I just wish Garmin would get their act together with filtering notifications on iOS. No, I'm sorry, not every app on my phone should be important enough to buzz my wrist. Filtering works fine for Garmin on Android, and apparently for other watch brands on iOS (Coros, Pebble, etc).
The sad thing is all I really need is app-level granularity (slack, you're banned from my wrist!).
If this isn't fixed by the time my 5 year old Fenix fails, I'll move to a different brand that enables filtering.
From what I’ve heard, this is actually a problem with the exposed OS level api’s provided by Apple. Other manufacturers have solved this with on device workarounds. Doesn’t make it better though. I resorted to only the system only notifications (Phone, Texts).
As an end user, all I really care about is that the watch doesn't buzz every single time my long-winded colleague hits <enter> on slack, but that I do see slack notifications when I'm able to look at my phone. And I always want to see my wife's texts on my wrist...
Whether that filtering is in the app, in the OS, or on the watch is not important to me.
I think the way to do this is in iOS itself. I would be shocked if Coros has better notifications tech than Garmin; it’s a way smaller company. I don’t even remember touching notifications when I set up my Coros watch. I think it is just governed by my iOS settings.
iOS has a lot of power to finely control notifications. For example for Slack I just have app badges, while iMessage buzzes. In Mail, only people I’ve added to a small “VIP” list cause a buzz. Otherwise I just look at the Mail app badge to see how many emails have come in.
It takes time to tune it, but it is a very good investment IMO.
For media consumption on the go, I use AR glasses. They are considerably cheaper than the upgrade from an 18Pro to a Duo, and give you an absolutely giant screen.
Which AR glasses? I'm looking more for a travel MacBook virtual display that doesn't weigh so much as the Vision Pro. I would gladly trade away most of the Vision Pro features, but I'm also a huge snob about pixel density so remains to be seen if I can tolerate alternatives.
I bought them to code more effectively on my laptop at my then girlfriend (now wife)'s house. The display was too pixely and distracting for me to code on. However, its plenty good enough for videos.
For videos I mostly use it with my phone (16 pro). Some apps are great (Netflix, AppleTV) and are smart enough to turn off the iPhone screen. Others (VLC, HBO) leave the screen on and burn battery at 2x-3x the rate of AppleTV or Netflix. I can watch AppleTV or Netflix on a coast-to-coast flight an still have plenty of battery left over. With HBO I use probably 20% battery per hour.
A CDN *cache* server is a special case. Netflix cache appliances can accept the risk of running FreeBSD -CURRENT and upgrading half their fleet to the latest snapshot every ~2 weeks and we thank them for battle testing FreeBSD's active development branch in production. It really helps to reveal regressions (both correctness and performance) early in the subsystems and drivers that matter to their usecase.
Most users will neither be willing nor able to accept the trade-offs that Netflix chose.
How is Miami not near the bottom of the list? Every time there is a moderate rainfall, streets flood like crazy. Plus we are in hurricane alley, and some models project that most of the Florida peninsula will be under water in 50-100 years.
I had asked a question "how is Miami not on the list at all" and then realized that the table is actually an image not a table so I couldn't search it.
It's on the list. #34 out of 72, middle of the pack. Within the U.S. Chicago, NYC, Philadelphia, LA, and DC are above it. Houston, Dallas, San Antonio, and Phoenix are below it. They seem to weight heat-stress pretty highly in their rankings, hence why all the TX/AZ cities are at the bottom and are joined by South and Southeast Asia.
The list is a little weird in that I can't find any population-based reason why Miami would even be on it: it's almost the top-10 U.S. cities by population, but missing San Diego or any SF/BayArea city, while Miami & DC are #41 and #22 respectively. If you go by metro area it explains why Miami & DC are there and why Dallas & Fort Worth are condensed, but not why Atlanta is missing and San Antonio is included.
My guess is that Miami and Washington are there for essentially rhetorical reasons. Miami is often talked about as a city that's vulnerable to climate change, and Washington is the capital.
("most of the Florida peninsula will be under water in 50-100 years" is certainly not true, however, Miami would be in a very difficult spot at 2m SLR)
The problem with South Florida isn't that the sea level will rise enough to directly flood everything with seawater but rather with drainage of rainwater. There is already only a small gradient for rainwater to drain off into the ocean. If the ocean level rises even a little then drainage slows and flooding increases. The whole region sits on a karst substrate so dikes aren't effective; they'll need active pumping.
Yes, what's your point? That doesn't refute the prediction that even a slight sea level rise will cause more frequent flooding in South Florida due to slower drainage of rainwater.
My point is that while most of Florida won't be constantly underwater in 2100, significant parts of it will be underwater more often than they are now unless there are major, expensive upgrades to flood control infrastructure. While the original claim might have been overstated there are likely serious problems coming that will hit Florida harder than most other states.
