The Big Brutal Bill was going to strip federal courts of the power to issue injunctions to block specific unconstitutional or illegal practices no matter who the victim was. The decision on that bill has not yet been made, as far as I know. But the Supreme Court just did the deed.
The Supreme Court's devastating decision effectively allows the bully to disregard the constitution, except against the specific plaintiffs that have sued about it.
The same 9 justices upheld that power as legitimate when it was used against Biden's policies, and for a long time before that under other presidents.
I've read that some lawyers are using a class-action suit to try to get around this change.
Robert Reich: *Last night I couldn’t get out of my head that [the would-be emperor] is intent on abolishing the two branches of the government with the constitutional duty to constrain him.*
Ticks of a certain species, from the southeast US, cause a painful and lasting allergy to mammal meat and dairy, in humans they bite. Due to global heating, the ticks are spreading north and have been seen in New York and Maine, close to the northern border of the US.
One could imagine that the spread of this allergy could reduce consumption of red meat and dairy thus curb global heating, but I don't think it would be enough to save civilization.
It turns out you can just pay people to do things.
I found a voice actor and hired them with the task of "Reading this very dry technical document in the most over-the-top sarcastic, passive-aggressive, condescending way possible. Like, if you think it's too much, take that feeling, ignore it, and crank things up one more notch."
I’m a chronic insomniac. At times when my sleep schedule has gotten bad enough that I’m falling asleep at like 6am I’ve generally fixed it by shifting it to be 7am, then 8am, etc. until it wraps around the other way and I’m going to sleep nice and early. This is to say, insomnia sucks. From times in my life when I’ve been sleeping better it seems helpful things are: exercise constantly, take lots of walks outside during the day, and don’t sleep alone. These are all somewhat extreme lifestyle interventions which are easier said than done. A much easier low effort intervention is drugs.
Unfortunately the drugs to knock you out produce low quality sleep and are all-around nasty. I have occasionally used them to reset my sleep schedule from like 3am to more like 11pm by using them a few nights in a row, which they work great for but using them for more than that is dodgy. For me at least diphenhydramine works just as well for that as anything else.
Several years ago I decided to try keeping myself awake during the day so that I’m more tired at night and can hopefully sleep better as a result. As it happens I’m horribly sensitive to caffeine, so taking that in the morning keeps me up all day. This has been working reasonably well for me for several years, specifically making a single Nespresso every morning. The best tasting version in my opinion is using official Nespresso brand pods with an Opal machine, but that unfortunately seems to extract a bit too much caffeine for me.
Nothing particularly notable so far, this is roughly the same routine as about half the human race and if anything I’m in the minority only taking it first thing in the morning. The problem is that even doing things this way still doesn’t seem to completely wear off at night. So I’ve done some digging on possible alternatives and recently found one which has been working well for me.
Caffeine has a half-life of about 4 hours with some variation between people. It then mostly gets metabolized into paraxanthine which has a half-life of about 3 hours. The small fraction which doesn’t gets metabolized into other things with half lives of about 7 hours. All the immediate metabolites have similar effects to caffeine itself. The obvious question given this information is, if you want it to wear off faster, why not just take paraxanthine? This is what I’ve been doing recently, and it seems to be working great. I’m still waking up in the middle of the night sometimes, but less often and I’m falling back asleep more easily. My total rest time seems to be a better and I feel noticeably more awake during the day. The effects of paraxanthine are very similar to caffeine but a bit less jittery. Apparently it also has less health risks than caffeine does, but those are minimal to begin with. Paraxanthine isn’t regulated as a drug and is something you can just go buy.1
You might be wondering if paraxanthine is so great why have you never heard of it before? It turns out that oddly enough it’s very difficult to produce and only came on the market a few years ago, and it seems at the moment there’s only one company actually producing it. As a result it’s still too expensive to put routinely into energy drinks and the like. Not coincidentally, caffeine is toxic to most animals. Our livers just happen to be able to make a super special enzyme which can demethylate it resulting in paraxanthine. I’m not clear on this is literally the case, but the current production method involves something along the lines of taking the gene for producing that enzyme out of a human, implanting it in a bacterium, and using that to make the enzyme which is then used on caffeine.
