cygon

The attack on Ukraine may have shaken things up, but before that, the Tories seemed quite close with Russia and, forgive this non-Brit for making assumptions, to me it looks like the entire Brexit thing was started and then heavily pushed by Russia as part of a larger plan to splinter the EU and cause infighting (from a quick web search: Wikipedia, Washington Post, Foreign Policy, Guardian).

I loved the stabilized bigfoot. Suddenly the supposed ape showed very human feet and heel strike.

You're right, it doesn't. I could have sworn I saw the opposite fin for a few seconds yesterday, but I must have been mistaken.

Probably not needed, but just to be sure... the entire graphic is satire and all statistics it shows are made up :)

It's a standard feature in nearly all common video editors (i.e. DaVinci Resolve or Adobe Premiere).

Usually, stabilization goes over all video frames and tries to find image transformations (rotation + translation + zoom) that make a frame match as closely as possible with the previous frame. That's an oversimplified explanation, but from a user point-of-view, these tools are mature enough to be applied with just a few clicks.

This video is definitely the result of that, as, whoever did it, didn't even bother to insert a cut when the feed switches between left side and right side camera, thus making the stabilization spazz out momentarily.

Indeed.

But after reading the article, it feels to me like the "EU Observer" just wanted to insert "AI" as a buzzword. They used volunteers to count voters at polling stations. The "AI" likely was just vanilla security camera software that counted unique individuals appearing in a rectangle in the video frames.

Anyway, good for them, now there's hard evidence in addition to statistical analysis.

The article says they used volunteers and AI to count the number of people who voted from video feeds:

after counting votes and comparing them with the official turnout, the software found discrepancies in 11 regions so huge that it made it impossible for the election result to have been accurate

based on volunteer analysis of video footage from 233 polling stations in 17 regions revealed a discrepancy in turnout equivalent to 81,731 voters. Based on election statistics, analyst Sergey Shpilkin estimated that 10 million additional votes had found their way into ballot boxes nationwide.

So they have strong evidence for around 10 million forged votes, but not which party they were cast for. Then again, when you consider that all political parties except Putin's come in below 10 million votes, the selection of who might have benefited from it becomes rather small :)

I had a gig as a software developer at a company that tried to organize its software development with... the most horrid call center ticketing system I've ever seen.

The software was named "TANSS" (an acronym for "transaction action notification solution system" which... says a lot... in a certain way). It couldn't handle UTF-8 and the company had Asian customers, it placed the signature of a different company under each message sent to a customer and project management might as well have been non-existent (supposedly the crapper of a ticketing system had "projects" but it was just a super naive lining up of tasks without buffer times, burndown/velocity chart or anything).

The expensive p.o.s. was strong-armed into the company, probably because one of the company owners had a background in tech support crap where you're generally chasing billable minutes.

I don't know if it was unprofessional by me, but I quickly refused to interact with the whole thing and handed in my notice (and I had actually liked the company and my tasks up until that point). Even Jira, which many consider a highly unpleasant system to work with, felt lean, responsive and fun after that experience.

It's been over 6 years, but I can state with certainty, if I see that system in use anywhere, my respect is gone and whether customer or employer, they'll be a hot potato in my hands form that moment on :)

So true.

I drive an extra mile to a different gas station only because I discovered their cashiers don't start a lengthy discussion about why I should get one of those plastic data collectors every time.

I'd like to believe that our intelligence communities do, but I don't know.

What I do know that that Russian propaganda tries to "immunize" their marks against mismatching views. One method is to pull them out of the shared media ecosystem by seeding distrust against non-aligned media. Another is to associate any undesirable viewpoints with weakness, idiocy or perversion.

Last but not least, Russia already tested a complete internet disconnect of their country so they could isolate their own population from anything not state controlled, should the tide turn or an emergency happen.

Same. The Russian IRA follows a simple, time-tested method: do whatever you can right now, little by little.

Most of it is just simple opinion shaping (try to connect the anger of internet strangers to the EU, US, liberals or the left). The interest slowly accumulates. Spreading bedbug hysteria causes just a little harm to France's reputation, causes just a small bit of disillusion in its people and reduces Olympic revenue by maybe just some 10'000 euros -- but ever so slowly, it alters the overall course.

You can pay $130 to run a marathon there: https://raceroster.com/events/2024/72825/2024-death-valley-marathon-half-marathon-and-10k

Had that one filed away in my mind because I once watched a documentary about Scott Juarek (a runner popular for being able to manage such feats) where the runners explained that they had to run on the white paint on the road so the soles of their shoes wouldn't melt. Humans are crazy (and I'd love see how far I could go in such heat myself :D).