Bad beat/Moaning/Venting thread - Wordle Gummidge

[eagle eye]

I hate moving. Been at it all day, just heading for a nap now. Lorry coming at 7 to pick up all the big stuff.
Sooner it's over the better. My doctor and physio are not going to be too happy with me. I got hit by a car a couple of months ago, back is not in great shape and I'm really feeling it right now after all the stuff I lugged over to our new house.
The one good thing that I never realised when we were buying the place is just how beautiful the back garden is, got to relax out there for a short while today. Quiet, private and it's got so many different plants. Gonna take a fair bit of upkeep but well worth it.

[eagle eye]

Just kill me now. Gotta change that attitude to something more positive. Hopefully a nice night and I can sit outside with a few cold beers when I'm done.

[rounders123]

[Lazare]

Wineguys, Lao Lao, Raoul, Zuut,

In Vivino, does 'Ageing - 16' mean the wine matures at 16 years old? See screenshot.

I've started my little collection with that 2016 Meerlust, thanks to Lao Lao for the nudge.

There's a couple of other wines I like that I want to find out if they age, how can I find out? Can I use Vivino?

Vino Nobile de Montepulciano is one.

[Lazare]

And GAB of course.

[oleras]

Yeah, he hooked up with Jenny something, one of his producers when he was back on today FM and they had, I think, two sprogs

Oh don't i know, i was being rhetorical, the cunt never shuts up about it, one of many reasons i stopped listening to him.

[Mellor]

i see SF have nominated Paddy Holohan for South Dublin Mayor

Fair play to him.
He’s not very au fair with politics but he’s very community driven. And an unbelievably nice bloke.

[Raoul Duke III]

Government!

Be very interesting to see who gets what. Particularly interesting to see what job Leo takes. You would have thought Foreign Affairs would be the natural one for a Tanaiste in this type of arrangement but surely Coveney can't be moved out of there at this point in time.

[Raoul Duke III]

Fair play to him.
He’s not very au fair with politics but he’s very community driven. And an unbelievably nice bloke.

au fait

I would have thought being political was part of being a politician myself. Anyway, good luck to him in his meaningless, powerless role.

[Raoul Duke III]

Wineguys, Lao Lao, Raoul, Zuut,

In Vivino, does 'Ageing - 16' mean the wine matures at 16 years old? See screenshot.

I've started my little collection with that 2016 Meerlust, thanks to Lao Lao for the nudge.

There's a couple of other wines I like that I want to find out if they age, how can I find out? Can I use Vivino?

Vino Nobile de Montepulciano is one.

it's probably the kind of thing you learn as you drink more

At a really high level, most wine sold in Ireland is for drinking now. Like 90%+. So drink it now.

Most white wine is best drunk young. There are notable exceptions such as good Riesling, Hunter Valley Semillon, Chablis and some sweet wines.

Red wine benefits more from ageing. But again, a lot of it is duly sold having already spent a few years in the bottle - like that Meerlust or, say, most riojas. You could drink that right now and it would be very nice. But you could drink it in 10 years time and it could be amazing.

I wouldn't be arsed with very specific 'this bottle of 2015 Chateau de Catpiss would benefit from 7-8 years of ageing' advice. A high level chart like this tells you everything you need to know.

how-long-to-cellar-wine.png

[Raoul Duke III]

Oh, and some day you will know the exquisite pain of opening up a very special bottle of wine that you have carefully put away for 10 years+ to savour on a special occasion and discovering it to have turned into rancid piss in the bottle.

[Lazare]

Brilliant, that's the kind of thing I'm looking for. Strangely difficult to find good info online.

Have you a link to that chart? It's difficult to read on the phone.

[Lazare]

au fait

I would have thought being political was part of being a politician myself. Anyway, good luck to him in his meaningless, powerless role.

He didn't land the role, the uproar was due to SF nominating him for it.

May well be the nice guy you say Mellor but you can't excuse the outdated ignorant shite he spouted.

Not fit for public office.

[Mellor]

au fait

I would have thought being political was part of being a politician myself. Anyway, good luck to him in his meaningless, powerless role.

Yeah the iPhone doesn’t really cope with random french phrases too well.
Maybe I should have said “playing politics”. You know the game I mean.
Paddy’s more of a champion of people type. Local council is the right place tbh, power aside.

[Guest]

Fair play to him.
He’s not very au fair with politics but he’s very community driven. And an unbelievably nice bloke.

Nice bloke apart from the whole not Irish enough racist shit!?

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[Guest]

He was indeed 'just asking the question' about why someone non-Indian, non-gay, couldn't run the country. Just asking the unbelievably nice community-driven question. Providing of course the community is straight pasty-Irish.