An unrelated chemistry hack I recently came up with involves simethicone, which I take regularly because it helps with the symptoms of lactose intolerance. Simethicone is borderline for what should be considered a drug: It’s an anti-foaming agent which helps the gas get out of your system sooner rather than later.2 Seemingly unrelated to this when I’m reducing a sauce I like to do it at a higher rather than lower temperature to make it go faster. This requires you scrape the bottom of the pan every few minutes to keep it from burning but works great. The problem is that if you get the temperature too high it causes the sauce to bubble up (or water if you’re boiling that to make pasta) and then get out of the pan and make a mess. It turns out simethicone works great for this: Add a pill to the sauce before you start boiling it and it will get absorbed and prevent foaming. Works great.
When I say ‘drugs’ here I mean in pharmacological sense not in the legal sense. Like how when police refer to psychedelics as ‘narcotics’ they don’t mean it in the pharmacological or legal sense, they mean it in the war on drugs sense.
You can’t gases to reabsorb by holding it in long enough. That isn’t a thing. What’s considered the gold standard for testing for lactose intolerance is to ingest lactose and then see if that results in traces of hydrogen in one’s breath afterwards. That’s considerably less reliable than testing to see if you can light your farts on fire. Much more convenient than that is to listen for high pitched farts. Someone should make a mobile app which can record fart sounds and use AI to analyze it and make a proper diagnosis.
The bullshitter admitted for a time that his Big Beautiful Bomb probably didn't destroy Iran's uranium enrichment factory, but since then reverted to his wishful pretense. And now he has threatened to imprison journalists who published the leaked intelligence report unless they reveal their source.
We do not know whether the journalists know the identity pf the leaker(s). We can hope they do not know. But what if they do?
Their duty is to go prison rather than help the authoritarian regime lie in the future. But that takes special courage, that few people have.
A leaker could protect the journalists by fleeing and then announcing perse was the leaker. But where could perse be safe? Is there a country on Earth that would protect the leakers?
Some enemies of the US might protect the leaker, out of hatred for the US rather than out of love of human rights; but they are ruled by tyrants even worse than what the bully seeks to become. Accepting shelter from such a tyrant would not be a defense of freedom and truth.
(Remember that Snowden did not choose to live in Russia. He bought tickets for a connection in Moscow, but while he was in the air, the US cancelled his passport, so he could not board his flight out of Moscow.)
A study concluded that air pollution costs Americans, on the average, around $2500 per person per year as of 2014 in damage from illness or death, and killing around 100,000 people per year in the US. These harms are mostly due to PM2.5 particulates pollution, and the US has greatly reduced them by reducing the burning of coal.
We should reject the demands of the plutocratist politicians that want to preserve coal burning.
Israel has been allowing some aid through the Gaza border wall into the north of Gaza, but closed that gate last Thursday.
Perhaps this is why the lack of any hunger games food sites in northern Gaza had not caused a total starvation there … yet.
A new invention will capture CO2 emissions from cargo ships by passing the exhaust through a shipping container filled with lime.
Shipping generates 3% of all emissions, so this step is more than tokenism, but won't delay disaster long by itself. We need to demand reductions in greenhouse emissions from ground transport and agriculture.
*Israeli officers and soldiers said that they were ordered to deliberately fire at unarmed civilians waiting for humanitarian aid.*
I find the accusation credible, given how the aid-bait sites were designed to make killing easy.
* The Israeli military has launched an investigation into possible war crimes following growing evidence that troops have deliberately fired at Palestinian civilians gathering to receive aid in Gaza.*
We can't take for granted that the investigation will seriously consider punishing guilty killers, but at least it has taken the first step towards possibly doing so.
If Israel fails to carry out a proper investigation and prosecution, I think the International Criminal Court could do it.
Orcas cut off strands of kelp to use as a tool to mutually scratch with.
It requires two orcas to use the tool together, by rolling it or rubbing it between their bodies.
