What I also think people don't appreciate, is how much work it is to use SNP data even for this. Figuring out how a 3-4 cousin-level match is related, is hard, and it's not easy to automate.

It's enough work that authoritarian goons are more likely to use it as a pretext for punishing whoever they'd like to punish, than to use it to actually find the "guilty" (even after their own standard).

"Nobody ever got fired for choosing IBM" isn't even a metaphor here - the company I currently work for runs a SAP which has been heavily customized by IBM.

Assume for a moment that there is such a thing as an objectively good album. Assume also that there's some luck involved in actually making one, not just skill. You have thousands of bands churning out albums.

Let's assume also that the critics are capable of recognizing an objectively good album at least better than chance.

Now picture a band making album after album, and they succeed in making an actually good one, that gets noticed by critics and called out as great. What are the odds that their next album will be as good?

Not great! If there's luck at all involved, it's very likely that their first album, which managed to get them on critics radar against thousands of rivals, was an outlier in terms of quality. They'll revert to the mean in album two.

That's enough to explain critics typically rating a second album lower. Even if they have widely varying ideals for what a good album sounds like.

For fans it's another matter. Fandom is a social phenomenon, it's never just about the music. It's also about the role the band plays in your life. Not just things like parasocial relationships, although that too, but think about it: If you find another artist that sounds just like artist you know and love, do you immediately jump ship? Of course not. Not even if it turns out that the other artist was "first" in making this style of music. There is such a thing as niches in music, once one is personally filled for you, say you've got all the happy party dance music you needed this month, you're not going to care if there's some objectively 1% better music out there.

So it's also understandable that fans rate second albums higher than critics. That just means they keep fulfilling the role they won in their listeners lives.

They must have wanted it, since they bought it!

Or, their search engine bought it on their behalf. Same thing, surely?

I take it you're saying that is the other crime? Has he been convicted of it yet?

A violation in the first degree occurs when a person falsifies business records with an intent to defraud that includes an intent to commit, aid, or conceal another crime.

OK, and what was this other crime? Has he been convicted of that one yet?

Holy cow, there are a lot of low-digit usernames on Slashdot who don't understand how science works and really like their drinks.

It remains to be seen if Starmer will take this result as an endorsement, or see it for what it really is - dissatisfaction with the Tories.

He will act as if he's personally elected king, and will continue 9 out of 10 Tory policies. Maybe if we're lucky he'll clean up the sewage in the rivers - but he'll certainly never try to claw back the profits from that.

It's very easy to make some authoritative-looking links supporting any well-funded political faction.

Community notes has been ridiculed lately, for automatically attaching a "rebuttal" to every instance of a certain image and keywords. The image is an image of hundreds of burned out cars after the Re'im music festival attack. The community note says something like "this has been conclusively rebutted" and links dozens of mainstream media articles/fact checks. People have been abusing themselves by posting the image with texts like "Elon is not actually a pedophile", only to have the community note angrily denying that attached in minutes.

So so much for the "Community" aspect of community notes. But even for the image itself, it's a master class in manipulative "fact checking". Because all those links don't rebut the burned out cars image, but a different video. It's quite true that that video is not what it claims to be, but it has nothing to do with the burned out cars image. Faced with a very obvious, damning piece of evidence (of something that has been publicly admitted), they dig up a dodgy video claiming to be of the same event, "debunk" that, and use it to claim that the event never happened.

It's a boss issue. Someone wrote a poor program, maybe in the 80s. Then the boss decided that instead of rewriting, their company's way of doing things should be the standard. They persuaded some other bosses of this. Now instead of an expense, you now have a "moat".

I'm sure it was pretty easy to figure out which accounts he created at the end.

Well, Microsoft still hasn't figured out a way to detect the people creating thousands of hotmail and outlook accounts and using them for porn site spamming.

He is the One. He can stop bullets. He can fly! He can do ANYTH... (hold on, are we making sequels?)

Stopping bullets and flying, that's it.

In UK, sports gambling is the natural companion of liquor stores, payday lenders and similar businesses preying on / doping down poor people.

Elsewhere in Europe, it's typically regulated.

The most impressive thing is that the usual suspects still haven't shown up in the Slashdot thread to tell us how unimpressed they are and how this is not "real AI". I had anticipated progress, but that they would shut up so soon defied even my most hopeful predictions.

The second stage of any scam is to package it up and sell it to others, once it's too much work and risk for too little profit. Ready-made scam kits are about on the same level as "guaranteed" lottery schemes.