Will he step down from the council when he finds out red hair isn't Irish?...it came from elsewhere!

Fuckin blowin

[Mellor]

May well be the nice guy you say Mellor but you can't excuse the outdated ignorant shite he spouted.

Which comments?
I know he was suspended a while ago for something he said on the podcast. Refer to a women as a scumbag:

And I just want to say to you, there's a situation that I heard during the week... somebody was underage, the person didn't know they were underage, the girl pursued the guy.
Got whatever she needed, had pictures, had videos, and then said 'I want 10 grand'.

Obviously a silly thing to say publicly without a verified incident to refer to. But I wouldn’t bet that on something like that hasn’t happened.
You may be referring to something else though.


Edit:

Nice bloke apart from the whole not Irish enough racist shit!?

This one I didn’t hear about.

[Guest]

Wineguys, Lao Lao, Raoul, Zuut,

In Vivino, does 'Ageing - 16' mean the wine matures at 16 years old? See screenshot.

I've started my little collection with that 2016 Meerlust, thanks to Lao Lao for the nudge.

There's a couple of other wines I like that I want to find out if they age, how can I find out? Can I use Vivino?

Vino Nobile de Montepulciano is one.

My guess is that ageing in that context means how long it was in the barrel/vat before bottling. As RDIII said 90% of stuff actually gets worse with age. I somehow had a 20+ year old supermarket Bordeaux in my stash and it was disgusting. Cellartracker is good for drinking windows but it doesn't have the simple scan system that Vivino has. It suggests that Italian red will be at its best after maybe 5 years-10 years.

[Lao Lao]

Government!

Be very interesting to see who gets what. Particularly interesting to see what job Leo takes. You would have thought Foreign Affairs would be the natural one for a Tanaiste in this type of arrangement but surely Coveney can't be moved out of there at this point in time.

Leo for Business and Enterprise as far as I know.

It looks like FF will be taking housing and health which if happens, could be a master stroke by FG as they are two poisoned chalices. They may be able to make some inroads on housing but health will always be a basket case.

[Wombatman]

I mean should the "Big 4" not just be disbanded or declared illegal organisations at this stage........??

https://www.irishtimes.com/business/...ndal-1.4289784

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[oleras]

I will be so pissed off if this new shower do a deal over all the poor part time workers who never even asked for the 350/week to be facing a tax liability come year end.

I can actually feel my BP rising thinking about it.

Bloke i work with telling me yesterday that his daughter got the new iphone, sure isnt she getting 350 /week for a job that paid her 80, shes loaded ! What about the tax says i ? She is a student and wont work next year is her plan, 5er a week jobbie.

[Raoul Duke III]

Housing is maybe a smart one. House building operates in almost unstoppable trends. The trend has been about 30% annual increases for last 5 years, and that will probably continue even if a blind monkey is in charge. So there will be a big increase to point to at the end of the five years. Obv won't make everyone happy due to the absence of free houses for everyone paid by billionaires, but there will be enough there to satisfy a fair few voters. Should be up around 50-60k annual builds by end of the term, which is grand, and with enough surplus properties to satisfy a decent part of social housing demands.

and sure, FF can collapse the economy again leading to mass emigration...problem solved.

I am deeply ambivalent about those fuckers getting their feet under the table again but the art of compromise etc etc

[Hectorjelly]

Here's the 2nd entry chronicling my first EP release, also containing a song about Elon Musk!

[Mellor]

Cellartracker is good for drinking windows but it doesn't have the simple scan system that Vivino has.

CellarTracker uses the Vivino search engine now.
You can scan labels or barcode to find the wine in the CT database. Which has better info imo.


@Laz here’s that graphic full size
https://media.winefolly.com/how-long-to-cellar-wine.png

[Raoul Duke III]

Working all this weekend and next; slightly mad to think something that started with me drawing shapes on a wall in New York to a sceptical audience has now turned into data that enables all aspects of a chunky 12 figures (do the math) worth of investments. Nice to see something through.

[Raoul Duke III]

Leo for Business and Enterprise as far as I know.

It looks like FF will be taking housing and health which if happens, could be a master stroke by FG as they are two poisoned chalices. They may be able to make some inroads on housing but health will always be a basket case.

The ironic thing about health is that they just proved they can do it - when suitably energised, motivated and organised, they can really rise to the challenge.

Mrs D3 was noting that it's all back to the usual turf wars now with nothing getting done.

[rounders123]

Grahan Linehan CANCELLED

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[Dice75]

Selling for WSOP Main Event this year. 1.65 markup as I hear its generally the softest Game going. So 22 x bulltes to cover each Day 1 @ $5k a pop. Selling 80%. DM for payment deets. Min chunks of 20% at $36k each please.

