The wrecker's commitment to fossil fuel knows no bounds. Not only is he inviting fossil fuel power plants to roast the world, he is willing to let them poison people with mercury and other chemicals.
Karen Newton, Briton, went to the US with permission for tourism, with her husband. They were jailed for 6 weeks based on no reason she was ever told.
They soon signed forms to agree to deportation, but instead of being sent home, they were kept in jail for weeks first, separated. She was sometimes kept in constant cold, without a bed.
Eventually the deportation thugs stole their luggage.
What she heard in prison was that a thug gets a bonus for each victim perse jails.
The details were finally released last week: [...] That's 7.5 million to 30 million litres of drinking water every single day. This is the reservoir's entire remaining capacity. Google is taking absolutely the limit of all the water they can.
How about the other AI vendors, like OpenAI? [...] Notice what Altman did there -- he started with the headline claim "water is totally fake" then he gave a made-up example ending with "or whatever." What he did not give was anything like a number. A current number. [...]
Given the secrecy, assume all the hyperscalers use a huge amount of fresh water. Until they give us official numbers somewhere they're not allowed to lie. They're not fighting to keep the numbers secret because they're good.
Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.
Someone asked Amazon for a report on everything that their Alexa listening device had listened to since they first got it. It was enormous.
Think about which words Amazon might have set it up to alert various US government departments about — and which departments those might be. (That might depend on which country you are in.)
Amazon never hears anything in my home.
Aside from the danger of remote surveillance and control, digital systems to control parts of your home have a tendency to be too smart for your own good.
When I looked for an apartment in 2019, I rejected outright any building with digital rather than metal keys. I do not trust whoever controls the system not to track residents' movements. I also rejected outright any building with a security camera.
The Food and Drug Administration tried to reject the new mRNA flu vaccine without even examining it, in accord with antivax ideology, but has changed its mind and will now examine it.
Many plug-in hybrid cars use considerably more fuel than manufacturers claim. How much more, varies from model to model.
The US government's museum about the US Constitution has fired its president, and people suspect he was fired because he wasn't a magat.
Criticizing society's assumptions of how to collect and then use data, and what makes data valid or useful.
US citizen George Retes was arrested by deportation thugs while he was commuting to work, then jailed for days without access to family, an attorney, or information about the charges against him. He is now free, and suing. I hope he wins, but this is not enough.
The fact that Retes is an Army veteran does not seem significant to me. It would be just as bad if they did this to someone who was never in the US military.
I believe in being very tough on government crime.
When individual official thugs break the law in a significant way, they deserves to pay a penalty, such as a prison sentence. When the government agency broke the law, the agency also should pay a penalty. But when the agency follows a general practice of breaking the law, and that practice was accepted by upper management, the upper management should get the prison sentence.
The US told Europe it still wants an alliance — but only with tyrannical, right-wing countries.
The EU should avoid agreeing to this, and avoid being scared by the threats, while accepting the alliance as if it didn't have those conditions. This way it can play for time hoping the US kicks out these right-wing jerks, and use the time to prepare for the US to break off with them.
Monarch, Legacy of Monsters has a fantastic title sequence. Since the show takes place in two timelines, they split the titles between the past on the left and the present on the right, contrasting similar events in each timeline. And season 2 keeps up this conceit, but it was completely rebuilt!
So here are all four quadrants from seasons 1 and 2, stacked.
Also, this show is still killing it.
In my online undergraduate P5.js course, students are about to begin the module on motion and physics, including a bit of physics simulation using Matter.js. It suddenly occurred to me that I had never seen anybody put together this particular demo before, and I realized it had to be done. Messy source code here.
Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.
E.g. "unicrud --block Katakana".
