All of Virginia is under a drought warning, and residents are being urged to conserve water.
"The utility says the guidance only applies to non-essential residential usage, not businesses or industries."
So I assume this means Virginia datacenters are free to continue to waste drinking water, got it.
The venality of the GenAI firms is breathtaking to behold.
They insist that their widespread theft of intellectual property to train their models should be treated as transformative fair use, but that model distillation attacks by overseas competitors are somehow crossing a line.
And their proposed solution to this made-up problem is lobbying the Trump regime for Juche-inspired isolationism.
Which, you know, has been working out swell for North Koreans.
All of this while their models churn out CSAM and nonconsensual intimate images, suggestions for suicide to their customers suffering from mental illness, and criminal hacking campaigns against competing firms and business partners, all at the expense of our land, electricity, clean air, and drinking water.
RE: https://chaos.social/@vogelchr/116953057618621110
A shocking development in transportation and energy sector security.
Gas prices are high. Our economy is suffering from stagflation. We've threatened and alienated all our allies. Our military is losing a half-assed war with Iran, occupying American cities, accomplishing almost nothing against the still-in-power Chavistas in Venezuela, committing war crimes on the high seas, and obsessing over the testosterone levels of whatever straight white male remnant is allowed to continue to serve. The White House hasn't experienced this much destruction since the British invaded and burned it down. Thousands are suffering from uncontrolled explosive diarrhea, this being the second plague mismanaged by these cretins. Masked secret police are dragging people away into concentration camps. Immigrants, minorities, dissidents, and political enemies are being jailed or gunned down in the streets. We have no idea whether key members of the gerontocracy are actually alive or not. Oligarchs are taking all our power and water to drive the cheap simulacra they hope to replace us with. And in a beautifully poetic touch, our narcissist in chief is obsessed over a reflecting pool.
I struggle finding an appropriate analogy for all of this.
At least Nero could play the fiddle.
Golly gee willikers, with all of these threats to our vulnerable election systems, it sure would be nice if we had a functioning CISA election integrity effort and a fully staffed EAC.
P.S., I hate having to link to war dot gov just because Pete Hegseth and Donald Trump are so fucking insecure that they can't be normal about anything.
The US Department of Defense is suspending CMMC Phase II, effective immediately.
RE: https://flipboard.social/@newsguyusa/116869115101331694
These corrupt assholes truly deserve each other.
Recent discussions about self-hosting and coop services got me thinking...
How absurd is it that we're all expected to surrender our computing needs to for-profit hyperscalers and cloud service providers? How dare these oligarchs try to make us feel weak and incapable of providing for ourselves?
They want us to forget that three decades ago we collectively created one of the world's fastest supercomputers with distributed.net using nothing more than scavenged compute power from our idle PCs.
They want us to forget that most of us have drawers full of old-but-otherwise-servicable smartphones with performance specs meeting or exceeding that of low-tier cloud service provider VMs, which might be brought back to useful life using open source tech like @postmarketOS.
They want us to ignore open source tech like BOINC, web assembly, and @thekhronosgroup 's Vulkan and OpenCL that might allow us to safely run local and distributed compute.
They want us to assume we have no choice but to accept higher electricity bills and greater reliance on fossil fuels to drive oligarch-run computing, and to ignore how the explosion of rooftop solar and the rapid commercialization of sodium ion battery tech could shift our society's power dynamics, both literally and figuratively.
We are mighty.
SpaceX/xAI were allowed to proceed to IPO without interference from the Trump regime, while the regime just pulled the plug on Anthropic's best model for ostensible national security reasons.
Was that because Anthropic's tech is actually a national security threat while Grok isn't, or is it because Anthropic is a political enemy to the regime while their competitor led by Elon remains in their good graces?
This also further demonstrates the unreliability of American tech firms under the Trump regime. Why bother purchasing their goods and services if the regime can cut you off on a whim? Why invest in them if the regime can arbitrarily make your investments worthless?
