Am I the only one who finds in bad taste to use "Epstein victims demand release ..." in the game?
Is rape and pedophilia already normalized and I didn't notice?
Maybe the game should have a kind of "trigger warning" on its start screen, telling you that it incorporates current news. Not everyone will read the blog, and few people click the "about" button before trying a basic game.
Or Memphis, which is smack dab in the middle of a permanently Republican supermajority state, yet has three times the murder rate and twice the robbery rate of NYC.
Is there a charitable explanation for why people cherrypick a single homicide in a metro of 8 million people and somehow act like it's proof for the downfall of liberal democracy?
Especially when by most relevant metrics, illiberal democracy performs dramatically worse?
Because you can gauge how you feel when you walk through the cities and realize something is off with this narrative. I suspect a lot of crimes aren’t tracked or classified properly in the data we see from cities in blue states, to support their policies. Or that victims are exhausted by the lack of prosecution and sentencing, and stop reporting things.
> I suspect a lot of crimes aren’t tracked or classified properly
People don't under-report or misclassify homicides.
> when you walk through the cities and realize something is off with this narrative.
I happen to live in one of those war-torn anarchist cities that was claimed by Fox and friends to be an open charnel pit back in 2020, and I assure you, there is something off with a narrative.
Specifically, the narrative that my city is a lawless hellscape.
That narrative (along with the sudden and immediate need for the military to be illegally deployed in it) is back, by the way.
> People don't under-report or misclassify homicides.
They do. I’ve seen games like changing the rules by which deaths are counted as homicides and when. For example by requiring certain things are proven before it can be counted in a reported stat.
And this happens on such a regular and systemic, and party-lines nature, so that all these liberal cities consistently undercount homicides by such incredible margins, despite all their police forces leaning heavily towards authoritarian-right?
Do you have any proof for this, or is this a 'the earth is flat' sort of assertion? Can I just as confidently assert that it's actually the Republican-ran states that dramatically doctor and undercount homicide stats?
Maybe Memphis actually has 10x the homicide rate of NYC...
You seem to be living in a distant parallel world.
Here is how it looks like on the actual world: urban centers are dominated by Democrats in almost every state. The leniency regarding criminals comes from Democrats, specially regarding violent criminals.
Cities only prosecute misdemeanors, and have no control over felony investigations or prosecutions. Police departments in all cities politically lean hard-right.
The state and the PD has far more influence over access to firearms and serious crime than a city's politics do. A city's authority is largely limited to handing out parking tickets and graffiti citations.
And republican supermajority states have never had any issue overriding any municipal legislature or policies that they don't like. It's as easy as drafting a piece of legislature for them. Municipalities don't enjoy even the illusion of sovereignty, or, really, any codified rights in the US.
----
And if you think it's the cities; fault, why is the homicide rate outside of cities in deep-Republican states so high? Missouri, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, the Carolinas... All have a horrible state-wide violent crime problem. How many more decades of Republican supermajorities will they need to bury the myth that Republican policies reduce crime?
Your assumptions are incorrect: felony prosecution is not outside local control, and police politics are irrelevant.
How many times a PD arrests a criminal then a judge later releases? That criminal with 30-year history would never be free if judged in a rural county instead of urban NYC or Charlotte.
The real drivers are prosecutorial policies driven by political priorities.
And we all know that who sides with criminals most of the time are the Democrats.
You seem to be describing the same "boiling frog" idea that Gramsci had of the "Long March through the Institutions", the takeover of a society without need to resort to violence, slowly occupying institutions (government departments, universities, arts, media, schools, corporations, etc) to decide the direction.
> We hear you, and want to clear things up! This is from an experiment to improve video quality with traditional machine learning – not GenAI. More info from @YouTubeInsider here:
> No GenAI, no upscaling. We're running an experiment on select YouTube Shorts that uses traditional machine learning technology to unblur, denoise, and improve clarity in videos during processing (similar to what a modern smartphone does when you record a video)
> YouTube is always working on ways to provide the best video quality and experience possible, and will continue to take creator and viewer feedback into consideration as we iterate and improve on these features
Love the "[company] is always working on ways to provide the best..." that's always in these explanations, like "you actually just caught us doing something good! You're welcome!"
All of which is pretty reasonable, especially for shorts, which are meant to be thrown directly in the trash after being used to collect some ad revenue anyway, right?
This outrage feels odd, TV has "improved" movies for ages, youtube doing it with machine learning is the same idea, are we really upset because an ear looks a bit clearer?
No, people are upset because Youtube is editing their content without telling them. If they really thought this was a high value add they could have added an enhance button to let creators opt in, as has been done elsewhere. I wouldn't like it if HN started "optimizing" the wording my comments without telling me, even if it made them better along some metric.
You’re conflating editing with rendering, YouTube didn’t overwrite creators's uploads, it applied an ML filter in the streaming/transcode pipeline, the same layer that already resizes, compresses, and tone-maps. That's not "editing my content" any more than your TV's sharpness setting edits a film, An "Enhance" toggle/label would be good UX, but calling it silent edits misdescribes what's happening
PS: this isn't "generative AI" It's basic ML enhancement (denoise/sharpen/tone-map)
"Editing" implies they are applying some kind of editorial change. From what I've seen it's a sharpening/upscaling filter to improve visual quality. If your issue is that Youtube is changing the quality of the video, well, they have been doing that since the very first video every uploaded to Youtube. All Youtube videos are compressed, they have always had that ugly softness to them.
