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Joined 8 months ago
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Cake day: March 3rd, 2024

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  • Been the only one in my family for years using Linux, but over the last few months struggles with Windows have basically resulted in all but one computer in the house being migrated to Linux.

    Put it on my 10-year-old son’s desktop because Windows parental controls have been made overly complicated and require Internet connectivity and multiple Microsoft accounts to manage. Switched to Linux Mint, installed the apt sources for the parental control programs, made myself an account with permissions and one for him without permissions to change the parental controls, and done. With Steam he can play all of the games in his library.

    Only my wife is still using Windows, but with ads embedded in the OS ramping up, and features she liked getting replaced with worse ones, she’s getting increasingly frustrated with Microsoft.




  • He and his allies have made the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan a central focus of their criticisms of the Biden administration’s handling of national security and foreign policy.

    What I consistently don’t see brought up is the fact that the “chaotic withdrawal” was directly set up by Trump. He signed the agreement with Afghanistan that put a fixed date on the withdrawal squarely in the next President’s term. This gave enemies a clear timetable of US actions beforehand, which gave them a significant advantage. So Biden was left with the choice of either fulfilling the US promise, despite it being in every way a bad construct, and executing an extremely difficult withdrawal, or harming the US image on the global stage by reneging on an already agreed upon deal.

    I would go so far as to say this, like the expiration of the middle class portion of the Trump tax cuts, was specifically designed to make the next administration, which was always very likely to be Democrat, look bad regardless of the cost or collateral damage.


  • The judge also noted that the cited study itself mentions that GitHub Copilot “rarely emits memorised code in benign situations.”

    “Rarely” is not zero. This looks like it’s opening a loophole to copying open source code with strong copyleft licenses like the GPL:

    1. Find OSS code you want to copy
    2. Set up conditions for Copilot to reproduce code
    3. Copy code into your commercial product
    4. When sued, just claim Copilot generated the code

    Depending on how good your lawyers are, 2 is optional. And bingo! All the OSS code you want without those pesky restrictive licenses.

    In fact, I wonder if there’s a way to automate step 2. Some way to analyze an OSS GitHub repo to generate inputs for Copilot that will then regurgitate that same repo.



  • Edit: I was thinking about the wrong “immunity” in this comment (the recently granted Presidential immunity to prosecution, not immunity to prosecution for law enforcement officers). I’ll leave the comment for context, but it’s not what the original commenter was talking about.

    Actually it will be very easy for the Supreme Court to give Trump a win and keep qualified immunity. If Biden didn’t directly order the raid on Mar-a-lago, then the immunity they granted doesn’t apply.

    Remember, these rulings don’t need logical consistency because they are bad faith justifications for any actions taken by their team. So when a Republican is in office they can extend the immunity to basically the whole Executive branch, but when a Democrat is in the White House that can shrink to just the President’s actions. And even there only those that are “official acts,” which only the Supreme Court gets to decide, so they can shrink it to almost nothing.






  • He’s not asking for the citation for the quote. He’s asking for the citation of the veracity of the assertion. We know Adam Schiff said the thing. What matters is the justification for saying the thing.

    With no data to justify it (and plenty available showing it’s not true), this is just further evidence Democratic leadership is stuck in the mindset of political battles from 30 years ago. If Trump were running in the political reality of the 90s with his current background and record, even current Biden would mop the floor with him. But we’re not in the age of the party of Gingrich. This is the party of Trump, and facts and record don’t matter to Trump voters and Republicans in general. Welcome to 21st century American politics, Mr. Schiff.


  • On August 21, 1945, physicist Harry Daghlian was performing an experiment with a plutonium core nicknamed the “demon core”. He accidentally dropped a brick of tungsten carbide directly onto the core. This action caused the core to briefly go super critical and expose Harry Daghlian to a lethal burst of radiation. He was able to walk away from the accident, seemingly okay at first, but 25 days later he was dead from acute radiation poisoning. By this time the effects of acute radiation exposure were well known, but there was nothing anyone could do to stop it. He was dead from the moment of the accident, it just took 25 days to come to completion.

    This Supreme Court ruling didn’t hurt the country. It has killed the country. It’s like the burst of lethal radiation from the demon core; our country is dead, but it’s going to take some time for the effects to sink in. How long that takes depends on elections and the humanity of the Presidents that are elected. The Supreme Court pulled the pin out of a grenade and handed it to Biden. He now has to pass that grenade to the next President, hoping that each one doesn’t release the lever. But someday, whether Trump in the next Presidency, or somewhere down the line, someone is going to release the lever and blow up our democracy.

    And we can’t undo this decision. As Devin from Legal Eagle explains, this is a Constitutional judgement by the Supreme Court. Since it pertains to Constitutional powers, Congress can’t pass a law to limit it in any way. And there’s no higher court to appeal to on this ruling. We would have to pass a Constitutional amendment, or just tear down the whole country to undo this. What could possibly be our path forward from here?




  • I was expecting some kind of analysis showing that otherwise normal people who adopted GOP politics simultaneously transitioned to showing sociopathic behavior, like in a measurable, scientific way. Instead the author gives a definition of sociopathy (“acting without feelings of guilt, remorse, or shame coupled with a tendency to reject the concept of responsibility”) and proceeds to label the policy positions and enacted laws of the GOP as sociopathic.

    Applying neuroscience terms developed for individual people to actions of groups does not seem scientific at all. Isn’t that the field of sociology? I’m not really sure how such a labeling helps the conversation, especially from a neuroscientist. I don’t disagree with the positions, but this isn’t neuroscience, so I can’t really take this author as any sort of authority or expert on this; I feel like this article has the same level of expertise as a Lemmy comment (like mine).



  • I think maybe you should approach this from a different angle. Rather than just to “get it off your chest,” I think you should approach this as a problem to be solved.

    We’re all human. We all do things we wish we didn’t. To be adults means to recognize under what conditions we make these bad decisions, and rather than just try to “do better,” you should work to remove those conditions. What I mean by that is, if you were to get drunk at a party today, what’s to stop you from making that same bad decision? Have you stopped going to parties with the kinds of people you would proposition like that? Have you stopped drinking alcohol so you wouldn’t get drunk in the first place? Or have you not changed anything at all, and those same conditions could reasonably come up in your life again today?

    If the answer is “these conditions can’t come up again because I’ve already made life changes to prevent them,” then great! No need to bring it up with the girlfriend, because it no longer represents a future threat to the relationship. You are no longer the person who did those things because you have made a change in yourself that wasn’t present back then.

    If the answer is “nothing in my life has changed to prevent this from being a future problem,” then you may (emphasis on may) want to bring it up as a problem to solve as a couple. Consider telling her about what you did in the context of asking for her help preventing that from happening again. Talk about what you think led to that situation and brainstorm things you can work on changing that she can help with. Maybe you only go to parties together and she helps keep track of your drinks? Maybe you stop going to parties and come up with other activities to socialize with friends (hiking, mountain biking, fencing, pottery, poetry writing, Warhammer 40k figurine painting; the limit is your imagination)?

    I don’t know you, so I can’t suggest changes that I think will work for you, but she does. The hardest part is that you have to legitimately want to change and you have to put in a good faith effort to make those changes. To make this work, you will have to sacrifice something, maybe sometime you really like doing. But it ultimately won’t be for her or even for your relationship. It will be to make yourself a better person, one who works at having a healthy relationship with your significant other.