Call that tin foil hat syndrome or whatever.

Racism. It’s racism and xenophobia.

I have an idea about why they’d come to a weird conclusion like that:

A “hot” topic like that might have outsized participation. That is, a single post about the topic may have a huge number of comments compared to an every day post. They don’t have methodology to differentiate between a rare-but-popular topic and an “every day” topic.

Just another example of how their poor methodology allows poor conclusions.

There seem to be three categories for how podcasts deal with ad spots.

Some podcasts mark their ads inline by using Chapter Markers. For example, ATP marks its ads by putting them in a new chapter with a name like “Ad: X”. In theory, you could have a player that skips any chapter who’s name begins with "Ad: ", though I don’t know of any existing apps that do that. Unfortunately, the number of podcasts using chapter markers seems to be a small portion of the podcasts I listen to, so this wouldn’t be very useful.

Another method that could work on some podcasts that don’t use chapter markers is identifying a delineating tone. Using ATP as an example again, every ad spot starts with the same jingle, and ends with the same jingle. In theory, an app could skip the delineated sections. Mind you, this would require work from the user to set up (or it could be crowdsourced): you would have to tell the app what specific sound snippet delineates the ad read. Luckily, many podcasts seem to be structured in this way, with a clear audio cue to delineate ad spots.

Then, you have really free-form podcasts where the hosts may just say, in everyday speech, something like “time for ads”, and the ads will insert. Sometimes it’s always the same phrase (e.g., the use of the phrase “the money zone” on MBMBAM), but that’s not always the case (e.g., there is seemingly no consistent verbiage in the Aunty Donna Podcast). This category is the most difficult to deal with.

In summary, I don’t know of any existing apps that enable skipping ads for any of these three categories. Of the three categories, one is very easy to implement, one less easy, and one quite difficult. All potential solutions would require a shared/crowd-sourced database of which category each podcast falls into, at the least.

Correct.

Pi hole does not work for YouTube (or Twitch or many others). It doesn’t work for services who distribute ads from their own servers.

If you had Android instead of iOS you may have been able to use an ad-free youtube client and cast to TV, but if you’re streaming on the TV, or from iOS, I don’t know how you’d go about blocking ads.

Oh man! I had ripped them to mp3 but they sit on my phone as single 45 minute files. I tend to listen all the way through but being able to seek to specific songs would be great.

Thanks!

I suspect that the way they came to that conclusion was: any post mentioning one of those groups, that also had a negative sentiment rating, meant that sentiment was directed at that group. Which is horribly dishonest. What’s more likely is someone to be angry (which registers as negative sentiment) about those groups being mistreated or what have you. By the naive approach they seem to have taken, that’s indistinguishable from being mad at that group.

Also, the methodology they describe, and the conclusions they come to don’t align. They don’t describe any methodology by which they could determine that the identities are being attacked. It would be like if they concluded some cause-and-effect relationship but their methodology had absolutely no way of establishing a causal relationship in the data.

I don’t follow. When you say magnetic cover, do you mean some of the newer models? Also, what does pressing the button to unlock it do? Does that turn on wifi or something? I have to press a button to turn my Kindle 4 “on” (aka remove the screensaver and show my book) but that doesn’t cause an issue.

I have a Kindle paperwhite without ads, worth paying extra imo.

Pro tip: if you leave off wifi for long enough, the ads seem to expire and they’re permanently replaced by some generic pencils image or something. And, since having wifi on can cause the kindle to overwrite your cover images, I sync with calibre over USB anyway. I have the ad-supported Kindle 4 from 2011 and haven’t had ads on it since 2012.

It’s upsetting. I’ve worked on projects that have received NSF funding before, and if the final result was this? I’d never be able to secure funding again.

Reading the responses there is sickening. No humanity. Everyone is making fun of them, saying its deserved, saying its efficient or smart, saying they’re being “treated like royalty”, calling immigrants “boat people”, calling them rapists, suggesting to sink it.

I don’t understand how people are so evil. The people doing this are evil, but they’re profiting and maintaining power because of these actions; the people going out of their way to voice support are getting nothing out of it except perverse joy. Absolutely disgusting.

So in order to discourage crossing at non-official crossings, the only answer is passive barriers.

Completely visible barriers would do the trick.

You’ve somehow, again, managed to miss the point: the purpose was not just deterrence, the purpose was to hide them and cause unexpected harm. I’m not using booby trap to evoke any legality relating to the word; I’m using the word to evoke the horrendously inhumane use of hidden weapons meant to cause harm to those who accidentally stumble upon them.

You’re defending a horrific practice in the guise of it being a necessary evil, when in all actuality, it’s just one horrific out of many not-horrific implementations of something that you’re overtly in favor of.

For $500k USD, you can get the low quality ArXiv article; for free, you can have this high quality teardown of said article.

