"Donald Trump makes perfect sense if you realize that sometime around 2012, he was captured by a foreign intelligence service and programmed to suddenly believe that..."
blaisehartley.com/2025/07/15/m…
Maybe Nothing Ever Really Changes
Concept: Donald Trump makes perfect sense if you realize that sometime around 2012, he was captured by a foreign intelligence service and programmed to suddenly believe that he could never be truly…Blaise's Blatherings
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I feel like I need to reiterate:
Just because you *can* do a thing, doesn't mean you *should* do a thing. Even if it's the hottest new buzzword...
wired.com/story/mcdonalds-ai-h…
McDonald’s AI Hiring Bot Exposed Millions of Applicants’ Data to Hackers Who Tried the Password ‘123456’
Basic security flaws left the personal info of tens of millions of McDonald’s job-seekers vulnerable on the “McHire” site built by AI software firm Paradox.ai.www.wired.com
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Belkin Is Ending Support for Most Wemo Smart Home Gadgets
So you know how a few of us have been yelling for years that buying "cloud-enabled" devices is buying constant uncertainty?
Belkin is ending app and cloud support for most of the brand's Wemo products. Devices compatible with Apple HomeKit, however, can keep working if set up before Jan. 31, 2026. pcmag.com/news/belkin-is-endin…
Man Afraid to Ride Subway Named Head of NASA
Trump Puts Sean Duffy, Ex ‘Real World’ Cast Member, in Charge of NASA
Trump has tapped Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy as NASA administrator.Charisma Madarang (Rolling Stone)
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Grok is coming to Tesla vehicles ‘next week,’ says Elon Musk
TechCrunch (@techcrunch.com)
Grok is coming to Tesla vehicles ‘next week,’ says Elon Musk https://techcrunch.com/2025/07/10/grok-is-coming-to-tesla-vehicles-next-week-says-elon-musk/?utm_campaign=social&utm_source=bluesky&utm_medium=organicBluesky Social
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SPD Confident They Can Brutalize Minorities without Federal Help
After witnessing the mayor of Los Angeles have to order an unwelcome ICE and the National Guard brigade out of MacArthur Park today, the Seattle Police Department reminded feds that they’re more th…The Needling
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"Police at Milan Bergamo International Airport told Sky News the person appeared to run on to the runway before voluntarily entering the engine."
I can't even begin to imagine what is wrong with a society who won't just say the word 'suicide'. Are we worried Voldemort will hear us, or something?
news.sky.com/story/flights-sus…
Flights suspended after man is sucked into plane engine on runway
Police at Milan Bergamo International Airport told Sky News the person appeared to run on to the runway before voluntarily entering the engine.Sky News
"In conclusion, we have investigated our own actions and discovered nothing untoward..."
"No, no, komrade Starovoit, I did not say 'You are fired', I told *him* to fire..."
britanniadaily.co.uk/russian-e…
Russian Ex-Transport Minister Found Dead Hours After Putin Dismissal
Russia's former transport minister Roman Starovoit has been found dead with a gunshot wound in his personal car, just hours after being dismissed by President Vladimir Putin amid mounting corruptionDarren Smith (BritanniaDaily)
We could stop spending trillions on unnecessary military 'superiority', *or* we could save a few million by firing all the people who keep our nation at the forefront of research.
But hey, at least ICE is getting a $72,000,000,000 bump in funding...
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Why old people should have to pass a "how shit invented in the last 50 years works" test before they're allowed to make government-level decisions...
Supreme Court upholds childproofing porn sites theconversation.com/supreme-co…Supreme Court upholds childproofing porn sites
Kids face risks online, but whether and how the law can protect them is a thorny issue. The Supreme Court weighed in to say states can try with age-gating – essentially requiring ID at the online door.The Conversation
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Source: "Internet" 🫣
Edit: Apparently, the original images are due to Allie Brosh at hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.com… . Still don't know who added the text.
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Is the theory here that if you let a child know that a particular other kind of person exists, even if there is no overlap between what defines that kind of person and religion, even if that kind of person is statistically likely to be the same religion as the child, then somehow that teaches the child a different religion?!?!?
