A Russian is on an airliner heading to the US, and the American in the seat next to him asks, “So what brings you to the US?” The Russian replies, “I’m studying the American approach to propaganda.” The American says, “What propaganda?” The Russian says, “That’s what I mean.”

How are they gonna get him to stand under a Rome statue?

I truly wish they could steal it away.

This line of reasoning was already perfectly captured in Office Space: https://youtube.com/watch?v=yZjCQ3T5yXo

The BT client will advertise the IP(s) of whatever network interface(s) you allow it to use.

Multiple things can be true at once.

• The election process in the US is horribly constructed in the first place
• It’s executed even more poorly
• Nevertheless, voting does determine who sits in the seat
• It does matter who sits in the seat
• The person who sits in the seat will represent the wealthy and powerful, not you
• It does matter who represents the powerful, because they can be pushed (by the people, and by the powerful) in different ways
• Even if we get the right person in the seat, and do a very good job of pushing them, it won’t be enough
• We need to do it anyway, because that act of organizing isn’t only to influence politicians — it’s also to influence ourselves, and improve our ability to find a path to real victory

Don’t think that voting alone is sufficient. Don’t think that voting and organizing are sufficient. But also don’t think that voting and organizing are not necessary.

We had tons of help and the easiest baby ever, and I think I managed to pull off two 15-minute gaming sessions in the 4 weeks I had saved up.

Also: company established 3 months paternity leave about 6 months after I came back to work. I’ve never identified more with the boomers who oppose student loan forgiveness out of jealousy.

Kinda more like:

I was gonna say… “no internet connection required” is not the key attribute of AirDrop. AirDrop doesn’t even require a network connection. It’s a weird comparison.

Not sure about Apple-mediated payments, but you can usually support the creator more directly and get an ad-free RSS feed that you can plug into the Podcasts app and it Just Works™. Usually ends up being a better deal for the creator, too.

One project that can help with this is the OUI-SPY, a small piece of open source hardware. The OUI-SPY runs on a cheap Arduino compatible chip called an ESP-32. There are multiple programs available for loading on the chip, such as “Flock You,” which allows people to detect Flock cameras and “Sky-Spy” to detect overhead drones. There’s also “BLE Detect,” which detects various Bluetooth signals including ones from Axon, Meta’s Ray-Bans that secretly record you, and more. It also has a mode commonly known as “fox hunting” to track down a specific device.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/01/how-hackers-are-fighting-back-against-ice

“If you put money in a vending machine and got two items instead of one, would you put additional money in for the second item?”

That is wild.

The vending company factors this into the prices they charge for the items, the amount they spend on the machine to ensure accuracy, and the amount they pay the people who stock the machines to do it properly.

If you take it upon yourself to unilaterally re-balance the equation, you’re not being noble, you’re just a fool.

Nix, but I’d only recommend it if you share my same brand of mental illness

iPhone’s design is more secure than Android (partly because of OS+hardware integration that just isn’t practical in a multi-vendor space), but they still have plenty of zero-days in their implementation. iPhone 7 is old enough that official security patch support is EOL, though Apple has still shipped some critical fixes past EOL.

Yeah, we need to be careful about distinguishing policy objectives from policy language.

“Hold megacorps responsible for harmful algorithms” is a good policy objective.

How we hold them responsible is an open question. Legal recourse is just one option. And it’s an option that risks collateral damage.

But why are they able to profit from harmful products in the first place? Lack of meaningful competition.

It really all comes back to the enshittification thesis. Unless we force these firms to open themselves up to competition, they have no reason to stop abusing their customers.

“We’ll get sued” gives them a reason. “They’ll switch to a competitor’s service” also gives them a reason, and one they’re more likely to respect — if they see it as a real possibility.

Doing the O last cuz the dementia got im for just a second.

“Fuck the C_ps… What was it? Caps? Cups?”

Ethel: “COPS”

“WHERE?!”

I’m always on unstable. Any time I try to stick to stable, I invariably need something-or-other that’s only on unstable.

You must have done something bad to deserve this. Trying thinking about everything bad you’ve ever done. That’ll help.

The seal looks like this:

Code completion is probably a gray area.

Those models generally have much smaller context windows, so the energy concern isn’t quite as extreme.

You could also reasonably make a claim that the model is legally in the clear as far as licensing, if the training data was entirely open source (non-attribution, non-share-alike, and commercial-allowed) licensed code. (A big “if”)

All of that to say: I don’t think I would label code-completion-using anti-AI devs as hypocrites. I think the general sentiment is less “what the technology does” and more “who it does it to”. Code completion, for the most part, isn’t deskilling labor, or turning experts into chatbot-wrangling accountability sinks.

Like, I don’t think the Luddites would’ve had a problem with an artisan using a knitting frame in their own home. They were too busy fighting against factories locking children inside for 18-hour shifts, getting maimed by the machines or dying trapped in a fire. It was never the technology itself, but the social order that was imposed through the technology.

To represent 4 values, you only need 2 bits

• 00
• 01
• 10
• 11