Skip forward / back is so janky and annoying. Eg, left or right on the remote wheel moves the timeline, but doesn't change the play position until you press the center button. I wish there was an option to skip immediately.
However, Strike 3 argues that this is no ordinary home pirate, using the timing of the downloads as evidence. On March 20, 2025, the porn producer’s general counsel first emailed Meta’s lawyers with forensic evidence of BitTorrent activity on the tech giant’s corporate IP addresses.
“Just hours later, Strike 3 first recorded BitTorrent infringement on John Doe’s residential IP Address,” the motion reads.
“This may suggest that Meta desired to shift infringing activity to this hidden residential IP Address in order to prevent further detection,”
Seems like there are 2 different reads to that. (a) is like they say, and Meta was using porn for AI training or something else official. Or (b) that he was personally downloading porn either at the office or a corp VPN and was told to stop by their corp It folks..
I've seen anti terrorist police appear at offices because certain executives were trading so much porn they assumed there must be messages hidden in it.
The noise has always been about the UN private network which is apparently absolutely full of anything you might ever want.
So the 'anti terrorist police" are monitoring porn transfer quantity specifically because they think messages might be hidden in multi-terabyte media transfers? What part of this story is even adjacent to reality.
It's Meta so no doubt they're lying and used it to train virtual girlfriends for adolescents or something heinous.
But I wonder if there is software like Sonarr / Radarr / Lidarr / etc for this media... I made Radarr automatically download insane quantities of movies by following actors on it, I had to stop doing that!
Yeah but then if you're trying to replicate Spotify functionality, then you'd need a lot of "dark" tracks so that you could listen to the ones you want to listen on a whim.
When I worked for office with about 40 employees in 2001 or so, the FBI came to our office to arrest a guy using I think Limewire over our high speed internet access to share music and videos. It may be so common these days they only crack down like that on really egregious abuse.
Around that same time my own brother was working at the second largest record label in the world and their own servers were hacked and serving about 1/3 of global warez downloads.
Law enforcement didn’t get involved and nobody did shit about it.
Not even the last time that company was massively hacked. ;)
The RIAA still has insane amounts of power both political and actual. They got away with successfully suing an ISP for billions over of what their customers downloaded and only lost on appeal. They've shaken down several other ISPs for settlement money to avoid going to court. Lately they've also been going after stream rippers, AI start ups, and archive.org
Cox v. Sony Music went all the way to the Supreme Court. The lawsuit started in a Virginia US District Court in 2018 and the Supreme Court opinion was in 2026. [1][2]
The raid being due solely to music copyright infringement is really the most likely situation. There's no need to imply it was anything else.
For example, in 2009 I worked at a record store that got raided due to such claims. The RIAA's informant claimed he had seen people selling hidden bootlegs, which absolutely wasn't happening, and that was all they needed to have cops raid the store, arrest several people and cart off boxes of not-bootlegged, sold-by-major-CD-distributors CDs. Court dates followed and the case was eventually dismissed (or settled due to being more convenient than continuing the case? I can't remember), but it still took time, money, and lawyers. And this was in 2009, when the recording industry wield less power than in 2001.
(I was running late for work that day or else I would have ended up arrested too, since I was one of the managers scheduled then. Thank god I was running late!)
I don’t know, rolled into work at 10 and only saw they were giving him the perp walk to the car and I only heard about the details from coworkers, wasn’t close to him.
This is crazy. Worked at a national ISP/telecom and one of the directors openly had a seedbox and was torrenting massive amount of things. Chalked it up as the poors being held to different standards as this person had a close relationship with one of the executives.
You are most likely correct but that sounds less fun. Also they can do it much smarter way. Just ask these companies for content so they can detect it and prevent copyright infringement
I mean basically that. If you hit a corporate IP, unless they have flow level logging or you have very extensive timestamps, then the game ends, company says they've enacted new training or controls, but they can't identify a specific person and it's not their fault.
Essentially - this is not a suggestion.
Residential ip's map to a specific person, and it's a lot harder for them to deflect and say I'm not responsible for my own Internet connection
Since when does every household member have their own residential IP?
Even in single households that's not true (friends visiting, on-and-off partner, one night stands, helping the neighbor out cause their wifi is broken, ...)
And I don't know the logging + data retention requirements for CGNAT.
Most devices should be using temporary dynamic IPv6 addresses, for this exact reason. I believe this is the default on most Linux distributions, not sure about others.
I felt quite let down when I realised Fedora which bills itself as "free & private" didn't use temporary addresses by default and I had to go hunting for configuration files to enable it as it's not exposed in the UI either.
From the ISPs perspective, companies are still just as responsible for whatever takes place over their connection. From the law's perspective, the person responsible is whoever a jury can be convinced did it.
