me sowing (signing a bill into law and bragging about its bipartisan support): haha fuck yeah!
me reaping (hearing that the Supreme Court has ruled 9-0 to uphold the law that I signed): well this fucking sucks. what the fuck.
there's always fierce competition in the category of Dumbest Own-Goal by a Democrat...but here comes President "only mostly dead...still slightly alive" Biden with a last-minute buzzerbeater and....MUH GAWD HE'S DONE IT!
> Where the fridge cases were previously lined with simple glass doors, there were door-size computer screens instead. These “smart doors” obscured shoppers’ view of the fridges’ actual contents, replacing them with virtual rows of the Gatorades, Bagel Bites and other goods it promised were inside. The digital displays had a distinct advantage over regular glass, at least for the retailer: ads. > > ... > > These internet-connected fridge panels, developed by a Chicago startup called Cooler Screens Inc., frequently flickered, crashed or showed the wrong products. Every so often, they caught fire. But store managers were stuck with them. As part of a 10-year contract with Walgreens for a split of the ad revenue, Cooler Screens had installed 10,000 smart doors at hundreds of US locations like this one. It planned to install 35,000 more. > > ... > > On Dec. 14, Avakian’s team secretly cut the data feeds to more than 100 Walgreens stores in the Chicago area. The dozen or so smart doors affected in each of these stores either glazed over with white pixels or blacked out altogether. Customers could no longer see where the Coke and Red Bull and Hot Pockets and Heineken sat, and either assumed the fridges were out of order or found themselves rummaging through one by one. Some staffers pasted pieces of paper on the opaque screens that read, for example, “assorted sports drinks & coffee.”
tapping the "there are no good billionaires" sign
remember when Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post, slapped "Democracy dies in darkness" on the masthead, and a bunch of MSNBC-brained liberals thought it was going to be the newspaper that led the resistance against Trump?
I just woke up from a years-long coma. could someone tell me how that worked out?
And you think Xiaohongshu is run by the Chinese workers?
oh yes daddy, harder. shove those words right into my mouth.
I've been very cynical about the TikTok ban, and assumed people would work around it by sideloading the APK on Android phones, after it was removed from the app stores (which, as I detailed in this comment, could theoretically get random users who share the APK with friends prosecuted by the federal government and charged with a $5000 per user fine)
but this is exceeding my wildest expectations
"oh, but it's full of Chinese propaganda!!!" people will whine. cool. don't care. Twitter and Facebook are full of American propaganda, no one seems to be falling over themselves to ban those apps from app stores.
if propaganda is the concern, have schools teach critical thinking and how to recognize propaganda techniques. they won't do that, of course, because they want people to be susceptible to American propaganda.
haha class solidarity go brrr. the average American worker has more in common with the average Chinese worker than they do with an American oligarch. all of the American propaganda about how Chinese people are inherently untrustworthy and nefarious is gonna fall apart as people interact with actual Chinese people and realize "oh they're pretty much just like me, other than the language barrier".
and TikTok-style shortform video is very nearly the ideal medium for surmounting that language barrier. it was already commonplace to have captions in TikTok videos. start captioning videos on RedNote in both English and Chinese and bang, language differences don't matter nearly as much anymore.
pretty strong "history doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes" vibes:
vs
meanwhile Israel will continue to illegally occupy & annex land, and take Palestinian hostages (except, when Israel does it, they're not called hostages, they're in "administrative detention")
Analysis found that more than 64,000 Palestinians may have been killed by traumatic injury in the first nine months of the war.
Apple announcing a new product would be news.
speculation that Apple might announce a new product...is not news.
This year, consider ordering your Girl Scout cookies from a trans girl scout to make their day!
“tiktok” does not appear to me to be a viewpoint
seriously? have you not paid attention to any of the arguments in favor of the ban that boil down to "it's pushing evil Chinese Communist propaganda into the minds of our precious children"?
here's the original bill - H.R.7521 - Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act.
it was introduced by Mike Gallagher (R-Wisconsin).
here's a tweet of his from March:
"This is my message to TikTok: break up with the Chinese Communist Party or lose access to your American users. America’s foremost adversary has no business controlling a dominant media platform in the United States." - Rep. Gallagher
and from November 2023, in a Fox News appearance:
Rep. Gallagher on why it’s critical to ban or force a sale of TikTok:
“It would be national self-suicide to allow the dominant media platform in America to be controlled, or at least be influenced by, the Chinese Communist Party.”
the advocates for the ban have been very clear, from the start, that they believe TikTok has a viewpoint - specifically that it's controlled or influenced by the Chinese Communist Party. and they want to discriminate against that viewpoint.
id say you have a stronger argument than viewpoint discrimination by saying it violates the first ammendment of the users of tiktok, personally, though the courts might disagree.
have you read the bill? the actual law, not news articles or summaries of it?
