The reason to lace actual heroin with fentanyl, instead of making a product purely from fentanyl, is about appearances. Black tar heroin is a roughly-made plant product. It appears as a dark brown to black, highly viscous, tar-like substance with the faint smell of acetic acid from production impurities, and a distinctly bitter flavor from a mixture of plant alkaloids.
If you simply put fentanyl in water - it looks, smells, and tastes like water. Someone who is used to buying black tar heroin is going to reject that immediately. To replicate the appearance, odor, and taste of black tar... I don't even know what you'd need to do, but it's going to be way easier to just use actual black tar heroin as your base material.
Basically, in an alleyway, it's possible to gauge if there is heroin present in the material, but not possible to gauge if there is fentanyl. So, you get the heroin you are looking for, plus the fentanyl you aren't. "It's 10x stronger than last week's batch but I'm only charging you double." is where the profit comes from.
What people aren't talking about as much is the presence of fentanyl in counterfeit pain pills. Outside of the pharmacies, there are more counterfeit fentanyl pills stamped with "Vicodin" or "Oxycontin" than there are actual Vic and Oxys. This is a lot more insidious, as it's easy to press a pill that looks identical to the real thing. These might also make their way into (for example) Grandma's medicine bottle, if her son is trying to replace the pills he took when he was hard-up. I believe what Prince overdosed on was nothing involving or pretending to involve heroin, but strictly counterfeit, fentanyl-based pain pills. This is a man who could have easily gone the Michael Jackson route and got whatever kind of meds he wanted from an actual doctor. Yet the fentanyl pills still ended up getting into his supply chain somehow.
The government mortality stats don't differentiate "fentanyl sold as heroin" from "fentanyl sold as Vicodin", but if they did, I believe we would see the fake pills being the bigger issue than fake heroin. We would also see that the aberrant uptick in deaths from the "epidemic" directly corresponds with restricting the supply of legitimate pain pills and pain clinics... then the government would have to admit that their "solutions" have been totally counterproductive for preventing drug use, and are also putting the squeeze on legitimate patients... cold day in hell that that happens.
I wonder if any of these bots are clicking on ads as well. That'd be a great "gentleman's agreement" between the two crooked parties that would require no direct communication and preserve plausible deniability at Twitter.
I haven't heard of any algorithm that can get it down to 5 spam posts, but if we can do 10 million instead of 20 million, I'm all for it. Why isn't Twitter all for it? Being a responsible corporate citizen would compel them to either work with these researchers, or hire others like them, to improve the value and indeed safety of their service.
The only concern I can fathom is if the rate of false positives goes up, which is an unknown number, due to Twitter's stonewalling. (The darker the closet we are kept in, the better.) I will say Gmail's spam filter works excellently, so I won't buy an argument that "it isn't possible".
But the best thing I could suggest to someone concerned about false positives is simply to stay off Twitter. I think I clicked a Twitter link maybe twice on accident during the course of my life. I have all their scripts blocked on every other site. I don't feel any worse off (to say the least) and haven't regretted a day of it. My concern, then, is where OTHER people's idiotic decisions begin to affect ME. That is when we start needing to establish rules and enforcement. That seems to be the point we are fast approaching with social media. At a minimum we need total transparency and responsibility at Twitter, to analyze the situation. We do not have that. If they do not want us to have that, it frankly needs to be taken by force.
When I was in high school, the teacher would confiscate all phones (which you weren't supposed to have anyway, and your parents would have to pay $20 to reclaim it from the principal). She would come around and clear the memory on your TI-83 as well, if you were not using a district provided calculator. There is no reason why these same policies can't be implemented now, other than teachers wanting to avoid the difficult part of their profession- telling kids no. But yes, writing answers on your arm under your sleeve worked just fine too.
NoScript and DNS blocking both together sounds ideal, but if I had to pick just one, I'd keep NoScript.
Most of the networks I'm on, someone else will have already cached the DNS lookups in the router anyway - the lookups aren't going to Google every time. The potential for detailed tracking there is a lot less than with a script having free reign to do whatever it wants.
The existence of air and water are enough to imply the FCC is lying these days. They went from misguided and ineffective to blatantly malignant. Sounds like it's time to drain the swamp.