In cases where the company wifi is open or places like hotels the person who did it could be long gone. Unsecured residential wifi connections aren't much of a thing anymore, but I've seen a lot of people lending out their residential connection when they airbnb their vacation homes to strangers.
>Unsecured residential wifi connections aren't much of a thing anymore<
most residential wifi are not very secure, put the black hat on for a second, then send a message telling a user there is something they cant have; cant do; or will lose, unless they log in, or sign in. then you see the joe password, and many times its the same password for everything.
I've lived in and around Cambridge for a very long time now. I've met a lot of Cambridge undergrads and graduates. Let me tell you: they are a mixed bag.
Don't misunderstand me: there are some very smart people at Cambridge University. Very smart indeed. And I think if you took any cohort from Cambridge Uni versus a similar cohort from another university you'd certainly find that, against most universities, the Cambridge cohort would be smarter on average. In fact the place is genuinely awash with very smart people literally everywhere.
But that doesn't mean there aren't plenty of people that went to Cambridge who clearly found a way to blag their way through the interview process that may not have been particularly closely correlated with their intellect. The same will be true of Meta, Google, etc. I swear, the interview processes at these companies are probably more of a sop to the egos of company leadership and people who already work there than they are any more effective at filtering down to good talent than less byzantine and overwrought hiring processes.
I went to a similar school. It depended on major. If it was a major that the school was known for, say the top ranked CS school...then it was 100% that a grad was someone who was noticeably much, much smarter than most people. If they were at the same school but in a much less well recognized major (at my school...let's say history), then they were much closer to the average. If you are seeing students at Cambridge who are in prestige majors but without obvious skills...something else is happening and it isn't good. Otherwise, you are probably just seeing the differences between different majors.
I've worked with and written papers with enough people from top ranked CS schools (multiple from top 5 on csrankings) while I was at a top 100 and it is a very mixed bag. There were plenty of idiots in the top 5 and plenty of geniuses in the top 100s.
I'd agree that average shows a difference but I don't think it is nearly as big as people act. Even the intra-university variance isn't what people would think (top universities have a very narrow distribution while lower ranks have wider). The trend follows, but the variance of the variances is not that large.
I agree with your point, but UK students also have to get very high grades in standardized national exams. That’s by no means a perfect measure of intelligence either, but it’s not something you can just blag your way through in an interview.
20 years ago, this wasn't the case (at least in tech in SV). If you are seeing this today, its because of something (or somethings) specific. Could be the general increase in size of the companies or industry, a problem with recruiting or a problem with the universities that feed into that industry. Maybe a combination of those things. But 20 years ago, you could tell who worked in tech and who didn't.
I still hold the line on interviewing. Maybe some don’t. I am sure it is true. My team us too small with too much responsibility to tolerate mediocrity to any real extent
Today's Torrentfreak article is about "an executive" and references the article you have linked thus:
This is not the first time a Reality Labs employee has surfaced in the case. Earlier this summer, Meta confirmed that a former data engineer at the division was behind a Comcast connection linked to 97 films.
Close reading of both allows for a not spelled out possibility ... that "the data engineer" is also the son of the first mentioned "an executive".
Or not - still much is under the fog of reporting ongoing partial disclosures.
I doubt executives even go through the typical employee interview hazing. It's more vibes and "do you know the right people or go to the right prestigious school?"
man, that's grand, especially the last paragraph. I definitely should be less modest with my resume :)
"Stat reported that in 2017, Richard Graydon self-published a book titled The Genetic Risks of Cancer: The Effects of DNA, Genomics and Inheritance on Aging and Survival.” The book described Graydon as an oncologist who had served as a chief medical officer in the biotech and drug development industry. It had no reviews on Amazon.
In October 2022, Atossa Therapeutics, a Seattle-based biotech, announced it had hired Richard Graydon as its interim chief medical officer.
“We are privileged to welcome Richard to Atossa, where his deep experience in CAR-T cell therapy fits well with our current strategic direction as we explore our opportunities in cell therapy,” Steven Quay, Atossa’s CEO, said in a statement at the time.
In March, Immix announced hiring Graydon, calling him a “board-certified hematologist-oncologist with over 20 years of experience in clinical development, most recently at Merck & Co. and Johnson & Johnson, where he led new and supplemental new drug applications and biologics license applications for 7 approved drugs including Darzalex, Carvykti, Keytruda, and Imbruvica.” Stat noted that these are some of the bestselling cancer medicines in the world."
Executive (and upper management) hiring is much more about owning and using risk, getting the management unit (your part of the org) all aligned and singing the same tune, and for executives showing that you've done this successfully across distinct business units (eg sales and engineering).
There's then a much more serious alignment pass.
Relationships can and do pre-vouch for big pieces of this such as alignment - if you've worked with someone for a decade, you are probably mission aligned.
is "executive" a well defined term for american corporate law? like "a person who can allocate funds from the master bank account without approval" or something like that?