I linked it in this comment. go read it, it's short, and not terrible as far as legalese goes.
the gist of it is that the law makes it illegal to run an app store (or anything that looks like an app store) that offers downloads of the TikTok app.
so the two big obvious targets of the law are Apple and Google...but it applies equally to everyone. F-Droid could violate it, in theory, by hosting the APK for download through their servers.
or for example, say the ban took effect, and TikTok gets removed from app stores. some tech-savvy high school kid knows how to copy the APK from their Android phone before it gets deleted, and shows their friends how to sideload it onto their phones.
then a bunch of other people ask for it too, so this kid uploads it to some filesharing service, passes around the link, and eventually it gets around to 100 other classmates.
that high school kid has violated the TikTok ban. the federal government can levy a fine against them of half a million dollars ($5,000 per user who downloaded it)
does that satisfy your desire to have the ban infringe on the free speech of "real" people, and not just Apple and Google?
tik-tok could be used to sideload data gathering for China, such as government officials camera or microphone use
but again - nothing about that is unique to TikTok.
do you think the federal government should force Apple and Google to ban the Twitter app, because of the risk that Elon Musk might use it to spy on politicians to get leverage for the 2026 midterms?
or, since Musk has said he's starting to meddle in European politics as well - should the EU require Apple and Google to ban the Twitter app on European soil, out of a similar fear that the Twitter app could be used as spyware?
beyond the worry of poisoning our society with propaganda.
of the 3 apps that I mentioned - TikTok, Facebook, and Twitter - aren't all 3 of them "poisoning our society with propaganda"?
why is TikTok singled out for the ban, do you think?
does it have anything to do with the long-standing right-wing grievance and fear and distrust towards Ghyna (or the "ChiComs", if you prefer the pre-Trump right-wing nomenclature)?
because as far as I can tell, every argument about this ends up boiling down to "sure, lots of apps do it...but it's uniquely bad when an app written by Chinese people do it"
you arent responding to their point about framing this as a 1st ammendment issue being problematic.
I've posted previously about why "the federal government can require Apple and Google to remove apps it doesn't like, and that has nothing to do with free speech" is a laughable position. I didn't feel like rehashing it here.
the platform’s collection of user data
this "oh banning TikTok is good because TikTok collects a bunch of user data" talking point has hoodwinked a whole lot of tech-savvy, generally-left-of-center people who really should know better.
thought experiment: I go out and buy a brand-new phone. Apple or Android, it doesn't matter.
I install some apps. let's say TikTok, Facebook, and Twitter.
all of those apps use the platform APIs published by Apple or Google respectively.
all of them are equally capable of collecting user data.
TikTok is not unique or special in any way when it comes to data harvesting.
oh, except TikTok is owned by Ghyna, and everyone knows that Ghyna is evil and scary. surely that makes it different, right? US-based companies can harvest our data all they want, and sure maybe an EU-based company too. but Ghyna harvesting our data? that's a bridge too far!
and that's why we need to ban companies owned by Ghyna from harvesting our data!
here's the problem with that. I install another app. I don't like the stock Weather app that comes with my phone, so I install Totally Trustworthy Weather from a developer named Absolutely Not Spyware LLC.
that weather app needs location permissions, obviously. and network access. and to be allowed to run in the background constantly.
because it's given permissions to run in the background, there's a decent chance the weather app can actually collect more info about me than TikTok/Facebook/Twitter/etc.
but, why would a weather app collect data like that? what's it going to do with it? it's just a weather app, surely it doesn't care, right?
wrong - it's going to sell all the data it collects on me to a data broker.
(read Temptations of an open-source browser extension developer if you're skeptical of how much money is thrown around in order to collect data of this sort)
if those nefarious people in Ghyna want data about you...they'll just buy it from a data broker, the same way everyone else (including the FBI) does.
if Congress had passed some sort of GDPR-ish law, that applied across the board to all forms of data harvesting, I'd be all in favor of it. but obviously they're never going to do that.
instead, what started out in 2020 as a "Ghyna bad" policy from Trump now has bipartisan support and people on the left defending it on data privacy grounds. we live in the stupidest goddamn timeline.
