Over the weekend, the #Trump admin ignored a federal judge’s order not to deport a group of Venezuelan men, violating an instruction that could not have been plainer or more direct.
#DOJ attys later justified the…actions w/contentions that many #legal experts said bordered on frivolous.…again raising the question of whether the latest clash between Trump & the #judiciary amounts to a #ConstitutionalCrisis.
Legal scholars say that the nation has reached a tipping point and that the right question is not whether there is a crisis, but rather how much damage it will cause.
Legal scholars say that is no longer the right inquiry. #Trump is already undercutting the #SeparationOfPowers at the heart of the constitutional system, …& the right question…is how it will transform the nation.
“If anyone is being detained or removed based on the admin’s assertion that it can do so without judicial review or #DueProcess, the president is asserting dictatorial power & #ConstitutionalCrisis doesn’t capture the gravity of the situation,” said Jamal Greene, #law prof at Columbia.
I don't really use Goodreads anymore bc it sucks so now if you wanna know what I think of a book you just have to listen to me babble about how stupid it is for 30 minutes. Anyway here's what I thought of Playground by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Richard Powers youtu.be/8DUFaKc8CJA
News outlets found that at least 10 articles about the Code Talkers had vanished from the U.S. Army and Department of Defense websites as of Monday. The Defense Department’s URLs had been modified to include the letters "DEI"
- Texas , Caddo Nation, means "Friend" - Milwaukee , Ojibwe, means "Good Land" - Miami - Illinois , is actually the name of a Language (Algonquian) - Tallahassee (Florida), Muskogean, means "old fields" (just few examples)
It's done! Here's the epic moment after the 11m concrete beam has left the yard (leaving a nice brown skidmark).
I was going to film it, but the gusty wind blew the camera over before it got interesting.
The other beam was damaged and broke in half, leading to some sketchy cutting of rebar under load (ping!) and dragging two halves out. Had to shovel the concrete debris out of the garden, that took even longer.
MANA: Making Authoritarianism Normal Again. With the Global Order collapsing under Trump, more Authoritarians are emerging nytimes.com/2025/03/19/world/m…
The mayor, Ekrem Imamoglu, was detained after prosecutors accused him of corruption and terrorism. The opposition said the arrest was politically motivated.
And that's precisely why this closet skinhead isn't fucking fit for office.
The international stage is not a place for schoolyard politics. I'm angry about the dumb orange fuck, I yell about him all the time, but I'm not in office and that's appropriate.
International politics is a job for grown people. Not merely legal adults, but people with the maturity and grace not to fall for the insult-politics and braindead jabs of the dementia-patient-in-chief.
Aww. Diddums. Is the fascist billionaire who used his social media platform to defend neo-Nazi thugs and buy an election for his sex-pest billionaire BFF discovering that actions have consequences? Wibble.
Maybe Tesla should jettison the one person who is responsible for all negativity towards itself outside the airlock. C'mon Tesla. It's only one fucking person who has slung the boat anchor of hate around your goddamned pencil necks.
Tesla is the car brand that a study shows has been involved in the most accidents. Tesla is well known for its self-driving system, which critics argue, is the problem.
Actually, Tesla has some culpability too. The cybertruck is ridiculously heavy, thus wasting energy, and is apparently killing occupants too, never mind pedestrians and occupants of other vehicles. Tesla’s corner-cutting on safety is certainly a cause for blame.
actually the Board of Tesla is also complicit with Musk's shitfuckery. After all it was they who tried to pay him the multi billion bonus against the wishes of independent shareholders.
WAISN is the largest immigrant-led coalition in Washington State. We are a powerful, volunteer network of immigrant and refugee-rights serving Washington State.
WAISN is the largest immigrant-led coalition in Washington State. We are a powerful, volunteer network of immigrant and refugee-rights serving Washington State.
According to surveillance video provided by Emish Grocery, an SUV with an "ICE" decal circled the store's parking lot on Sunday, leaving when approached by security.
A TON of these impersonators have been going to jail but I know this of little comfort to immigrants who are living this reality right now.