Not really, It's just another term for upper management. It's just shorthand for any employee whose title begins with "Chief" or has "Executive" in it (among others like Chairman, President, etc).
Usually, people who can make large decisions for the business without approval from higher-level employees.
Does anyone honestly believe that Zuck doesn't have his own history with filesharing? Any computer nerd from that time would have deep knowledge of filesharing.
Just tell yourself that they rejected you because they thought you had too strong a moral compass and you wouldn't click with the company's overall lack of ethics
> ...you need average folks who are going to STFU and get the unfun, unsexy tasks done.
This task might have been the sexiest work available at Meta, and there's nothing average about a guy that can single-handedly "process" 2,973 porn vids.
From TFA: "Strike 3 suggests the downloads are consistent with work to make the headset compatible with adult films"
> The company logged all BitTorrent activity detected from the executive’s connection, which was nearly 20,000 files.
> This includes VR adult titles made for Meta’s Quest headset. Strike 3 suggests the downloads are consistent with work to make the headset compatible with adult films.
> As recently as August 25, Strike 3 says it recorded more than 150 daily downloads, from multi-language “Mega Packs” of TV shows, movies, software and books to what it describes as AI-generated pornography and VR adult films. That included nearly a dozen of its own titles.
Why was torrenting needed anyway? Meta could’ve easily reached out to adult media providers to work on VR headset compatibility under an NDA. Or hired a third party contractor to do it.
It’s much more expensive. You as a consumer can buy a movie for $5 with a DVD on sale. But tos generally don’t include commercial activities. If you reach out to the film studio to get their permission, they can charge you anywhere from $10K to $1M+ for same thing.
And I’m sure meta paid for some specific content but they generally wouldn’t want to set a precedent where they paid everyone.
Meta wants to make their service compatible with meta vr headsets. They don’t require ongoing access to the content. The media vendor would also benefit from this, so an agreement is in the interest of both parties.
> But tos generally don’t include commercial activities
I can't think of any ToS that prohibit a device manufacturer from testing whether the content plays on their device. That's literally why anyone buys content - to play it on their device.
How would they enforce those anyway? And how would being sued for that be worse than being sued for torrenting?
Because that would have been the right way to do it, and if they do it right even once, they can't say "We DiDn'T KnOw aNy BeTtEr" or whatever excuse they fall back to.
> "In short, this is a lot for one person to torrent on an average day, particularly one who has a demanding job," Strike 3 writes. The company believes the pattern makes more sense as AI training data or research.
I hope they drag Meta hard and get every penny for this.
Seems plausible. The material contains many hours of highly detailed human interaction plus I don’t expect Meta would have moral objections given their track record.
I'm not a fan of joking about those efforts. The people doing that work to catch predators and prevent their evil from reaching the general public are heroes.
I'm not a lawyer, but in my view copyright violations center around distribution, not necessarily the method by which a work is obtained
e.g. if someone is reciting a poem they wrote in a public park, and I make a recording of that recitation, I have not violated their copyright in doing so, however I might violate their copyright by reconstructing that poem and then distributing it
As in all cases it depends on jurisdiction. For example where I am performers have a right to not be recorded so you may in fact not make such recording, you didn’t not necessarily violate copyright but you violated related rights.
And likewise if you distribute any sort of copy of the recording you made you are violating at least one if not more copyrights.
where I live, anything in public view is allowed to be filmed/recorded, which is how the news can record things on the street without getting a release from those that they filmed, and they certainly distribute those recordings
If the news reporter said "Someone at a park played this 4 minute copyrighted song, and today's top story is just us showing you the recording" I'd bet that would be illegal where you live.
> however I might violate their copyright by reconstructing that poem and then distributing it
My argument is that the recording itself is not a copyright violation, not that distributing such a recording couldn't be construed as one (however I disagree on principle with that being illegal as well, as it puts an undue burden on the exercise of free speech, which should include the ability to accurately and entirely recite what I had experienced in a public place).
Which is why torrenting is the dumbest way to do this, since every downloader is also an uploader. That is what gets torrenters locked up. It is possible to leach only, but its not the default mode, and if this guy was broadcasting his IP address, then he was seeding... distributing.
The potential output. You train on movies and animation and you get a model that can
- produce your own movies/animation
- identity movies/animation from context
- identify actors/characters and cross-reference them in other works
You apply these parallels with porn, a more anonymous and intimate setting, and you can see how the kinds of results can be more morally dubious. And that's before getting into if the kinds of porn being trained on is even legal in your given jurisdiction.
The second read, (b), is irrelevant with respect to Meta's liability for the downloads before the switch to a residential IP, i.e., the downloads that prompted the email to Meta's lawyers
I HATE it when a company does a staged rollout of something after making a big announcement. If you're going to announce something, then don't stage the rollout. Its off by default after all..
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