_iyig
Joined 10 years ago
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1,833
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546
Member since
Jan 25
Recent submissions
Comment · 5 years ago
Comment · 5 years ago
China has forcibly implemented strict birth control policy for decades. They're also forcibly sterilizing ethnic minority populations, Uyghurs in particular:
https://www.newyorker.com/news/a-reporter-at-large/china-xin...
Comment · 5 years ago
> The real problem isn't technology or even adoption, it's that people who work at giant companies suck at making games.
Many companies besides Facebook have developed games for the Quest. I guess you could say Facebook sucks at working with game developers, but I’m not sure if that’s true either. Unreal and Unity have well-developed integrations with Oculus [0].
I think where Facebook really falls down is tying customers’ FB account to their Oculus Store purchases (and ability to use the Quest at all). They’re applying a social media platform’s aggressive algorithms to suspend or ban accounts which violate their expansive TOS, which is wrong in consumer product and digital marketplace space. For that reason, mixed with personal experience at the hands of Facebook's algorithms, I have no interest in developing for Oculus.
Comment · 5 years ago
Having owned every Oculus headset since the Kickstarter, I think the Quest is the first truly consumer-ready VR headset. At $300 it’s competitively priced against gaming consoles, without requiring a gaming PC or separate tracking sensors. It has a healthy library of games, 6DOF position tracking, and hand-tracking controllers with excellent haptics.
I was tremendously excited about it, to include messing around with VR development in my spare time, until the Facebook account debacle dropped my enthusiasm to zero. I’ve used my Quest maybe twice since my account got caught up in all that. I have no plans to develop any software for such a closed platform with arbitrary gatekeeping.
Comment · 5 years ago
In a similar vein,
George Washington’s Mount Vernon estate - today privately owned and operated as a living history museum - has an excellent series of exhibits which puts names and stories to the Washington family’s enslaved servants and laborers:
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/groundbreaking-exhibi...
The re-enactors are all fantastic and very knowledgeable. It’s unsettling talking to a black re-enactor who’s firmly in-character as a slave, which I suppose is the point:
Comment · 5 years ago
One of many reasons I’ve stuck with the default “Mail” app on iOS. Labeling, attachments, search, etc. all work fine. I manage my filters (an infrequent task) through the desktop web interface. The Mail app UI hasn’t changed much in the last ten years.
If Google ever breaks plain old IMAP support, I’ll complete my migration to Fastmail.
Comment · 5 years ago
>Our privacy is eroding. [...] The war is not lost, however.
Steven Rambam would probably disagree. He's a private investigator who's given many excellent talks on privacy at Hackers On Planet Earth (HOPE):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FHwl6AyL6js&t=10m20s
He goes into exquisite detail on the ways in which private info is shared, sold, amalgamated, and analyzed by private and public entities, and how law enforcement uses (and abuses) these resources. That particular talk is from 2016, so things are probably even worse now.
Comment · 5 years ago
Sad but not surprising that Amazon let Goodreads moulder. They did the exact same thing with Shelfari [0], formerly Goodread's main competitor.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shelfari#Amazon_and_shutdown
Comment · 5 years ago
Apologies for pedantry - here is the dictionary definition of "crime":
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/crime
>1: an illegal act for which someone can be punished by the government
And from the Code of Laws of the United States of America, linked previously:
>Any alien (including an alien crewman) in and admitted to the United States shall, upon the order of the Attorney General, be removed if the alien is within one or more of the following classes of deportable aliens:
>(1) Inadmissible at time of entry or of adjustment of status or violates status [...]
To reside in the U.S. illegally is prohibited by law, and the government shall punish you with removal to your country of origin. In other words, residing in the U.S. illegally is a crime.
EDIT: Downvotes because I'm mistaken, or because you don't like the U.S. Code? If the above analysis is wrong, please correct it.
Comment · 5 years ago
The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952
https://www.uscis.gov/laws-and-policy/legislation/immigratio...
Specifically:
https://uscode.house.gov/view.xhtml?req=(title:8%20section:1...
See language regarding “adjustment of status” and “present in violation of law.” As enforced via:
https://uscode.house.gov/view.xhtml?req=granuleid:USC-prelim...
Comment · 5 years ago
Despite the downvotes you’ve received, you are correct. The under-reporting of crime among illegal immigrant communities for the reason you identify has been studied and documented:
https://www.iza.org/publications/dp/10306/silence-of-the-inn...
Since most victims of violent crime know their attacker [0], this may imply an under-reporting of crime committed by members of the undocumented community as well.
[0] https://www.zocalopublicsquare.org/2016/08/06/americans-most...
Comment · 5 years ago
Indeed, this effect has been studied and documented:
https://www.iza.org/publications/dp/10306/silence-of-the-inn...
Per the study, crime among an illegal immigrant population fell post-amnesty in repose to increased crime reporting. Conversely, this implies that when members of a community report crime less often as a result of their immigration status - which the study finds to be the case - crime in those communities is higher than it would be otherwise.
Comment · 5 years ago
The statement
>But at least two independent studies suggest Secure Communities didn’t have any effect on crime rates, according to Light, despite deporting more than 200,000 people in its first four years.
>“If the plan was to make communities safer, to reduce the likelihood of, say, a felony violent assault in these communities through deportation, it did not deliver on that promise,” Light says
would seem to contradict
>“They have a tremendous incentive to avoid criminal wrongdoing. The greatest fear among undocumented immigrants is getting in legal trouble that leads to deportation,” says Light
That incentive exists because the law is enforced. If the law were not enforced, the incentive would disappear and crime would increase. QED the Secure Communities program prevents crime.
Am I missing something?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26306020
In that instance, the canceled person was one of the United States' top reporters on the COVID pandemic.