Centrist, progressive, radical optimist. Geophysicist, R&D, Planetary Scientist and general nerd in Winnipeg, Canada.

troyunrau.ca (personal)

lithogen.ca (business)

  • 295 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • The tops of the clouds on the night side of Venus are about -45°C. So it’s not actually glowing like the image implies. But in infrared, you can reprocess the colours to make a delightful image like the above.

    Well, I know you’re implying the greenhouse gases will kill us all. And that might be true, but probably not in ten years.





  • Canadian observer. Two things, and I think they’re related effects.

    Harris is a minority and a woman. The Democrats were convinced they were the party that minorities would automatically vote for. But what they failed to realize was that those same minorities are misogynistic as hell. Like, have you ever been to a Baptist wedding? If you ask them what the role of a woman is…

    The US is also the only first world country where the birthrate is above replacement. But if you look at who are having children, you’ll find that it skews conservative. And they’re passing those values along.







  • Your assertion that the document is malicious without any evidence is what I’m concerned about.

    At some point you have to decide to trust someone. The comment above gave you reason to trust that the document was in a standard, non-malicious format. But you outright rejected their advice in a hostile tone. You base your hostility on a youtube video.

    You should read the essay “on trusting trust” and then make a decision on whether you are going to participate in digital society or live under a bridge with a tinfoil hat.

    In Canada, and elsewhere, insurance companies know everything about you before you even apply, and it’s likely true elsewhere too. Even if they don’t have personally identifiable information, you’ll be in a data bucket with your neighbours, with risk profiles based on neighbourhood, items being insuring, claim rates for people with similar profiles, etc. Very likely every interaction you have with them has been going into a LLM even prior to the advent of ChatGPT, and they will have scored those interactions against a model.

    The personally identifiable information has largely been anonymized in these models. In Canada, for example, there are regulatory bodies like OSFI that they have to report to, and get audited by, to ensure the data is being used in compliance with regulations. Each company will have a compliance department tasked with making sure they’re adhering.

    But what you will end up doing instead is triggering fraudulent behaviour flags. There’s something called “address fraud”, where people go out of their way to disguise their location, because some lower risk address has better rates or whatever. When you do everything you can to scrub your location, this itself is a signal that you are operating as a highly paranoid individual and that might put you in a bucket. If you want to be the most invisible to them, you want to act like you’re in the median of all categories. Because any outlying behaviours further fingerprint you.

    Source: I have a direct connection to advanced analytics within insurance industry (one degree of separation).