A magat who openly threatened to start a civil war if the wrecker loses this election has apologized.

Republican leaders often say this with dog-whistles. and Americans are aware of this danger, but Republicans try to avoid admitting it clearly.

Information about the politics and career history of Kamala Harris.

I would like to know what laws she would like Congress to adopt if it agreed with her — regarding issues such as decarbonization, reduction of toxic pollution and plastic pollution, public transit, a public medical system, the taking back the Extreme Court, decreasing the political influence of rich people and big businesses, and reversing decades of dooH niboR by applying some Robin Hood.

How would she defend democracy from what Peter Thiel defines as "freedom"?

*Seven major US labor unions call on Biden to "shut off military aid to Israel."*

Lula has accused President Maduro of neighboring Venezuela of threatening massive violent repression if he loses the coming election.

Some of Maduro's opposition consists of right-wing rich families that used to control Venezuela and want to control it again. Like the US billionaires that back the corrupter, they are ready to attack using lies and distortions. So I can't trust them to be honest any more than I can trust Maduro to be honest.

Lula's statement gives me a basis for understanding the situation. Lula is a sincere supporter of democracy. When he accuses a president in Latin America of repression, I have confidence that he is right.

*Latest satellite imagery [of Gaza near the Egyptian border] reveals new roads that appear designed to support the long-term presence of Israeli troops.*

The article describes other military construction in Gaza that seems designed for permanent occupation.

Bernie Sanders condemned the invitation of Netanyahu in Congress shortly before Netanyahu arrived.

*More than half of the tree species at Kew’s Royal Botanical Gardens are at risk of [extinction] because of climate breakdown.*

*American rule of law is vanishing at the tips of [the wrecker]-appointed judges’ pens.*

*Bangladeshi students allege police tortured them after protests crackdown.*

US citizens: call on Teamsters president to oppose Republicans if they won't match Biden's bold support for workers.

Barely six weeks after the XScreenSaver for Android Privacy Policy fiasco, Google, is up to brand new fuckery. As far as I can tell, they're saying that if I don't give them a copy of my driver's license, they're going to remove XScreenSaver and XDaliClock from their "Play" [sic] store.

So that's obviously not going to happen.

And gosh, I'm all broken up about the consequences.

Director	We can't just have someone looking through binoculars, they need to be fancy binoculars with tech on them.
Art dept.	Got it boss. "In porta sed elemen tum eu mattis morbi lectus congue portit or leo", just like you asked!
Director	Wait what
Art dept.	Sorry, I meant: "Harestra mec eget amet arcu eu curabitur mulla dec auctor integer pharetra congue sapien tellus morbi vitae ergis socales ligula malesurdia curobutyr qyus sei vuvrutys duan gravida."
Director	This is an action movie, why are these binoculars summoning the devil?
Art dept.	165.9547 71.9077 17.9717 27.7862 64.9883! Loading! Initializing_datas_acad_tyu191!

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I keep posting about the importance of functions inside of deep neural networks being sublinear but haven’t given an exact definition of that before. It’s sublinearity in the computer science asymptotic sense. The Taylor expansion should not only have a linear bound but either going to zero or at least have the positive and negative directions go to different asymptotics. If the function is defined by different formulas in different sections that criterion should apply to all of them.1

With that out the the way here’s how common activation functions look with a new suggestion at the bottom.

RELU

This is as nonlinear as you can get a monotonic function sublinear function to be and is trivial to compute. The one big problem is that it has that kink at 0. Is it too much to ask for a function to be continuously differentiable?

Leaky RELU

It’s okay to have insecurities about some areas being completely occluded and hence stop responding to training but if it’s that much of a problem for you you don’t have what it takes to work with DNNs and should go back to playing with linear functions.

GELU

We get it, you got rid of that kink, but the requirements specified a function which is monotonic, can you not read? Also maybe don’t use functions which are so obscure that I can’t figure out how to enter them into Wolfram Alpha.

Softplus

Thank you for you following the requirements and there’s some argument to using Softmax here since you’re probably using it elsewhere anyway. But it does seem to take a large area to smooth that kink out and never quite gets to exactly RELU in either direction.

RELU with Sinusoidal Smoothing (RELUSS)

This is my new idea. Not only is the kink completely smoothed out, it’s done with a simple quick to calculate function which meets the requirements and reverts completely to RELU outside of that area.

Pondering out loud:

Sometimes I post things to Ye Olde Blogge, and sometimes I post them on Mastodon only. How do I decide which? It has been somewhat random, but if I examine my decisions, I think what I have been doing is:

• Linking to a long funny article, or to Actual Artwork: Blog.

