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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 19th, 2023

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  • About 20 new cases of gender violence arrive every day, each requiring investigation. Providing police protection for every victim would be impossible given staff sizes and budgets.

    I think machine-learning is not the key part, the quote above is. All these 20 people a day come to the police for protection, a very small minority of them might be just paranoid, but I’m sure that most of them had some bad shit done to them by their partner already and (in an ideal world) would all deserve some protection. The algorithm’s “success” in defined in the article as reducing probability of repeat attacks, especially the ones eventually leading to death.

    The police are trying to focus on the ones who are deemed to be the most at risk. A well-trained algorithm can help reduce the risk vs the judgement of the possibly overworked or inexperienced human handling the complaint? I’ll take that. But people are going to die anyway. Just, hopefully, a bit less of them and I don’t think it’s fair to say that it’s the machine’s fault when they do.





  • I don’t want to get too deep into your business but just to understand better what you’re trying to communicate… Please tell me if I get this right: there’s current (not past) drama in your family and you think that not acknowledging father’s day at all would feed into that drama (maybe your dad’s reaction would be “see, you’re all against me” and he’d play the victim or something like that) . On the other hand you also don’t want to pretend everything is right with your father. So you want something to communicate “I don’t want to be against you, but I certainly am not on your side either; I just want to be left alone and talk to you the strictly necessary amount of times”. Is that it?

    If that’s the case, yes, the standard-est, humorless “happy father’s day” card you can find, with nothing but your signature in it should convey that message pretty well. If you can’t find anything, just a white one with a handwritten “happy father’s day, [your name]” would do.


  • The medical field is ripe for some intrusive ads to boost revenues! Possibilities are endless:

    Ad-supported hearing aids (“this conversation will resume after a quick message from our sponsors!”)

    Pacemakers - want to watch an ad for 100 more free heartbeats?

    Surgery - this will leave a visible scar, but how about we make the cut look like the Amazon logo ?

    Implants - click the nipple and watch an ad to re-inflate the left breast for 10 more days





  • there’s an old joke about this:

    man goes to doctor saying “I keep farting, doc; my farts aren’t smelly and luckily they are also silent but I am worried because I fart all day long. Even now, as I was talking to you, I kept farting the whole time”.

    “I see”, says the doctor. “I will prescribe you this pill, to be taken twice a day for a week”.

    “And will that help with the farting?”

    “No, but it should help you with your sense of smell. Then come to see me after one week and we’ll try to fix your hearing”





  • Ah yes it’s that pre-emptive awkwardness of nearing the end of a date, knowing that (although nothing in particular went spectacularly wrong) you don’t really want to have more and trying to signal this to the other person.

    I’ve been on the receiving end of that too and now, many years later and away from the dating game, I can retroactively see it and accept it for what it was but man, it would have stung back then to hear it in plain and simple words. Being ghosted seemed like a better option to me too in retrospect. Kudos to you for being mature enough to handle that conversation!



  • RyanAir is (in)famous for this type of shit. E-tickets are used everywhere, but RyanAir forces you to have your ticket printed on paper or on their own mobile app. If you don’t, you’ll pay 20+ Euros for the employee at the check-in to print it for you. I think these ludicrous fees are meant more as “fines” than revenue.

    Whether you like RyanAir or not (and I don’t like them much), they are good at keeping their prices low by cramming as many people as they can on each flight as quickly as possible. This means disincentivizing anything that can waste them a few seconds per passenger, be it additional baggage (the base ticket now has no baggage at all, except for a small bag or backpack that can be placed under the seat) or, I guess, checking someone’s identity at check-in.