[Raoul Duke III]

I'll take it all

[BennyHiFi]

Here's the 2nd entry chronicling my first EP release, also containing a song about Elon Musk!

Haha... this Elon Musk track is great. Reminds me of Weavie Stonder.

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[Raoul Duke III]

On (1), they did ask for this, there was an application form they had to fill in, no-one just magicked them money

On (2), 350 a week is the minimum wage. There's no tax due on the minimum wage. If someone was earning less before the covid payments then they can't possibly have exceeded the threshold for paying tax.

PRSI and USC

[rounders123]

One of the best things in sport to come out of Covid is tennis players not throwing sweaty towels at ball boys/girls. It was all a bad habit in the first place the superstitious twitchy little bstards.

[RichieM]

The ironic thing about health is that they just proved they can do it - when suitably energised, motivated and organised, they can really rise to the challenge.

Mrs D3 was noting that it's all back to the usual turf wars now with nothing getting done.

Well I think that it helped that it was adequately funded for the first time in a few years - the children’s hospital has been killing the health budget but I wouldn’t say that the health service was unmotivated.

my wife is an ot and there is a huge back log in assessments and therapy - lots of kids have had no therapy in months so there will be long term impact on their development. Some parents and caregivers in serious need of respite too.

all elective, explorative and quality of life procedures were stopped so again a huge backlog and a lot of long term impacts for people who could have had problems detected early. This cleared out the hospitals but we will be back to over capacity instantly.

I am not trying to take away from the incredible effort and results (nursing homes aside) but I would imagine the return to normal will be far more difficult and if we hit a second wave I don’t know if they could take the same measures again.

real positives in changes to gp care being done remotely, electronic prescriptions and hypochondriacs being to afraid to go to hospitals and clog them up.

[Hectorjelly]

Haha... this Elon Musk track is great. Reminds me of Weavie Stonder.

Cheers! Will check him out

[Opr]

TikTok seems super shady

So I can personally weigh in on this. I reverse-engineered the app, and feel confident in stating that I have a very strong understanding for how the app operates (or at least operated as of a few months ago).

TikTok is a data collection service that is thinly-veiled as a social network. If there is an API to get information on you, your contacts, or your device... well, they're using it.

• Phone hardware (cpu type, number of course, hardware ids, screen dimensions, dpi, memory usage, disk space, etc)
• Other apps you have installed (I've even seen some I've deleted show up in their analytics payload - maybe using as cached value?)
• Everything network-related (ip, local ip, router mac, your mac, wifi access point name)
• Whether or not you're rooted/jailbroken
• Some variants of the app had GPS pinging enabled at the time, roughly once every 30 seconds - this is enabled by default if you ever location-tag a post IIRC
• They set up a local proxy server on your device for "transcoding media", but that can be abused very easily as it has zero authentication

The scariest part of all of this is that much of the logging they're doing is remotely configurable, and unless you reverse every single one of their native libraries (have fun reading all of that assembly, assuming you can get past their customized fork of OLLVM!!!) and manually inspect every single obfuscated function. They have several different protections in place to prevent you from reversing or debugging the app as well. App behavior changes slightly if they know you're trying to figure out what they're doing. There's also a few snippets of code on the Android version that allows for the downloading of a remote zip file, unzipping it, and executing said binary. There is zero reason a mobile app would need this functionality legitimately.

On top of all of the above, they weren't even using HTTPS for the longest time. They leaked users' email addresses in their HTTP REST API, as well as their secondary emails used for password resets. Don't forget about users' real names and birthdays, too. It was allllll publicly viewable a few months ago if you MITM'd the application.

They provide users with a taste of "virality" to entice them to stay on the platform. Your first TikTok post will likely garner quite a bit of likes, regardless of how good it is.. assuming you get past the initial moderation queue if thats still a thing. Most users end up chasing the dragon. Oh, there's also a ton of creepy old men who have direct access to children on the app, and I've personally seen (and reported) some really suspect stuff. 40-50 year old men getting 8-10 year old girls to do "duets" with them with sexually suggestive songs. Those videos are posted publicly. TikTok has direct messaging functionality.

Here's the thing though.. they don't want you to know how much information they're collecting on you, and the security implications of all of that data in one place, en masse, are fucking huge. They encrypt all of the analytics requests with an algorithm that changes with every update (at the very least the keys change) just so you can't see what they're doing. They also made it so you cannot use the app at all if you block communication to their analytics host off at the DNS-level.

