txmachinery

So, we are left to wonder why YT suddenly cares so very much about foreign countries being accused of meddling in the US election.

I wouldn't regard those downvotes as valid. There is a large and vocal group on this thread with no apparent regard for HN's culture. They appear to be from "out of town".

Not an article, but a large amount of well-organised evidence (not great on mobile):

https://hereistheevidence.com

CodeMonkeyZ on Twitter is biased, but links to interesting material nonetheless, such as excerpts from Dominion software manuals describing such oddities as vote tallies stored as floating point rather than integer values (seriously?).

Or the commentary is largely coming from those normally absent from HN.

Where is the evidence?

Https://hereistheevidence.com

As I explained, most of the research indicating positive results is old (meaning before the 70's). Though there were some in the 90's (eg, William Rea et al. https://eloverkanslig.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/William... )

But set that aside that for a moment. Consider that it's well-established that EMF can and does affect human tissue, and it's also well-established that some humans are extraordinarily sensitive and susceptible to harm from tiny doses of just about anything you can name (versus "normal" people who aren't).

Therefore, I have no idea why ordinarily intelligent people will readily believe EMF/RF hypersensitivity to be completely impossible.

For often-overlooked background in EMF research and health effects, here is a comprehensive list of 2300 (pre-70's) studies: https://www.emfanalysis.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/Naval...

You might also consider US NTP's study on cellphone radiation.

Possibly relevant (Baghdad Battery):

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baghdad_Battery

Shantaram is incredible, I can only think of the original Dune novels by Frank Herbert as comparable in depth, scope and revelation of what it is to be human.

Shantaram's author claims use of artistic license in names, character descriptions and details, in order to protect those described from repercussions. Reading the extraordinary story and arc, and subsequently learning of the fact that later in real life the author later went on to marry into Czech royalty, it's easy to believe it as a fundamentally true account.

In principle it leaks information, so is always worse practice than not leaking. For example, one could imagine an edge-case where given a set of average-colour password images collected over time, for a password field that has a dynamic in its presentation that is exposed in the averaging, useful information could be discerned and used to supplement other attack vectors.

Say for example, the password field had one of those password strength colour indicators that subtly changed the background or font colour to indicate password strength, and the images were captured and obfuscated at that point. Information useful to an attacker would now be embedded in the colour average.

Or they do, are rare, and haven't yet been reliably identified: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31640707/

The fact that the "new name" (IEI) seems to ignore/discredit the primary claims of the sufferers at the outset, and that a multi-billion (trillion?) dollar industry would somewhat prefer these people don't exist, I remain skeptical of recent studies. (A view no doubt also biased by personal experience.)

That older studies show the effect, and newer ones don't isn't a smoking gun, but it is a cause for skepticism.

At least, one thing almost all studies agree on is "more research is required".

I can well understand this being true. Without discounting it, I've also had roughly equivalent, but opposite experiences, with flight mode and sleep.

Yes, I would generally agree. But I think it's fine, and justified to investigate the (many) claims of EMF sensitivity. People having a seizure because they walked past someone eating peanuts may have seemed insane when it first came about, and while I have no idea of the history, it's easy to imagine that nut may have been cracked only finally by someone crazy enough to hypothesize such a thing. I have a friend who will die if their partner kisses them after drinking a glass of milk - the human body can at times decide to do extremely counterproductive things based on things ordinarily considered "safe".

(I love the werewolf research line, definitely stealing that for when I'm on the other side of this argument.)

Yes, and do you know the difference between science and conjecture? Practice and theory?

Done any research into people who are medically hyper-sensitive, sometimes at the milliwatt level, to RF energy?

Is it possible that the cumulative effects of compounded milliwatts could potentially have harmful effects, that have yet to be sufficiently studied or understood?

Maybe.

I'm not at all suggesting there is a massive conspiracy to do whatever to everyone by deploying 5G or Wifi or whatever else. But I am saying that "move fast and break things" is an irresponsible modus operandi when the things might be us.

The race for faster and make more money does NOT have a good history of safety for us, nor the planet. Proceed with caution, and value those who doubt. What have you got to lose? Your Netflix buffering 2 seconds faster?

And you think I'm crazy?

Maybe the commenter simply believes that it might not be crazy to exhibit concern for something that's known to be dangerous enough weaponise, is invisible, silent and being deployed in concentration all over the world including throughout your own neighbourhood and living complex.

Sure, similar things could be said for electricity, and many other beneficial things - even water. But the same can also be said for things that were said to be safe - by the same sources; industry and media - and yet ended up causing great harm.

How bizarre, I'd been led to believe wireless energy was completely harmless; safe to use in the home, upon ones person daily and even distribute randomly in concentrated areas en masse without coordination.

And further, I thought I was in the right that anyone claiming otherwise was paranoid and misinformed.

Oh, look, this information is even coming from the same news services that previously told me it was completely safe.

It's almost like the X-ray thing all over again. Or smoking. Or DDT. Or...