There have been an insanely large number of much more confrontational ICE impersonators. Several fake ICE agents have pulled people over and have been armed with guns.
This is a real and serious threat to all minorities and immigrants in the US right now.
Man seen driving fake ICE vehicle in Fife WA has been arrested and charged with 2nd degree criminal impersonation.
The man claims he did it for his youtube channel, which is also how cops located him, bc he posted videos staging fake ICE arrests(uniform n all) with the same vehicle.🥴
The car was also driven on public streets with no plates and had misspellings in the ICE emblem.
A man accused of driving around a Ukrainian grocery store in a fake U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) vehicle said he did it for a YouTube video and that the whole thing was being blown out of proportion.
Hey @thunderbird, what's going on with addons.thunderbird.net/ and do you have an ETA for when it will be fixed? I keep getting hung pages or Cloudflare Bad Gateway errors and I can't update my add-on listings or upload new add-on versions.
We just checked on our end (Southeastern United States) and it loaded okay, but we've reached out to our contacts at Mozilla Corporation to see if they know more about this (since this is also the site for FF add-ons). Thanks for the heads up!
@seindal We had issues with bots creating large traffic spikes but it's largely resolved, as you noticed. (And yup, they're different sites! This typist is definitely having some big Wednesday energy.)
The apparent olive branch offered by Moscow after lengthy talks on Tuesday in fact suits the Kremlin tactically, writes world affairs editor Sam Kiley in Odesa, Ukraine
HP's Omen Transcend 32 OLED is a true dual threat: an outstanding 4K gaming display, as well as an excellent pick for the color-accuracy-critical work of creative pros. Here's our review: pcmag.com/reviews/hp-omen-tran…
This week, Jonathan Bennett and Ben Meadors talk to Darko Fabijan about Semaphore, the newly Open Sourced Continuous Integration solution! Why go Open, and how has it gone so far? Watch to find out…
Plex ups its price for first time in a decade, changes remote-streaming access You've got until April 29 before the Lifetime Pass more than doubles in price. arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/0…
Another model underway... To be fair, it's been underway for a while , but it seems I haven't shared any #WorkInProgress shots yet, apologies!
This is a print from AliExpress, so no idea of the actual model name, but it's from #ZBBoy and I think I'll call it #JetBikeDemon* (*demon not included in these shots) #MiniaturePainting #Crafty
♪I like big bugs and I cannot lie♫ You other brothers can't deny. When a wasp flies in with an itty bitty waist And you wave your hands around your face, you get stung!♫
There is an anime called "JoJo's Bizarre Adventure" where all of the lead characters are always dressed in this wild fashion for absolutely no in-universe reason. Just because I think? IDK really. Anyway they have these powers that are like alternate spirits called "stands" so a "stand user" is another superhero type.
Saying they could be "anyone" is absurd. It's always the guy with the crazy outfit.
Ah! My kids used to watch JoJo. I only caught glimpses of the episodes. Yes, they had some very _interesting_ fashion choices, much like those in the tumble photo. LOL!
Today in my surveillance class we're discussing Faraday bags for mobile devices: what threats they can (and most importantly, can't) protect against, the physics involved, and how to measure their effectiveness.
Should you keep your phone in a Faraday container? Probably not. But Faraday bags are useful to provide assurance against a particular, if narrow, range of threats, and understanding what they do and don't do for you is essential if you're considering using one.
In particular, if the protest is one that's illegal (or that could be treated as illegal), I'd be at least as worried about having the device seized and analyzed, revealing all my contacts and text history. To the extent a Faraday bag is emboldening you to bring your fully-loaded phone with you, it's actually hurting, rather than helping, your security and privacy. (I'd rather bring a burner, if possible, and leave it off unless needed).
They do seem (in the UK at least) to have a niche for trying to prevent keyless relay attacks, you even have auto magazines doing reviews (autoexpress.co.uk/product-grou…)
"We have ceded so many of the core operations of our lives and institutions to tech, we must recognise that strong encryption isn’t the enemy of security — it *is* security." - Signal President @Mer__edith for the Financial Times on the war on encryption
Yes but you are still not Open Source and de centralized. Or usable without Phone Number.