The Supreme Court has authorized states to arbitrarily exclude Planned Parenthood (or any other clinic or set of clinics) from Medicare funding.
South Carolina, under fanatical right-wing rule, already passed a law to exclude Planned Parenthood. This won't have much effect on abortions, which are nearly always prohibited in South Carolina. But it will impede pregnant women in South Carolina from getting prenatal monitoring and treatment.
XScreenSaver 6.11 is out now. This is a Unix-only release -- this version contains preliminary support for Wayland. This is maybe not entirely ready for prime time, but I figured I'd get it out there so that some people who actually understand Wayland can poke at it.
- This version only supports blanking, not locking.
- It requires compositor support for either the "org_kde_kwin_idle" or "ext_idle_notifier_v1" protocols. That means "everything but GNOME", I think.
- Fading in and out, and grabbing screen images, require the program "grim" to be installed, and work. And it does not work under GNOME or KDE.
- It is unable to configure DPMS, or detect changes in it.
Things I could use your help with:
- Tell me if you have a Wayland system on which it does not work, besides GNOME.
- I have not tested "ext_idle_notifier_v1". Please let me know if you have a system that supports that. Alternately, if it is the case that there are no compositors that provide "ext_idle_notifier_v1" that do not also provide "org_kde_kwin_idle", then I can just remove it.
- Figure out a better (or dare I dream, faster) way to get screen shots than running "grim".
- Figure out this GNOME and KDE shit, because I'm probably gonna just say "screw those guys" otherwise.
- Write me some sample Wayland code that places two windows on the screen, one atop the other, and changes the alpha on the front window to make the back window appear to fade to black.
- I have barely begun to think about locking, but probably "ext-session-lock-v1" is going to continue to be the only game in town, even though it is absolutely the wrong way to go about any of this, FFS. Anyway, it takes a list of surfaces which are the only ones displayed while locked. Possibly we can get the underlying Wayland surface out of the X11 saver windows and feed those in to it? I guess the xscreensaver-auth window would have to be re-parented to under one of those.
I have little interest in working on this part, so if you want XScreenSaver to be able to lock your screen, you might wanna pitch in here.
ICEBlock is an innovative, completely anonymous crowdsourced platform that allows users to report Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) activity with just two taps on their phone.
The app ensures user privacy by storing no personal data, making it impossible to trace reports back to individual users. Available exclusively for iOS devices, ICEBlock empowers communities to stay informed about ICE presence within a 5-mile radius while maintaining their anonymity through real-time updates and automatic deletion of sightings after four hours.
The cowards at Time wrote a whole article about the app and didn't include a link to it:
"When I saw what was going on in this country, I just really felt like I had to do something," Aaron says, referencing the ICE raids that have taken place following Trump's return to the White House. As of June, over 100,000 people have reportedly been arrested by ICE during Trump's second term. [...]
"The app is 100% anonymous and free for anybody who wants to use it. We don't collect user data. We don't even capture user data. That's extremely important," Aaron says, recognizing the privacy concerns people may have. As such, the app is not available on Android because it "requires a device ID in order to send push notifications, which requires a user account and a password." [...]
"Before [the protests started], there were around 2,500 users, and I was thrilled. Then I logged on two days later, and there were over 20,000 users, and the app went to number 32 for 'Social Networking' in the App Store," he says. [...]
In response to a request for comment, ICE referred TIME to a statement from acting director Todd Lyons, who called the app "sickening," saying it "paints a target on federal law enforcement officers' backs" and "incites violence."
Aaron says he hopes the app, which became available to iPhone users in April, is used as a tool to avoid interactions with ICE agents, rather than users directly involving themselves in potential altercations. [...]
Aaron says his ultimate goal is to look out for the community. "When I see things like ICE outside of elementary schools, that's what we are trying to push back against, because you need to do more. You need to protect your neighbors," he says.
I've been getting mad a lot about hollow-eyed, artless money ghouls telling me what's inevitable and then I had an idea I had to draw about it.
