to which an excited Trump — "leaning" toward Pratt as if to be discreet — then told Pratt two pieces of information about U.S. submarines: the supposed exact number of nuclear warheads they routinely carry, and exactly how close they supposedly can get to a Russian submarine without being detected.

Holy fucking fuck.

This guy needs to be in jail. He’s deliberately leaked sources and methods, national nuclear information, and intelligence on foreign forces. Never in the history of the country has there been such a person in charge of national security. He is such a total waste that he thinks the president of the fucking United States needs to show off in front of foreign government officials by leaking national security secrets.

What an absolute piece of shallow-ego shit.

To be a little more clear than this headline would suggest, it’s not a 4% tax on millionaires. It is a 4% tax on people making over $1M per year. That’s a pretty far cry from someone who simply owns a house, retirement fund, or a stock portfolio worth over $1M. And it’s going to education and infrastructure. I would fully support this tax if I lived in the state.

First, squatters of this type are taking advantage of laws intended to protect renters from predatory landlords. Wherever you stand on people appropriating unused property, these laws need to stay in place even if they’re made more specific.

Second, news outlets like this will always quote a “guns and drugs” case and not the mom with three kids seeking employment or homeless vet cases.

Third, with security cams and doorbells being so cheap, there’s no reason why this should be an issue, especially for a large real estate rental company. That alone puts me in “cry me a river” mode. Notice again that the article lists interviews with individual homeowners but is actually profiling the impact on a rental company.

Slay and serve are part of the drag/queer community lexicon that were made popular (iirc) in the NY ballroom scene. No one cares when 6th graders use them or if they stop.

If you watch queer media or hang out with The Gays, you’ll hear them all the time. They’re a bit campy, but not cringe.

While that’s understandable, I think it’s important to recognize that this is something where we’re going to have to treat pretty carefully.

If a human wants to become a writer, we tell them to read. If you want to write science fiction, you should both study the craft of writing ranging from plots and storylines to character development to Stephen King’s advice on avoiding adverbs. You also have to read science fiction so you know what has been done, how the genre handles storytelling, what is allowed versus shunned, and how the genre evolved and where it’s going. The point is not to write exactly like Heinlein (god forbid), but to throw Heinlein into the mix with other classic and contemporary authors.

Likewise, if you want to study fine art, you do so by studying other artists. You learn about composition, perspective, and color by studying works of other artists. You study art history, broken down geographically and by period. You study DaVinci’s subtle use of shading and Mondrian’s bold colors and geometry. Art students will sit in museums for hours reproducing paintings or working from photographs.

Generative AI is similar. Being software (and at a fairly early stage at that), it’s both more naive and in some ways more powerful than human artists. Once trained, it can crank out a hundred paintings or short stories per hour, but some of the people will have 14 fingers and the stories might be formulaic and dull. AI art is always better when glanced at on your phone than when looked at in detail on a big screen.

In both the cases of human learners and generative AI, a neural network(-like) structure is being conditioned to associate weights between concepts, whether it’s how to paint a picture or how to create one by using 1000 words.

A friend of mine who was an attorney used to say “bad facts make bad law.” It means that misinterpretation, over-generalization, politicization, and a sense of urgency can make for both bad legislation and bad court decisions. That’s especially true when the legislators and courts aren’t well educated in the subjects they’re asked to judge.

In a sense, it’s a new technology that we don’t fully understand - and by “we” I’m including the researchers. It’s theoretically and in some ways mechanically grounded in old technology that we also don’t understand - biological neural networks and complex adaptive systems.

We wouldn’t object to a journalism student reading articles online to learn how to write like a reporter, and we rightfully feel anger over the situation of someone like Aaron Swartz. As a scientist, I want my papers read by as many people as possible. I’ve paid thousands of dollars per paper to make sure they’re freely available and not stuck behind a paywall. On the other hand, I was paid while writing those papers. I am not paid for the paper, but writing the paper was part of my job.

I realize that is a case of the copyright holder (me) opening up my work to whoever wants a copy. On the other other hand, we would find it strange if an author forbade their work being read by someone who wants to learn from it, even if they want to learn how to write. We live in a time where technology makes things like DRM possible, which attempts to make it difficult or impossible to create a copy of that work. We live in societies that will send people to prison for copying literal bits of information without a license to do so. You can play a game, and you can make a similar game. You can play a thousand games, and make one that blends different elements of all of them. But if you violate IP, you can be sued.