I need to have this for full offline apocalypse, zombie and Doomsday Mode, to trust you my dairy.
P.s. I still love what you done so far. However, every chat got unencrypted and exploited by Apps and advertised on Apple and Google devices with its A.I. ... privacy bank rubbery.
@schm43cky So, then I take it from your words in conjunction with the fact that the ICE contractor ShadowDragon is grabbing phone numbers from Signal and using them (presumably to merge with other data) that the use of Signal is contributing to attacks on the privacy of its users.
An oldie (2017) but a goodie. Australia (conservative) leader "Laws of Australia > Laws of Mathematics" Anti encryption spiel. zdnet.com/article/the-laws-of-…
Despite calling the laws of mathematics 'commendable', the prime minister of Australia told ZDNet the only law that applies in Australia is the law of Australia when it comes to legislating decryption.
#electronics tool rec of the day: The last time I visited Berlin, I went to modulor and I impulse bought a new cutter knife for my micro soldering work. The knife is made by OLFA, and it’s actually great. The blade is held firmly by the metal shroud, the retraction action is really smooth, and it’s thinner than any other knife I have making it easier to handle under the microscope. I highly recommend it. Here’s a link:
I used to use (and carried everyday) that one too!
Unsolicited cutter nerding:
That was until I discovered the Tajima LC-301 and afterwards the LC320B wich has become my most loved tool to carry.
The LC-301 felt thinner but sturdier at the same time while the LC320B is same thickness but longer (and also black and yellow, my fav colors, as irrelevant as that is) and has withstood using it as light duty screwdriver.
Can also confirm tajima blades last sharp longer than olfa.
Good to know! Did you also try the black Olfa blades? olfa.com/products/9mm_abb_blac… They feel considerably better than their silver counterparts but I cannot compare them objectively.
OLFA 9mm ABB Black Snap Blades are 25% sharper than silver blades. Made with carbon tool steel, each blade has 13 sharp segments to ensure precision cuts.
@neuron I am not 100% sure I tried them or not, because it was a long time ago, but I do remember going on a quest for colored blades (even contemplated titanium coating normal blades and anodising them) so I know I tried a few overall.
I even tried titanium nitride coated blades, but I found them way more expensive and not that durable compared to tajima ones (I was working with LOTS of cardboard ad the time, so the tests where thorough)
"...“The Vancouver International Auto Show has removed Tesla as a participant in this week’s event, after the automaker was provided multiple opportunities to voluntarily withdraw,” said Eric Nicholl, the show’s executive director, in a statement.
“The Vancouver Auto Show’s primary concern is the safety of attendees, exhibitors, and staff. This decision will ensure all attendees can be solely focused on enjoying the many positive elements of the event.”.."
I heard a news item (NPR?) use the word "stranded", which didn't even seem pedantically wrong. Complaining about stranded astronaut jokes is something up with which I would not put.
Did you hear about the starship that crashed on an planet with a fauna of red and brown plants? Apparently after eating the alien fruits and vegetables the whole crew's melanin content was altered, and they became, marooned...
I agree so hard with this thread from @quephird, and the @jrose post that inspired it.
Learning diverse and esoteric programming languages has unquestionably made me a better software developer and given me a leg up. And, no less important: it’s been •fun•! My own experience strongly bears out what these two are saying.
I used to work with a couple of software architects who literally made fun of me specifically because I would install and experiment with numerous languages other than Java, which is the only PL that they ever used.
I too share a love of esoteria programming languages. I recall learning Haskell (arguably not so esoteric...) and I didn't really understand functional programming, or things like "you cannot change the values of a variable"...and figuring that out broke my brain, in the best way.
Put another way, it's good to learn such languages because, as they say: a mind, once stretched, never returns to its original dimensions!