For what it's worth I've reversed the Instagram, Facebook, Reddit, and Twitter apps. They don't collect anywhere near the same amount of data that TikTok does, and they sure as hell aren't outright trying to hide exactly whats being sent like TikTok is. It's like comparing a cup of water to the ocean - they just don't compare.

tl;dr; I'm a nerd who figures out how apps work for a job. Calling it an advertising platform is an understatement. TikTok is essentially malware that is targeting children. Don't use TikTok. Don't let your friends and family use it.

[BennyHiFi]

Cheers! Will check him out

Only the first album in worthwhile. Very acquired taste but Skam Records put it out so, you know. I love it but others think it's a waste of time.

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[Strewelpeter]

[hotspur]

Here's the 2nd entry chronicling my first EP release, also containing a song about Elon Musk!

Why did you have to go to Vietnam for a month for your new job?

[Opr]

Come on dude. Boredpanda, and a link to a reddit account of a user who mainly writes about his mundane hobbies with no sign of tech brilliance and he is 'reverse-engineering' the most popular app in history and finding secret traps that Google and Apple haven't noticed.

What have Google and Apple got to do with it? TikTok is Chinese based where they are not subject to the same laws. Some of the comments in the thread verify that a 3rd party security company has reported the same findings. Reverse engineering the app isn't that big of a deal, although according to him it is mostly written in machine code so it will take someone with specific skills to understand it. What the app is actually doing from a technical perspective according to him isn't that complicated but no other tech company would dare do it because of the laws that govern the jurisdictions they based in. Surveillance is just a way of life for Chinese tech firms.

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[Opr]

Well here are the research papers documenting the code and each of the use cases outlined.

Do you really think a private app company in China cares about jurisdictional law?

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[eagle eye]

Got through the day. In the new house now. Loving the peace and serenity here, I'm one mile from the centre of the town and I feel like I'm in the middle of nowhere.
I'm gone past the tiredness now and can see myself maybe even watching UFC tonight.
It's my birthday tomorrow so taking the day off. Then finish off cleaning the old place on Monday.

[Opr]

I don't know why they need funding. It seems almost certain from that report that they are owned by the Alibaba group under the hood? I mean in this part of the paper he shows you the exact classes, the data they are collecting and points to classes which clearly show this being the case. They provide the links to download the source code.

https://penetrum.com/tiktok/Penetrum...whitepaper.pdf

To be honest I am not sure that it is a huge amount more than Google/FB collect other than the really concerning reports of them being able to remotely execute code on devices with the app installed. The report points to a data breach which contained all the information described which happened very recently.

With the US currently dismantling laws around personal privacy, I don't trust anyone in regard to data and especially not the big tech firms. Then you are asking me to trust a company that is run from a surveillance state is on the up and up.

Edit - Read the Alibaba bit wrong. They host their servers.

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[Guest]

Hitch , CCP aren’t paying you enough, Sterling work
adults who use Tick Tock deserve to have their privacy traded away tbh, It’s all just pathetic attention seeking , it’s a good tool of subversion, turning people in to thirsty attention whores , degrading their attention spans even more

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[Pat Mustard]

Stephen Donnelly in health

[Guest]

I mean should the "Big 4" not just be disbanded or declared illegal organisations at this stage........??

https://www.irishtimes.com/business/...ndal-1.4289784

They are terrorist organisations
would love a handy number in there all the same, have fuck all relevant qualifications and was pretty poor at maths but I’d say that would be considered a plus point by the looks of it

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[Opr]

There was an interesting report today that Facebook has lost 7 billion in revenue recently due to companies boycotting them. There does seem to be quite a bit of discontent on the internet with many people asking how to decouple from their service but considering they also own Instagram and Whatsapp that is easier said than done for some people. Signal is an interesting option on the messaging front which seems to be the one of choice recommended for people who want to stop using Whatsapp. Completely open-source. I have my doubts though that anything will come of it in the long term as I don't think outside forums on the internet that the general public is that aware or even care that much about any of this at the moment.

[Opr]

I think we agree that the base assumption is that no tech company should be trusted! My doubt is about singling out a Chinese company just because they've made an app that everyone likes and then applying a geopolitical story to it. I'm also a surprisingly huge fan of the app - their algorithms are ridic good at showing you stuff that you actually want to see.

Seems they are rancid good at showing other people what they want to see too!

[Opr]

OPR has sent me deep down the rabbit hole of Lex Fridman podcasts.

This latest one is just fantastic, even if you are not particularly interested on AI many of the insights Joscha Bach shares here are not just insightful and profound but also beautifully and clearly communicated.

I am only a little over halfway through this and have had to rewind multiple times to try and wrap my head around some of the things he is saying. Fascinating listen.

[Solksjaer!]

Did a spot of busking yesterday. I'm a bit rusty but was soon into my stride . CC Sorry it's a FB link. Made 600 euro.

https://m.facebook.com/story.php?sto...00002328802660