The Lone Badger posted:

Milo and POTUS posted:

Your operating system is filled with poo poo

Milo and POTUS posted:

Your operating system is littered with poo poo

uber_stoat posted:

https://x.com/lusciousbeagle/status/1768879789245337641?s=20

www.seattletimes.com - Mon, 18 Mar 2024 posted:

This year, you’ll need a smartphone to try your luck getting walk-up permits to backpack the wildly popular Enchantments in the Central Cascades, the U.S. Forest Service announced on Friday.

But there’s a catch: The new mobile application process only lets people who are within a mile of the Wenatchee River Ranger Station to sign up for the “walk-up” lottery, which makes up a quarter of all Enchantments overnight permits. 

The “geofence boundary,” which requires smartphones or other mobile devices with location turned on, mimics the traditional walk-up method while getting rid of the “cumbersome manual lottery and permit system,” according to the Forest Service. The perimeter also means successful applicants will be close enough to attend the in-person resource and safety briefings, and available to pick up the printed permit for their trip departure the following day.

The walk-up permits are available at 8:30 a.m. from Monday to Saturday at the Wenatchee River Ranger District Office in Leavenworth. A designated group leader will need a Recreation.gov account to sign up for the lottery, according to the Forest Service. 

The daily lottery issues one permit each for the Colchuck, Stuart, Snow Lakes and Eightmile/Caroline zones, while eight people can be allotted for the Core Enchantment Zone. 

Walk-up permits are limited and demand usually exceeds availability, the Forest Service said, as the July to September peak season might have 50 people or more present to enter the lottery on a given day. If more people are present than permits are available a drawing is held to distribute the permits. Participants are asked to show up 15 minutes early. Latecomers cannot take part in the drawing.

The advance lottery, which this year was open from Feb. 15 to Feb. 29, became digital on Recreation.gov in 2011. Before the transition, permit applications were mailed in and drawn by hand.

“Transitioning the lottery to a new digital process will help us free-up limited staff resources to better serve the public,” Wenatchee River District Ranger Erica Taecker said in a statement. “Both the Enchantments advanced and daily permit programs help the Forest Service manage the high visitor use that can result in resource damage if left unmanaged at this extremely popular, sensitive high-alpine destination.”

Interest in the Enchantments, located in the Okanogan-Wenatchee National Forest, has exploded over the past decade. Last year, the success rate to get a permit through the advance lottery system was 6% — a spot more coveted than Yosemite National Park’s Half Dome.

Rangers and conservationists say that spike in interest has been caused by population growth, a pandemic-era surge in outdoor recreation and the viral spread of social media capturing scenes of mountain goats, pristine lakes and jagged peaks.

The new mobile app permit system will begin in May. The Forest Service expects to release more details in the coming months on how the daily lottery will work. For updates, check st.news/EnchantmentPermits.

mawarannahr posted:

you need an iPhone now to enjoy the outdoors

Walk-up permits for Enchantments now require a smartphone

Tulip posted:

It's really good classic cyberpunk that it's doing something we've done for thousands of years, but slightly faster and just feels a lot crasser.

FFT posted:

There was a sweet spot in the late 90s with a poo poo-ton of qualifiers

uber_stoat posted:

https://x.com/lusciousbeagle/status/1768879789245337641?s=20

The Oldest Man posted:

Ah good now I can simply have my manservant drive my van filled with my many burner phones up to the park entrance and enter the lottery on all of them while I relax at home

RadiRoot posted:

thank you for the new startup idea

mycomancy posted:

This seems bleak for some reason, like we'll be watching GitS in five years as hopeful escapism.

Platystemon posted:

spaceblancmange posted:

the vision pro sure seems to have dropped off the face of the earth

uber_stoat posted:

the Vision Shuffle constantly shifts your sight through countless viewpoints every few seconds, like Warioware. also, it locks onto your face so you can't remove it.

spaceblancmange posted:

the vision pro sure seems to have dropped off the face of the earth

Ruffian Price posted:

The fate of every new headset, there's a "huh, neat" wave, everybody checks out the 30 minutes of available content, then it's chucked in the closet forever. Carmack was endlessly frustrated about this because you bet your rear end Meta is keeping score; almost nobody uses their headset again after the first session or two, and they don't return them, either. Which is solid business if you're selling hardware but not if you're selling services.