@ddrake Yes! “You cannot change the values of a variable” is a special day in the p-lang class: I show them some very, very, very basic Elm completely cold, and ask: “What can we ask about this language? What experiments will tell us what kind of language it is?” We do some tinkering with things they think they already know. We read the error messages carefully. It usually takes about 30-40 minutes for the class discussion to reach the point of “oh, wow, `=` doesn’t mean what we think it means in this language,” and it breaks their brain every time.
I remember the poke address for the border on the C64 (53281), writing TSRs for DOS, raw X11 programming. Registering event handlers in Pascal for the original Mac. Unix I/O using select.
I think it's true and false at the same time, because the constraints and the hardware change. Linked-list made sense with relatively fast, but scarce memory, I don't see this pattern being useful ever again. Languages that can self-evaluation were so cool when I was at the Uni, blessed days before security. There are also anti-patterns that are sadly timeless, like floating point numbers or languages that pretend they have a built-in type/class for human text…
@thias Linked lists are a great example, and I have a whole soapbox on what’s wrong and what’s right about teaching them that I don’t have time to type out right now. The very short of it:
- A linked list is rarely a good way to implement a List ADT on modern machines - But doing that is a great exercise in implementing a contract and thinking about corner cases; useful learning if framed that way (“How can this break?” etc) - But seriously, please please less of “What big O tradeoff makes using linked lists the right choice?” - But but! linked / recursive data structures are •ubiquitous•, recognizing that pattern and working with it is essential - Same for stacks, queues, lots of basic data structures curriculum: less about •choosing• the tool, more about •seeing• the tool
I think I went full circle about recursivity: costly option to enable in Fortran, everything is recursive in Lisp or Smalltalk (which I taught at EPFL) to dangerous thing that will probably blow in your face in production. If I had a time machine, I could probably have heated debates with myself and loose.
@thias To be clear, because I think it may have slipped by, when I say recursive data structures I mean that in contrast to recursive code: not necessarily a function calling itself, but a type T with a member that points to another T. Recursive code and recursive data structures do often go together, but it’s possible to work with a recursive data structure using non-recursive code.
indeed, but I would make similar reservations about recursive structures, as they imply pointers, memory layouts yada, yada. If you had told me in 2000 that the heap / stack would be some proeminent in newer languages like Swift I would have looked at you funny (Swift even has a keyword for recursive members). Mind you, this is no criticism, more me looking at the courses I gave and thinking “Mmh”.
@thias I mean, “heap allocations can be costly” has definitely been one of the longest-lived patterns of my programming life. There was that mystical window in the early 00s where it sort of seemed like infinite improvements to GC were going to make this a non-issue, but that was a short-lived mirage.
yup, I taught in that mystical time window. Compilers were going to solve all optimisation problems, parallelism was dead, multithreading was the answer. Cooperative multitasking was clearly going rhe way of the dodo.
@thias OOP will give us limitless code reuse! XP will give us limitless flexibility! Infinite collaboration means there are no deep software problems! Business analysts will integrate software by dragging connections in a GUI between Java Beans!
At the same time, my day-to-day work is in Rust and I have to keep reminding myself that it’s fine to Box things and even copy Strings because they’re going to be returned as a tree of JavaScript objects later anyway. Most of the time it’s an “eat your vegetables” optimization more than an “accidentally quadratic” trap on modern machines, which is amazing.
(My games programmer friend would probably point out “not all use cases” here. 😛)
@thias Yeah. One of my many refrains is that there is no such thing as “good code” without a context, and what’s good code in one project might be terrible code in another.
@Catfish_Man @thias Yes, exactly all this! This aspect of software is — full-throated, no irony — something that gives me deep optimism about the world. Our power structures may be broken, our systems may be broken…but yes, it really is possible for humans to build things together that are bigger than any one of us and that •work•.
@thias I have a similar thought exercise that I do when I'm feeling down, which is look at a city skyline at night, and then attempt to trace everything that had to happen to get all those little points of light there
One thing I wish I would have been told at the university is that a design can at best absorb one order of magnitude up or down, above that, the underlying assumptions will be completely off. The other is that a programming language is typically built upon hardware assumptions that are off by one generation at least.