I stocked lentils once and they sat for weeks
random idea - could you make little "meal kit" type things for the less popular ingredients like these?
if someone has never cooked lentils before, and sees them in a free pantry, I can definitely understand why they wouldn't be inclined to take them, they can be somewhat daunting at first.
but you could do something like bundle together a bag of lentils with a can of tomato paste and a jar of curry powder, with a printout of this recipe or a similar one, and someone would only need to add a couple of fresh veggies to complete the recipe.
Nuts would be great but are pricey.
is buying them in bulk and dividing them up into smaller portions an option? one of my go-to snacks are these cashews which are still on the pricey side, but less expensive than buying them in smaller packages.
Outraged by the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, a wilderness survival trainer spent years undercover climbing the ranks of right-wing militias. He didn’t tell police or the FBI. He didn’t tell family or friends. The one person he told was a ProPublica reporter.
Former Black Panthers fear the FBI is still keeping tabs on them decades after COINTELPRO. In at least one case, they were right.
> In fact, it’s the uncertainty itself that contributes to the surveillance PTSD experienced today by aging Black activists like Silvers. Surveillance PTSD, also common among young men who’ve experienced multiple police stops, manifests as hypervigilance, anxiety, depression, and mistrust of formal institutions, including health clinics and banks. Sometimes it’s the very inability to know whether you’re really being watched, or you’re simply being paranoid, that is most unsettling of all. > > ... > > Rahim and Silvers are not outliers. The destabilization, the inability to know what’s real, to be haunted by uncertainty for decades—that’s the point. FBI briefs from 1971 describe their purpose as the inducement of “paranoia.” So COINTELPRO’s effects linger on, whether or not the program’s targets are still being actively surveilled by the state today.
you will get better answers to your question, and a more productive discussion in general, if you leave your subjective opinion out of the question.
it’s not fully memory safe (there are some programming languages that are even safer, like Ada)?
for example, you might ask instead "why has Rust gotten widespread adoption, that previous safety-focused languages like Ada did not enjoy?"
this is a big ol' "it depends"
if it's a hobby project, then by all means rewrite it if you want to.
if it's a commercial project of some kind - there's a business that's making money, and part of the business making money relies on this code working properly - then rewrites are almost always a bad idea.
read Things You Should Never Do, Part I, an almost 25-year-old blog post (man, that's a weird sentence to write) about why giant rewrites in a commercial setting are a bad idea.
in general, people greatly underestimate how much work is involved in a rewrite. it feels like it should be simpler to start from a blank slate, and tell yourself you're going to avoid all the mistakes that you hate with the existing codebase. maybe you're writing it in a new language, or at least a newer dialect/version of the same language.
if the current codebase is a mess...how did it get that way? lack of engineering discipline? a "just make it work now, we can go back and tidy it up later" attitude towards accumulation of tech debt? if those same attitudes are present on the team doing the rewrite, you're going to end up right back where you started after the rewrite is "done".
the main things you need for refactoring to be successful is a) tests, and b) a plan.
the tests allow you to refactor with the confidence that if you break something, the tests will point it out for you. trying to refactor something that lacks tests is the worst place to be in, because you'll want to add tests, and often adding tests requires refactoring the code to be more testable, placing you in a catch-22.
the plan allows you to make those refactoring changes gradually, over time, while still maintaining the system. in the context of a business that's paying developers to do this work, the businesspeople tend to look poorly on an engineer coming to them and saying "we're gonna spend the next year or two doing a big rewrite, so in the meantime you can't ask us for any new features or bugfixes to the existing system. but once it's done the new system will be really cool, trust me."
successful refactoring is a Ship of Thesus - you can replace the entire thing, but you have to do it one component at a time.
putting this in the context of other committee fights the Democrats have been having:
77-year-old Jerry Nadler was the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee (which also plays a crucial oversight role)
Nadler's leadership was successfully challenged by 62-year-old Jamie Raskin.
so Democrats' version of "younger blood" was to replace a baby boomer (born 1947) with...a slightly younger baby boomer (born 1962, which depending on where you draw the line is the last of the baby boom, or the very beginning of Gen X)
Raskin had previously been the top Democrat on House Oversight, so that spot became vacant.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez ran for that leadership position on House Oversight. she's 35 years old, has an excellent media presence, and is well-known nationally.
instead of AOC, Democrats chose a 74-year old, Gerry Connolly.
and not just any 74-year old...they chose a 74-year-old who has cancer
and not just any 74-year old with cancer...a 74-year-old who has an especially deadly form of cancer
and not just any 74-year old with an especially deadly form of cancer...esophageal cancer. cancer of the esophagus. you know, that thing that's in your throat. you know what else is in your throat, right next to your esophagus? your voice box. that thing you speak with.