Kit Walker posted:

A cyberpunk story that kicks off with the protagonist playing around with an app that randomly switches what you see with a different user every 5 seconds and accidentally witnessing a gruesome murder that way would be pretty good

bedpan posted:

need to bundle a subscription with the headset

Kit Walker posted:

A cyberpunk story that kicks off with the protagonist playing around with an app that randomly switches what you see with a different user every 5 seconds and accidentally witnessing a gruesome murder that way would be pretty good

Cup Runneth Over posted:

You can give my turns to somebody else

The Oldest Man posted:

Ah good now I can simply have my manservant drive my van filled with my many burner phones up to the park entrance and enter the lottery on all of them while I relax at home

spaceblancmange posted:

the vision pro sure seems to have dropped off the face of the earth

Oysters Autobio posted:

I honestly wonder how difficult it would be to spoof this remotely?

I'm guessing you download some app that you give permission to read your location data. But how difficult would it be to spin up a bunch of VMs with the location set artificially? I doubt an app contracted by the forestry service has a bunch of counter spoofing.

tokin opposition posted:

That's good ive been talking mad poo poo about you with chatty for years now

www.nature.com posted:

Intergroup contact occurring through indirect means such as the internet has the potential to improve intergroup relationships and may be especially beneficial in high conflict situations. Here we conducted a three-timepoint online experiment to ascertain whether the use of a conversational agent in E-contact platforms could mitigate interethnic prejudices and hostility among Afghanistan’s historically segregated and persistently conflictual ethnic groups. 128 Afghans of Pashtun, Tajik, and Hazara backgrounds were assigned to one of four E-contact conditions (control with no conversational agent and three experimental groups that varied in the conversational agent settings). Participants in the experimental conditions contributed more ideas and longer opinions and showed a greater reduction in outgroup prejudice and anxiety than those in the control group. These findings demonstrate that E-contact facilitated by a conversational agent can improve intergroup attitudes even in contexts characterized by a long history of intergroup segregation and conflict.

…

One form of indirect contact that has received research and policy attention is electronic contact (E-contact)1,5,12,27,28. Here, individuals from different groups interact via online, virtual, and/or internet platforms that enable, for example, video conferencing or chatting. The use of the internet may bridge interactional gaps between various antagonistic ethno-racial groups in view of the barriers that may militate against the possibility of direct contact in places where rigid segregation norms and rules, protracted conflicts, spatial impediments and so on remain endemic3,12,27,28,29.

Unlike the evidence on direct face-to-face contacts, the evidence regarding the optimal conditions for E-contact remains sparse, thus suggesting the need for more studies to improve our understanding of how technology-mediated contacts can affect intergroup processes and reduce prejudices and hostility5,28,29,30. Likewise, there is a dearth of research exploring the effects of intergroup contact in contexts such as Afghanistan, which is understandable given the volatile intergroup relations and the difficulties it may impose on researchers, relevant authorities, and the participants themselves31,32.

Condra and Linardi’s (2019)33 study in Afghanistan showed that unstructured and unsupervised intergroup contacts may escalate rather than assuage intergroup anxiety and stereotypes, suggesting that researchers should pay greater attention to the conditions surrounding intergroup contacts. Accordingly, we highlight here a particular condition, the use of a conversational agent (CA) to facilitate E-contact, which may yield more fruitful outcomes than E-contact occurring without a CA. CAs are artificial intelligence programs that engage in human-like conversations, using natural language37. Having a CA facilitate online discussions could be a cost-efficient and relatively unbiased strategy for improving E-contact interactions by mitigating the risks of unstructured and unsupervised E-contact interactions by guiding and moderating the conversation to achieve desired goals. We use a CA that does not represent any of the existing ethnic groups in Afghanistan and that can act as a sort of neutral authority figure to support the goal of harmonious multi-ethnic relationships. Although Allport’s7 original concept of authority support focused on institutional and normative backing, we considered CAs a modern application of this idea to the extent that it structures the discussions and functions to ensure a level playing field that enables participants to participate on equal terms and with mutual respect for the opinions of other.