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I feel like if you get shot on active duty for the US military, it ought to just be an automatic citizenship, or something...
hawaiinewsnow.com/2025/06/24/u…
U.S. Army Purple Heart veteran forced to self-deport from Hawaii
Kunia resident Sae Joon Park, a decorated Army veteran, was given three weeks to return to South Korea, after 48 years in the U.S.Annalisa Burgos (Hawaii News Now)
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That is a whole new level of F'd-UP.
In my opinion anyone who is allowed to serve in The United States military should be made a citizen (nationalized). Whether shot or not they served this country. It should be an automatic. Besides we should not have non-citizens serving in the military, it is a security issue. So when they are vetted and allowed to join it should be an automatic citizenship period.
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Somewhere Barbara Streisand can heave a huge sigh of relief. It will henceforth be known as "the Vance effect."
#JDVance #fascism #couchfucker
cy likes this.
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This one paragraph sums up a decade of MS-DOS use for me:
"The original MS-DOS Editor represented a major step forward for Microsoft's command-line text-editing capabilities at the time of its release. Before 1991, DOS users suffered through EDLIN, a line-based editor so primitive and user-hostile that many people resorted to typing "COPY CON filename.txt" and hoping for the best."
Microsoft's relaunch of EDIT for Linux implies that they're relaunching QBASIC for Linuxarstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/0…
Microsoft surprises MS-DOS fans with remake of ancient text editor that works on Linux
It’s funny how useful a 34-year-old software design can still be.Benj Edwards (Ars Technica)
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Edlin was a MS/DOS compatible version of the Unix ed utility and it was awkward to use. I was very happy to see edit though I was not using it long before I migrated to GNU/Linux and found I preferred vi and later vim which I still use today.
If someone is a basic developer on GNU/Linux I am sure they would find gambas far more useful than qbasic though I do have a soft spot for these nostalgic applications. 😉
So I did build a copy of edit and installed it on my system. 😀
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So I'm reading in the Times that recruiters and HR departments, who for a decade or more have been using AI tools to generate false job postings and manipulate labor-pools, are "Inundated" by an "applicant tsunami" of AI generated resumes and AI-faked confirmation video calls. Apparently, using automated systems to spam an entire industry doesn't result in everyone just shrugging and accepting the situation.
Who could possibly have predicted this...
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So I spent about 3 hours working with an AI to develop an AI prompt optimized for minimal execution time that would tell the AI to identify product data, product claims, and scientific evidence on a few hundred products, cross reference those data and rank products by likelihood of working as claimed.
We're not there yet, but I really like that on our trial run, the same AI that had helped me write the prompt, upon realizing that it was the chosen executor of that prompt, began it's response with, "OK, This is a massive undertaking..."
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Are you using a custom LLM or are you using one out of the box? By custom I mean one you built yourself not just one you trained. The results are going to be very interesting as product claims can rarely be accounted for in product data. Marketers have a way of ... well lying is the only appropriate term I can think of. I would love to hear more about this project as it continues. Please keep posting to keep us up to date.
@Unus Nemo No, I'm experimenting to see how much useful work you can get out of a free, public AI service. I generally start with Grok, then attempt to reproduce on ChatGPT and Claude.
My whole project may come to nothing, in the end, because the damned things keep making up some percentage of the data, even if you spoonfeed all the research materials to it and specifically ask it to use only, and all of the data provided. And they lie about what and why they did what they did at least 80% of the time...
I'm at best only about 80% there. I'm not sure my theory of getting the AI to help me write the prompt will turn out to be helpful...
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Me: What? Why would you want that many beds?
11-yr-old: Dad! So I can defeat the Ender Dragon, duh!
Help me out here. I definitely understand photographers have a challenging job that requires both skill and talent, and deserve to be paid for their work.
However, if I pay someone to take a picture, is it really reasonable for me to have to pay separately for every copy, be denied a digital copy, and be woke-shamed for musing out loud about just scanning a print and being done with it?
