It appears that deportation thugs attacking Chicago change the license plates on their cars every day. The state of Illinois has reminded them that it is a crime to do this.
I wonder whether the hotline for reporting suspected instances of such crime can possibly do any good.
*EU criticised for pausing sanctions on Israel in response to Trump Gaza efforts.*
In fact, Israel is continuing to bomb Gaza and continuing to restrict food imports. Sanctions on Israel should continue until Israel fully stops its war crimes and some time goes by without any.
*Ex-police commissioner sues New York City and Eric Adams over alleged NYPD corruption.*
He says that he informed Night-Mayor Adams privately and was then pushed out of the post. *Donlon claims that his efforts to establish internal NYPD oversight were "sabotaged". He gives examples including that his meetings were cancelled, his communications were spied on, he was excluded from decision making, and alleges that his official police commissioner’s stamp was used to forge internal documents.*
Larry Bushart has been jailed for a month so far, and charged with "Threatening Mass Violence at a School," for posting mockery of Charles Kirk.
*Pregnant women report medical neglect in [US deportation prisons], rights groups say.*
The new leader of the British Green Party has embraced the partial socialism that Starmer Labour has rejected. It offers a way out of the plutocratist ideas of Starmer Labour.
The bully appointed a revenge operative as US attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, who indicted New York Attorney General Letitia James. She has challenged in court whether appointment was lawful.
Robert Reich on the second age of robber barons.
US citizens: call on Congress to reject giving medals to soldiers that massacred Lakotas at Wounded Knee.
If you phone, please spread the word! Main Switchboard: +1-202-224-3121
The wrecker's order designating the nonexistent "Antifa" organization as "terrorist" are meant as a tool to criminalize organizers of nonviolent protests. In particular, this can be done at someone commits violence at a nonviolent protest.
Here is how that order can do practical harm.
Here are details of the actual prosecution.
The US has a long history of using that excuse to frame the organizers of nonviolent protests for left-wing causes. In 1886, persons unknown set off a bomb at a nonviolent labor protest at Chicago's Haymarket. Organizers of the protest were convicted of planting the bomb despite the absence of evidence connecting them to it. Several were executed, and were known in the labor movement as the "Haymarket martyrs".
But then someone wisely pointed out:
- There is probably no entity in the world willing to sell us a license to screen this;
- It's possible that nobody even knows who the copyright holder is any more (CBS? Lucas? Disney?)
- Despite all that, being even Star Wars-adjacent means that any attempt at an unlicensed screening would cause the sky to blacken with lawyers.
This is why we can't have nice things.
I have enabled overlay via raspi-config, but I would like my second "/rw/" partition on the same drive to remain writable. How do I do that? Raspberry Pi, Debian 12.11.
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on /dev/mmcblk0p2 7.8G 6.5G 896M 89% /media/root-ro tmpfs-root 454M 28M 427M 6% /media/root-rw overlayroot 454M 28M 427M 6% / /dev/mmcblk0p3 7.7G 37M 7.2G 1% /media/root-ro/rw /media/root-ro/rw 454M 28M 427M 6% /rw /etc/fstab: LABEL=rw /media/root-ro/rw ext4 ro,defaults,noatime 0 2 /media/root-ro/rw /rw overlay lowerdir=/media/root-ro/rw,upperdir=/media/root-rw/overlay/rw,workdir=/media/root-rw/overlay-workdir/rw 0 2
It's great for the people of San Francisco that the president has capriciously decided to unsend the troops he capriciously decided to send. But the real story here is, per the president's summation of his discussion with Lurie on social media, that the Commander-in-Chief is overtly stating that he is basing a domestic military deployment upon what local "friends of mine" (billionaire CEOs Jensen Huang of Nvidia and local boy [ed: Hawaii resident] Marc Benioff of Salesforce) lobbied him to do. Trump also noted that Lurie asked him "very nicely" not to establish a military beachhead in San Francisco.
All for the good. But what if Huang and Benioff had been in the mood for a military parade and called for sending in the troops? What if Lurie had been less polite? [...]
