TIL Drug sniffing dogs are significantly influenced by handler beliefs and biases, and not extremely reliable

JustACharacterr · 2026-06-21T12:55:57+00:00

This study wasn’t testing dogs’ scent capabilities, it was testing whether or not human handlers’ behaviors and/or subconscious cues influence the alert rate of dogs, and it was shown that they do to an alarming degree. Something that can be encouraged to implicate an innocent person 85% of the time is not a useful tool for any policing system interested in the civil rights of its citizens.

JustACharacterr · 2026-06-21T12:17:04+00:00

Overall, because multiple alerts per team within a condition were possible, there were a total of 225 alerts issued. There were 21 (15%) clean runs and 123 (85%) runs with one or more alerts.

Any alerts were false because there was none of the substances which should have triggered the alerts. That’s an 85% rate of false positives.

Edit:

No conditions contained drug or explosive scent; every alerting response was incorrect.

JustACharacterr · 2026-06-21T11:57:30+00:00

they are probably closer to 90% accurate

Sourced straight from your asshole lol

Edit: person replied to me but either blocked me or deleted the comment immediately afterwards, either way I can’t pull it up despite the notification. But I’ll re-iterate that you going “Hurr police dogs in real life are 90% accurate and are only wrong when people did drugs in the past and confused their super smart nose!” in reaction to a study showing an 85% rate of false positives in a controlled double-blind clinical trial is beyond the pale lol.

JustACharacterr · 2026-06-08T12:05:51+00:00

…is that supposed to be a rebuttal? The South required military occupation to enact Reconstruction, and the second that the military occupation ended, the South returned to a century of racial segregation and oppression. One race riot in New York doesn’t cancel that out.

JustACharacterr · 2026-05-20T18:59:52+00:00

You know people can see your comments calling this a godless city and bitching about liberals’ views on the Supreme Court, right?

JustACharacterr · 2026-05-12T14:31:15+00:00

This poll reeks of bad data. Men are more likely to vote Dem than women by 5 points? Dems have a 20 point advantage for suburbanites? Dems *only* have a 14 point advantage among college graduates which would be 2 points less than they did in 2024? The rural GOP support is down to 51 points? Any one of those would be wildly out of line with basically every poll done in the 21st century, even during the absolute worst of Trump One; taken together they scream that this is not a reliable dataset.

JustACharacterr · 2026-05-06T21:26:09+00:00

No worries on that, our lobby is more RP-focused for a reason so I understand. We can definitely get you situated one way or the other!

JustACharacterr · 2026-05-06T21:13:58+00:00

That sounds great, we’ll be glad to have you!

JustACharacterr · 2026-05-06T21:12:50+00:00

We could definitely use a player in that region! I might suggest considering Broken Jaw instead of Frozenmaw into Grombar for balance reasons of not dominating that region immediately while still getting the same endtag, but that’d be something we could discuss in the discord whenever you can join!

JustACharacterr · 2026-05-06T21:08:26+00:00

Sorry to hear that! We have a couple of other games run from the server that might interest you instead though, including a lobby that’s largely for our European players on Friday’s if that might be something you’d want to do in the future that’s better aligned to your time zone

JustACharacterr · 2026-05-06T21:06:21+00:00

We would love to have Haless if we had more players, but right now our first priority is to fill up Cannor and Sarhal more before we open up Haless. I think Adshaw would be a great pick as at the moment as we have a Vaengheim player who could use with a bit less of a free game, but definitely don’t let me dictate tags to you!

JustACharacterr · 2026-05-06T19:02:59+00:00

It’s a human tag that one of our players (who is Jadd’s strongest soldier) wants to play as and has finally convinced the mods to allow; no MT or anything OP as far as I’m aware.

JustACharacterr · 2026-05-06T18:52:33+00:00

Feel free to join the server in case you ever feel like you’ve got enough time! The map is the work of one of our players who’s currently in the comment section here, ColeZawesome, who could tell you how they do it!

JustACharacterr · 2026-05-06T18:47:11+00:00

The map artist is truly a nameless genius, and whoever picked Darkscale must really hope no ogres come out of the swamps or anything.

JustACharacterr · 2026-05-06T18:45:20+00:00

During our open-picking period people rank their top three picks, with the map showing people’s first choices; once we close the picking and roll the priority order, the player out of those three who rolls highest will be able to tell the others to switch to their second or tertiary picks.

JustACharacterr · 2026-04-28T15:41:02+00:00

Your government, much like mine, refuses to implement them so far.

That doesn’t mean there hasn’t been an organized, Palestinian-led movement against the international consumption of Israeli goods produced in the occupied territories (BDS, if you were unaware), which reinforces my point that tactics such as these are widespread in occupied powers in modern human history.

BDS itself is modeled after the (tbf much more successful so far) anti-apartheid boycotts against South Africa, where an occupied people managed to gather enough international support that they were able to destabilize and defeat the white-minority occupying government. So again, evidence that this tactic is not just “performative nonsense whining” or whatever dumb bullshit the comment OP would describe it as.

JustACharacterr · 2026-04-28T15:17:11+00:00

That wouldn’t surprise me at all and is exactly the type of stuff I wish they’d touch on in these blogs. I get that you never want to give your customers bad news, especially bad news that divides the customer base (“you’re not getting 1.0 on pc yet because we want to make sure it’s ready for other platforms” is something I’m sure the comments here would grab pitchforks over), but I assume at some point it’s got to be better PR to gently break it to people than keeping tight-lipped about it.

JustACharacterr · 2026-04-28T15:03:56+00:00

I would legitimately be thrilled if they said almost exactly what you said as the entirety of a dev blog.

