#I'm Speechless

[softiedingo]

[breegadey]

holy fucking shit

[jfleamont]

Look at what the wonderful @constancezin showed me! Lily's dress is based on the last one in this post I made earlier, and she asked me to post this.

I'm in awe, it's so beautiful I could cry. And James looks so handsome, too! Thank you for letting me show the world this beauty ❤️

[narcoticwriter]

... this is supposed to be a Nigerian?

This is supposed to be a Nigerian?

You can't even tell by the design of the clothes he's wearing, let alone his skin color.

I don't know which higher-up in Genshin's art department and development is allergic to melanin or simply portraying certain cultures well, but come on now. Be serious, Hoyoverse. Be for real.

I don't like putting this on blast as I just want to exist in peace, but as someone who's not only a casual history enthusiast, but also happens to be ethnically Nigerian and has some Yoruba blood, this is fucking abysmal.

[anameistoohard]

Broken(?) Emotions: An Unexpected Part Two

Sometimes I convince myself something is "just a me thing" and then get surprised when other people say they experience the same thing. I genuinely thought people wouldn't know what we were talking about.

Thank you to the folks who made us realize bpd is another thing we should look into. I've only done a cursory look so far, but what I saw was, well... relatable ^_^'

(Part 1)

[physical-manifestation-of-spite]

UHM. I'M PRETTY SURE I JUST GOT A HANDDRAWN PIECE OF MY ARTHUR AND JOHN DESIGN FROM THE LOVELY @potato-lord-but-not WITH THE REST OF MY ORDER???? I'M SO BLOWN AWAY. WOW. DUDE. I'M SO TOUCHED. WHAT.

[slapthebass]

Amazing source video by @castleofsand__ on IG

DIR EN GREY - EUROPE TOUR24 FROM DEPRESSION TO [mode of UROBOROS] - LONDON 26/03/24

[mayasdeluca]

“Today was magical and I want to keep the magic alive but being back in here...It’s still so painful.”

[sleepoutro]

joan of arc

[smudgeandfrank]

Thank you SO F*CKING MUCH to every one of you darlings at Galaxycon San Jose for making this such a magical weekend! 💖😭💖 You are all SO KIND I can't even put my gratitude fully into words! I love you all SO much, and I will treasure these f*cking treasures always! 🖤✨️

There's so much more I want to say, but I'm so tired I'm bad at words. 🖤🤣✨️ I'll say more later, but for now, THANK YOU ALL SOOOOO MUCH!!!! 💖😭💖

[stealthywing]

Okay

[arthursfuckinghat]

"John made it. He's the only one. Rest of us… No. But I tried. In the end, I did."

[linkyu]

tell me about your defense contract pleage

Oh boy!

To be fair, it's nothing grandiose, like, it wasn't about "a new missile blueprint" or whatever, but, just thinking about what it could have become? yeesh.

So, let's go.

For context, this is taking place in the early 2010s, where I was working as a dev and manager for a company that mostly did space stuff, but they had some defence and security contracts too.

One day we got a new contract though, which was... a weird one. It was state-auctioned, meaning that this was basically a homeland contract, but the main sponsor was Philip Morris. Yeah. The American cigarette company.

Why? Because the contract was essentially a crackdown on "illegal cigarette sales", but it was sold as a more general "war on drugs" contract.

For those unaware (because chances are, like me, you are a non-smoker), cigarette contraband is very much a thing. At the time, ~15% of cigarettes were sold illegally here (read: they were smuggled in and sold on the street).

And Phillip Morris wanted to stop that. After all, they're only a small company worth uhhh... oh JFC. Just a paltry 150 billion dollars. They need those extra dollars, you understand?

Anyway. So they sponsored a contract to the state, promising that "the technology used for this can be used to stop drug deals too". Also that "the state would benefit from the cigarettes part as well because smaller black market means more official sales means a higher tax revenue" (that has actually been proven true during the 2020 quarantine).

Anyway, here was the plan:

Phase 1 was to train a neural network and plug it in directly to the city's video-surveillance system, in order to detect illegal transactions as soon as they occur. Big brother who?

Phase 2 was to then track the people involved in said transaction throughout the city, based on their appearance and gait. You ever seen the Plainsight sheep counting video? Imagine something like this but with people. That data would then be relayed to police officers in the area.

So yeah, an automated CCTV-based tracking system. Because that's not setting a scary precedent.

So what do you do when you're in that position? Let me tell you. If you're thrust unknowingly, or against your will, into a project like this,

Note. The following is not a legal advice. In fact it's not even good advice. Do not attempt any of this unless you know you can't get caught, or that even if you are caught, the consequences are acceptable. Above all else, always have a backup plan if and when it backfires. Also don't do anything that can get you sued. Be reasonable.

Let me introduce you to the world of Corporate Sabotage! It's a funny form of striking, very effective in office environments.

Here's what I did:

First of all was the training data. We had extensive footage, but it needed to be marked manually for the training. Basically, just cropping the clips around the "transaction" and drawing some boxes on top of the "criminals". I was in charge of several batches of those. It helped that I was fast at it since I had video editing experience already. Well, let's just say that a good deal of those markings were... not very accurate.

Also, did you know that some video encodings are very slow to process by OpenCV, to the point of sometimes crashing? I'm sure the software is better at it nowadays though. So I did that to another portion of the data.

Unfortunately the training model itself was handled by a different company, so I couldn't do more about this.

Or could I?

I was the main person communicating with them, after all.

Enter: Miscommunication Master

In short (because this is already way too long), I became the most rigid person in the project. Like insisting on sharing the training data only on our own secure shared drive, which they didn't have access to yet. Or tracking down every single bug in the program and making weekly reports on those, which bogged down progress. Or asking for things to be done but without pointing at anyone in particular, so that no one actually did the thing. You know, classic manager incompetence. Except I couldn't be faulted, because after all, I was just "really serious about the security aspect of this project. And you don't want the state to learn that we've mishandled the data security of the project, do you, Jeff?"

A thousand little jabs like this, to slow down and delay the project.

At the end of it, after a full year on this project, we had.... a neural network full of false positives and a semi-working visualizer.

They said the project needed to be wrapped up in the next three months.

I said "damn, good luck with that! By the way my contract is up next month and I'm not renewing."

Last I heard, that city still doesn't have anything installed on their CCTV.

tl;dr: I used corporate sabotage to prevent automated surveillance to be implemented in a city--

hey hold on

wait

what

HEY ACTUALLY I DID SOME EXTRA RESEARCH TO SEE IF PHILLIP MORRIS TRIED THIS SHIT WITH ANOTHER COMPANY SINCE THEN AND WHAT THE FUCK

HUH??????

well what the fuck was all that even about then if they already own most of the black market???

[thedreamerstoryteller]

[drunkdumbfucker]

Feeling totally fine about Dracule Mihawk's piss eyes in One Piece (2023)