Is there any benefit at all

Maybe! There’s at least some scientific evidence that chemical compounds in mushrooms can have medicinal effects.

Bias disclaimer: I put a lion’s mane mushroom tincture in my morning tea because it may have a neuroprotective effect (source). My father’s father had dementia, my father is currently in a home with profound dementia, the chances it’s going to happen to me are very high. It’ll be years before I know whether lion’s mane mushroom will do anything for me (and even then you couldn’t claim anything from one data point), but I’m willing to try anything as long as it’s affordable and has at least some plausible evidence behind it. This isn’t the only thing I’m doing of course, I’ve also overhauled my diet (MIND diet) and lost 30 pounds (obesity is correlated with dementia).

why can’t you make it your self by pulverizing dried mushrooms of the same variety they use into powder and making the coffee yourself?

You absolutely could. Or, you know, just eat some of the same mushrooms. The benefit to dried products like Ryze, or tinctures like the one I use, are that they’re convenient, easily transportable and self-stable. I’ve cooked up fresh lion’s mane mushrooms several times, but not super often because they’re not in many stores in my area and tend to be pricey for the amount you get. I’ve also grown my own from a kit but that takes significant time and a little bit of daily attention to maintain optimal growing conditions. The tincture is convenient and relatively affordable as far as daily supplements go.

OpenAI on that enshittification speedrun any% no-glitch!

Honestly though, they’re skipping right past the “be good to users to get them to lock in” step. They can’t even use the platform capitalism playbook because it costs too much to run AI platforms. Shit is egregiously expensive and doesn’t deliver sufficient return to justify the cost. At this point I’m ~80% certain that AI is going to be a dead tech fad by the end of this decade because the economics just don’t work now that the free money era has ended.

Tl;Dr the protocol requires there to be trusted token providers that issue the tokens. Who do you suppose are the trusted providers in the Google and Apple implementations? Google and Apple respectively, of course. Maybe eventually there would be some other large incumbents that these implementers choose to bless with token granting right. By its nature the protocol centralizes power on the web, which would disadvantage startups and smaller players.

Private State Tokens are Google’s implementation of the IETF Privacy Pass protocol. Apple has another implementation of the same protocol named Private Access Tokens. Mozilla has taken a negative position against this protocol in its current form, and its existing implementations in their current forms. See here for their blog post on the subject, and here for their more in-depth analysis.

My dream was to work as a game developer. This was nearly 20 years ago. I actually got an offer in that field at one point, and the salary was like $20k less than what I was already being paid. I was the main bread-winner in what was a (mostly) single-income household at that time, with my partner pursuing her PhD. Gave up the dream, and I’m glad I did based on what I later learned about that industry. If I went into the game industry I’d be making far less money and have far less free time to do the things I enjoy, like playing the games other people make.

MinuteCast from AccuWeather does exactly this. It looks at your location, looks at radar data for storm systems approaching your location, and estimates when precipitation will start at your location and how intense it will be. It’s generally pretty accurate, with some limitations. It seems to be pretty good for consistent rainstorms but it can get tripped up by pop-up thunderstorms, where the radar track can go suddenly from no rain to downpour. It doesn’t make predictions more then 2-3 hours out because past that timeframe it’s not easy to predict if weather will continue on its current track or change direction. Even with the limitations, I use it all the time. Mostly to tell if I should take the dogs out right away, or if I should wait an hour or two.

Anything that pushes the CPUs significantly can cause instability in affected parts. I think there are at least two separate issues Intel is facing:

• Voltage irregularities causing instability. These could potentially be fixed by the microcode update Intel will be shipping in mid-August.
• Oxidation of CPU vias. This issue cannot be fixed by any update, any affected part has corrosion inside the CPU die and only replacement would resolve the issue.

Intel’s messaging around this problem has been very slanted towards talking as little as possible about the oxidation issue. Their initial Intel community post was very carefully worded to make it sound like voltage irregularity was the root cause, but careful reading of their statement reveals that it could be interpreted as only saying that instability is a root cause. They buried the admission that there is an oxidation issue in a Reddit comment, of all things. All they’ve said about oxidation is that the issue was resolved at the chip fab some time in 2023, and they’ve claimed it only affected 13th gen parts. There’s no word on which parts number, date ranges, processor code ranges etc. are affected. It seems pretty clear that they wanted the press talking about the microcode update and not the chips that will have the be RMA’d.