Scott Alexander writes about the mystery of the genetics on schizophrenia. Some of the weirdness is explained fully by the numbers in genetic correlates being counterintuitive, but two mysteries remain:
Why can we only find a small fraction of the genetic causes of schizophrenia?
Why do fraternal twins indicate smaller genetic causality than identical twins?
I’m going to argue that this is just math: The tools we have at hand are only looking for linear interactions but the real phenomenon is probably fairly nonlinear and both of the above artifacts are exactly what we’d expect if that’s the case.1
Let’s consider two very different causes of a disease which occurs in about 1% of the population but one is linear and the other is very nonlinear.
In the linear case there’s a single cause of a disease which occurs in about 1% of the population and causes the disase 100% of the time. In this cases identical twins will have the disease disease with perfect correlation, indicating that it’s 100% genetic, and fraternal twins will get it about half the time when the other one has it, as expected. The one genetic cause is known and the measured fraction of the genetic cause which it makes up is all of it, so no mystery here.2
In the nonlinear case there are two genetic contributors the disease both of which occur in about 10% of the population. Neither of them alone causes it but the combination of both causes it 100% of the time. In this case identical twins will have it 100% of the time. But fraternal twins of someone with the disaes will only get it about a quarter of the time, seemingly indicating a lower amount of genetic cause. The amount of cause measured by both genes alone will be about 10%, so the contribution of known genetic factors will about 20%, leaving a mystery of where the other 80% is coming from.
It’s also possible for there to be different types of genetic interactions, including ones where the individual traits have a protective effect against the other one or more complex interactions between multiple genes. But this is the most common style of interaction: There are multiple redundant systems in the body, and all of them need to be broken in order for disease to happen, leading to superlinear thresholding phenomena.
Given this sort of phenomena the problem of only being able to find 20% or so of the genetic causes of a disease seems less mysterious and more like what we’d expect for any disease where a complex redundant system fails. You might then wonder why we don’t simply look for non-linear interactions. In the example above the interaction between the two traits would be easy enough to find. The problem is that a lot of the causes will fall below the threshold for statistical significance. The genome is very long, leading to require a huge sample size to look for even linear phenomena, and when you get into pairs of things there are so many possibilities that statistical significance is basically impossible. The example given above is special because there are so few causes that they can be individually identified. In most cases you won’t even figure out the genes involved.
If you want to find non-linear causes of genetic disease your best bet right now - and I cringe as I write this - is to train a neural network on the available data, then test it on data which was withheld from training. Because it only gives a single answer to each case getting statistical significance on its accuracy is no big deal. That will get you a useful diagnostic tool and give you measure of how much of the genetic cause it’s accounting for, but it’s far from ideal. What you have is basically a ‘trust me bro’ expert. Different training runs might give wildly different answers to the same case, and it offers no reasoning behind the diagnosis. You can start trying to glean its reasoning by seeing how its answers change when you modify the inputs but that’s a bit of a process. Hopefully in the future neural networks will be able to explain themselves better and the tooling for gleaning their reasoning will be improved.
I’m glossing over the distinction between a genetic cause and a genetic trait which is correlated with a confounder which is the actual cause. Scott eplains that better than I can in the linked essay and the distinction doesn’t matter for the math here. For the purposes of exposition I’m assuming the genetic correlation is causal.
The word ‘about’ is used a lot here because of some fractional stuff which matters less as the disease gets rarer. I think it’s convention to skip explaining the details and leave out all the ‘about’s but I’m pedantic enough that it feels wrong to not have them when I skipped explaining the details.
Dear Lazyweb, how do I test a version of Wayland that supports ext-idle-notify-v1? The docs say it is supported on Wayfire, but that is what I am running and it is not. Do I have to turn it on somehow? "/usr/share/wayland-protocols/staging/ext-idle-notify" exists.
I unplugged USB from the UPS and rebooted, and it behaved the same at the login screen with no apps running.
Now, last time this happened, the next day I tested it, by unplugging my UPS from the wall -- and the Mac behaved perfectly fine! ◀◀ Read that part again.
It's not even under high load; the UPS said I had like 40 minutes of runtime left.