"Maybe we shouldn't want" is a strange statement. It simultaneously appears to acknowledge widespread desire for something, along with an apparent minority view that wanting that thing is bad. In the context of a democracy, the argument ends before it begins.

Maybe we shouldn't want to write "maybe we shouldn't want"?

Yes, I would use it every booking.

Ah, that's great. Thanks!

Thank you. The power bank may work as a hardware solution sometimes, though even in a pocket, any battery can fail if the outside temps are low enough (as they often are in winter at higher latitudes).

I essentially was wondering if the heat a phone produces during higher-load operation might be repurposed to create an entirely software solution to the problem of a battery dropping below functional temperature. Your answer suggests it can. Perhaps this could also be balanced by some kind of dynamic heat-dispersion design to account for the converse issue of battery temperature getting too high. But that's encouraging - if modern designs intentionally direct heat away from the battery, that suggests the basic software-only idea might be possible in principle, and maybe in practice - in any existing phone that has poor hardware design in that respect. Components under load increasing battery temperature must be a valid effect, to necessitate designing around it - so using this "feature" to conversely keep battery temperature higher than its operating minimum may be a valid proposition.

Extreme cold situations can also sometimes be an emergency, so it's not necessarily a trivial issue. Granting phones a kind of rugged-cold mode to prevent shutdowns, via a software update that makes simple power management choices dependent on outside-temperatures (phone getting too cold: crunch numbers and activate display), could potentially save lives.

And when you're done playing Flappy Bird, there's always Flappy Bird Within Flappy Bird:

https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?tid=29323

I appreciate your good-natured discussion, but disagree: my statements were factual, and it's not strange to present hubris as an indicator of untrustworthiness.

You could indeed see yourself as being "fact-checked". But this doesn't mean the person attempting to persuade you of their point of view thinks of themselves as a "fact-checker", or popularises themselves as a source of information that is always more correct than any other.

I read it as: self-annointed arbiters of truth demean themselves by their own definition as such.

Trustworthy sources of information accept the limits of their knowledge and recognise their own ability to make mistakes. Who fact-checks the fact-checkers?

"Fact-checking" by definition, implies infinitely-superior, infallible knowledge.

Ie, bullshit.

Possibly qualifying - a game called Everything: https://store.steampowered.com/app/582270/Everything/

Agreed. If some kind of Proof of Personhood, optionally anonymized, combined with a permanent publicly verifiable and immutable record (blockchain?), elections may be conducted securely, verifiably and efficiently.

https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof_of_personhood

This was certainly the weakest point in the article for me. Not explained nor backed up, and not easy to verify (unlike other points).

I did find a PEW Research article [1] that stated Hispanics made up 13% of democratic voters circa 2019, a growing metric (10% in 2012, 11% in 2004, 5% in 1996). Versus Replublican which was 7% in 2019. But I'm not sure how to interpret these (and what other context may be necessary).

It did illustrate Dems rather greater reliance on non-white voters, so if they lost many to Trump, that would at least support the general direction of the statement.

The Spectator article also states that in 2020 Trump grew his support among Hispanics by "two-thirds", but from what? Presumably 2016, but what was that number? From the PEW article it could perhaps be inferred to be 6%, meaning it would be 10% for 2020, a significant jump toward near parity with the Democrats, a trend which might well engender some of the requisite puzzlement.

[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/10/26/what-the-20...

"Targeted surveillance" as a concept, is mainly a relic from a bygone era. If you exist, everything you do is surveilled, both by the state and private interests.

> Macs will never be a mass market product, unless Apple slashes prices. But that is not going to happen.

They just have. The M1 range are $3000-$4000 worth of computer starting at around $1000.

"The media" and "social media" may not be controlled by a single actor, but it's common knowledge that large enough chunks of both can be and often are.

For example, the conspiracy theory that Russia rigged the 2016 election for Trump is based on this premise.

There is also a widely-accepted partisan divide between the encumbent news sources on the left, and Fox and newer so-called "fringe" or "alt" news sources on the right. These in fact aren't correctly fringe or alt - at least in the US - as clearly very close to or more than half of the US population for the past decade has indicated they have political beliefs aligned with them.

It's therefore as disingenuous to attempt to delegitimize "alt right" media by referring to it thusly, just as it may br for right-leaning media to do the same by referring to the left as "fake news". With this example, both sides are behaving in uniform ways exactly typical of unified, single-actor control, respective to each.

If the Russian conspiracy is true, the premise that single-actor control is possible is accepted, as it therefore happened with enough force to alter a major an election. If it isn't, then half of the US is legitimately right-leaning, making the labelling of their mainstream news sources as "fringe" or "alt" or "extreme" indeed tantamount to "fake news".

Either way, it's mistaken to believe it impossible for the control of single actor to be enacted upon a large enough portion of the media to achieve widespread adoption of their agenda.

In effect, your last paragraph directly contradicts your first.