(1) FLAC may sound better than lossy compression depending on many factors: codec/profile, bit rate, and source material.
(2) What marketers now call "high resolution audio" - bit depth and sampling rate way beyond CD-spec - gets you nothing.
(3) A cassette tape or vinyl record will always sound worse than a CD. (Assuming the CD was not deliberately fucked up during production, which is the fault of the producer/engineer not the format.)
My guess is that nobody who took part in the Forbes article could define the difference between "bit depth" and "bit rate" as they are used in this post. Nor could most people on Slashdot. (I can provide clarification on any of the above points if needed.) The average consumer - no chance. Whether it's Jay-Z and Kanye selling you Tidal, or Neil Young selling you Pono - Yes, they will sound better than a random YouTube upload, but no they will not sound any better than the CD.
Claims like "more space", "audio feels warmer", and "more pleasurable" are pseudo-religious and meaningless by design. "The higher you go with audio file resolution, the better it gets." is demonstrably false past CD-spec, and has been proven so experimentally, over and over.
Spotify doesn't let you make stations based on genres or tags? I remember last.fm and Pandora having features to that end, 10+ years ago. They also both had a "ban track" button. Seems like basic stuff, especially when you're asking for payment. If all it lets me do is pick individual songs to play and make them into playlists - I can already do that very well without paying anyone a monthly subscription.
The main problem is looking at the Hot 100, plenty of albums I got in 2018 had 10 and 12 minute tracks on them. But sometimes I'll take a good 4 minute song vs a 10 minute song that overstays its welcome. Since we want to fixate on 70s rock, I always liked the shorter greatest-hits edit of Pink Floyd's Echoes more than the full 20 minute version.
It's sure getting a hell of a lot of advertising on this comments page, now that it's shut down, all the G+ users are coming out of the woodwork with "There were less idiots on Google Plus!"... if I would have heard this argument louder and earlier, I might have joined.
It's not a matter of gullibility so much as people confusing "what the law declares" with "what is". Although my personal experience is that both types of folly tend to occur in the same people. Probably stems from a lack of critical thinking.
It's actually not bad for making vector-based animations with interactive components. I believe that was its intended purpose. The issues came when people started using it to design entire web sites.
I remember having to do this with bootlegged software back in the day - "set it up without a network connection" - Never thought I'd have to do it with a legit paid-for OS.
Hiring another CEO to be your CEO sounds as traditional as it gets, unless you mean the OLD traditions, like pre-war era. Something like calling your Christmas Tree non-traditional because it has electric lights on it.
EA has a "loyal gamer fanbase"? You will have to explain that. Battlefield hasn't even had a loyal fan base in over a decade. EA has been universally hated from the beginning.
I quit even paying attention to big games around the time they all started to get watered down for dumbasses, planted with financial booby traps, and pay-to-win... And just generally stale.
But, I am guessing most of the people who would care about there being a girl in the trailer, are probably too young to even remember that there was a time when games *werent* so shitty.
New homes are built to such a shit standard that the foundations start cracking and boards start pulling apart after a couple years. At least the one my parents moved into is - but you can tell the miles of identical houses around it are all built in the same rush, and with the same cheap materials.
*That* certainly doesn't get brought up by the realtor in his pitch. I'd tell him he can keep the 1000 square feet.
Another thing you can tell by walking through these neighborhoods, a lot of the "single-family homes" are actually being used as apartments. In a 4-bedroom, you might have several non-related tenants living there besides the property owner. You might get 15% more square feet, but then you have to split the whole house three ways, to be able to pay for it.
AI will never be "available to the general public." The general public will be subjected to proprietary AI forced upon them by banks, retailers, social media sites, the police, etc. - These systems are not going to be open or transparent in any way, and you will not be able to opt out. To think otherwise demonstrates a lack of understanding of the technology, and of the people implementing it.