Am I understanding this right that the scalper buys a legit ticket to extract the token, then it can be used any number of times to get in a venue? I thought their system should be able to identify a token/ticket has already been scanned after it’s first used? That’s why there are no re-entry rules at most venues.

I don’t think the intent of the scalpers is to allow ticket reuse. Like you say, there are likely additional checks at the gate when a bar code is scanned. If a rotating barcode is cloned, only the first person to scan is going to get in. Everyone else who tries to use a clone of that now-used barcode is going to get denied entry because the door staff’s scanner is going to throw a “ticket already used” error of some kind. So while it’s technically possible to clone one of these rotating barcodes, just like it’s possible to have multiple authenticators producing the same OTPs, there’s no point in doing so.

What the scalpers are after is a platform that allows them to resell tickets without giving TicketMaster a cut. TicketMaster allows their rotating-bardcode tickets to be transferred to a wallet app like Google Wallet. Wallet apps like Google Wallet have features to allow you to transfer tickets to another user’s wallet, but the wallet specification also includes a flag for whether wallet-to-wallet transfers are allowed. TicketMaster sets that flag so you cannot give (or sell) your ticket to someone else using your own wallet, instead you have to go through something that TicketMaster controls. For transfers to friends and family, TicketMaster forces you to use their app. For reselling tickets, TicketMaster forces you to use their reselling site. TicketMaster’s primary motive is obvious: they want to take a cut of ticket resales, and this is how they do that.

The whole thing is a legal fight between two utterly shitty groups, TicketMaster and scalpers. Here’s hoping they somehow both lose.

I’m not sure it fits 100% with what you’re looking for, but I’ll take chance and recommend Slice & Dice (Google Play, Apple App Store). Free demo, no ads, single in-app purchase to unlock the full version. This game is easily the best value-for-dollar mobile game I’ve ever purchased.

He was a raging alcoholic who hid his illness from the medical professionals who examined him as part of his Super Size Me “experiment.” A lifetime of booze did way more damage than 30 days of McDs possibly could.

This story originally appeared on Ars Technica

Looks like you can read the article, without a paywall, here: https://arstechnica.com/cars/2024/05/am-radio-is-a-lifeline-lawmakers-say-tech-and-auto-industries-disagree/

This seems a lot more plausible to me. Exit wounds tend to be pretty gory.

There is a Unicode Technical Standard for this, called the Unicode Collation Algorithm. Whether everyone uses it, I can’t say. As it says on the linked page:

Conformance to the Unicode Standard does not imply conformance to any UTS.

So in other words it’s possible to conform to the Unicode Standard without adhering to the Unicode Collation Algorithm.

whatever this is: ¦

That is the pipe symbol, or vertical bar. When it has a gap in the middle it may be known as the broken pipe symbol or broken bar. It’s considered the same symbol with or without the gap. Early terminals displayed it with a gap to make it distinguishable from lower-case L characters.

Yes because the security of barcodes and screenshotted tickets were such a huge problem before.

I think what you just described is actually a problem. Friends of my parents were visiting somewhere, bought tickets to a show from a reseller, met up with the seller (normal looking guy, no red flags, gave some plausible story why he was selling) and paid cash for printed out tickets with barcodes. Printouts looked legit, dates on the printouts were correct, etc. Went to the doors, tried to scan their tickets, got told that unfortunately they’d just been scammed. The impression they get from the box office worker is that this sort of bad news is something they’ve had to deliver frequently. Anecdotal, but I doubt those friends of my parents were the only ones to get scammed in this way. TicketMaster still sucks as an organization but the extra security of rotating barcodes does serve a legitimate security purpose, just like the rotating security codes generated by an authenticator app.

Airlines have recently been having problems with stowaways using screenshots of boarding pass barcodes or QR codes too. Such stowaways should get caught before departure by passenger headcounts or boarding ID checks, but clearly there are gaps or breakdowns in these procedures because some of these stowaways are getting caught at the destination. Others may have successfully flown for free. If it keeps happening I bet we’ll see rotating barcodes come to mobile boarding passes too, if that hasn’t already happened.