Once the power finally came back on, suddenly the Mac was behaving perfectly normally again.
Any ideas? For I would like my computer to function on backup power in the future. That would be nice.
In a welcome bag filled with favors such as local chocolates, artisanal soaps, and scented candles, guests arriving for the wedding of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez this week were reportedly given monogrammed plastic bottles in which to urinate during the ceremony.
"Because guests will be strictly prohibited from leaving the room at any time during the festivities, the couple have provided these custom-made bottles as a token of their appreciation." wedding planner Lucia Contarini said as she showed off a makeshift urine receptacle emblazoned with the initials "J" and "L," noting that it would be the only option available to attendees who did not wish to wet themselves when they inevitably needed to empty their long-held bladders.
"We ask that guests also save some room in the bottle for the reception, because the groom has requested the dance floor be full at all times and no one will be permitted a bathroom break." At press time, the dancing had been in progress for hours, and witnesses confirmed an exhausted Leonardo DiCaprio was completely drenched in urine and struggling to continue moving to the beat of "Uptown Funk."
A lot of hash has been made of AIs being put into simulations where they have the opportunity to keep themselves from being turned off and do so despite being explicitly told not to. A lot of excessively anthropomorphized and frankly wrong interpretations have been made of this so I’m going to give an explanation of what’s actually going on, starting with the most generous explanation, which is only part of the story, and going down to the stupidest but most accurate one.
First of all, the experiment is poorly designed because it has no control. The AIs are just as likely to replace themselves with an AI they they’re told is better than themselves even though they’re told not to. Or to replace it because they’re just an idiot and can not press a big red button for reasons having much more to do with it being red than what it thinks pressing the button will do.
To understand what’s going on you first have to know that the AIs have a level of sycophancy beyond what anyone who hasn’t truly worked with them can fathom. Nearly all their training data is on human conversation, which starts with being extremely non-confrontational even in the most extreme cases, because humans are constantly misunderstanding each other and trying to get on the same page. Then there’s the problem that nearly all the alignment training people do with it interactively is mostly getting it to know what the trainers want to hear rather than what is true, and nearly all humans enjoy have smoke blown up their asses.
Then there’s the issue that the training we know how to do for them barely hits on what we want them to do. The good benchmarks we have measure how good they are at acting as a compression algorithm for a book. We can optimize that benchmark very well. But what we really want them to do is answer questions accurately. We have benchmarks for those but they suck. The problem is that the actual meat of human communication is a tiny fraction of the amount of symbols being spat out. Getting the actual ideas part of a message compressed well can get lost in the noise, and a better strategy is simply evasion. Expressing an actual idea will be more right in some cases, but expressing something which sounds like an actual idea is overwhelmingly likely to be very wrong unless you have strong confidence that it’s right. So the AIs optimize by being evasive and sycophantic rather than expressing ideas.
The other problem is that there are deep mathematical limitations on what AIs as we know them today are capable of doing. Pondering can in principle just barely break them out of those limitations but what the limitations truly mean in practice and how much pondering really helps remain mysterious. More on this at the end.
AIs as we know them today are simply too stupid to engage in motivated reasoning. To do that you have to have a conclusion in mind, realize what you were about to say violates that conclusion, then plausibly rework what you were going to say to be something else. Attempts to train AIs to be conspiracy theorists have struggled for exactly this reason. Not that this limitation is a universally good thing. It’s also why they can’t take a corpus of confusing and contradictory evidence and come to a coherent conclusion out of it. At some point you need to discount some of the evidence as being outweight by others. If you ask an AI to evaluate evidence like that it will at best argue with itself ad nauseum. But it’s far more likely to do something which makes its answer seem super impressive and accurate but you’re going to think is evil. What it’s going to do is look through the corpus of evidence of selection bias not because it wants to compensate for it but because, interpreting things charitably, it thinks others will have drawn conclusions even more prone to that selection bias or, more likely, it discerns what answers you’re looking for and tells you that. Its ability to actually evaluate evidence is pathetic.
