IDK about PSA specifically, but I've collected comics, video games, toys, etc and the one commonality between all of them is that there are these big "grading" companies that charge money to seal your stuff in a plastic box with a label at the top that indicates its "grade" and there is always a scam of some sort. Sometimes they're not actually investigating the goods with any real scrutiny, sometimes they have a conflict-of-interest involving a well-stocked seller, sometimes they're directly manipulating the market. There's always something with these guys.
Also a lot of their income comes from convincing people who aren't educated on the market to grade extremely common items that will never be worth any significant amount of money no matter what "grade" they get; not actually a scam in that case but it shows you what their real priorities are.
I've also seen them set up booths at sci-fi conventions where you can pay to have them "authenticate" things you got signed by celebrities. In this case the authentication is entirely separate from the signature so there's nobody who can actually testify that they witnessed William Shatner signing your crap, only that they know your crap and William Shatner were in the same convention center at the same time.
I don't think it's an overt scam, but let's put it this way: as with auction houses, there is a disconnect between the service the company is providing and what the buyers think they're getting. And the companies have no special interest in correcting that.
For grading companies and for auction houses, the goal is to move the highest possible volume of goods at the highest possible valuation. They're not going out of their way to root out non-obvious fraud. They operate with the assumption that 99% of the traffic they're handling is legitimate, and of the 1% that's forged, only a small fraction of the buyers will ever find out. On the rare occasion it blows up, they can apologize and settle for an amount much less than what it would take to investigate every specimen with great zeal.
From stories of same exact card being graded for different ratings at different times. Would indicate that they are less perfect in their service than they might market. Difference in grade can change the value.
So as whole the process is quite questionable at times.
Not to even talk about some things slipping through or being questionable in documenting.
Difference in grade basically DETERMINES the value. Even small steps down from perfect greatly diminish a card's value. Basically IGN review scale levels of drop-off.
Something can be subjective, without being a scam.
Are you suggesting they are deliberately misleading people, or are you saying grading is not consistent and is subjective based on circumstance around when the item is graded.
The service being sold is the objectivity of the grading process, otherwise anyone could just decide they have a high grade item.
This sort of thing happens all the time in grading – a later reveal shows that earlier gradings were obviously incorrect in the mind of any collector. That means that they have such a poor objective process as to be no better than subjective analysis.
Graders ultimately sell reputation. Like currency, grading only works if you believe in it. Don't believe the grader? Then their word isn't worth anything. This means as more and more of these issues happen, graders will struggle to retain that trust, and when it disappears it disappears rapidly.
> my understanding was that the point of grading a card was to have a verified, objective rating of the card's condition.
> If grading is subjective, then I don't see the value of the process
This made me curious to check the PSA grading standards, turns out it's both.[0]
Personally, as a very young kid I collected baseball cards, unfortunately for me, this was the very late 80's & early 90's. While I have some cards that are my favorites, would be pointless to grade cards that are practically worthless.
>> While it's true that a large part of grading is objective (locating print defects, staining, surface wrinkles, measuring centering, etc.), the other component of grading is somewhat subjective. The best way to define the subjective element is to do so by posing a question: What will the market accept for this particular issue?
>> Again, the vast majority of grading is applied with a basic, objective standard but no one can ignore the small (yet sometimes significant) subjective element. ... The key point to remember is that the graders reserve the right, based on the strength or weakness of the eye appeal, to make a judgment call on the grade of a particular card.
Based on my experience, more recent kernel versions have more fixes/better support for recent hardware(or sometimes not so recent). LTS doesn't backport everything from later releases for obvious reasons.
Expecting hardware companies to get things ready so much ahead of time that they make the cut for a LTS release might lean towards being too unrealistic since LTS releases have a fair bit of gap between them.
Are you saying you think more critical government databases than OPM or security clearance rosters are inevitably going to be breached?
I'd like to think the government or corporation can effectively protect some databases at least...
those are already pretty bad, but i think the really dangerous ones are things like verizon's billing records and customer location history, credit card transaction histories, license plate registrations, credit bureau histories, passport biometrics, enough voice recordings from each person for a deepfake, public twitter postings, etc.
> The 1943 bombing of the Amsterdam civil registry office was an attempt by members of the Dutch resistance to destroy the Amsterdam civil registry (bevolkingsregister), in order to prevent the German occupiers from identifying Jews and others marked for persecution, arrest or forced labour. The March 1943 assault was only partially successful, and led to the execution of 12 participants. Nevertheless, the action likely saved many Jews from arrest and deportation to Nazi extermination camps.
to avoid partisan debate, imagine a neo-nazi group takes over the us, which presumably we can all agree would be very bad. after they took over, how hard would it be for them to find all the jews? not just make a list of them, but physically find them? (much easier than it was in 01943, i'm sure we can agree.) how hard would it be for them to find all the outspoken anti-fascists? where could those anti-fascists hide?
now, step it up a notch. how hard would it be for them to find all the jews before they take over? it wouldn't be that hard if the databases leak. and if you feel safe because you're not jewish, rest assured that neo-nazis aren't the only groups who are willing to use violence for political ends. someone out there wants you dead simply because of the demographic groups you belong to. the reason you haven't been seeing widespread political violence previously is that it hasn't been a winning strategy
FWIW the Pixel 8, the newest device offering Advanced Memory Protection, sells for less than $600 brand new right now. You can tune memory tagging & hardened memory allocation on a per-app basis. It's a game changer
You are saying that as if it was cheap. I am pretty sure most people buy <$250 smartphones. That is at least the case in my social circle, very few iphones, pixel, an awful lot of cheap Xiaomi Redmi and the Samsung Galaxies are usually the A line instead of the S line.
Agreed. I think the same strategy also applies to a given table or night: only play hands where you have good cards. It's a good strategy for beginners
I know almost nothing about cars and so assumed LiDAR sensors are just prohibitively expensive for Tesla to install in every car. But then years later I learned that every modern iPhone has a LiDAR camera.
Still don't know how to think about this - how is it possible for a phone to have LiDAR (barely utilized) but it's too expensive to have them in such a critical setup as an autonomous vehicle.
Just like you can have a 50MP camera sensor in the phone: it works? Sure. Is it sufficient to capture the Moon (heh) or something 50-100 meters from you? Not at the quality and performance of professional equipment.
Sure, you can have a matrix of iPhone LIDARs but whould they works at sufficient speed, accuracy, at +40C, at -35?
I can't speak to any production systems, but the ideal is to use a "sensor fusion" approach which can safely degrade or alert the driver when a sensor is lost.
Lidar, cameras, wireless communication with other vehicles and infrastructure, and with the internal sensors in the car.
More concerning would be adversarially-crafted signals. (Think a Wil-E-Coyote style fake-tunnel, but for lidar and and whatnot too.)
I would bet still better than how teslas fail to recognize cyclists or motorcycles still, even in 2023
And most systems use an array of sensors like radar, laser, and vision too. It’s only musk who is hell bent on lying to his customers about machine vision and also lying about his intentions where the goal is cost savings and not because machine vision is better.
I think the reference is to ALP systems which are used to defeat law enforcement speed guns? Not sure if those operate on the same frequencies as the DrivePilot LiDAR. It seems unlikely they do otherwise LE would have difficulty prosecuting speeders in these new vehicles?
I did a search for the phrase because I was also curious what it meant and hadn’t heard it before, but found your original question on the first page of the search results.