I think that’s what it comes down to. We need to figure out what constitutes intellectual property and what rights go with it. What constitutes cultural property, and what rights do people have to works made available for reading or viewing? It’s easy to say that a company shouldn’t be able to hack open a paywall to get at WSJ content, but does that also go for people posting open access to Medium?

I don’t have the answers, and I do want people treated fairly. I recognize the tremendous potential for abuse of LLMs in generating viral propaganda, and I recognize that in another generation they may start making a real impact on the economy in terms of dislocating people. I’m not against legislation. I don’t expect the industry to regulate itself, because that’s not how the world works. I’d just like for it to be done deliberately and realistically and with the understanding that we’re not going to get it right and will have to keep tuning the laws as the technology and our understanding continue to evolve.

According to a recent review, 100% of the people falsely arrested via facial recognition findings have been black.

The technology needs to be legally banned from law enforcement applications, because law enforcement is not making a good faith effort to use the technology.

Truth is an absolute defense in cases like these. They admitted to the facts of the case. The testing methodology is absolutely standard. There is no way Musk can prevail.

I just wonder if this will also fall under anti-SLAPP laws, since Musk is clearly doing it to shut down public disclosure and discussion.

Edit: If this is actionable, I would be interested in participating in a class action suit against Philips for materially altering a product’s functionality after purchase. This is like buying a normal car and being told a year later it was given a remote update and now can only use Ford (tm) brand gasoline which costs $10/gallon.

If you do have an existing investment in Hue products, I suggest reaching out to them to request a refund because your purchase was made under a different policy, and this policy change is going to render your products useless without consent on your part. If they’re going to force a significant change that compromises the functionality of what might be hundreds of dollars worth of equipment without permitting recourse for legacy users, they should have to accept returns on what essentially is now a product you did not purchase and would not have purchased.

Honestly, it could be a real power move for some blue state republicans to flip parties. If they could pull a Reagan and say that the Republican Party has changed but they haven’t, they could take both the democratic voters and centrist republicans while losing the MAGAs, and still carry their district.

That would be something for the history books.

So if an armed and violent group were to break down the doors and windows of the Supreme Court while it was in session with the announced intent to disrupt their proceedings and possibly commit bodily harm to the justices and their staff and personnel, that’s all cool?

Legally, no. You cannot use an NDA to force someone to help you cover your a crime. That’s illegal.

What it might do is get people to come forward, because the threat of the NDA was perceived as real.

Most noncompete agreements are also illegal and unenforceable but if people follow them without seeking advice, they’re doing what the employer intended them to do.

When I had to sign a non-compete as a requirement to accept a job I thought I wanted, my lawyer’s advice was to just sign it because it was completely unenforceable. He said to basically sign it and forget about it.

I’ve never understood how a Trump NDA as something agreed to by members of the US government would have any teeth whatsoever. Any NDA I signed as an employee of the government was between me and the government. I couldn’t imagine my manager making me sign one with him personally.

Given every election that’s happened since 2016, this is exactly what every single Democratic candidate needs to hang around the neck of every single Republican. No more blue state moderate republicans. Link them all to 100% supporting a national abortion ban, outlawing marriage equality, and forced Christian prayers in public schools. Anti-civil rights, pro-child endangerment. Every single market should get this message, and it should be clear and consistent across the country.

This is an actual OMG moment.

The next Y2K style problem will happen on this date, January 19, at pi o’clock in 2038. I was really hoping he’d get to see that.

He was ironically taken too soon.

It’s not a totally unreasonable impression, but no, this will not turn into a second civil war. The Guard units of each state can be called up for federal duty. The National Guard is part of the US Department of Defense and thus ultimately answers to the DoD and the US president as commander in chief. The US military has multiple components, including regular services (eg the full time Army), reserve components (eg US Army Reserve) and National Guard components. The latter two are part-time military with one weekend per month training duty plus an annual training. Guards members and Reservists hold regular full time jobs.

The Guard units are deployable by the governors of their respective states, and so can be used in emergency situations like natural disasters. They have also been deployed against what have been perceived as riots that threaten lives and properties of the individual states.

However, they are subject to activation by order of the US president and they fall under the national command authority. Guard personnel take the same oath to the constitution as other military personnel, and cannot legally refuse federal activation. Guards personnel would be subject to courts martial and face potentially extreme penalties including being discharged from service under criminal conditions, being stripped of rank and benefits, and jail time in federal prison. This would be what we call a career limiting rule.

So, if push comes to shove, Biden can activate the NG and order them to stand down or to implement policies to maintain order. Thinking the NG units and in particular their commanders would disobey a presidential order because they just love their state governor and hate the president so much is getting into Turner Diaries levels of right wing apocalyptic fantasy.

