"If you like democracy, you must resist the peculiar Americanism of anti-partyism. Be pro-party—as many of them as possible." https://www.liberalcurrents.com/make-political-parties-great-again/
"...we find that the January 2025 implementation of congestion pricing reduced passenger vehicle traffic by roughly 21 percent near the boundary and improved total EMS travel times by 63–70 seconds, approximately 5–6 percent. Effects emerged quickly and show little evidence of displacement to adjacent areas... These findings suggest that cost-benefit analyses of congestion pricing systematically understate net social benefits by omitting emergency response improvements."
The cure is to stop doing that; there are other, better ways.
"But it's what everyone is doing!"
Yeah, that's why it's a problem.
This post is about three hundred and sixty six different things.
Why is the appeal to “traditional European values” always about xenophobia and patriarchy, and not dragging nobles off their horses and bludgeoning them with farming implements in a peasants’ revolt?
Where the hell did Sun get the idea that account expirations should be in DAYS since the epoch?
The key thing to understand here is that LARGE LANGUAGE MODELS ARE WRONG ABOUT SHIT ALL THE FUCKING TIME.
We used to sarcastically say, "Every time I read a news article about my area of expertise, I'm appalled by everything it gets wrong, but I'm sure the news articles about things that aren't in my area of expertise are all perfect!"
It's no longer news articles people blindly trust, it's LLMs, which can produce bullshit at the speed of light.
…
Google's new reCAPTCHA wants you to turn on your camera and show it your hand, so it can identify you more definitively.
https://reclaimthenet.org/googles-new-recaptcha-wants-your-camera-access-and-21-points-of-your-hand
'This is a company whose business runs on gathering and monetizing personal data, now asking to switch on your camera and read your hand.'
This gripe brought to you by https://vuxml.FreeBSD.org/freebsd/690144e9-4f88-11f1-982e-00a098b42aeb.html
It makes about as much sense to me that Gtk and Qt applications have a *runtime* dependency on py3xx-setuptools. I'm not building python libraries in Wireshark or Inkscape or gnuplot! #FreeBSD
It makes absolutely no sense whatsoever that upgrading Python from 3.11 to 3.12 does not also upgrade things like python-openstackclient, ansible, etc. #FreeBSD
"The written Constitution is for the public. It is a feint, designed to distract the unserious from the much more important Constitution that exists exclusively as ideological vapor circulating around conservative legal thought.
You cannot just read that Constitution. You must perceive it, specifically the ethereal version manifesting as a constantly shifting cloud above the right wing of the Court, where original meaning rearranges itself around political need." https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/the-us-constitution-is-for-simple-folk-still-burdened-by-the-belief-that-words-have-meaning
There are only two types of people who talk seriously about data centers in space:
People who don’t know what they are talking about.
People who think you are stupid.
Ah, Canada Day. Also known as the day when a thousand of my users learn that their supervisors neglected to renew their accounts for another year. (Totally by coincidence: it's also the start of our fiscal year.)
Happy Canada Day to my friends north of the border
Ended up building rust twice today, once before the big wodge of FreeBSD security advisories came out, and once after updating the package-building jail. (Which probably wasn't necessary, the important bugs are all kernel code.)
@dtl @simontatham I don't know how else to express it. My expectation for a Python project is that it will need to be rewritten every 2-3 years simply because the development infrastructure has disintegrated . The underlying source code might need only minor modifications but the tools for doing all the software engineering tasks needed to maintain and package the code will have completely changed making the project unmaintainable.
RE: https://social.nlnetlabs.nl/@nlnetlabs/116837804231661634
“By humans for humans, like humans”
It occurs to me that I actually do have 30 years of unsynchronized .bashrc files scattered around various systems and environments that I use. I theoretically store my dot-files in a git repository, but I only bother to merge changes between my two primary workstations (home and office).
Most of the logic of the post-2005 Internet is based around a core assumption that CDNs are cheap, plentiful, and come with no downsides. We threw away lots of technologies that could have relieved drain on servers because we assumed redundant downloads are actually better than the added complexity of averting redundant downloads. Most of the logic of the post-2005 Internet is now broken
(I remember the week that the NY Times Opinion article -- every single one of them -- was aimed at making President Biden withdraw from the race. EVERY. SINGLE. ONE. Because they were using the opinion section to put their arm on the scale.. and they've been doing this blatantly on all topics recently... i.e. if you want to tilt "public opinion" towards "butter side up", the entire "opinion" section of the NY Times is "Why Butter Side Up Is Good For the US Economy" "The Scandal Behind Butter Side Down" "Butter Side Up's Promise" "Butter Side Down: The Sickness" "Butter Side Down Is Unamerican!" )