2024-05-05


Horseshit


Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering

Religion / Tribal / Culture War and Re-Segregation

TechSuck / Geek Bait

  • and knowledge of SDL, pygame, openCV, and Numpy data structure layout A 100x speedup with unsafe Python

    In any case, I'd be surprised if that many people use SDL from Python for this specific issue to be broadly relevant. But I'd guess that numpy arrays with weird layouts come up in other places, too, so this kind of trick might be relevant elsewhere. The code above uses "the C kind of knowledge" to get a speedup (Python generally hides data layout from you, whereas C proudly exposes it.) It also, unfortunately, has the memory (un)safety of C - we get a C base pointer to the pixel data, and from that point on, if we mess up the pointer arithmetic, or use the data after it was already freed, we're going to crash or corrupt data. And yet we wrote no C code - it's all Python.

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security

  • The horrible truth about shaken baby syndrome cases.

    Back in 2008, the Wisconsin Court of Appeals became the first to overturn an SBS conviction, writing that there was “fierce disagreement” among doctors and “a shift in mainstream medical opinion” about the certainty of the diagnosis. Last year, a New Jersey appeals court barred the admission of evidence about shaken baby syndrome, calling it “junk science.” Yet elsewhere, hundreds of parents and caregivers continue to be prosecuted based on the same medical theory. A review of more than 1,400 appellate rulings between 2008 and 2018 found that only 3 percent of SBS convictions were overturned, a far lower rate than in other types of cases. The reality is that in parts of the country, evidence of the telltale triad of symptoms won’t warrant an arrest—but in other parts, it can literally amount to a death sentence.

World

  • Georgia rocked by protests as government pushes Putin-style 'foreign agent' bill

    The ruling Georgian Dream party is trying to force through a “foreign agent” law, likened by critics to a measure introduced by Russian President Vladimir Putin to quash dissent. The draft law, which has passed the second of three votes, would require organizations in the former Soviet country that receive more than 20% of their funding from abroad to register as “foreign agents” or face crippling fines. critics say the intended target of the legislation is Georgia’s independent media and civil society organizations, ahead of elections in October in which Georgian Dream, whose popularity is waning, is desperate to keep power.

  • Cuba sentences 22-year-old to 15 years in prison for posting videos of protests

Russia Bad / Ukraine War