Carl

Exactly. Trash cans on every street corner won’t help if everyone thinks littering is okay.

Nah, the gays aren’t doing very much reading right now, due to AO3 being down.

Yeah, and this is why being an informed voter is so difficult. There was one initiative on my ballot that was worded like “create funding for programs to reduce homelessness.” Sounds nice, right? Sounds progressive? Sounds like something I’d want, for sure!

After googling it, it was basically just giving tons of money to cops… So that the cops can buy new tactical gear, to march into homeless camps like jackboots and beat the shit out of homeless people while torching all of their stuff. But sure, it’s “reducing homelessness.” I guess if we tear down the homeless camps and violently chase all of the homeless people out of town, there are no more homeless people? That’s how it works, right?

It would require capturing a zygote.

Did you mean capturing a gamete? As in, a viable sperm cell or egg? Which proves that the individual is biologically capable of producing those gametes, which means they are capable of producing viable offspring?

Because capturing a zygote (a viable egg that has been successfully fertilized by a viable sperm cell, but hasn’t yet implanted itself on the uterine wall to become an embryo) would require a woman to have a fertilized egg. And I feel like requiring impregnation just to confirm sex is a little… Impractical?

It would mean positively identifying males would be impossible, because they’re not capable of carrying a zygote at all. That that’s before we even get into the whole “in order to confirm an elementary school girl is biologically female so she can compete, the doctor would first need to impregnate her to create a zygote” thing.

Yup, I’m sure China is over the moon. A lot of his decisions have basically just boiled down to “hand {soft power} directly to China.” Because the slimy sack doesn’t understand the concept of long-term planning and soft power. Hell, he doesn’t even understand quarterly business planning, because he bankrupts every business he gets his tiny mitts on.

Yes, it specifically affects the OpenSSH/Alpine/musl interaction. It’s a vulnerability in how Alpine/OpenSSH interfaces with musl, and allows anyone who can reach your SSH port to instantly log into a passwordless account by entering over 256 characters into the password field.

The vuln is nicknamed *sshole, if you want to search it. Because it only works on passwordless accounts, (meaning it has a * in the password field). And the most common use-case for passwordless accounts is because you’re using cert-based authentication instead. Thus the warnings that if you’re using cert-only SSH, you’re most likely vulnerable.

No, there was an SSH vulnerability discovered a day or two ago, which allows anyone to bypass the certificate check during authentication. So if your SSH is configured to only use a certificate, (not cert and password) then anyone can log into your shit.

Even this isn’t a foolproof solution, because you can still find them on third-party instances that federate with both yours and .ml

I just bought a refurbished HP EliteDesk for ~$400, and it’s much better than a pi in basically every metric except power draw. If those things are actually retailing at $385, it’s legitimately time to start treating the used/refurbished market as the new standard.

9 year old me (casually scrolling on 4chan) would agree. I still remember accidentally stumbling across my first beheading video. The early (largely unmoderated) internet was like the Wild West.

Texas has been red for over three decades. The state was a key part of the Southern Strategy, because packing the 5th circuit court of appeals with conservative judges was a big part in overthrowing longstanding liberal legislation.

Texas provides a direct pipeline to the 5th circuit, and they also needed to pack a local district court too. So all of the legislation they hate can get litigated in that district court, seen by a batshit crazy conservative judge, and get a batshit crazy conservative ruling. And then any appeals will go to the 5th circuit court of appeals, where it will land in front of another batshit crazy federal judge. And when that batshit crazy federal judge makes a batshit crazy ruling, it goes into effect nationwide unless the SCOTUS overturns it.

Seriously, basically every time you see some kind of “federal judge overturns the every person gets a free puppy and our farts all magically smell like cotton candy law, and reinstates the livestream puppies getting fed into the Puppy Masher 9000 and we all have uncontrollable diarrhea law instead” type of news story, it’s coming out of the 5th circuit court of appeals.

Texas got hit hard by conservative propaganda as a result, because it has been instrumental as a weapon for conservatives to overturn liberal legislation. Let’s not let perfect be the enemy of progress.

We’re going to end up with civil engineers who don’t know how to calculate dynamic weight ratings, because they used Claude to get through their physics classes.

Skill atrophy is absolutely a concern, even if we continue teaching the fundamentals. Because without that higher level knowledge, there is nobody to check for hallucinations.

The desktop calculator is an amazing tool for people who do a lot of math, but those people still know how to do the math. AI is fundamentally changing that, because it is directing users on how to do the work, not simply taking in {a}+{b} and returning {c}. It is a user going “hey chatbot how do I find the difference between {a} and {b}?” Then the AI confidently (and incorrectly) goes “Oh all we need to do is {a}+{b} to give us the result {c}.” But if the user already doesn’t know how to find a difference, they won’t notice that the AI is incorrect.

And that is obviously a small example, but apply it to larger problems like calculating thermal expansion requirements for a suspended walkway. Calculating maximum wattage ratings for a circuit. Calculating maximum weight ratings for a highway overpass or bridge. Calculating medicine dosage based on a patient’s body weight and an interactive drug.

Any one of these could lead to disaster if done incorrectly. And the issue with AI is that it will happily hold your hand through the entire process, while confidently being incorrect the whole time.

