Mastodawn

🇫🇷 French police have an app to perform face recognition on anyone in the street, based on a database of 9 million photos. It's built by a German company.

https://disclose.ngo/fr/article/la-reconnaissance-faciale-deployee-a-grande-echelle-sur-les-telephones-des-forces-de-lordre

It's also exactly what ICE in the US is building with Palantir.

https://www.404media.co/ice-is-using-a-new-facial-recognition-app-to-identify-people-leaked-emails-show/

Except the French have been at it since 2020.

Disclose.ngo

Disclose est un média et une ONG de journalisme d’investigation.

Disclose.ngo

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Eel-on-Mollusk 17h ago

@mason @ketan Also, if you have a tool library around, a thermal camera (and a very cold or very hot day) is hugely helpful to ID both air leaks and insulation gaps.

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Eel-on-Mollusk 17h ago

@mason @ketan sure thing! Building science is one of my ADHD side-hobbies that I've gotten into as I try to bring our 90yo, barely-insulated house up to speed. Lots of good online resources out there (GreenBuildingAdvisor Forums in particular), but I've still had to figure out stuff as I go just because pre-WWII homes have so many idiosyncracies. Happy to talk further if that'd be helpful.

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Eel-on-Mollusk 1d ago

@mason @ketan but yeah if you're in the Northeast, electricity rates are really something

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Eel-on-Mollusk 1d ago

@mason @ketan air sealing refers to fixing any gaps or cracks that might be letting outside and inside air mix. Usual locations are top plates and chases in the attic, sill plates and rim joists in the basement (/crawl space), outlets along exterior walls, and any other wall penetrations. Insulation is important to minimize heat loss through conduction and (to a lesser extent) radiation, but convection is both a huge mechanism for heat transfer and not something (most) insulation really blocks.

Eel-on-Mollusk 1d ago

AI6YR Ben 1d ago

Bwahahahaha

KTLA: Bear wanders into KTLA reporter’s live shot while covering bear attack

https://ktla.com/news/local-news/bear-wanders-into-ktla-reporters-live-shot-while-covering-monrovia-attack/

#photobomb #bear #wildlife

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Eel-on-Mollusk 1d ago

@mason @ketan this isn't that helpful, maybe, but it sounds like insulating and air sealing may be helpful if your energy bills are that high. (It is getting harder to save money that route, though, as utilities add more flat "service" and "connection" fees.)

Eel-on-Mollusk 1d ago

Wren Reilly 5d ago

The tech bros aren’t “saying the quiet part out loud” just now.

They were saying it with the demographics of their teams. They were screaming it with the demographics of leadership. They were being crystal clear when they fired people for pointing out the harms of language models trained on sexist, racist data.

Eel-on-Mollusk 2d ago

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Neville Park 2d ago

@geekysteven even at the time people were critiquing the whole "Lost Cause" Civil War-analogy undertones and the sprinkled-on Chineseness-without-actually-hiring-Chinese-actors!

Eel-on-Mollusk 2d ago

geekysteven 2d ago