Democrats in a nutshell: the guy we put in charge of oversight of the Trump administration...there's a good chance he's going to have surgery that renders him physically incapable of speaking.
> A 74-year-old congressman stricken with an especially deadly form of cancer was chosen today to be the top Democrat in charge of oversight, a watchdog role that will oversee investigations into public corruption and wrongdoing over the next two years. > > ... > > Doctors I interviewed took a uniformly dim view of Connolly’s prognosis, expressing shock that he hasn’t resigned, much less been passed up for the demanding oversight role. > > “This man is clearly dying,” a Pennsylvania-based surgeon told me, requesting that their name not be used in order to comment candidly. “This is insanity.”
the most plausible explanation I've seen so far - credit to this post (from one of the hosts of the 5-4 podcast) where I saw it first:
my suspicion is that Kamala is floating a CA governor run or 2028 run not because she thinks she has a chance but because it will help convince wealthy donors that it's still worth buying influence with her and thus help her fundraise to pay off her campaign's debts
but also Kamala ending up as the nominee wouldn't surprise me. if it's not her, there'll be a different "establishment" Democratic candidate that the DNC puts their thumb on the scale for. 2028 seems likely to be yet another "this is the most important election of our lives, it's crucial to the future of the country that you vote for whichever Democrat we tell you to vote for, now shut the fuck up and stop complaining".
Michael Conahan was convicted of accepting $2.8m for jailing more than 2,300 children, some as young as eight
> In 2011, Michael Conahan was sentenced to more than 17 years in prison after he and another judge, Mark Ciavarella, were found guilty of accepting $2.8m in illegal payments in exchange for sending more than 2,300 children – including some as young as eight years old – to private juvenile detention centers.
if you're unfamiliar with the backstory of this "kids-for-cash" scandal, yes that is an accurate name for it. here's the Wikipedia article about it.
We need a frank discussion about Democratic fundraising practices and their long-term consequences.
when people say "echo chamber" with negative connotations, what they actually mean is "a place that has a consensus reality, and I disagree with that consensus reality".
a forum for geologists bans flat-earthers. the flat-earthers will call it an "echo chamber". they'll ask why the geologists are so afraid to have their beliefs questioned. if they're so sure the earth is round, shouldn't they be willing to debate it?
having a consensus reality is good, actually. and enforcement of that consensus is usually necessary to maintain the health of the community. geologists want to talk about...actual geology stuff. if flat-earthers are allowed, they'll turn every thread into a debate about flat vs. round earth, and it will drown out the actual more interesting conversations the geologists were there for.
when someone says "such-and-such is an echo chamber" you should look to see what the consensus reality of that place is, and what aspects of that consensus reality the complainer disagrees with.
recently, I've seen a lot of people calling Bluesky an echo chamber, for example. if you dig into it...usually they posted some transphobic bullshit and got blocked by half the site. Bluesky isn't perfect, but one thing they've gotten right so far is "trans people exist, and have the right to exist, and to live their lives free of harassment" is a pretty strong part of their consensus reality. people who disagree with that are inevitably going to run back to Twitter and whine about Bluesky being an echo chamber.
the primary source of this is annoyingly hard to track down for legislation that passed Congress and was signed by the President.
it turns out that's because it was part of H.R.815 - "Making emergency supplemental appropriations for the fiscal year ending September 30, 2024, and for other purposes."
if you want to read the actual text of the law, this PDF starting on page 61.
the gist is that it's illegal to:
Providing services to distribute, maintain, or update such foreign adversary controlled application (including any source code of such application) by means of a marketplace (including an online mobile application store) through which users within the land or maritime borders of the United States may access, maintain, or update such application.
everyone calls this a "ban on TikTok" and it kinda annoys the shit out of me, because as far as I can tell, the website tiktok.com is probably still going to be available in the US.
what this law actually does is require Google and Apple to remove TikTok from their app stores, for US-based users. and makes them subject to a fine of $5000 per user if they don't comply.