Of course, you weren't thinking about that - you needed to find some way to talk about how "government regulations" are "really stupid" and "stifle innovation". (Is that a bird I hear? Sounds like a parrot...) Let me break something to you: Some innovations need to be stifled. Are you aware of the things that happened when society discovered radioactivity? (serious question.) Radioactive materials made their way into all sorts of consumer products. Children were blasted with ungodly amounts of X-rays to see their bones as they tried on shoes at the store. And so we slowly developed regulations on what you could use, when, where, why, and how much. These details are what is completely absent from our AI discussion on Slashdot. These are the details that would comprise any regulation. Without them, you can't even begin a debate on what effect they will have. You can only sling blind, axiomatic, inflexible ideology.
I predict AI will play out much like radiation did. We will see AI shoved into every place it will fit, sometimes with disastrous outcomes. The trickier part is the bad outcomes here are going to be a lot more varied. The way we regulate now tends to look at specific processes within specific industries- and AI has the potential to upend almost any process in any industry. So you can't really "regulate AI" as such. You regulate areas in which AI gets applied. The AI Pandora uses for music recommendations probably doesn't need to be regulated. We probably do need to regulate the AI used for determining who gets a mortgage, or the AI that sets bail for people who are arrested. What form the regulations take, I can't say. Maybe something like limiting what input data the AI can use, although that alone will be inadequate. AI experts would need to be heavily involved in drafting any specific regulations. Maybe the best thing for certain applications is to avoid the use of AI altogether, or to mandate any AI decision can be contested for human review.
I'm not sure that we are at a point in the development of this tech where we can draft meaningful regulations until we see how the problems actually manifest. My concern is the government will act too slowly, and people will feel a lot of pain in the interim period, while corporate apologists drag it on for as many years as they can. That is what history shows us - society's rules always lag behind new developments.
I believe all of the Earth's crust is crust. I don't believe I saw anyone giving moral advice. (Or advice of any kind.) You seem to either not comprehend what you are reading, or don't quite understand what these words mean. Very proficient with the word "pussy" though - at least nobody will mistake you for a "faggot" or a "snowflake". But you might want to brush up on, well, everything else, unless you want to spend the summer between 9th and 10th grade in school.
There's plenty of homeless people riding in cars as well. Especially in CA, with housing costing 10x per month what a car costs, it makes financial sense to vacate your apartment before selling your car. You can sleep in your car, but you can't drive your house. Factoring in the dual-purpose, you could get 20x the bang for your buck paying for a car instead of an apartment unit.
I am guessing a lot of these 'missing' bike riders are the working homeless. Now in Florida, probably Ohio too, the spread wasn't so wide between rent and car payments. But recently housing prices have increased much faster than car prices. Last year they could afford an apartment within biking distance. This year they can't, so they are living (and thus commuting) in their cars.
Californians have been dealing with this for decades now, but the rest of the country is doing its best to catch up in the homelessness business.
I imagine most of the accounts are dead - mine definitely is. Maybe you offered me a job on LinkedIn last year, thinking I would get the message. And the message is still sitting there, unread, nestled between dozens of scams. The situation is so shitty that even the basic drive for hunger couldn't get me to log in. If I've got to wade through the feces manually and (for example) verify a company's physical presence for each and every potential opportunity - the site gives me 0 advantages as a job-seeker, versus something like Craigslist. I now put LinkedIn with Craigslist - sites whose usefulness has been suffocated under the weight of scams.
It may have been smarter for them to avoid adding manufacturing capacity, given that the demand was due to an artificial bubble. Had they opened another factory for example, it would be sitting idle now. That is probably a negative ROI, even without knowing their financials.
I'm sure nVidia pushed hard for it, and pushed the blame for the high prices as well. While fingers were pointing every which way, nobody in the crypto-currency echo chambers online wanted to address the elephant in the room, which is that the whole thing was a bubble. It looks like the DRAM manufacturers might be the only ones who didn't buy the hype.
I couldnt get TWCs web site to load in Firefox for about 4 months this year, even after disabling Adblock and allowing all scripts. I am assuming they fixed it but I have long since replaced my bookmark with Ventusky. I don't look at the forecasts ever but it's 100x better for real-time weather data. And it still would be, even if you had to click through fifty One Weird Tricks to get to it.