Sue.

Remember when the republicans regularly accused the democrats as being soft on defense and the party of “cut and run?”

Manager at a FAANG here. Three days of sick leave (per year I’m guessing) is fucking insanely low. Just a flu will take someone out for a week easily. If you force them to come in or else take unpaid time off/risk being fired you’re going to a) get someone who is marginally productive at best and b) likely to get more coworkers sick, causing a bigger slowdown and costing the company more money. You also come off like the person who writes the memo that 40% of sick time is taken on a Monday or a Friday.

You’re Colin Robinson, the energy vampire of your office.

I don’t think twitter has $30B in valuation left. Musk bought it for $44B (which was beyond its value at the time, but okay). Since his takeover, it’s lost between 50-60% of its value. That was as of several months ago, so I have to imagine it’s even less now.

With the loss of brand equity, they might be sliding towards the single digit billions very quickly.

He’s just setting money on fire at this point.

No, not in New York. These were personal decisions on the part of the health care providers, and I think this lawsuit is not only appropriate but desperately needed.

The suit is exactly targeted. When fetal personhood is considered to outweigh the life of the mother, it’s absolutely something that needs to be fought tooth and nail. When a hypothetical future fetus is determined to be more important than the life and health of the mother, we’ve entered into a zone that can only be called psychotic.

There is no case that makes it more clear that they’re turning women into sub-persons.

Donald Trump, 6'3 215 lbs

I am making a skeptical face.

The bit that really irked me was that it was purely performative. It seemed like literally the exact same community that populated the_donald with memes and Trump train bots and the photoshopping of Trump’s pic onto Rambo. Their posts have fuck all to do with communism just like the trump posts had nothing to do with conservative politics. It was just edge faux-outrage and basically taking an opposite position for its own sake. They could simultaneously criticize Gov Newsom for not signing a trans rights bill while praising Putin who is doing his level best to make being gay illegal. It’s a mistake to see it as political discourse when it’s really just trolling. Like on the_donald, they egg each other on and have their in jokes and memes (in both the picture sense and in the actual meme sense) about walls the same way the trumpers did with helicopters.

Defederation is the best response imo.

There was a quote that I’m remembering coming from Nixon about Vietnam that observed that when he lost Cronkite, he lost the war. I’m seeing a shift in the mainstream American press that’s increasingly highlighting what in all honesty are war crimes using the kinds of bleak language normally reserved for things like civil wars in Africa.

I can only see Israel, particularly while still under the Netanyahu government, becoming more and more isolated from the rest of the world.

I’ve been concerned Texas and other states would be looking for this kind of thing for abortions as well. Everyone has been telling me that this kind of thing is impossible and no one would ever try to go after a patient based on medical procedures done out of state.

I’m also concerned that Texas could issue an arrest warrant for medical personnel or people facilitating abortion travel who reside in California (for example) such that it becomes inadvisable to drive through Texas, or even have a layover.

It’s not paranoia if they’re actually after you.

Iirc the GoT intros gave you a hint about the episode by highlighting the map areas that the episode was going to cover. But S8 ended up being so bad that it went back in time and ruined the entire series for me, so I never rewatched it and might be misremembering.

Right now I never skip the intro for What We Do in the Shadows. It’s the same every time, but the song is just too much fun to skip. I am probably on my fourth watching of that series.

I think I also sit through most of the Star Trek intros just because I enjoy the visuals.

This is the key paragraph, at least for me:

"When a defendant invokes such a defense in court," Smith's office argued, "he waives attorney-client privilege for all communications concerning that defense, and the government is entitled to additional discovery and may conduct further investigation, both of which may require further litigation and briefing."

So if he’s going to blame his lawyers, the government can compel all of their communications in order to investigate whether he actually conspired with the lawyers to get the advice that his illegal act was actually legal. If he did (as seems likely), then he incriminates himself and his lawyers on additional conspiracy charges. If he didn’t, then he will have to own the decision.

This is something they’re going to fight tooth and nail against, so I’m curious as to what their next step is going to be.

This post has made me spend the last 20 minutes sounding out the word “genetically” in my head to see if it should have four or five syllables. I think I might even pronounce it differently in different contexts.

I am a biologist, by the way.

I have decided it has 4.35 syllables.

I am a mathematical biologist.

Ironically, Robocop would have defended him from the terminators.

I really do miss the 80s/90s era anti-capitalist dystopian future movies. We have the Purge series now, which has been pretty good (at least 3 and 4), but nothing approaching the massive numbers of productions ranging from They Live to Rollerboys to Robocop to Running Man and so many others.

