Monthly Archives: September 2019

Microsoft is making it difficult to create local accounts in Windows 10

Source: OSNews

Article note: Dark pattern is dark. Microsoft, like every other neo-feudal tech landholder, really wants you in their roach motel.

Windows admins have options to create local or Microsoft Accounts when it comes to the operating system. The initial setup after installation pushes the Microsoft Account option but it was possible up until now to create to a local account instead. Microsoft has made it more and more difficult to create local accounts during initial setup and discouraged users to do so. A report on Reddit suggests that Microsoft has made it more difficult to create local accounts during first run. The user reported that no option to create a local user account was presented during first run on the system Windows 10 was set up on. While there’s nebulous ways to make the local account option reappear, this is clearly designed to push people to online Microsoft account. I personally use an online Microsoft account since I find it easier to manage my various machines, but removing or hiding the option to use a local account is just a user-hostile dick move.

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A student at Karen Pence’s school alleged students cut her dreadlocks. She just took it back.

Source: The Week: Most Recent Home Page Posts

Article note: Didn't we _just_ finish with an episode of "bias-confirming but improbable sounding hate crime creates national outcry, only to turn out to be fictional?"

The Virginia private school student who claimed three classmates pinned her down and forcibly cut off her dreadlocks has now retracted the story.

Reports emerged last week about an allegation from 12-year-old Amari Allen, who is black, that three white sixth-grade boys pinned her down during recess at Immanuel Christian School and cut her dreadlocks while saying "my hair was nappy and I was ugly and I shouldn't have been born," as she told The Washington Post. The story quickly went viral online in part because second lady Karen Pence teaches art part time at the school.

But the Post now reports Allen has told the school that this incident, which was being investigated by the Fairfax County Police Department, did not happen, with her family apologizing in a statement.

"To the administrators and families of Immanuel Christian School, we are sorry for the damage this incident has done to trust within the school family and the undue scorn it has brought to the school," Allen's grandparents said in a statement. "To the broader community, who rallied in such passionate support for our daughter, we apologize for betraying your trust."

The principal of the school, Stephen Danish, confirmed that Allen now says the allegations are false, saying, "We recognize that we now enter what will be a long season of healing."

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CA Governor Signs Bill Allowing College Athletes to Profit from Endorsements

Source: Hacker News

Article note: My desire to eat popcorn and watch this legal battle is still up like D1 pregame hype. The NCAA's position that they are an amateur league is so obviously contradicted by the vast sums of money circulating among everyone but the actual athletes it's funny watching them try to defend it.
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Goodhart’s Law: Are Academic Metrics Being Gamed?

Source: Hacker News

Article note: A very nice presentation of the drum I'm constantly beating, with much clearer data than most. My life would be much easier if I believed the academic publication process was still, on average, producing value, but no, I really just want everyone to shut up and let me spend my time teaching and building experimental apparatus for other people's research.
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Lawsuit: Troubled CenterCourt development defaulted on loans, should be sold

Source: Kentucky.com -- Fayette County

Article note: That building's construction quality was (and still is) a clearly visible garbage fire. Apparently their financial practices were just as bad as their construction practices. I'm not sure that anyone sane would buy the building for anything like the apparent debt.

A troubled mixed-use development near the University of Kentucky campus allegedly has defaulted on more than $8 million in past-due loans. Now, the investor group owed that money wants a … Click to Continue »

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Restaurant in iconic Lexington location has closed after less than a year

Source: Kentucky.com -- Fayette County

Article note: I bet the Herald Leader has this article saved madlibs-style, because nothing will ever be able to make that building economically viable.

One of Lexington’s most unique and largest restaurant buildings is empty again after less than a year. Cowboy Brazilian Steakhouse, which opened last fall, is gone. It’s unclear exactly when … Click to Continue »

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Richard Stallman Resigns from CSAIL and FSF

Source: Hacker News

Article note: Stallman has a lot of ideas that are ...far outside the mainstream... and make him unpleasant, and I'm sympathetic to people who don't want to deal with him as a result. He certainly deserves credit that a bunch of his seeming paranoid ramblings have been proven very right over time, and he probably would be better served being less of a public figure because his eccentricities dilute his ideas. HOWEVER, the specific old 2006-era remark "I am skeptical of the claim that voluntarily pedophilia harms children. The arguments that it causes harm seem to be based on cases which aren’t voluntary, which are then stretched by parents who are horrified by the idea that their little baby is maturing." being used as proof he's irredeemably horrible makes a lot a sense in the context that it was addressing issues like "Probably we shouldn't paint a couple whose ages are (e.g.) 18 months apart and happen to be 16 and 18 with the same brush as an adult trying to fuck prepubescent kids." "Probably we shouldn't treat a 15 year old who sends their friend a racy picture the same as someone filming kids getting raped and selling it to paying customers." Which are _technically_ defending pedophilia within the current legal framework, and also things most of the "woke" people using it as ammunition would agree with. Likewise, his attempt to differentiate Minsky (possibly) doing something unacceptable inadvertently from Epstein doing something unacceptable intentionally and systematically that sparked off the cancel ritual ... though the fact that he stated it so carelessly is why he probably shouldn't be such a public figure.
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When the Culture War Comes For the kids

Source: Hacker News

Article note: That's a psychologically unhealthy onion right there. From the dysfunction of vast metropolitan clusterfucks, to metric-driven childhood, to weird cultural judgements on parents, through the perversity of slogan- progressivism, and back around. Repeatedly. All in one article. It's an interesting read because it makes nice, nuanced passes on the tension between providing children appropriate educations and using the education system for social projects, and between progressive ideals and ham-fisted, knee-jerk 'progressive' policy.
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Anti-Putin Politician Facing Kremlin Raid Uses Drone to Fly Hard Drives Away

Source: Hacker News

Article note: It's largely symbolic (because networks) but it's incredibly cyberpunk.
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Elsevier investigates hundreds of peer reviewers for manipulating citations

Source: Hacker News

Article note: No shit, the list of misconduct in TFA is basically standard operating practice as far as I can tell. Pressuring other researchers to cite your papers, and trying to maximize papers per experiment are basically preconditions for tenure now. Elsiver is an enormous part of how the incentive structure that leads to that kind of behavior came to be.
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