One thing that makes it so hard to make a design future proof is that CS evolves very quickly along one axis, bangs against some wall and then switches to another axis.
The Programming Languages course I teach is built around this idea of tinkering with the unfamiliar as a way of learning underlying patterns, and learning how to learn — as opposed to preparing students specifically for graduate research in programming languages (“this semester, we will build a subset of OCaml in OCaml”) or offering a utilitarian pass-the-exam checklist of specific language paradigms and language features. (Both of those can be good courses, but they’re not the one I teach!)
I spend a lot of time giving my students advice that is various forms of “don’t artificially narrow yourself” and “learn to embrace the unfamiliar with curiosity instead of fear.”
And do they get it? From the p-lang course, from the curriculum in general? Based on what I see, I think they actually •do• to a surprising extent. And if they do, I think two big reasons for that are (1) it’s a conscious learning goal across many classes through the curriculum, not just a single unit or an afterthought, and (2) we try to address this as •social-emotional learning•, not just technical knowledge accretion.
By “social-emotional learning,” I mean things like:
- Learning programming is hard, frustrating, daunting, makes you feel stupid; you need psychological tools for dealing with all that
- Programming carries all sorts of social baggage, is absurdly gendered and racially coded in our culture, comes with all sorts of social pressures; you need to be mindful of all that or you’ll fall into the pit of it (whether you’re on the privileged or the marginalized side)
- Learning how to explain and share what you already know is at least as important as what you know
- Learning how to lift up the people around you instead of being an asshole pays •extraordinary• dividends — for your career, for the people around you, and for your own psychological health
…etc etc, I could go on.
We forget so easily that software is made by humans for humans, and thus that humans are the ones learning to make it. Treating people like humans is so powerful, if we can figure out how to do it.
I have programmed in a language that is so esoteric that it does not have a name!
It's the language you use to define a BibTeX style; I was writing a paper and wanted the amsplain style, but with some minor changes...so I puzzled through the BibTeX stuff and eventually figured out how to modify that style to do what I want. 😀
*nod* I’m not sure whether or not I believe it for natural language but I do believe it for programming languages, all the way back to a project in college (that I admittedly could have put more effort into) that attempted to show a priming effect just between different tutorials for a language.
Strong agree — and I even ran a not-especially-stellar session on this topic at Minnebar once!
I’d argue that something that distinguishes programming languages from natural language is Sapir-Whorf-style shaping of thought is actually a conscious design goal. Language design choices say “we want programmers to pay attention to this, and not to that” and “we expect you to approach coding with this kind of mindset, this kind of thought process.”
In 13 days, Wisconsin voters will elect a new state Supreme Court justice. In tomorrow's The Big Picture, Todd Beeton looks at whether Elon Musk will be able to buy that seat for the Republican. And yesterday, Jay Kuo dug into what is really behind the fascist tactics of Trump and Musk. thinkbigpicture.substack.com/p…
Keep defending against all the attacks on ethical standards and you'll loose the one or the other. But you'll never win. You win *only* if you make it impossible to attack, generally by disarming the aggressor or by ousting him. And a win it is only if you can undo the damage.
As long as Trump has the means he and his cronies will attack. Anything that might hinder them in any way at any time will be discredited, dismantled, disbanded or dispelled. Or murdered if cheaper.
Is not about whether he can buy the election but the people wake up and start voting and developing a pair of balls and ovaries. Sorry for any misspelling.
Nonilex
in reply to Nonilex • • •Legal scholars say that is no longer the right inquiry. #Trump is already undercutting the #SeparationOfPowers at the heart of the constitutional system, …& the right question…is how it will transform the nation.
“If anyone is being detained or removed based on the admin’s assertion that it can do so without judicial review or #DueProcess, the president is asserting dictatorial power & #ConstitutionalCrisis doesn’t capture the gravity of the situation,” said Jamal Greene, #law prof at Columbia.