Ok, let’s use your first example. Someone crosses into a neighboring state and returns in the same day…I had co-workers who did that every day.

Let’s narrow that down… You cross into another state with abortion care once and return in the same day. Or maybe you’re a salesman closing a deal. Or maybe you’re visiting family and have work tomorrow… And honestly, both those situations are far more frequent. That happens every day. It happens more if you live near the border - otherwise you probably got a hotel. Unless you can’t afford a hotel. And the list goes on - all this structured data turns into stories at some point

Here’s the thing. Prism could handle it, because it’s a ton of people on the payroll

The government is not a monolith though…9/11 is a great example. We knew it would happen, we knew it was planned, but the right people didn’t know in the right time, because the agencies are not a monolith.

Because that is the hard part - communication is hard, harder with security concerns. More data means more analysts reviewing it - you can collect all the data you could want , (and we do), you could hire all the analysts you can afford (and we do), but that still gives you severe limits

We’re actually pretty great at stopping terrorism, but we do that (in part) because we have all this data and use it for specific ends

None of this shit is easy - I used to do this, specifically. How do you take 15 data sources that sometimes conflict, and deconflict them? There’s no hierarchy of truth here. This is literally a cutting edge problem - it’s a literal holy Grail. No one can solve it in 3 weeks, or even 3 years

You want a 20% rate? I could give it to you tomorrow, poisoned data or no, I could give it to you in weeks… Maybe not 3, because that’s a shit ton of data sources, but with proper motivation I could pump it out.

You want 90%? Give me a century or two, and I’m good at this. Maybe a genius could give it to you in a lifetime of with

It’s like they say in game dev, you can do 90% in 10% of the time, but the last 10% takes 90% of the time. And that’s a solved problem.

Except this is an unsolved problem, possibly the most lucrative unsolved problems in history

I agree with the first half… It’s very easy to ingest and sift through insane amounts of data

What isn’t easy is doing so usefully. Yes, if you can link the account to a person, it’s trivial to pull up their records. Linking is easier said than done - it’s doable, but to make it scale you have to get the full records of device IDs, link them back to a number, then link them to a person. Minimum, you’d need the telco’s data

That’s a staggering amount of work - it’s much easier to do it if the app also has phone numbers, but even then where do you link it? The telco’s have an account holder (which often will be a family member), 50 separate dmvs might have more accurate links, but they’re largely legacy systems that will be a nightmare to work with. It’s doable, but it’s hard

Then you get to distribute this super extensive database of personal information - at this point it’s prism, and probably already has most of this data - they’d just have to ingest period data too

But we don’t give that kind of access to local police, because then every government would end up with it. And that’s a big and genuine security threat… But also a very unwieldy thing to work with. More data means more man hours to work with

The other direction is far more practical - if you start by looking at the data, you can tie it back to a person if they match a pattern. Then you can look at just the records you do have, and pay Amazon or the credit agencies for more. A human can easily investigate another human, because we are great with unstructured data, and computers aren’t

A chaotic data source means more bad leads to manually chase down. Man hours are limited, and people have morale - if a cop wastes an hour on a lead that ends with a spare phone or a single man, they’re going to complain and drag their feet. If productivity and morale are in the garbage, that’s going to lead to pushback. If it happens enough, the message at the top will be “this program doesn’t work”

It would be far better to find the patterns and target them methodically, but even chaotic garbage is effective - data analysis isn’t easy to automate, it’s very expensive to do when accuracy matters and they’re poisoning the data source

You’re very welcome, this is exactly the kind of tool I want to put in the right hands

But I do hope you don’t need it, so there’s also variants I hope you will use

The pregnant pause is the version I derived it from - instead of blanking your body language, you project encouragement and full attention. It makes people feel awkward, but it gives them the urge to keep talking to fill the silence

It’s a therapy tool, but great for any kind of teaching - for example, I have a friend with bad imposter syndrome who I’ve been mentoring in software development for the last few years. When I help him, he has a bad habit of shutting off his brain and second guessing himself. I’ve been telling him for a decade he has an aptitude for it, but all he saw was how I could glance at his code and zero in on the problem… But I’ve been doing this for almost 2 decades and I also have an aptitude for it, and no matter how much I tell him “it’s just experience, and you’re genuinely good at this” or “I only know because I’ve been in your situation before” he would shut down

So I’d hit him with the pregnant pause after asking a leading question to get him thinking along the correct lines. Sometimes he’s already too frazzled to think and I’ll just tell him the answer before it drags on uncomfortably long and he feels stupid, but usually he knows and I’ll give him validation before expanding on the topic

Last week, he called me to tell me he did the same thing for someone else. The week before, someone accused him of causing a bug and he stood his ground without rereading his code (correctly). He regularly calls me to tell me about a lesson of mine that has helped him, and more and more I have nothing more to add, I’m looking forward to the day when he pushes back against me

The key here is lack of judgement - you have to find a reason to give them validation immediately. From there you can break it down or correct them, but they need to feel good at the moment you give your verdict, even if what they said is wrong. Only then you correct them or expound on the topic

It’s good for any time you want to get someone talking or make them feel awkward - you can use it for jokes, teaching, or encouraging them to get something off their chest. So long as you do it right, it builds trust and deepens relationships - and again, the important bit is they must walk away feeling like you didn’t judge them when they opened up

Just be sure you want that deeper relationship with that person - everyone has horrible intrusive thoughts sometimes, and if you don’t fully believe in their fundamental goodness you might end up hearing things you aren’t equipped to deal with

Despite being LGBT+ that friend repeats shit blasted at him from far right social media, and I know he’s not that person so I help him unpack it and get to the core truths behind it (and he’s come a long way). I know my sister and closest brother are very empathic people, so when they say shit out of left field I know to break it down instead of taking it at face value