Slashdot Mirror
The reason to lace actual heroin with fentanyl, instead of making a product purely from fentanyl, is about appearances. Black tar heroin is a roughly-made plant product. It appears as a dark brown to black, highly viscous, tar-like substance with the faint smell of acetic acid from production impurities, and a distinctly bitter flavor from a mixture of plant alkaloids.
If you simply put fentanyl in water - it looks, smells, and tastes like water. Someone who is used to buying black tar heroin is going to reject that immediately. To replicate the appearance, odor, and taste of black tar... I don't even know what you'd need to do, but it's going to be way easier to just use actual black tar heroin as your base material.
Basically, in an alleyway, it's possible to gauge if there is heroin present in the material, but not possible to gauge if there is fentanyl. So, you get the heroin you are looking for, plus the fentanyl you aren't. "It's 10x stronger than last week's batch but I'm only charging you double." is where the profit comes from.
What people aren't talking about as much is the presence of fentanyl in counterfeit pain pills. Outside of the pharmacies, there are more counterfeit fentanyl pills stamped with "Vicodin" or "Oxycontin" than there are actual Vic and Oxys. This is a lot more insidious, as it's easy to press a pill that looks identical to the real thing. These might also make their way into (for example) Grandma's medicine bottle, if her son is trying to replace the pills he took when he was hard-up. I believe what Prince overdosed on was nothing involving or pretending to involve heroin, but strictly counterfeit, fentanyl-based pain pills. This is a man who could have easily gone the Michael Jackson route and got whatever kind of meds he wanted from an actual doctor. Yet the fentanyl pills still ended up getting into his supply chain somehow.
The government mortality stats don't differentiate "fentanyl sold as heroin" from "fentanyl sold as Vicodin", but if they did, I believe we would see the fake pills being the bigger issue than fake heroin. We would also see that the aberrant uptick in deaths from the "epidemic" directly corresponds with restricting the supply of legitimate pain pills and pain clinics... then the government would have to admit that their "solutions" have been totally counterproductive for preventing drug use, and are also putting the squeeze on legitimate patients... cold day in hell that that happens.
I wonder if any of these bots are clicking on ads as well. That'd be a great "gentleman's agreement" between the two crooked parties that would require no direct communication and preserve plausible deniability at Twitter.
I haven't heard of any algorithm that can get it down to 5 spam posts, but if we can do 10 million instead of 20 million, I'm all for it. Why isn't Twitter all for it? Being a responsible corporate citizen would compel them to either work with these researchers, or hire others like them, to improve the value and indeed safety of their service.
The only concern I can fathom is if the rate of false positives goes up, which is an unknown number, due to Twitter's stonewalling. (The darker the closet we are kept in, the better.) I will say Gmail's spam filter works excellently, so I won't buy an argument that "it isn't possible".
But the best thing I could suggest to someone concerned about false positives is simply to stay off Twitter. I think I clicked a Twitter link maybe twice on accident during the course of my life. I have all their scripts blocked on every other site. I don't feel any worse off (to say the least) and haven't regretted a day of it. My concern, then, is where OTHER people's idiotic decisions begin to affect ME. That is when we start needing to establish rules and enforcement. That seems to be the point we are fast approaching with social media. At a minimum we need total transparency and responsibility at Twitter, to analyze the situation. We do not have that. If they do not want us to have that, it frankly needs to be taken by force.
When I was in high school, the teacher would confiscate all phones (which you weren't supposed to have anyway, and your parents would have to pay $20 to reclaim it from the principal). She would come around and clear the memory on your TI-83 as well, if you were not using a district provided calculator. There is no reason why these same policies can't be implemented now, other than teachers wanting to avoid the difficult part of their profession- telling kids no. But yes, writing answers on your arm under your sleeve worked just fine too.
NoScript and DNS blocking both together sounds ideal, but if I had to pick just one, I'd keep NoScript.
Most of the networks I'm on, someone else will have already cached the DNS lookups in the router anyway - the lookups aren't going to Google every time. The potential for detailed tracking there is a lot less than with a script having free reign to do whatever it wants.
The existence of air and water are enough to imply the FCC is lying these days. They went from misguided and ineffective to blatantly malignant. Sounds like it's time to drain the swamp.