There are only so many turns of phrase you can employ: This is just a profoundly fucked-up way to lead a country. It's like dealing with King George or a warlord out of the Dark Ages.
Mission Local has been live-blogging the siege of Coast Guard Island, among other things.
Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.
There’s a nutrient called folate which is so important that it’s added to (fortified in) flour as a matter of course. Not having it during pregnancy results in birth defects. Unfortunately there’s a small fraction of all people who have genetic issues which make their bodies have trouble processing folate into methylfolate. For them folate supplements make the problem even worse as the unprocessed folate drowns out the small amounts of methylfolate their bodies have managed to produce and are trying to use. For those people taking methylfolate supplements fixes the problem.
First of all in the very good news: folinic acid produces miraculous effects for some number of people with autism symptoms. It’s such a robust effect that the FDA is letting treatment get fast-tracked through which is downright out of character for them. This is clearly a good thing and I’m happy for anyone who’s benefiting and applaud anyone who is trying to promote it with one caveat.
The caveat is that although this is all a very good thing there isn’t much of any reason to believe that folinic acid is much better than methylfolate, which both it and folate get changed into in the digestive system. This results in folinic acid being sold as leucovorin, its drug name, at an unnecessarily large price markup with unnecessary involvement of medical professionals. Obviously there’s benefit to medical professionals being involved in initial diagnosis and working out a treatment plan, but once that’s worked out there isn’t much reason to think the patient needs to be getting a drug rather than a supplement for the rest of their life.
This is not to say that the medical professionals studying folinic acid for this use are doing anything particularly wrong. There’s a spectrum between doing whatever is necessary to get funding/approvals working within the existing medical system and simply profiteering off things being done badly instead of improving on it. What’s being done with folinic acid is slightly suboptimal but clearly getting stuff done with an only slightly more expensive solution (it’s thankfully already generic.) Medical industry professionals earnestly thought they were doing the right thing working within the system have given me descriptions of what they’re doing which made me want to take a shower afterwards. This isn’t anything like that. Those mostly involved ‘improving’ on a treatment which is expensive and known to be useless by offering a marginally less useless but less expensive intervention. They’re also conveniently at a much higher markup. Maybe selling literal snake oil at a lower price can help people waste less money but it sure looks like profiteering.
The thing with folate which is a real problem is that instead of fortification being done with folate it should be done with methylfolate. People having the folate issue is a known thing and the recent developments mostly indicate that a lot more people have it than was previously known. It may be that a lot of people who think they have a gluten problem actually have a folate problem. There would be little downside to switching over, but I fear that people have tried to suggest this and there’s a combination of no money in it and the FDA playing its usual games of claiming that folate is so important that doing a study of whether methylfolate is better would be unethical because it might harm the study participants.
There’s a widespread claim that the dosage of methylfolate isn’t as high as folinic acid, which has a kernal of truth because the standard sizes are different but you can buy 15mg pills of methylfolate off of amazon for about the same price as the 1mg pills. There are other claims of different formulations having different effects which are likely mostly due to dosage differences. The amounts of folinic acid being given to people are whopping huge, and some formulations only have one isomer which throws things off by a factor of 2 on top of the amount difference. My guess is that most people who notice any difference between folinic acid and methylfolate are experiencing (if it’s real) differences between not equivalent dosages and normalizing would get rid of the effect. This is a common and maddening problem when people compare similar drugs (or in this case nutrients) where the dosages aren’t normalized to be equivalent leading people to think the drugs have different effects when for practical purposes they don’t.
Today, it comprises 69% of my total URLs served. (Nice.)
Normally it feeds junk after a few seconds delay, but in "high-load mode" it bans IPs for 30 days instead. High-load mode is entered when the free-worker count is low, and ends when it has been calm for 15 minutes.
This month it has been in high-load mode 50% of the time: 15 out of 30 days of traffic.
At Chia we aspire to have plans for how to do a project put together well in advance. Unfortunately due to it being needed the minute we launched we had to scramble to get original pooling protocol out. Since then we haven’t had an immediate compelling need or the available resources to work on a new revision. On the plus side this means that we can plan out what to do in the future, and this post is thoughts on that. There will also have to be some enhancements to the pool protocol to support the upcoming hard fork including supporting the new proof of space format and doing a better job of negotiating each farmer’s difficulty threshold but those are much less ambitious than the enhancements discussed here and can be rolled out independently.
