IIRC they found that even with balanced training data facial recognition models just do worse on darker-skinned people. Something about cameras picking up less contrast on the skin, meaning there are fewer easily-identifiable facial features it can pick up from an image.

That would make more sense if we also counted in base 12 in general, which we don't.

Sure, but it's a bit of a jump to "he tried to secretly dose Melinda with antibiotics to treat the STDs he gave her from screwing underage Russian girls".

Doubt, sure. Those files should definitely be investigated further. But I don't think we've seen very concrete evidence yet, have we?

This article doesn't seem to claim that, do you have a link?

This is a draft email from Epstein to himself. We don't have the actual emails that prove any of this.

If you look at just about any country anywhere, you'll find that party membership does not really correlate with election success, but rather with more radical beliefs or activism. The national election results of the CPRF had been on a downward trend well before the war broke out as well. Their membership may have increased, but electorally they lost about 70% support. Even in wartime that's hard to ignore.

I also don't think you've been paying attention to what the propaganda efforts of the Kremlin have been putting out. As a result, you have cause and effect reversed. They've been boosting national pride through the "great history of Russia", which inevitably means highlighting the Soviet Union and the great patriotic war. But the Soviet sympathies created through it are a side-effect of this.

This also explains why polling suggests that sympathies for the Soviet Union mostly (not fully) consist of cultural and military pride. Yet sympathies for the Soviet economic system is low in comparison. It's also heavily influenced by current geopolitics. Ukraine used to be the most pro-communist member state, but these days the majority no longer regrets its dissolution. In East-Germany, there's a significant chunk of people who believe life was better in the GDR, yet that effectively translates into nationalist support for parties like the AfD (who of course are fascist, not communist). In Hungary, a large majority believe they were better off under communism than they are now, yet a large majority of 70% supports the move to a market economy. Uzbeks believe the Soviet government better responded to their needs, yet only a tiny minority believe life was actually better in the USSR.

But this is all largely besides the original point, which is that the graphic showing the Soviet referendum results is used in a misleading narrative that suggests people did not want the Soviet Union to dissolve, as that wasn't on the ballot and subsequent referendum results showed overwhelming support for independence and dissolution. And as election results in former Soviet states prove, support for a return to communism or a more socialist system is fairly low, despite a complicated nostalgia for the Soviet Union in some member states.

Party membership is a bad indicator for national popularity, as evidenced by the historically bad election result that followed the first article you linked.

The second article does not have anything to do with the popularity of the party.

The third article contradicts the sentiment you express in your own paragraph; you suggest the Russian government is taking advantage of rising Soviet sympathies, as if it's "just happening". But as your article explains, those Soviet sympathies are being expressly fuelled and created by the Russian government, as part of their propaganda efforts to promote the great patriotic war (which Putin now claims they're in another one of course, fighting the west). It's artificial, not natural.

The horse dewormer thing iirc comes from the fact that ivermectin is a prescription drug, and doctors obviously wouldn't prescribe it for covid. So people resorted to one of the very few ways you could still purchase it: as the horse dewormer variant.

Of course this version is much stronger and intended for horses, not humans. IIRC this led to a few hospitalisations and even deaths.

That's why when people advocate you should take ivermectin, the counter claim is that they're telling you to take horse dewormer, since that's the only way to get it. It's not out of a general 'disrespect' for ivermectin.

Plenty of fun to be had with LLMs.

If Microsoft is unable to verify ownership of the account, they shouldn't take ownership of your files.