• Someone's good shitpost: Blog if it is a banger for the ages; Mastodon boost if it is an ephemeral Sensible Chuckle.

• Actual News, that will still be interesting next year: Blog.

• Breaking Bullshit News, but funny, but that won't matter tomorrow: I often just boost someone else's Mastodon post, which does not show up on the blog. (E.g. "Republican says something dumb"). Unless it is, like, such a self-own that it amounts to a Quality Shitpost, then I'll re-blog it.

  One reason for boosting others' posts is that I do not see the replies and sometimes that is for the best.

• My own "Sensible Chuckle" shitpost: sometimes I do these on the blog, and sometimes Mastodon only. The problem with the Mastodon ones is that sometimes I misjudge the popularity of these, and my throwaway one-liner gets a dozen angry replies from the Mastodon HOA or the anarcho-syndicalists, and my blog readers might enjoy skimming that pile-on.

  Plus there's the whole "the blog functions as an archive" aspect of things.

So, I dunno. Maybe I should fall into a pattern of: never make top-level Mastodon posts, only post to the blog and mirror that to Mastodon.

Here's a good "where should this have gone" example.

"Always blog" is in the spirit of POSSE, but in my case there's not a lot of "E = everywhere" in that these days -- pretty much just Mastodon -- as I no longer use Facebook or Twitter. (I do still auto-post a screenshot-breadcrumb to Instagram, because I have a few friends who seem to use that the way I use a feed reader.)

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• Suggesting that the vast majority of the systems that failed due to reliance on not just Windows but on some third-party Windows rootkit were part of the Bullshit Economy and are societally "surplus to requirements".

  (Yes, I know you have read about one counterexample. Please sit down.)

• Suggesting that taxing billionaires is good actually.

  (And several of the people mad about this take were dorm-room-bong anarcho-syndicalists eager to tell me things that I "just don't understand", about like, the futility of voting, that both sides are the same, and presumably the CIA's malign influence on their skunk weed.)

---

Anyway, send BSODs. Reply here with the best photos of Clownstrike BSODs in the wild. Please do a modicum dilligence and don't send years-old BSODs, only the freshest.

Previously, previously, previously.

If you're wondering why the billionaire owners of the New York Times, Washington Post, et. al. are trying to sabotage the Democrats in general and Biden specifically, it's because of tangible accomplishments like this.

For years, the tax agency simply didn't try collecting sizable debts owed by 1,600 people with annual incomes of at least $1 million:

"The tax bill wasn't even in dispute -- the taxes were clearly owed by these people," IRS Commissioner Danny Werfel said in a call with reporters. "But we didn't have the people or the resources. ... It takes time and staffing to work through these cases."

The tax agency, boosted by the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, has hired hundreds of skilled accountants over the past year and a half after years of shrinking staffing. Some of them have focused their efforts on specific groups of tax delinquents, including a group of 1,600 households with annual incomes above $1 million who were all known to owe at least $250,000 in back taxes, based on their previous tax returns. Facing understaffing in the past, IRS leaders admit, their agents simply didn't try to collect these taxes for years. [...]

In other cases, it took much more effort, and in some instances levies on the taxpayers' assets, to collect the money. Werfel described months of letters back and forth between the IRS's new agents and the millionaires' accountants and lawyers.

The push that IRS officials described this week targeted people who filed tax returns but hadn't paid. The agency is also pursuing a far larger group: wealthy people who haven't filed returns at all.

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Spotted one in the wild!

This is definitely an improvement. Now the extremely loud fan is running 24/7 to display a PSA against using MICROS~1 products, instead of whatever advertising bullshit was there before.

Advertising shits in your head, so thanks for enabling this upgrade, MUNI!

Sam Altman is the owner of a massive, invasive, parasitical toxic sludge that respects no boundaries and ruins everything it touches, and that he thinks someone else should clean up.

Also his new house has mold.

OpenAI CEO's $27 million San Francisco mansion is ridden with 'hazardous' mold, lawsuit says:

The 950 Lombard St. property was once San Francisco's most expensive single-family listing, boasting six bedrooms and eight bathrooms across its 9,500 square feet along with expansive views of the San Francisco skyline. Friday's lawsuit said it "seemed obvious why" the property was so expensive, and called the home's infinity pool, cantilevered over a hillside, its "crowning achievement." But according to the lawsuit, which was filed in San Francisco's Superior Court against the property's developer and contractors, living there has been one headache after another.

Womp womp.

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