With Chia pooling protocol you currently have to make a choice up front: Do you start plotting immediately with no requirement to do anything on chain, or do you get a singleton set up so you can join pools later? As a practical matter right now it’s a no-brainer to set up the singleton: It only takes a few minutes and transaction fees are extremely low. But fees might be much higher in the future and people may want greater flexibility so it would be good to have a protocol which allows both.
‘Chia pooling protocol’ is composed of several things: The consensus-level hook for specifying a puzzle hash which (most of) the farming rewards go to, the puzzles which are encoded for that hook, and the network protocol spoken between farmers and pools. The consensus layer hook isn’t going to be changed, because the Chia way (really the Bitcoin way but Chia has more functionality) is to work based off extremely simple primitives and build everything at a higher layer.
The way current pooling protocol works is that the payout puzzle for plots is a pay to singleton for the singleton which the farmer made up front. This can then be put in a state where its rewards are temporarily but revocably delegated to a pool. One thing which can be improved and is one step further removed from this is that that delegation is to a paying out to a public key owned by a pool. It would be more flexible for it to be to a pay to singleton owned by the pool. That would allow pools to temporarily do profit sharing and for ownership of a pool to be properly transferred. This is an idea we’ve had for a while but also aren’t working on yet.
Anyway, on to the new idea. What’s needed is to be able to pre-specify a singleton to pay to when the singleton when the singleton doesn’t exist yet. The can be done with a modification of Yakuhito’s trick for single issuance. That characterization of the trick is about reserving words where what’s needed for this is reserving public keys and getting singletons issued. What’s needed is a doubly linked list of nodes each represented by a coin and all having the capability that they came from the original issuance. Each node knows the public keys of the previous and next nodes but isn’t committed to their whole identities because those can change as new issuances happen. Whenever a new public key is claimed a new node corresponding to that public key is issued and the nodes before and after it are spent and reissued with that new coin as their neighbor. The most elegant way of implementing this is for there to be a singleton pre-launcher which enforces the logic of coming from a proper issuer and makes a singleton. That way the slightly more complex version of pay to singleton specifies the pre-launcher puzzle hash and needs to be given a reveal of a bit more info to verify that but that’s only a modest increase in costs and is immaterial when you’re claiming a farming reward. This approach nicely hides all the complex validation logic behind the pre-launcher puzzle hash and only has to run it once on issuance keeping the verification logic on payment to a minimum.
"lol" as the kids day, "lmao".
With a new majority on the Board of Supervisors, along with control over the Mayor's and District Attorney's Offices, the school board, and the local Democratic County Central Committee, political power in San Francisco has been consolidated in the hands of so-called "moderates" funded by and friendly to the interests of the tech and real estate industries. Put in the language of our political moment, San Francisco's halls of power are awash with Abundance. Not coincidentally, San Franciscans are suffering more than ever in just about every measurable way, and City Hall is simply ignoring their plight. [...]
San Franciscans are highly preoccupied with Trump's shocking and constant attacks on democracy, ICE raids disappearing of our neighbors, and exacerbation of the two-year-long genocide in Gaza. Mayor Lurie barely acknowledges these issues. In contrast to big city mayors like Boston Mayor Michelle Wu, Oakland Mayor Barbara Lee, and Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson, Lurie refuses to take a stand against ICE kidnappings and his police department won't even protect those who do. Outrageously, SFPD's stated position is that its priority is to protect ICE agents from protestors.
This is a stunning lack of leadership for a Democratic mayor in a sanctuary city widely considered to be the nation's progressive heartland, at the precise moment when American fascism begs confrontation. But even more squarely on the plate of San Francisco's current leaders is the fact that local economic conditions have rapidly deteriorated for the city's working people and poor in the short time since they came into power.
Planet Debian upstream is hosted by Branchable.

Yo, check it. 5pm today.