My company recently shifted to a new time clock system, which uses AI for basic search functions. Search is also intended to be the primary way users navigate the site. The salesperson’s marketing was “oh it’s so easy, you just describe what you want to do, and the AI takes you there!”

I need to approve my time card each week. The page is literally titled “Time Approval”. But searching for “Time Approval” usually doesn’t yield any results. Sometimes I’ll get lucky if I search for something like “I need to approve my time card for last week” but even that isn’t foolproof. Like it literally can’t find the page I need every week, even when I search for the exact title of the page. And who the fuck wants to type out an entire sentence just for a basic site directory search?

The way to get to the approval page through the UI (by clicking through, without using the AI-powered search function) is like four obscure menus deep. This is something that every employee is expected to do every week, and they buried it like they were planning on making a treasure map. They intentionally made the UI unintuitive, so users would feel compelled to use the AI search. But then the AI search doesn’t fucking work, so I end up having to navigate the unintuitive menus anyways. I ended up just bookmarking the approval page directly in my browser, so I can log in and then use the bookmark to jump straight to that page.

This is actually why I think we should bring back the old tradition of pieing corrupt politicians and public figures. The humiliation is only half of the message. The other half of the message is “this could have been a weapon, and you only continue to live because I chose a pie instead. Your security needs to win every time, but we only need to touch you once.”

I always figured it was a reference to the “birds work for the government” joke. That, or because birds tend to perch up on traffic lights and watch the traffic passing below. Or something about safety in numbers, because Flock’s biggest selling point is that after they hit a certain number of strategically placed cameras, avoiding them becomes nearly impossible.

It’s encouraging vigilantism, but I wouldn’t call it vigilante work directly. I agree with the overall sentiment though: When we consider the Four Boxes of Liberty, the billionaires have already done everything they can to nullify the soap box, ballot box, and jury box. All that’s left after that is the ammo box.

This is the real crux of the issue. Blanket pardons shouldn’t be a thing. If you want to pardon someone, it should be specific. Which crimes? Where? When? Who was victimized? Who else was involved? What was the outcome of the crime?

The SCOTUS has already ruled in Burdick v. US that accepting a pardon requires admitting guilt of the crime you’re being pardoned of. The wording of the ruling was that a pardon carries “an imputation of guilt and acceptance of a confession of it.” The SCOTUS has consistently held that a pardon does not overturn a guilty conviction. Instead, it removes the punishment for the crime. You’re still unequivocally guilty after a pardon.

It shouldn’t be some sort of “I pardon you for waves arms in air vaguely” power, because that turns the whole “needing to admit guilt” part into a sly wink wink elbow nudge situation. It puts the person’s crimes in a quantum Schrödinger state. The person accepting a vague pardon is inarguably guilty of something, because they admitted guilt when they accepted the pardon. But the court doesn’t know what they’ve admitted to until a prosecutor tries to indict them, and they go “oh no you can’t prosecute me, I was pardoned.”

Yeah, I also grew up poor, and now I’m the cool house that gives out full-sized candy bars. Even in this economy, and after having a bad year financially, I refuse to compromise on Halloween. I always strive to be the house that kid-me would have wanted to tell his friends about.

Kids will take the potato for the laughs. My brother did it one year, and quickly had kids excitedly go “ohhh you’re the potato house??” when he offered the potato. One year, he ended up going through like three giant bags of russets, and still had an almost full candy dish at the end of the night.

He lives on the curve of a horseshoe-shaped street that is a popular destination for trick-or-treaters. The entire neighborhood goes all out with the Halloween decorations, several neighbors coordinate with themes and set up haunted houses, etc… They basically treat it like a big block party, and fully shut down the entrances at both ends of the horseshoe so kids can safely wander around and play in the street. Experiencing your first Halloween in his neighborhood is basically a rite of passage for new neighbors. And parents looking for good trick-or-treat destinations like it because there’s a public parking lot at the end of the horseshoe. So they can park at the end of the horseshoe, walk the horseshoe with their kids for an hour or two, enjoy the low-stress chaperoning with the closed street and amateur haunts, and end up right next to where they parked afterwards. It’s a whole thing.

Since he’s at the peak of the horseshoe curve, he’s the halfway point for that specific street. Groups of trick-or-treaters pass each other on the sidewalk, and the group that got a potato will naturally be laughing about it. So by the time those new trick-or-treaters make it all the way down the street to his house, they have passed several groups that were all laughing about their potatoes. And of course by that point, they want a potato of their own.

It basically generates a real-time micro-meme, where kids excitedly discussing their potatoes makes other kids want a potato. And since he’s at the curve, he’d have trick-or-treaters talking about the potato house all the way down to both ends of the horseshoe. And that means that they’d be generating potato meme-force for the entire second half of their trek, (regardless of which end they started at,) all the way down the street. At a certain point, it becomes self-sustaining and kids are actively seeking out the potato house like it’s some sort of urban legend.

Exactly. It already reached the conservative eyes that it needed to reach, to stoke conservative fear and anger. They don’t care if liberals get upset about their posting, because the posts weren’t meant for liberal audiences.