Tuesday Overnight Open Thread - September 1, 2026

Howdy Hordelings! The Tuesday ONT has arrived. So have you. Nice when a plan comes together! Open thread, as always. What's on YOUR mind tonight?

Hey, I know this guy!

Well done, Sheriff. Thank you for protecting our little freedom-loving part of our formerly great state.

Two thirds of MD sheriffs are suing the 100% Democrat run state over its sanctuary policies. TWO THIRDS. Elected by like-minded people at the local level. But there's no election fraud at the state level in MD, right??

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Tony Romo - former NFL quarterback and recent NFL announcer - releases a statement on the heels of his recent DUI arrest.

Seems like a classy guy who made a really bad choice. When I was still watching the NFL regularly, I thought his announcing was great. He had an amazing ability to say what was gonna happen by reading formations and coverage.

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Not sure I understand the "little bit" thing

I'd say gay fits in with dead or pregnant -- you either ARE or you AREN'T!

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Want to outsmart the ever-increasing number of AI cameras?

World’s Ugliest Hawaiian Shirt Was Designed to Make You Invisible to AI Surveillance Cameras

The aptly named Digital Camouflage may look like a hideous Hawaiian shirt, but its seemingly abstract pattern was created with a very specific purpose in mind – to prevent AI-powered CCTV cameras from recognizing the wearer as a person.

“AI systems are made of multiple layers and never learned what a human is – they learned what humans statistically look like in millions of training images,” Simon Weckert, the shirt’s creator, explained. “In the early layers it’s edges, contrasts and texture gradients; deeper in the network it’s part-like patterns: the head-and-shoulders silhouette, the proportions of limbs against a torso, the continuity of a body’s outline against the background. A ‘person’, for the machine, is a bundle of visual statistics – and that is exactly its weakness.”

The Digital Camouflage shirt was carefully designed to confuse AI systems, making it very hard for them to recognize the wearer as a human being. Ironically, the pattern was created using AI, through a process known as an “adversarial loop”.

Check out the whole thing. Photo at the link.

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Science news. Actually - spinning earth news. OK, not really news - something happened 2 years ago. Oh well - read about it anyway!

On 5 July 2024, Earth completed a rotation 1.66 milliseconds short of 86,400 seconds, the shortest day measured in the atomic-clock era, breaking the previous record set in June 2022

Here are two facts that seem to argue with each other. Over the long haul, Earth is slowing down. The pull of the Moon’s tides has been stretching our days out for hundreds of millions of years, adding about 2.3 milliseconds per century to the length of a day. And yet for the past several years the planet has been doing the opposite, spinning slightly faster, setting one shortest-day record after another. The current mark is 1.66 milliseconds short of a full 24 hours, clocked on 5 July 2024.

Both things are true at once. The slow tidal drag is still there in the background. Riding on top of it are shorter, faster wobbles, and lately those wobbles have been pushing in the speed-up direction. That’s the puzzle, and it’s stranger and matters more than a few thousandths of a second sounds.

But wait - there's more. Something is slowing the earth down. Can you guess what the wrinkle is?

While the core has been speeding the planet up, climate change has been working the other way. As polar ice melts in Greenland and Antarctica, water moves from the poles toward the equator, and that shift in mass slows the rotation.

But of course - that dang climate change again. Just meltin' ice and makin' the earth slosh around slowly.

The oddest part is that melting ice bought the world time. Agnew’s modeling suggested the reckoning would have arrived around 2026, but the ice-melt braking pushed it back. Without the effect of melting ice, Earth would need that negative leap second in 2026 instead of 2029, Agnew calculated. A problem created deep in the Earth is being partly held off by climate change at the surface.

Oh, the modeling was wrong? First time that's ever happened, right?!?

These idiots will never stop.

DJ Doof - This Date in Music History Edition

REM's album Document was released on this date in 1987

Barry Gibb was born on the date in 1946

Jimmy Buffett died on this date in 2023 at age 76

Tonight's ONT brought to you by unfair tests

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posted by Doof at 10:00 PM

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