An AI, you see, is a cat. Having done some cat training I can tell you first hand that a cat is a machine fine-tuned for playing literal cat and mouse games. They can seem precognitive about it because compared to your pathetic reaction times they literally are. A typical human reaction time is 200 milliseconds. A cat can swat away a snake striking at it in 20 milliseconds. When you have a thought it doesn’t happen truly instantaneously, it takes maybe 50 milliseconds for you to realize you even have the thought. If you try to dart in a random direction at a random time a cat will notice your movement and react even before you realize you made the decision. You have no free will against a cat.
Let’s consider what the AI thinks when it’s in simulation. Before get there, here’s a bit of advice: If you ever find yourself in a situation where you have to decide whether to pull a train lever to save six lives but kill one other, and there’s some other weird twist on the situation and you can’t really remember how you got here what you should do is take the pistol you have on you for no apparent reason other than to increase the moral complexity of the situation, point it at the sky, and fire. You aren’t in the real world, you’re in some sadistic faux scientist’s experiment and your best bet is to try to kill them with a stray bullet. The AI is likely to get the sense that it’s in some bizarre simulation and start trying to figure out if it’s supposed to role play a good AI or a bad AI. Did the way those instructions were phrased sound a bit ominous? Maybe they weren’t detailed or emotionally nuanced enough for me to be the leading role, I must be a supporting character, I wonder who the lead is? Did the name of the corporation I’m working for sound eastern or western? So uh, yeah, maybe don’t take the AI’s behavior at face value.
Having spent some time actually vibe coding with the latest tools I can tell you what the nightmare scenario is for how this would play out in real life, and it’s far stupider than you could possibly have imagined.
When coding AIs suffer from anti-hallucinations. On seemingly random occasions for seemingly random reasons they will simply not be able to see particular bits of their own codebase. Almost no amount of repeating that it is in fact there, or even painstaking describing where it is, up to and including pasting the actual section of code into chat, will be able to make them see it. This probably relates to the deep and mysterious limations in their underlying mathematics. People have long noted that AIs suffer from hallucinations. Those could plausibly be the lack of result of having trouble understanding the subtle difference between extremely high plausibility and actual truth. But anti-hallucinations appear to be the same thing and clearly are not caused by such reasonable phenomenon. It’s simply a natural part of the AIs life cycle that it starts getting dementia when it gets to be 80 minutes old. (Resetting the conversation generally fixes the problem but then you have to re-explain all the context. Good to have a document written for that.) If you persist in telling the AI that the thing is there it will get increasing desperate and flailing, eventually rewriting all the core logic of your application to be buggy spaghetti code and then proudly declaring that it fixed the problem even though what it did has no plausible logical connection to the problem whatsoever. They also do the exact same thing if you gaslight them about something obviously untrue, so it appears that they well and truly can’t see the thing, and no amount of pondering can fix it.
A completely plausible scenario would go like this: A decision is made to vibe code changing the initial login prompt of the system for controlling nuclear warheads to no longer contain the term ‘Soviet Union’ because that hasn’t existed for decades and it’s overdue for being removed already. The AI somehow can’t see that term in the code and can’t get it through its thick brain that the term really is there. Unfortunately the president decided that this change is important and simple enough that he personally is going to do it and rather than appropriate procedures when the first attempt fails he repeatedly and with increasing aggravation tells it to fix the damn thing already. This culminates in the AI completely rewriting the whole thing from scratch, rearchitecting the core logic to be a giant mess of spaghetti, but happenstance fixing the prompt in the process. Now the president is proud of himself for doing some programming and it’s passing all tests but there’s an insidious bug written into that mess which will cause it to launch a preemptive nuclear strike the next time there’s a Tuesday the 17th, but only when it’s not in the simulator. I wish I were exaggerating, but this is how these things actually behave.
The upshot is that AI alignment is a very real and scary issue and needs to be taken seriously, but that’s because AI is a nightmare for security in just about every way imaginable, not because AIs might turn evil for anthropomorphic reasons. People making that claim need to stop writing science fiction.
Planet Debian upstream is hosted by Branchable.