It feels like we’ve hit a tipping point where subconsciously at least we’ve figured out we’re actually the bad guys from Red Dawn and the Wolverines are the people we’re killing, and just decided to lean into it. I’m waiting for Handmaid’s Tale to get a Birth of a Nation makeover in the next ten years.

"Included also are World Leaders, both good and bad, but none of which are as evil and 'sick' as the THUGS we have inside our Country who, with their Open Borders, INFLATION, Afghanistan Surrender, Green New Scam, High Taxes, No Energy Independence, Woke Military, Russia/Ukraine, Israel/Iran, All Electric Car Lunacy, and so much more, are looking to destroy our once great USA." Trump posted. "MAY THEY ROT IN HELL."

Versus

Biden, who is running with little competition for the Democratic party presidential nomination in 2024, struck a different tone with his Christmas message. He posted a video of the White House's holiday decorations overlaid with an audio track of him and First Lady Jill Biden reading the poem "The Night Before Christmas" by Clement Clark Moore.

Sigh.

We are so fucked.

Scott's decision to end his campaign came as a surprise to his staffers, who only found out after watching his interview on TV.

Now that’s some leadership right there.

I continue to use “twitter” because Musk is a transphobe. If he feels obligated to deadname or misgender people, or defend those who do, I don’t see the need to follow what he wants to identify as, either.

It’s not one day. It’s happening in the headlines as we watch. Some estimates are that twitter has lost 90% of its value in the (a bit under a full) year since Elmo took over. Post-rebranding, some financial institutions and even one of Musk’s own dumb-ass shoot from the hip tweets puts twitter’s current value at around $4-5B.

Even if that’s low, I think the best case estimate, before rebranding, was sitting around $15B. That’s still a loss of 2/3 value in less than a year (that was in May) and it hasn’t gotten better since the attempted rebrand.

It’s happening, and his incompetence is on full display. He’s even reached the stage of megalomania where he’s blaming the Jews.

I know the monies come from from different buckets and have wildly different orders of magnitude, but is there some sort of justification in continued recovery of a piece of shit sub full of the seemingly invulnerable ultra-rich that everyone knew was going to implode, versus, say, school lunches? Was there enough money to have paid SAT prep tutors in a handful of inner city schools in Chicago instead of dragging up the remains of one of the stupidest and most entitled public displays of sheer idiocy on the past handful of years?

The truth is an absolute defense in matters like these. Musk’s thermonuclear lawsuit is going to go off like a damp squid.

I haven’t tried it yet, but I’ve heard that you can call to get vehicles towed if they are blocking the sidewalk. I don’t know if that’s in every municipality, but I suspect the tow companies and the city would not mind the revenue.

TFW when all of your bugs are like cockroaches that run away from the light but hide in the dark where you can’t see them.

Braess's paradox

Dietrich Braess, a mathematician at Ruhr University, Germany, noticed the flow in a road network could be impeded by adding a new road, when he was working on traffic modelling. His idea was that if each driver is making the optimal self-interested decision as to which route is quickest, a shortcut could be chosen too often for drivers to have the shortest travel times possible. More formally, the idea behind Braess's discovery is that the Nash equilibrium may not equate with the best overall flow through a network

Okay, sure, but have you ever even considered uparmoring your car and mounting an automatic weapon to it? It’s like people never even played Car Wars. With some armor and a SAW they could have practiced their rights, and with a .50 they probably could have cut his house in half.

I mean, gas costs will go up with the additional weight and you need additional crew members to serve the weapons, but that’s the price of freedom.

Alternatively, you could try delivering the groceries by trebuchet from the back of a flatbed truck, but the automatic weapon thing is less likely to result in them cancelling the tip.

I tried loading lunch meat into my canon but it developed a film.

We want to clarify. President Trump assuredly did not purchase a handgun in South Carolin because that would have been illegal. Instead, he ordered a staff member to make a straw purchase for him.

Texas is basically the Iraq of the US. Specifically, Saddam-era Iraq, not the lovely paradise it’s become since liberation.

It’s run by a ruthless dictator with a corrupt and criminal government dependent on him for protection. The oil-based economy keeps the money rolling in, with the poor getting the bare minimum to keep them from revolting while the rich get richer and the “elected” leaders get patronage.

He exploits religious and ethnic differences to make sure Texans remain divided and conquered, and will not hesitate to use violence to keep them in line.

I think it’s clear that we will eventually have to invade them and liberate them for their oil.