#anthropic #spacex #xai #digitalAutonomy #digitalsovereignty #uspol #genai
RE: https://flipboard.social/@newsguyusa/116731561277762712
It's difficult to imagine any scenario involving boots on the ground on Kharg Island that doesn't involve thousands of US casualties before a blood soaked withdrawal and defeat.
The Pope just issued an encyclical that, among other things, excoriates the dehumanizing effects of AI.
Our news headlines and courtrooms are filled with absurd demands for reasonable accommodations for religious reasons from the most unhinged cranks and bigots.
But what would happen if someone demanded a reasonable accommodation from their employer to avoid what they sincerely believe to be sinful uses of AI in the workplace?
https://www.vaticannews.va/en/pope/news/2026-05/pope-leo-xiv-encyclical-magnifica-humanitas-ai.html
Anyone else in the DC region noticing a rise in personally owned vehicles driving around with federal government/DoD-issued official plates?
Unfortunately, I haven't been able to get any pictures yet because my encounters have always been on busy DC roads where I have to keep my hands on the wheel.
I hope I'm just mistaken. But part of my wonders if there's something shady going on with cronies getting issued official plates for local vehicle tax registration evasion and other corrupt purposes.
I feel sorry for the many students attending Utah colleges working hard in good faith (no pun intended) to get an education, only to find all the prospective hiring managers throwing their resumes in the trash for being presumptively worthless, but I guess that's where we are.
RE: https://infosec.exchange/@agreenberg/116533336872355044
It remains amazing to me that there's a breathless debate about the danger of GenAI in vulnerability discovery, yet crickets are chirping when it comes to dangerous common uses of GenAI in accelerating the creation of those vulnerabilities.
TIL crows, starlings and similar birds only *look* black to us — they’re actually very colorful in ways human eyes are unable to perceive. 🤯
Remember that next time people can’t see your “colors”.
Some colors just require different eyes.
RE: https://flipboard.social/@newsguyusa/116332460380397831
You know what? Fine. Let this piece of shit loser think he won if it gets him to stop.
I still think the best course of action after the 2020 election was to tell him he won, ship him off to MAL, tell him that MAL is the new White House, and construct a fake Truman Show-like presidency around him.
I'm getting a respectable 145W out of this Sokiovola 200W panel despite a certain someone partially shading it.
I guess my Jackery battery isn't the only thing that's solar-powered.
I bought a Jackery Explorer 1000 Plus kit containing a 30aH LiFePo4 battery and a 100W portable solar panel from Costco earlier this week in preparation for the Monday Midatlantic windstorm, further supplemented with an additional 200W solar panel. Yeah, I probably could've done better for cheaper than Jackery, but I was in a hurry and the storm was coming. The primary goal is to keep the fridge and sump pump powered during extended power outages. But now that I've got this thing, I'd like to solicit some ideas for what to do with it in-between emergencies.
The battery is rated for 4000 full charge/discharge cycles, which means I could theoretically use it hard every day for the next decade. I've got a nice, unobstructed, south-facing back deck next to a window through which I could run wires from the battery to the panels. My region's cloud cover is highly variable, but averages out to something like 4 hours of sunlight a day, temperatures ranging from 7F in the winter to 100F in the summer (-14C to 38C), and lots of humidity and unpredictable precipitation.
My initial thought is to keep the battery inside the house by the window to protect it from the elements, run cables to the panels through through foam backer rod or a pool noodle trimmed to size for insulation in the window, along with a rain loop to prevent water intrusion into the house and the panels, and hang the panels on a small frame on the deck. Then maybe I use the battery to charge up gadgets like tablets, bluetooth devices, etc.
Thoughts and suggestions? What do you use your portable solar/battery rig for in-between emergencies and camping trips?
If you are thinking about opening an account with Nuveen, don't.
I am dealing with a lot of bullshit right now with my father's estate, and Nuveen is the clear winner in the bullshit game.
If you die as a Nuveen account holder, your grieving heirs will have to navigate through a Kafkaesque scavenger hunt to get something from a third party financial institution called a medallion, which is just a fancier and more exclusive version of notarization for completely arbitrary reasons.