Nothing to back it up with, as usual
I'm going to have to call you out on that one. Where are these death threats Twitter hasn't removed? Show me.
(1) FLAC may sound better than lossy compression depending on many factors: codec/profile, bit rate, and source material.
(2) What marketers now call "high resolution audio" - bit depth and sampling rate way beyond CD-spec - gets you nothing.
(3) A cassette tape or vinyl record will always sound worse than a CD. (Assuming the CD was not deliberately fucked up during production, which is the fault of the producer/engineer not the format.)
My guess is that nobody who took part in the Forbes article could define the difference between "bit depth" and "bit rate" as they are used in this post. Nor could most people on Slashdot. (I can provide clarification on any of the above points if needed.) The average consumer - no chance. Whether it's Jay-Z and Kanye selling you Tidal, or Neil Young selling you Pono - Yes, they will sound better than a random YouTube upload, but no they will not sound any better than the CD.
Claims like "more space", "audio feels warmer", and "more pleasurable" are pseudo-religious and meaningless by design. "The higher you go with audio file resolution, the better it gets." is demonstrably false past CD-spec, and has been proven so experimentally, over and over.
Spotify doesn't let you make stations based on genres or tags? I remember last.fm and Pandora having features to that end, 10+ years ago. They also both had a "ban track" button. Seems like basic stuff, especially when you're asking for payment. If all it lets me do is pick individual songs to play and make them into playlists - I can already do that very well without paying anyone a monthly subscription.
The main problem is looking at the Hot 100, plenty of albums I got in 2018 had 10 and 12 minute tracks on them. But sometimes I'll take a good 4 minute song vs a 10 minute song that overstays its welcome. Since we want to fixate on 70s rock, I always liked the shorter greatest-hits edit of Pink Floyd's Echoes more than the full 20 minute version.
It's sure getting a hell of a lot of advertising on this comments page, now that it's shut down, all the G+ users are coming out of the woodwork with "There were less idiots on Google Plus!" ... if I would have heard this argument louder and earlier, I might have joined.
It's not a matter of gullibility so much as people confusing "what the law declares" with "what is". Although my personal experience is that both types of folly tend to occur in the same people. Probably stems from a lack of critical thinking.
It's actually not bad for making vector-based animations with interactive components. I believe that was its intended purpose. The issues came when people started using it to design entire web sites.
I remember having to do this with bootlegged software back in the day - "set it up without a network connection" - Never thought I'd have to do it with a legit paid-for OS.
Hiring another CEO to be your CEO sounds as traditional as it gets, unless you mean the OLD traditions, like pre-war era. Something like calling your Christmas Tree non-traditional because it has electric lights on it.
EA has a "loyal gamer fanbase"? You will have to explain that. Battlefield hasn't even had a loyal fan base in over a decade. EA has been universally hated from the beginning.
I quit even paying attention to big games around the time they all started to get watered down for dumbasses, planted with financial booby traps, and pay-to-win... And just generally stale.
But, I am guessing most of the people who would care about there being a girl in the trailer, are probably too young to even remember that there was a time when games *werent* so shitty.
New homes are built to such a shit standard that the foundations start cracking and boards start pulling apart after a couple years. At least the one my parents moved into is - but you can tell the miles of identical houses around it are all built in the same rush, and with the same cheap materials.
*That* certainly doesn't get brought up by the realtor in his pitch. I'd tell him he can keep the 1000 square feet.
Another thing you can tell by walking through these neighborhoods, a lot of the "single-family homes" are actually being used as apartments. In a 4-bedroom, you might have several non-related tenants living there besides the property owner. You might get 15% more square feet, but then you have to split the whole house three ways, to be able to pay for it.
AI will never be "available to the general public." The general public will be subjected to proprietary AI forced upon them by banks, retailers, social media sites, the police, etc. - These systems are not going to be open or transparent in any way, and you will not be able to opt out. To think otherwise demonstrates a lack of understanding of the technology, and of the people implementing it.