Not sure if any of these are close to you, but several libraries in western Canada seem to have copies available to borrow:

• Vancouver Public Library
• Prince Albert Public Library (Saskatchewan)
• Parkland Regional Library (Saskatchewan)

If you’re not close to any of those libraries, try asking at your local library. They may have some means of doing an interlibrary loan, or have other suggestions.

Hardly the first time. I’d argue the US made the same mistake in Afghanistan in 2003, diverting resources to Iraq because Bush Jr. had such a hard-on for Saddam.

Any increase in accuracy would not be worth the tradeoff. The current system in Canada is very simple and very visible. Scrutineers for every candidate can watch the votes being counted and immediately understand what is happening. No amount of trust is required for the system to work.

A machine that counts votes would be a black box to observers of the election. Most would need to trust that the machines are operating correctly. When machine counts and manual counts disagree, even slightly, it sows confusion and discord. The mere existence of voting machines and machine counts in the US has been sufficient to give rise to numerous conspiracy theories. In my view they are part of the rot besetting American democracy, and I don’t want them where I live.

Hey, don’t get me wrong, it’s not all sunshine and roses up here in the north. We have huge problems with cost of living, especially housing, which our current government is failing to address. We have a multi-party system but in my lifetime the national power only ever oscillated between two parties, Liberal (roughly equivalent to US Democrats) and Conservative (roughly equivalent to US Republicans pre-MAGA, or maybe even pre-Reagan). Based on current polling, Canadian discontent looks set to sweep out the incumbent Liberals and sweep in the opposition Conservatives sometime between now and Oct. 2025. I don’t think the Conservatives are going to do any better at addressing cost of living, but fear that they’ll bring in a bunch of regressive crap while they continue to fail in the same way the Liberals have failed. There are lots of other areas where Canada has room for improvement, but within the very narrow scope of how Canada runs its elections, that I will claim we got right.

It only “costs little” because you have a ton of people willing to do it.

First off you say that like it’s a bad thing. For the record, it is not. Second, many of the people counting votes are paid, i.e. Elections Canada employees. Scrutineers could be volunteers or paid employees of the party/candidate they represent.

What if there’s something that prevents people from volunteering?

That would equally inhibit people from voting. Besides which, elections can and have been postponed in cases of severe weather, and wildfires have been considered in cases where they’ve been occurring around an election. No politician or Elections Canada supervisor is going to send voters, employees and volunteers out to die for an election.

Or maybe a worldwide pandemic?

We had one, it went fine. Anyone who didn’t like the thought of voting in public had the option of voting by mail, something that every Canadian has been allowed to do since 1993.

There’s really no reason to not machine count with a matching hand count.

Yes there fucking is. Machines add completely unnecessary complexity to a simple system that works.

Why not machine certify and hand-count verify?

Because the manual system works well and costs little.

Could have both systems for quick results on the day and verified accurate results in the longer term.

Canada already has hand-counted and verified results the same day the election occurs, in a country with a population roughly equivalent to the state of California. Adding machine counting would only add complexity and cost while producing no additional benefits.

Have the voting machine

Canada doesn’t have voting machines, nor do we want them. Our ballot system is a piece of paper and a pencil. That’s it. That’s our whole voting “machine.”

The real genius is in how the vote counting process works. Every candidate is allowed to provide a representative, often called a scrutineer, to oversee the counting process at each polling station. Scrutineers are allowed to challenge a ballot if they feel it has been attributed to the wrong candidate or should have been considered a spoiled ballot. The doors to the polling station are locked while ballots are being counted, and no one is allowed to go home until the count is complete. Basic self-interest ensures that counts are done in a timely fashion, while also ensuring that every candidate can have a representative that was part of the counting process.

Under the Canadian system, for all practical purposes it would be impossible to perpetrate election fraud. A candidate would need to somehow induce Elections Canada employees and/or volunteers at multiple polling stations to miscount ballots. They would also need to convince multiple scrutineers to turn a blind eye, scrutineers who were nominated by their opponents. Each riding typically has 4+ candidates (at minimum Liberal, Conservative, New Democrat, and Green party candidates, plus often some independent or fringe party candidates), and every single one of those candidates is allowed to provide a scrutineer at each polling station. There will be many polling stations across a single riding, so that’s potentially dozens or hundreds of people that would need to be coerced or convinced to contribute to the election fraud. And that’s just for one single riding.