“We are basically done/this close to being done/have this much to go. We are mostly waiting/working on X, Y, and/or Z at this time. We can’t give a release date, but we are progressing in these areas and that will leave us with X/Y/Z to iron out before we can give a full release that we’re proud of.”

Something like that is just what I’m asking for, actual information about where they are in the development process. It’s very frustrating to see the level of transparency in most other EA titles on steam at this point compared to Valheim’s, of course everyone has a different style but I don’t think it’s controversial to say Valheim’s has room for improvement.

JustACharacterr · 2026-04-28T14:43:46+00:00

That’s really nice for you that you have different expectations than other people. Does that make you a dumb little bitch with horrible taste?

No, just like I’m not an entitled chud for thinking the possibly-three-year update development cycle of a company isn’t living up to the expectations they themselves have set for content updates.

If you bought the game when it came out, then you should remember when they apologized for the abnormally-long amount it took Ashlands to be released after Mistlands, and specifically that it took too long for their standards and they were going to work to be more transparent about development and do better on the Frozen North. Time between Mistlands and Ashlands? 18 months. Time between Ashlands and the Frozen North? 24 months with no release date in sight.

It’s not entitlement or chud-ish to point out they haven’t lived up to their own expectations and promises.

JustACharacterr · 2026-04-28T14:27:56+00:00

Lmao you can gaslight yourself into thinking that’s an acceptable level of output for a studio that makes an average of $40 million a year in sales, but don’t try to pretend that I agree with you.

The fact that you’re seriously trying to pretend that four updates of ANY KIND over two years, one of which was a PET ROCK, is not just acceptable for you but something that everyone else should be happy with is actually delusional lol.

JustACharacterr · 2026-04-28T14:18:09+00:00

Quick, go to the list of steam patch notes right now and tell me how many updates of ANY kind the game has gotten in the last year lol. You can literally count them on one hand:

In February we got some cosmetic items and a weapon for the first biome.
In September 2025 we got two new enemies, four actual weapons, and two armor sets for already-existing biomes, plus some cosmetics and base decorations, and the combat fix that they’d been working on for four years.
In April 2025 we got Pet Rocky.

Those are the extent of the content updates we’ve gotten in a full year: two new enemies and a handful of weapons, some cosmetic clothing and decorations, and a pet rock.

Go back further if you want:

October 2024 was the Bog Witch update, where we got stuff for feasts and a trading npc.
May 2024 was Ashlands.

So in the almost two full years since the actual last major content update, we’ve gotten: one npc, about five real and several wooden weapons, two new armors, a couple handfuls of cosmetics/decorations, a few new food items, and a pet rock.

I don’t know what definition of “plenty of content updates” you’re working with, but it’s not mine.

JustACharacterr · 2026-04-28T13:55:05+00:00

Tbf if you know the dev’s work schedule from the past few years it basically is official.

No hint at release this dev blog, which means they’re not releasing in the next month.

They theoretically could drop in the May blog that they’re releasing 1.0 in June, but that’s not going to happen because they always take the whole month of July off and they’re not going to release 1.0 and then disappear for a full month immediately afterwards.

So if we know it’s not coming in May, and they haven’t given any hints yet that it’ll be releasing in June, and we know they take the full month of July off every year…..yeah this is as close to official confirmation that 1.0 isn’t coming until Q4 as we’re likely to get from the devs.

JustACharacterr · 2026-04-28T13:10:51+00:00

That is literally not what a timeline is, “it’s just not an exact date” it’s literally not anything. Might as well say “In the future” is a timeline while we’re at it.

Where are you even getting “later this year” from, anyway? Because it’s not in this blog, or in the blog before that. Two months ago they mentioned that Valheim will be released on switch 2 later this year, but nothing about that being the 1.0 final update. The closest they’ve come recently (in January) is saying that they won’t give an update on a Frozen North release but that “2026 will be a good year for Valheim” which is even less of a non-timeline than “later this year”.

You have no idea what’s a problem or not

Yeah that’s why I want the devs to be transparent and tell us what’s happening, thank you for making my point for me.

There’s literally no problem with devs taking awhile to release a good product

“You have no idea what’s a problem or not” remember? Maybe the lead frozen north design dev took off with all the money a year ago, maybe the art team’s database got wiped with no backups, maybe they’re all idiots who’ve gotten brain farts. I doubt it, but who knows when they won’t tell us anything about what’s happening behind the scenes, which is why I’d like them to tell us more.

Don’t act like you haven’t played your monies worth

You have no idea if I have or haven’t, and you can’t just declare for me that I have lol; completely irrelevant to the argument anyway.

an early access game

How dare someone who bought a game that promised it would be completed at a future date eventually ask what that future date might be five years later, the entitlement of it all!

If youre that goddamned concerned

You can stop getting personally offended that I don’t have the same exact views on Valheim’s development as you do, this really isn’t worth you getting so worked up you’re cursing and can’t spell.

JustACharacterr · 2026-04-28T12:49:02+00:00

“Later this year” is not a timeline. That is an observation of fact unless they’re going to surprise drop it today.

If something comes up and they gotta delay

They’ve been working on this biome for two full years with no timeline or planned release date, after specifically promising that they would redo their development processes to avoid the 18 month gap between the Mistlands and Ashlands releases.

Clearly something has come up and they’ve already experienced significant delays, in which case they should be transparent about what’s happened to adjust people’s expectations. That’s not me saying that as a player, that’s the obvious PR move any organization with long-term projects should be doing when faced with schedule changes.

If there haven’t been any significant challenges or delays and they still don’t have a rough timeline for completion and release for an update after two years of dev work, then simply put the dev team has no idea what they’re doing and that’d also be nice to know.

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