People often don’t know what they’re saying, because propaganda works - if you encourage people to open up to you unfiltered, you’ll cut deep if you don’t come from a place of understanding. But there’s great power there - people will tell you exactly what’s going on with them, and they’ll listen when you dive into it

Nah, that’s the beauty of it. You’re not the enemy. You’re not attacking them. You’re giving them absolute attention, but giving nothing back

It’s pure judgement. And they don’t know the verdict yet

Their fight response won’t be aimed at you, but they’ll certainly throw others under the bus. They might lash out at you, but they’ll quickly wilt when you still give with nothing. It’s just angry human noises, ignore them

Their flight response won’t kick in, because it overrides human instincts. Walking away is a conscious decision in this case, and most humans aren’t self aware enough to choose it

It’s the third path. You take all the power in the interaction, you cut off the other roads, and you engineer a choice that is only fawn or slink away quietly in defeat

Nah, there’s nothing louder than silence.

Wipe all expression from your face, and stare at them. Maybe just an expression of incredulity if this is out of character for them. That’s all it takes.

Bystanders will literally stop what they’re doing and watch. Their brains will scream “I’m about to be excluded from the group”, and they’ll start babbling. They’ll confess their sins and be harsher on themselves than anything you could say

If you don’t like their next words, give them nothing. Literally don’t respond, anything you give them is closure. Don’t give them closure, move on with your life - they can’t.

Don’t give them judgement, give them nothing. If you judge them, they can turn themselves into a victim or you into an enemy… Without a response, the only enemy is themselves, because they will crave your approval.

It’s like a teacher staring down a student who keeps talking until the whole class is looking at them, except they don’t know what to do to make it stop. So they try anything and wrack their brain for a solution. It seriously freaks people out

Note: this is less likely to work against neurodivergent people, they’ll just be confused. That’s how I learned to do this - I got annoyed and straight up asked a therapist why they kept staring at me when I was done talking. They explained the concept of a pregnant pause, and so I started using it.

And acquaintances started telling me how they were abused to explain their behavior and strangers started confessing how they cheated on their partners out of nowhere.

I get a lot of long apology emails the day after someone wrongs me, I now make an effort to give closure to everyone I like early and often.

Humans are tortured by this

I agree, but you forgot the biggest one

No more third places

Would you give a few hundred dollars and couple dozen hours of learning? Because this is a very achievable goal

It just makes too much sense… The only way to get past electron is a better electron. Or just fix electron

We’ve been going after this concept for decades now. That’s what java swing was supposed to be, what python gtlk was supposed to be, and I’m sure there were others before that and there’s been a hell of a lot since then

It’s all trade-offs between flexibility, ease of use, and performance. Also between maintenance cost, portability, and existing library support

Electron is a good compromise. The execution could be better, but it’s come a long way. There is no one size fits all solution, but there are some decent options that handle that compromise differently

I’m split, but I lean slightly towards no. On one hand, it could be good for discoverability, and it would help my efforts to make a client-side algorithm

On the other hand, it will make one of Lemmy’s problems worse - engagement. Some people will vote less, and it’s already feeling a little quieter around here as the numbers settled after the Reddit Exodus. I doubt it’ll be a massive change, but a .5% decrease in voting, permanently, could make a difference

Ultimately, you can see it on federated platforms, so shrug

That sounds like when you install a gun on your arm rest to keep good shooting posture

You guys are circling around the answer

Aero looks, better menus (I refuse to believe nested drop downs are peak layout, but ribbon stuff looks pretty, at the cost of useful organization)

And finally, make it look good in dark mode. We aren’t a print-first culture anymore, and I prefer my retinas intact

I’m sorry, I have no idea what you’re talking about. Could you explain it in assembly?

Embracing lack of meaning is nihilism talk!

Take in existence as it comes and laugh at the absurdity of it all

Just to put this in context:

There’s only so many ways to turn a bunch of files into one - mainly, you stick them back to back. Easy.

Then, there’s an infinite ways to compress that file… You could come up with you own method, but what good is that? It’s better and smarter to use a format already supported by your users

So of course most bundles are the same archive type under the hood. Everything from backups to installers - you shouldn’t be inventing new formats without a damn good reason

According to my friend, people are into boxes because you get a certain amount of guaranteed rarity, or will just buy individual cards. People distrust packs for just these kinds of reasons

You guys have numbers? I have the infinity sign on every new device within days

I just remember the day, as a software dev with a solid understanding of Blockchain, my older dev neighbor started explaining how NFTs worked

I thought he was confused or stupid or something.

“Wait, so like you have these super rare images, proof you own it on a Blockchain, and a link to the place they’re all publicly hosted?”

Him: “Yep”

“And the only use for these right now is as a profile picture?”

Him: Shrug, “yeah, people use them for discord and stuff”

“But… Couldn’t you just download the image and use it anyways?”

Him: “Yeah, it’s all publicly hosted”

And it was about then my brain locked up. I did multiple hours of research later, sure I had to be missing something

Just want to say, good on you for bothering to sum up your stance. Comments little this are why I use this format for information…I still have my skepticism of plastics, but clearly you’ve done some petg 3d printing and thought it through

They actually use consultants like McKinley, who are the coordinating force behind a lot of the obviously self-destructive decisions companies are making in lockstep

I used to wish I lived in a world like Pokemon, with endless interesting creatures with crazy abilities

Then, I realized that Earth is that world, except we’ve just killed off most of the animal life. Even the fireflies… They used to be everywhere in summer, I recently met kids who had never seen one. I found two in the middle of the woods during summer - literally surrounded by miles of forest

We live on a dying paradise, and it’s depressing