I'm generally in favor of more regulation of tech companies...but this is a really fucking stupid way to do it.
direct link to a PDF copy: https://web.archive.org/web/20241205062806/https://mailman13.u.washington.edu/pipermail/pophealth/attachments/20230624/5ef83030/attachment.pdf
oh golly why would anyone do such a thing
here's a totally unrelated news article from about a year ago: UnitedHealth uses AI model with 90% error rate to deny care, lawsuit alleges
Diane Morgan playing the character of Philomena Cunk. some of the best deadpan British humor I've ever seen.
The crusade against bright headlights has picked up speed in recent years, in large part due to a couple of Reddit nerds. Could they know what’s best for the auto industry better than the auto industry itself?
archive link: https://archive.is/MFa7R
you read a post about how awesome C is, asking why more people don't use it and instead gravitate towards replacements.
you ctrl-F for "security" - no mention
"buffer overflow" - nope
"memory safety" - nothing
"undefined behavior" - nada
this is sort of a reverse Chesterton's Fence situation. the fence is getting replaced, and you're talking about how great the old fence was, without understanding any of the actual problems it had.
you wrote some C and found it simple? OK, great, congratulations.
go work on a C codebase that spans 100 or more engineers all contributing to it.
go write some C code that listens on a TCP socket and has to deserialize potentially-malicious data received from the public internet.
go write some C code that will be used on an aircraft and has to comply with DO-178C.
and so on. after you've done that, come back here and tell us if you still think it's "simple and effective" and "applicable everywhere".
there is a reason C has stood the test of time over many decades. but there is also a reason it is being replaced with more modern languages.
As most of you are aware, since Kamala Harris’s election loss (which trans people were not in charge of nor responsible for), Democratic politicians and pundits have been signaling that they plan to throw trans people under the bus. Sadly, this came to fruition last week, when Republican congressper...
from Julia Serano
> I propose that on Tuesday, December 3rd, 2024 (the first day that both the House and Senate are back in session), all of us who are invested in this issue and have a platform (whether it be a blog, newsletter, column, podcast, YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, etc.) publish a piece with the shared title: “LGBTQ+ People Are Not Going Back.” Yes, I know, it’s a cheesy title, but it holds Democrats accountable to their own talking points and makes it clear that backsliding on LGBTQ+ rights is nonnegotiable for us. > > ... > > The purpose of this endeavor is not to dictate how you should vote in future elections, but to remind your representatives that your vote should not be taken for granted, and if they abandon LGBTQ+ people or backslide on LGBTQ+ rights, then they will pay a political price for that decision.
This campaign season, some of America’s richest people promoted—and even seemed to believe—ludicrous hoaxes.
> If there’s one salient feature of the 2024 election cycle, it’s that rich people—rich men, particularly, and even more particularly ones who support Donald Trump’s reelection campaign—fell for things at a previously unimaginable rate. Separate from simply supporting Trump or advancing right-wing talking points, they promoted ideas and stories that almost no reasonable person could possibly believe: cartoonish lies, absurd leaps of logic, and clearly fake documents.
everyone is focused on the Presidential race, for obvious reasons, and to a lesser extent on control of the House and Senate.
but there's thousands of downballot races across the country. are there any that you're watching / particularly interested in?
Audio obtained from board of elections meetings in Georgia show how a tool called EagleAI was pitched to election officials.
> Nancy Gay, the executive director of Columbia County’s Board of Elections, told 404 Media that the county ultimately did not use EagleAI this year because it ran out of time to get trained on it before the election. But the audio shows how the software was pitched, what voters in the county think about it, and, most importantly, show how some election officials have in some cases begun repeating and spreading ideas that are popular with election deniers.
The Trump campaign and other conservative groups have spent millions on anti-trans ads, setting a dangerous precedent for a potential second Trump term.
Roll 2 the Polls is transforming Election Day accessibility by providing rides to vote for people with physical disabilities.
The Evangelical family’s twisted obsession with corporal punishment.
archive link: https://archive.is/H0FZY
from Talia Lavin, who's high on my list of "anything she writes is worth reading" journalists. an excerpt from her upcoming book Wild Faith: How the Christian Right Is Taking Over America.
hopefully the title made it obvious, but a big ol' content warning for explicit and heartbreaking details about child abuse and endangerment.
A drag protest ballet revolted against military police raiding queer spaces in the 1970s.