The whole thing seems completely outrageous, but massive numbers of people seem to see no problem with it...
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I just don't get it. If a picture is worth "x", charge me "x" for the picture, and be done with it. I can certainly guarantee that people are *always* pissed off about it, which is bad for business, and it can't really be making the photographer *that* much money. I mean, how often do people make requests for a picture more than a month or two after they are first delivered? It just seems like bad thinking/bad business.
Besides, we're talking about a commissioned work. Does the guy who first drew Donald Duck retain control of the pictures he made? No, of course not, Disney did.
To be honest, it also concerns me a bit that raw photos of my children are perpetually housed in the "collections" of at least two-dozen photographers whose security procedures most likely range from "what's a virus?" to "Microsoft has that firewall, they say I'm safe"...
Laws are vague at best. Though as a rule of thumb the one that took the picture has rights to it, not the subject of the photograph. Though consult a lawyer, as I am not one, for better legal advice on the topic. The same as a painting. Unless a contract is specifically drawn up to give rights to the contractor. You can be sure that the photos taken by a media platforms photographer belong to the media platform and not the photographer (unless they are freelance and have no specific contract then if they sell them to the media they insist on full rights not copies in most cases). The next time you hire a photographer draw up a contract the clearly states that you own the negative (raw files) and all parts of the photographs taken and that you you are only contracting their services and nothing more and that they have no right to maintain a copy of the images for any purpose. This will cause the photographer to ask for more money for their services though it seems you would be okay with that?
Seriously, though, it's time to move back to the open web again. The writing was on the wall a decade or more ago. And yet, here we are, all still trapped in Meta's data-prison. Unless the AI banned us from the platform for no reason, of course, then we don't even have access to our friends to tell them we left!
Come on, try Friendica. Or Mastodon's fine too, but *I'm* on Friendica, so clearly that's where it's at...
newyorker.com/business/currenc…
Why Are We Still on Facebook?
What makes the social network thrive? Not our desire to connect with others but our desire to do so publicly.Maria Konnikova (The New Yorker)
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Per my last post, I give you, "the apples"...
LAPD shoot US woman with a rubber bullet for trying to get into her home, they were blocking her entrance and there was no protest in sight. “Holy fuck — They literally just shot her point blank… I live here…” ( www.tiktok.com/@labyrinthlore) #3E #StopICE
A Few Bad Apples...
... Spoil the bunch. - Why do police and police enthusiasts use the first half of this idiom to describe officers who act unethically/immorally/illegally, get caught, and then are protected by the police? Does it not occur to them that *they* are the "bunch"?
@plan-A " but not all " - This is the basis of the irony. If the "not all" ones accept and protect the behaviour of the corrupt ones, then *they* are the corrupt ones, too.
"*I* didn't shoot a peaceful, unarmed woman point-blank with a rubber bullet just because she wanted to go into her home" is only an acceptable defense if it's followed by, "but I recommended the officer who did for punitive action", or, "and I tried to stop the officer who did". Any other answer means our 'good' officer is as guilty as the trigger-happy officer...
@plan-A "if he so anonymous then why does he have a profile on tiktok??" - "Anonymous" isn't a description, it is the name of an organization that acts publicly, but hides the identity of its members to protect them from illegal reprisals from governments or corporations.
"rest does not hurt me" - I'm not sure what this means... Are you trying to say that since you personally are not being shot by a cop for trying to peacefully enter your own home, then it's OK for them to do to others?
I will always apply the heat-shrink first, *THEN* solder.
I will always apply the heat-shrink first, *THEN* solder.
I will always apply the heat-shrink first, *THEN* solder.
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I will always apply the heat-shrink first, THEN solder.
I will always apply the heat-shrink first, THEN solder.
I will always apply the heat-shrink first, THEN solder.
Anthropy
in reply to Kate Morley • • •Royce Williams
in reply to Kate Morley • • •The Four Horsemen of The Naming Soup Apocalypse are now complete.
(Spoiler: the fourth one is real - see thread)