Super PACs are so 2012. In 2024 SCOTUS ruled that officials are allowed to accept “gratuities” so long as they don’t directly say it’s a bribe.

Unless it’s for the President. Then they can just say it’s a bribe.

4mph is close to the maximum speed in downtown Austin traffic.

It’s Austin. The traffic is so shitty you can’t go fast enough to get in a wreck most of the time.

I live in the area, and can confirm anecdotally that the Teslas are bad drivers and the Waymos generally are excellent.

Childless uncle here. My role is to love my nephew and support him in whatever way he needs me to.

Sometimes he just needs me to be a responsible, safe adult he can count on who isn’t burdened by the need to act parental.

That’s because they’re guaranteed to sell all the water when there’s a storm anyway. There’s a reason there’s laws against raising prices in an emergency.

DMCA is interpreted very widely.

It criminalizes circumventing anything that could be used to protect copywritten information. So they just add copywritten stuff where it isn’t needed to criminalize anything they don’t want you to do. It’s why washing machines now have proprietary software and circuit boards instead of mechanical switches and why printer ink cartridges have chips on board.

The response to this mess is gonna be everyone sticking with Discord, not because there’s no alternatives, but because there’s too many alternatives.

That’s not true. Packet loss is a thing. It’s the same reason some USB cables suck and others are awesome.

It matters in digital signals more than I expected.

A bad-quqlity HDMI cable over a long run will start getting a bunch of noise on some of my displays that shows up as random green specs popping off due to signal loss, whereas better cables will give a clean signal.

And back when more broadcasts were analog and I ran tech for a road show, I’d occasionally pick up random stations on poorly-shielded cables that would get amplified by powered speakers. The cables essentially became antennas. Though I haven’t run into that in over 20 years.

Poorly-shielded cables and speakers also used to have a lot of issues with cell phones. Anyone else remember the series of 3-beeps you could sometimes hear on speakers a few seconds before a phone in the room started ringing?

What we need to do then is poison the well and provide bad training data.

Yeah - that’s why I always use credit if I can. If someone steals my credit card, I’m protected. The money doesn’t even leave my account, so I don’t have to worry about losing access to my funds for a few days while everything is worked out.

Inverted Y works for me in first-person games because I equate the tilt of the stick to tilting my head. If I want to look up, I have to lean my head back.

In 3rd-person platformers, it’s because I’m imagining moving the camera. It’s also why I have to invert the x-axis on third-person platformers.

3rd-person shooters I just treat as an fps because that’s how my brain works.

Or just photos of random people or celebrities

Or AI slop photos. Or AI slop fake IDs.

The important takeaway is they won’t be restricting AI bots from participating.

I work in municipal development and we have 20 new “developers” a week trying to get us to buy their permitting apps. All of them are willing to offer us an exclusive discount as an early adopter, and the few I’ve had meetings with haven’t even been able to tell us what backend databases the apps use or understand that there’s a difference between an Amending Plat, Site Development permit, and a Building permit.

And I have to fight the mayor every time because he’s all aboard with the AI hype. He tried having all the city ordinances and decelopment manuals re-written by GPT to make them easier to understand, and we had to get the city attorney to explain that not only was it idiotic, but that it would cost a couple hundred grand just to have his firm go over everything and explain the specifics of how dumb it was, and that if a code re-write is needed (and it is), they should spend that money hiring a firm specializing in code review.

The slop apps are out there - they’re just all being pitched to governments and CEOs that have infinite faith in anything that will make people more expendable.

9-5 isn’t really a thing anymore.

It’s more likely to be 8-5 or 9-6. You get an hour for lunch, but you’ll be so busy you usually skip it and work that extra hour for free.

I work near downtown Austin, where both Waymo and Robotaxi operate.

Waymo cars are some of the best drivers on the road because they actuallyt ested their product, use multiple Lidar sensors instead of just cameras, and have remote driver backups for unusual situations.

Teslas drive like maniacs and will end a ride and tell the driver to get out in the middle of a lane.

This is why when my city installed them (with a 3-2 vote from Council) they required them to all be installed in the Right-of-Way, which gives the city more authority to remove them if the contract is terminated (which it likely will be soon).

Or did they just initially export the emails from Outlook as pdfs for the redaction process?

I’d be careful about saying you “got” it. You got a glimpse of it.

I remember going into a segregated laundromat in 2005 in Alabama. It wasn’t legally segregation, but they absolutely had a black and a white laundromat, and I (white dude) went into the wrong one and felt very uncomfortable with all the looks I was given. I was eventually approached and told to leave and go to the white one, which happened to be much nicer, of course.

I thought at the time that I suddenly understood it. But black people deal with thay every fucking day, and I do not “get it” because of 10 minutes of racial discomfort in my 20s.

Google pays them the make Goigle the default search engine.