The actual XFT font I get from XftFontOpenXlfd("-*-sans serif-bold-r-*-*-*-180-*-*-*-*-*-*") is
Noto Sans-300 :familylang=en :style=Bold :stylelang=en :fullname=Noto Sans Bold :fullnamelang=en :slant=0 :weight=200 :width=100 :pixelsize=401.899 :foundry=GOOG :antialias=True :hintstyle=1 :hinting=True :verticallayout=False :autohint=False :globaladvance=True :file=/usr/share/fonts/truetype/noto/NotoSans-Bold.ttf :index=0 :outline=True :scalable=True :dpi=96.4557 :rgba=5 :scale=1 :minspace=False :fontversion=131334 :capability=otlayout\:DFLT otlayout\:cyrl otlayout\:grek otlayout\:latn :fontformat=TrueType :embolden=False :embeddedbitmap=True :decorative=False :lcdfilter=1 :namelang=en :prgname=unicrud :postscriptname=NotoSans-Bold :color=False :symbol=False :variable=False :fonthashint=True :order=0 :namedinstance=False :fontwrapper=SFNT
The articles, produced in collaboration with the investigative collective WAV, detailed a years-long, multi-ministry charm offensive by Palantir to sell its software to Swiss federal authorities. The campaign was, by all accounts, a comprehensive failure. Swiss agencies rejected Palantir at least nine times, with concerns ranging from data sovereignty to reputational risk to the simple fact that nobody needed the product. [...]
So how does a sophisticated data intelligence company respond to well-sourced investigative journalism based on official government documents?
By suing the journalists, of course.
Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.
In 1995 someone could have written a paper which went like this (using modern vernacular) and advanced the field of AI by decades:
The central problem with building neural networks is training them when they’re deeper than two layers due to gradient descent and gradient decay. You can get around this problem by building a neural network which has N values at each layer which are then multiplied by an NxN matrix of weights and have Relu applied to them afterwards. This causes the derivative of effects on the last layer to be proportionate with the effects on the first layer no matter how deep the neural network is. This represents a quirky family of functions whose theoretical limitations are mysterious but demonstrably work well for simple problems in practice. As computers get faster it will be necessary to use a sub-quadratic structures for the layers.
History being the quirky thing that it is what actually happened is decades later the seminal paper on those sub-quadratic structures happened to stumble across making everything sublinear and as a result people are confused as to which is actually the core insight. But the structure holds: In a deep neural network, you stick to relu, softmax, sigmoid, sin, and other sublinear functions and magically can train neural networks no matter how deep they are.
There are two big advantages which digital brains have over ours: First, they can be copied perfectly for free, and second, as long as they haven’t diverged too much the results of training them can be copied from one to another. Instead of a million individuals with 20 years experience you get a million copies of one individual with 20 million years of experience. The amount of training data current we humans need to become useful is miniscule compared to current AI but they have the advantage of sheer scale.
I have this pulley wheel, 50mm inside diameter, 4mm groove. I need a rubber traction ring to go inside it. I cannot find anyone who will sell this to me.
The ring must be flat or concave, not round like a typical gasket seal O-ring, or the string its pulling will just slide off the track.
Alternately, any similar-sized metal pulley wheel that comes with a friction surface pre-attached, 8mm axis hole with set screw.
I have tried coating it with sugru, but that is too soft and wears off after not-very-long.
Update: If you're going to say "why don't you just" or "have you searched for" without a purchase link to a product of the correct size, please know that you are not helping.
Yes, naturally, you would need a prosthetic butthole for this movie about a celibate religious sect, Amanda. I completely agree.
"I was pregnant and naked, but I wasn't naked at all, and at the end of the movie, I'm standing in front of a burning building with just a merkin," she explained. "I felt so free."
Unfortunately, she did clarify: "You cannot see my butthole in the scene, but I swear there is a prosthetic butthole there." Release the butthole cut.
Jason Scott of Internet Archive was kind enough to digitize them for us. And these nearly-40-year-old VHS tapes turned out to be of surprisingly high quality! The very high resolution scans of the raw tapes are at Internet Archive.
I've also split them apart and uploaded them to YouTube, so here's a playlist of more than 24 hours of live performances at DNA Lounge spanning the years 1988 through 1992! Plus some other stuff.
We are also hosting a memorial for Spencer on the afternoon of Sat, Apr 4. If you knew him, please stop by!
Planet Debian upstream is hosted by Branchable.