Yeah. I guess we’ll never figure out why oil washed up on beaches next to an offshore oil drilling zone. One of life’s mysteries, I guess!

Editing to add: The legal fate of the offshore oil wells is in question, and it’s not clear if work has begun on them or not. New South Wales has banned drilling within their territory, but the company said they’ll just go farther out to sea, where it’s governed by Australia’s federal laws, and I don’t know if they’ve actually started drilling yet.
Heck, those could also have come from a deteriorated WWII ship. Not that I seriously believe that theory, though.

I’ve responded to similar questions with “I will not explain.”

~~That’s where I know I don’t know enough to respond.~~

Well, crap. I just looked it up. Looks like phones will send out your MAC address when looking for WiFi networks to connect to, and they more or less always search for WiFi, unless currently connected to WiFi.

So - yeah. Same issues with Bluetooth.

And some newer consumer routers do all sorts of funky things under the hood in the name of security, which includes sending information about traffic back to their corporate home base. That could easily also include MAC addresses of passing devices. (Or telling the manufacturer every site you visit. Very fun now that the latest trend in routers is to require cloud connections and accounts, so your identity with them is ‘known’.)

Info dump incoming!

Basically, your phone is a big ol’ slut.

I’m not as well versed with WiFi, but phones are set up to be very friendly with Bluetooth. Every Bluetooth device your phone sees, it says hello to. Most phones these days don’t really disable Bluetooth (they just limit its active use), or they disable it for a limited time period.

This is ostensibly fine, since Bluetooth supposedly identifies itself with a MAC address that isn’t necessarily tied to your identity. Unless you connect to something with Bluetooth that knows your identity, like a smart speaker, or have given Bluetooth permissions to any apps you’re logged into.

BLE positioning with sensors utilizes BLE-enabled sensors that are deployed in fixed positions throughout an indoor space. These sensors passively detect and locate transmissions from BLE smartphones, asset tracking tags, beacons, personnel badges, wearables and other Bluetooth devices based on the received signal strength of the transmitting device. This location data is then sent to the central indoor positioning system (IPS) or real-time location system (RTLS). The location engine analyzes the data and uses multilateration algorithms to determine the location of the transmitting device. Those coordinates can be used to visualize the location of a device or asset on an indoor map of your space or leveraged for other uses depending on the specific location-aware application.
– Some random website - inpixon.com

That’s not to say that every place you go is deploying BLE beacons to know you spent 20 minutes looking at candy when you were supposed to be making a quick run to get milk, but it’s possible that is occurring. And if it is occurring, it’s likely they’re working with some sort of data broker to deanonymize your data. Or at the very least, making their own inferences - using that loyalty card and a BLE beacon to know that the loyalty info put into a register corresponds to your MAC address.
What’s not likely, however, is that this data is public. Your data has value, so they don’t want to let it go for free, plus if the general public knew they could be tracked almost anywhere, there might be enough outcry for lawmakers to adopt better consumer privacy laws.

Editing to add: Even if you aren’t being precisely tracked within a retail location, a single ping on a Bluetooth device is enough to establish that your phone was within 30-50 feet of the device, which is apparently all the police need to send you to jail for 20 years.

I hope you’ve enjoyed your tour of this info dump. Tin foil hats are on sale at the gift shop!

Does this mean they’re going to pull it from YouTube?

It’s been available to stream there for years because no one was making any copyright claims against it.

I’m ruined on “Lee-“ anything. , because I think of Leeroy Jenkins. Now I’m just imagining Lebron just charging into every play with no strategy, shouting “Leeee-bron James!”

I once moved across the country for a woman I (re)met during a random Words with Friends match. Took us a dozen games before I realized I’d originally met her through LiveJournal, about a decade earlier.

Many years later, my wife moved across the country to be with me, after we met on Reddit. (Clearly the previously mentioned woman was better as a friend.)

You say “Not even close.” in response to the suggestion that Apple’s research can be used to improve benchmarks for AI performance, but then later say the article talks about how we might need different approaches to achieve reasoning.

Now, mind you - achieving reasoning can only happen if the model is accurate and works well. And to have a good model, you must have good benchmarks.

Not to belabor the point, but here’s what the article and study says:

The article talks at length about the reliance on a standardized set of questions - GSM8K, and how the questions themselves may have made their way into the training data. It notes that modifying the questions dynamically leads to decreases in performance of the tested models, even if the complexity of the problem to be solved has not gone up.

The third sentence of the paper (Abstract section) says this “While the performance of LLMs on GSM8K has significantly improved in recent years, it remains unclear whether their mathematical reasoning capabilities have genuinely advanced, raising questions about the reliability of the reported metrics.” The rest of the abstract goes on to discuss (paraphrased in layman’s terms) that LLM’s are ‘studying for the test’ and not generally achieving real reasoning capabilities.

By presenting their methodology - dynamically changing the evaluation criteria to reduce data pollution and require models be capable of eliminating red herrings - the Apple researchers are offering a possible way benchmarking can be improved.
Which is what the person you replied to stated.

The commenter is fairly close, it seems.

I thought this disease sounded familiar. Trichinosis - Wikipedia

While the most common vector in the U.S. is now bear meat, that wasn’t always the case. The most common human infection vector used to be undercooked pork!
Many older folks won’t touch pork unless it’s well done, because apparently these parasites make your muscles feel like they’re on fire.
A history teacher (many years ago) even told my class that trichnosis was the reason Jewish people don’t eat pork. (A quick internet search throws water on that. Doesn’t rule it out, but it’s not guaranteed to be correct, either.)

While I agree that hunting apex predators (or, really, any sport hunting) is kind of dumb, I do want to note that pigs famously eat slop and bathe in their own shit and bacon is delicious. Which is to say, we probably can’t assume taste based on diet/lifestyle

Maybe you can.
All the money I’d earmarked for kung fu lessons and a collection of random lethal weapons wound up going into pet care and hobbies. Besides, I definitely don’t have plot armor. I’d get popped by some junior security mail cop. They probably wouldn’t even have to shoot me. They’d run me over with their Segway, I’d fall, crack my head open, and they’d put a little skull and crossbones sticker on their scooter, like a WWII fighter pilot.

Billy Butcher: “Fuck off, you pale cunts! I’ll bollocks every last one of you!”

Vampires: “Oh, shit! He believes in himself! Run away!”

I know that COVID isn’t regarded to be a serious disease if you’re vaccinated and reasonably healthy, but I had mental fogginess for about 2 months after my infection.

I mostly seemed outwardly okay during that time, but it was a tremendous effort to just do the bare minimum.

I hope he ducks out if there’s even a fraction of those types of symptoms.