ignirtoq

Originally enacted in 1964 to protect workers during the transition from private to public ownership of mass transit, the provision now blocks the modernization of transit operations: no legacy US heavy-rail system has automated its operations to permit trains to run without onboard crew. In contrast, countries like France and Canada, each with robust labor protections, automate without conflict.

Okay, can we get those robust labor protections first, and then fully automate public transit?

Ok so when a dozen people all go to say the same thing, when do the other people get to speak? 36 minutes later. They get 3 minutes each. These elected officials can spend a half fucking hour listening to their citizens.

Energy is not only a property of matter. Photons have energy, no mass, and are not matter but in fact force carrier particles.

Also of note: According to the Financial Times, some of these SPV deals are being cut up, pooled together and resold to investors as new asset-backed securities.

Oh good. That risk-obfuscating strategy has never caused any economic problems and has only had positive results.

It’s cover. They’re not laying off because of AI. They’re laying off to make line go up.

An inquiry could ultimately see justice department officials, including the acting attorney general, brought before her court to testify.

Don’t waste time having them testify. They have no qualms lying under oath. Subpoena documents. That’s the only way to get at the truth.

One of the big problems is that the world continuously gets more complicated and needs commensurate regulation, but the legislative branch can only handle so much complexity and expertise directly. So it has been delegating more and more of its regulatory powers to agencies that are supposed to be staffed with the experts that can handle that complexity and have that expertise.

But in our system “executing” the law is under a different branch, controlled by the President, so it in effect transfers that power to that office. Congress can’t just “take it back” without solving that underlying problem, or the power they take back will vanish due to their lack of capacity to execute it effectively for the good of the people.

Violate the law. The US civil rights movement of the 50s and 60s have a lot of success stories, and stories of challenges/failures that careful study of would really equip today’s civil rights advocates well.

I’m skeptical of just a mathematical model without tying it to real data, no matter how hard the researchers try to make it “realistic.” You can make a mathematical model that says anything. That said, I did find this part interesting:

Burgess and his colleagues delved into the mechanics of ambition after earlier work found that fisheries performed best when boats stopped searching for more fish once they reached higher-than-average catches. They wanted to see if the mathematics supported the strategy in other realms of life, too.

The change will de-emphasize the effects of methane, a main component of natural gas that has a potent effect on the climate but breaks down more quickly than carbon dioxide.

I hate language like this. Carbon dioxide doesn’t break down. It’s stable. So methane breaking down in 100 million years would be “more quickly” than carbon dioxide. This turn of phrase puts an inaccurate picture in the layman’s mind of greenhouse gases that’s very avoidable. Just say “but eventually breaks down, unlike carbon dioxide.” There, fixed in the same number of words.

Some details that seemed important to me:

The protesters tried to stop ICE from transferring Martin Soto – who announced the strike – but officials said that they were able to move him to the Elizabeth contract detention facility.

Laura Herman, who serves as legal director of the advocacy organization Make The Road New Jersey, said that lawyers had communicated with the US attorney’s office. The US attorney’s office claimed he would not be transferred Sunday because of a federal judge’s order prohibiting him from being moved out of state as his habeas petition proceeds through court, according to the City.

So federal court has forbidden them from transferring him out of state, and they decide to transfer him. They moved him to another ICE facility in New Jersey (where he was initially), so this doesn’t break that order, but who would trust ICE to do that?

No I think they mean the linked webpages in the results are websites entirely generated by AI that Bing search has indexed. I’ve noticed this, too, especially looking for guides or help with very niche topics. It’s incredibly frustrating that not just the search engines but the web itself is filling up with AI slop.

This combined with the OpenAI and Anthropic price increases mean I have hope the bubble will pop by the end of the year. Microsoft has to report their stats as a publicly traded company, and both Anthropic and OpenAI are aiming for IPOs in H2, so they will have to disclose stats for that as well. When all of their “customers” go up in smoke once the real price tag hits, they won’t be able to hide it.

AI in its present form is just too expensive without venture capital footing 90+% of the bill. They burned through that too quickly. They didn’t get the traditional economy addicted to AI enough; most companies can unwind most of the changes they have made to roll AI into their operations.

Edit: GitLab might be screwed, though.

“Iran now knows without doubt it needs a nuclear weapon to survive, and will probably threaten the Strait of Hormuz in perpetuity,” the Nato source added.

This is Trump’s legacy. There’s no way to undo this. No amount of diplomacy or military action will ever be able to change their minds after what the US has done. It doesn’t matter who gets voted into office for the next 30 years. The Iranians won’t forget this.

No, sales are going down because prices are going up. If you have a fixed inventory and sales go down, you lower prices to increase demand and move the product and keep your revenue stream. But in this case, they’re moving supply away from this market (consumer hardware) to a different market (AI data centers). So the supply is going down with (previously) fixed demand, driving prices up. The “motherboard sales are collapsing” headline comes from looking at the consumer hardware slice of the computing hardware market. If you look at total sales from each manufacturer, so include the AI data center sales in the analysis, they’re not having any trouble moving inventory nor keeping up their revenue stream overall.

Was it built specifically for promotional material like this picture? Or does NASA really stamp their logo on anything they build larger than an envelope?

Wholeheartedly agree. The point I’m more trying to make is that they can survive much longer without popular support than other kinds of movements. So Palantir can be very successful for a long time aligning with the regime, even if it will ultimately fall. They can (and probably plan to) jump ship before that fall, like German companies that aided the Nazis did after WWII.

Two weeks ago, we wrote about Palantir going mask-off for fascism, specifically about CEO Alex Karp’s company posting a 22-point manifesto that included some genuinely ugly stuff about how “certain cultures” are “regressive and harmful” and how pluralism is a “shallow temptation.” I argued that this kind of public ideological positioning was both morally bankrupt and strategically suicidal. The moral bankruptcy part should be obvious (if it’s not, go do some soul-searching). But doing so at a time when American-style fascism is historically unpopular basically everywhere, including within the US, just seems like you’ve bet on the losing team at a time when it’s clear they have no chance of coming back to win.

I keep seeing this logic that:

1. If a movement is unpopular it will fail in short order
2. In the US, the current fascist movement is unpopular
3. Therefore it will fail soon

That may be true of a lot of movements, but fascism doesn’t work like that. They don’t need popularity, they just need control over the levers of power. The Heritage Foundation and many, many other conservative groups have been working for decades, some since the 1950s, to seize control of those levers of power.

Palantir aligning with this fascism is not nearly the clearly failing strategy the author believes it to be. There’s a very real chance they are successful for years or even decades aligning with the current fascist regime. It has a lot of momentum, and I haven’t seen good evidence that that momentum is reliably ebbing. It’s seeing speed bumps, but I haven’t seen any kind of turning point. I really hope the midterm elections are that turning point. Either conservatives lose Congress or the public realizes they can’t stop it by working within the system anymore.

In the ruling, Judge Kyle Duncan, who was appointed by President Donald Trump, agreed with the state of Louisiana’s contention that allowing the drug to be mailed there makes moot the state’s ban on abortion at all stages of pregnancy.

“Every abortion facilitated by FDA’s action cancels Louisiana’s ban on medical abortions and undermines its policy that ‘every unborn child is human being from the moment of conception and is, therefore, a legal person,’” the ruling states.

Yeah, it’s called the Supremacy Clause. You know, the one the federal government is using right now in multiple cases to remove other rights citizens are getting through state laws and constitutions? I guess it can only be used to take rights, not grant them?

To bone and to debone both mean to remove bones from something, typically food.