Thank you for the amount of effort this took to put together. I’ve done only a quick skim but I’m going to give it a full read. Some stuff that definitely stood out to me is: the horseshoe theory nonsense; and the “rude words mean evil person” nonsense. Use of charged words or negative sentiment don’t make you bad or wrong; arguably, negative sentiment is the only rational response to a lot of the topics at hand.

There is no legal distinction.

Using legality as a gauge for morality is not always the best thing to do, especially when these are law enforcement agencies operating entirely within the law.

no where are barbwire or “razorwire” considered a “booby trap.”

So you’re being wilfully obtuse. Nowhere was anyone implying the use of barbed wire is what makes it a booby trap. Every single time it was mentioned, it was clear: it is a booby trap because it is a purposefully hidden device meant to cause harm to those who stumble upon it by accident.

It also does matter the distinction between razor wire and barbed wire. Barbed wire you can hold in your hand. You can grip it, move your hand along it, and indeed are unlikely to be very harmed by encountering it; it is designed as an unpleasant deterrant, not a dangerous one. Razorwire, on the other hand, is designed to cause harm: every part of it is dangerous, and an encounter with it would result in deep lacerations.

But again, it could be barbed wire and my point would stand: the concealment of it is what makes it a booby trap, and what makes it a problem.

“Booby trap” is a description of its concealedness. These are concealed, on purpose. That’s the issue.

Moreover, they’re not barbed wire, they’re razor wire. There’s a massive difference between barbed wire and razor wire.

Oh good god. I had given them the benefit of the doubt and assumed there was no way an actual professor would be any of the names on it. I figured such poor work could only be explained by being ignorant undergrads. I genuinely would question their previous work if they are comfortable publishing this garbage.

This is downright shameful. I’d be embarassed to be a student of these profs, or of the department.

Now I’m genuinely curious if they embezzled some of the NSF money, or are otherwise being paid for this? I extremely rarely take up the whole “paid shill” angle, because frankly it’s almost never the case, but how in the everloving shit would these people produce and publish such trash and not feel embarassed?

but I wonder whether some form of dehumidification specifically, rather than just cooling, could also aid survival?

The issue is that in general, dehumidification is energy intensive, just as cooling is. In fact, one of the best ways to dehumidify air is to cool it down. Other non-mechanical solutions, like chemical solutions (e.g., dry hygroscopic material with large surface area) don’t have an energy cost during their use, but they have an energy cost in their production and renewal. For example, to dry the hygroscopic material back out to recycle it and re-use it, you must supply a lot of heat energy.

I would be interested in an energy consumption comparison though, between: cooling air to keep it under the red area of the curve; dehumidifying air to keep it under the red area of the curve; and some combination of the two (as most air conditioning units do). It may be the case that dehumidifying is less energy intensive.

It’s a grift on supposed support for “data-driven” analyses. It’s just a specultive opinion piece. Its data handling and analysis is anything but academic.

The stated goal is killing the Ukrainian identity, a.k.a. genocide.

Is it? Can you point me to anywhere that that’s the stated goal?

Never has the stated goal included wanting to genocide Ukrainians. To say that’s the case is to pretend your imagination is reality.

As someone who did some natural language processing research in undergrad, they obviously have no idea what they’re doing. To get meaningful data you need^[1] to remove words such as “the”, “is”, “it”, etc. And that’s not the only normalization you need to do.

What’s offensive for something claiming to be an academic paper is their lack of explanation of their data processing techniques. Meaningful conclusions can only be made if your data is reasonable. And to make sure you have meaningful data, especially when the source is extremely noisy human-generated online comments, you need to do several things to process your data before you can feed it into an analysis. The goal of publishing academic research is not only to publish a result, but to publish methodology to enable independent reproducibility: if you have the paper, and the data, you should be able to follow the methods and come to the same conclusions; if you can’t, the paper’s bad. Yes, these details are boring, and a lot of people will put them in an appendix instead of in the main body of the paper, but if you’re being honest you do provide these details.

They also don’t even pretend to be objective; the paper reads more like a speculative opinion piece on sociology than it does a “data-driven” paper. Their assumptions drive their analysis and thus their conclusions. Moreover, when they attempt to make the distinction between TOXICITY and SEVERE_TOXICITY, they are not making these objective categories: the definitions they give are pure air and the distinction between the two categories is purely subjective.

It’s honestly an embarassment; I wouldn’t want my name on a paper of such poor quality. I wouldn’t want my university to be named on a paper of such poor quality (nor would I think the university would want themselves to be named on such a paper).

Either these are genuinely ignorant undergrads who don’t realize that they’re producing wildly questionable and meaningless “research”, or they’re dishonest grifters taking federal taxpayer money^[2] and producing garbage.

Being published in ArXiv is not automatically a bad thing; but it makes me wonder if they were rejected from peer-reviewed journals. There’s no argument that they didn’t want to or were unable to spend money to submit to a “real” journal since they are receiving outside funding.