what’s wrong with it.” To the surprise of no one — except, apparently, LA Times readers — the article concludes that financial incentives are to blame for making the web suck.

What made me click through to the article was the absolutely certainty that I would see the following, and the notion that I would capture the horrible, inescapable irony for posterity. To wit: On the site of one of the nation’s largest newspapers, over an article describing the ruination of the web by crass commercialization, capped with a complaint of the loss of privacy, there is a banner ad for subscribing, overlaid with a warning that you (effectively) surrender any notion of privacy, just by looking at the site.

Well done, all around.

H-1B Visas, Facebook, and Cummins

I ran across an article about Facebook’s use of H-1B visas in my news crawl. This part really caught my eye:

Since 2017, as part of his promise to “hire American,” the Trump administration has been denying record numbers of H-1B visas—those offered to high skilled workers with bachelor’s and advanced degrees, including many engineers at Facebook, Amazon, and Google. In the three years that Trump has been in office, the denial rate for H-1B visas has risen from 10 to 24 percent. The United States issues roughly 85,000 new H-1B visas each year. In 2018, 651 of those visas were granted to Facebook employees, the seventeenth most of any employer in the country.

Source: ‘Do Not Discuss the Incident,’ Facebook Told Employee Fired After Speaking About Worker Suicide – VICE

That got me curious. Around these parts, it’s obvious that Cummins is a big fan of the system, but I had no idea how much. If you click through that link from the article, you can see Cummins sits at 29th out of 30 largest users of the H-1B visa program! That was surprising to me!

From state-level data, we can see that, in Indiana, Cummins is #1, obviously.

I think both sets of numbers rather dramatically understate Cummins’ use of the H-1B visa program. Cummins employs lots of people through Tata, Infosys, KPIT, and, of course, my own employer, LHP. It seems like the counts in their totals that represent people working for Cummins ought be applied to Cummins’ count, and I’m assuming that this is same for the rest of the counts. I’m sure Tata and Infosys have people embedded in many of the other companies as well. I guess it doesn’t matter much in the end, but it would still be nice to remove the “consultancy indirection,” and just get final numbers for all of these companies. It would show who’s taking most advantage of the indirection.

Do other countries, like India and China, run programs like this, to get professionals from the US into their countries? I honestly don’t know, and any searches I do online seem to get redirected back to the H-1B program, because that’s all anyone seems to talk about, so it’s hard to tell.

Almost all visa holders I meet are be from India. Second place seems to go to people from various countries in Africa. China has about the same amount of people as India, and about as many as all of Africa combined, but I haven’t met any Chinese visa holders at Cummins. Mexico and Canada are right here on our borders. I’ve never even heard of someone from those countries working here under an H-1B visa. Why does it seem that the program is almost exclusively Indian? Again, I don’t know.

This is all very complex and fascinating to me. Maybe I should read a book and educate myself about the underlying dynamics. It’s just that I have so many books I’m already not reading…