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Cake day: July 7th, 2023

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  • Also worth noting that Costco doesn’t require a membership for their fresh food, pharmacy, or (depending on where you live, and your local liquor laws) liquor store. You can just tell the greeter that you’re there for the pizza, and they’ll wave you through.

    Their pharmacy is often one of the cheapest, and the pharmacy techs at my local Costco are all super helpful. Apparently working in pharmacies is pretty soul-sucking, but my local employees always seem to be in a good (and not just artificial “retail smile” good) mood.

    And yes, the Costco brand vodka is every bit as good as Grey Goose.


  • Sort of. The program uses a specific part of the website for its auto update. And it also didn’t do any kinds of TLS (https) validation (which would prevent changing the destination). They also signed their installers (which would throw an error if the file had been modified) but the auto update didn’t check for a valid signature. So basically the two big things that a browser would do when you visit the site to download the installer, the auto updater just… Wasn’t doing.

    So people who visited the site to manually download the installer were fine. They would have been alerted if the TLS cert was invalid or if the installer wasn’t properly signed. But if you used the auto updater, you wouldn’t get any of those errors and it would happily install the malware.




  • Take their assets and put $10M towards keeping the bounty program going. Take another $15M and put it towards a second (even bigger) bounty. Every day a billionaire’s name gets lottery’ed and killing them wins the big pot plus the original $10M bounty. So every single billionaire has a constant bounty on them, plus the chance of getting lotto’ed… At first that lotto may only be $25M. But as more and more die, that bigger pot continues to grow.

    Their private security teams may not be willing to turn against their masters for only $10M… But for $25M? $40M? $55M? $70M? Everyone has a price, especially the billionaires’ mercenaries. Of course, the billionaires would probably start requiring bomb collars for their private security at that point, to ensure they remain loyal. But that means the teams would inevitably weigh the price of a bomb collar vs an easy $10M payout in the first place. And that $10M alone would be enough to have them gunning down the billionaires before they put the collars on.

    The rest of their assets go towards a fund for reducing homelessness, bolstering food stamp programs, unemployment insurance funds, getting people back on their feet, forgiving debt, funding Social Security, expanding Medicare and Medicaid, maybe even UBI if the fund is large enough to be self-sustaining, etc…




  • As someone who occasionally has to scrub through hours of security camera footage, these cops need to learn what a binary search is. We had some art get stolen from our gallery, and I had to search through ~5 days of footage to find it. I found it in about 3 minutes with a binary search.

    Start by defining your timeline. In my case, it was about 5 days (so roughly 120 hours) over the course of a long weekend. Then divide that time in half, (60 hours) and start at the middle. Is the artwork still there? If so, you know you don’t need to bother scrubbing through the first 60 hours at all. Or if it’s already missing, you know you don’t need to bother searching through the second half. Then divide the remaining half in half again, (30 hours) and do the same. Repeat, each time dividing the potential search by half. With only 10 divisions, (each taking only a few seconds to figure out what the next halfway point is and jump to it in the security camera program), I have already narrowed my search down from 5 days to ~7 minutes. And it only took me a few minutes total. And at that point, I just scrub through manually until I find the culprit.

    My boss was just sitting at her computer, watching the video at like 2x speed from hour 0, hoping to eventually catch the person. After like 20 minutes of that she gave up and passed it off to me. And I had the incident found in like 3 or 4 minutes total.

    The only real reason the cops have to avoid scrubbing through footage is laziness.





  • Yeah, dating is 100% a numbers game. You cast a broad net, and then pick through the ones who show interest. There’s no way to find the right person without failing a few times. The people that end up with their high school sweethearts are the exceptions that got extremely lucky, not the standard to strive for.

    Don’t take the failure personally. Unless you’re blatantly going around cheating, being misogynistic, racist, etc., it’s likely not anything in particular that you did “wrong”. It simply means you weren’t a good match. The best thing you can do is simply be the best version of yourself. By that, I mean to avoid just sitting around on your hands, expecting someone to land in your lap. The “if you can’t handle me at my worst, you don’t deserve me at my best” mentality is extremely toxic; Be the kind of person that your ideal partner would want to date.



  • Phone calls in prison are recorded. Luigi needs to use prison phones to talk to his lawyer. So his phone calls with his lawyer were recorded. The content of those calls is guarded by attorney client privilege, and the prosecutor can’t legally access them… Except the prosecutor 100% accessed them, and listened in.

    As soon as the prosecutor fessed up to knowing anything about the content of those calls, it threw a giant wrench in the works for the courts, because everything the prosecutor has done so far (or does in the future) is potentially tainted by the knowledge from those calls. Luigi could 100% use that to try and appeal if he’s convicted, citing the fact that his attorney client privilege was breached. And if that appeal works, then any evidence gained as a result of that privileged info would also be tossed out. So the prosecutor was recused, meaning they’re basically being removed from the trial.






  • I occasionally do scale drawings for my job, and I occasionally have to remind my coworker that her nice pretty colorized drawings will look fucking atrocious when printed in greyscale on a shitty laser printer. She likes to color code things to make it easier to communicate info… But that often ends up making things harder on the crews who are actually executing things. Because when she used color to communicate something, but the entire drawing is printed in shades of grey to hand a hard copy to the crew, it becomes fucking impossible to actually follow the drawing.

    For instance… The yellow circle is the one we need done today. Here’s what she draws:

    Except here’s what the crew receives:

    Now imagine if this was a watermark on every page of a 50 page court filing, which then gets printed out for the judge. Now they’re seeing text on the grey background, which likely makes it harder to read and is a massive waste of toner. It also massively inflates pdf file sizes, because you’re sending that image on every single page.