Of course, you weren't thinking about that - you needed to find some way to talk about how "government regulations" are "really stupid" and "stifle innovation". (Is that a bird I hear? Sounds like a parrot...) Let me break something to you: Some innovations need to be stifled. Are you aware of the things that happened when society discovered radioactivity? (serious question.) Radioactive materials made their way into all sorts of consumer products. Children were blasted with ungodly amounts of X-rays to see their bones as they tried on shoes at the store. And so we slowly developed regulations on what you could use, when, where, why, and how much. These details are what is completely absent from our AI discussion on Slashdot. These are the details that would comprise any regulation. Without them, you can't even begin a debate on what effect they will have. You can only sling blind, axiomatic, inflexible ideology.
I predict AI will play out much like radiation did. We will see AI shoved into every place it will fit, sometimes with disastrous outcomes. The trickier part is the bad outcomes here are going to be a lot more varied. The way we regulate now tends to look at specific processes within specific industries- and AI has the potential to upend almost any process in any industry. So you can't really "regulate AI" as such. You regulate areas in which AI gets applied. The AI Pandora uses for music recommendations probably doesn't need to be regulated. We probably do need to regulate the AI used for determining who gets a mortgage, or the AI that sets bail for people who are arrested. What form the regulations take, I can't say. Maybe something like limiting what input data the AI can use, although that alone will be inadequate. AI experts would need to be heavily involved in drafting any specific regulations. Maybe the best thing for certain applications is to avoid the use of AI altogether, or to mandate any AI decision can be contested for human review.
I'm not sure that we are at a point in the development of this tech where we can draft meaningful regulations until we see how the problems actually manifest. My concern is the government will act too slowly, and people will feel a lot of pain in the interim period, while corporate apologists drag it on for as many years as they can. That is what history shows us - society's rules always lag behind new developments.
Your Apple Tax dollars at work!
I believe all of the Earth's crust is crust. I don't believe I saw anyone giving moral advice. (Or advice of any kind.) You seem to either not comprehend what you are reading, or don't quite understand what these words mean. Very proficient with the word "pussy" though - at least nobody will mistake you for a "faggot" or a "snowflake". But you might want to brush up on, well, everything else, unless you want to spend the summer between 9th and 10th grade in school.
There's plenty of homeless people riding in cars as well. Especially in CA, with housing costing 10x per month what a car costs, it makes financial sense to vacate your apartment before selling your car. You can sleep in your car, but you can't drive your house. Factoring in the dual-purpose, you could get 20x the bang for your buck paying for a car instead of an apartment unit.
I am guessing a lot of these 'missing' bike riders are the working homeless. Now in Florida, probably Ohio too, the spread wasn't so wide between rent and car payments. But recently housing prices have increased much faster than car prices. Last year they could afford an apartment within biking distance. This year they can't, so they are living (and thus commuting) in their cars.
Californians have been dealing with this for decades now, but the rest of the country is doing its best to catch up in the homelessness business.
I imagine most of the accounts are dead - mine definitely is. Maybe you offered me a job on LinkedIn last year, thinking I would get the message. And the message is still sitting there, unread, nestled between dozens of scams. The situation is so shitty that even the basic drive for hunger couldn't get me to log in. If I've got to wade through the feces manually and (for example) verify a company's physical presence for each and every potential opportunity - the site gives me 0 advantages as a job-seeker, versus something like Craigslist. I now put LinkedIn with Craigslist - sites whose usefulness has been suffocated under the weight of scams.
It may have been smarter for them to avoid adding manufacturing capacity, given that the demand was due to an artificial bubble. Had they opened another factory for example, it would be sitting idle now. That is probably a negative ROI, even without knowing their financials.
I'm sure nVidia pushed hard for it, and pushed the blame for the high prices as well. While fingers were pointing every which way, nobody in the crypto-currency echo chambers online wanted to address the elephant in the room, which is that the whole thing was a bubble. It looks like the DRAM manufacturers might be the only ones who didn't buy the hype.
I couldnt get TWCs web site to load in Firefox for about 4 months this year, even after disabling Adblock and allowing all scripts. I am assuming they fixed it but I have long since replaced my bookmark with Ventusky. I don't look at the forecasts ever but it's 100x better for real-time weather data. And it still would be, even if you had to click through fifty One Weird Tricks to get to it.