BryantD

Without judging this guy's current state, he makes it clear in his first blog post that he was a dealer.

"So instead of coming back home broke and apologetic, I ended up pretty deep into this and soon was making tens of thousands of dollars a week, very much unapologetically."

Then, after his first sentence:

"I was left with the difficult choice of either living there and walking to a temp agency with hopes of making $10.50/hour doing manual labor (without an ID or social security card at this point), or getting on a bus to NYC to see some associates, and coming back in a week or so with $15-25k in my pocket and living in comfy luxury hotels until I could rent an apartment... I chose the latter: and obviously, was back in prison after a short 14 months of addiction and misery."

"It kinda seems like the democratic party is more aligned with slavery these days, intentionally bringing in an underclass of workers who can't protect their rights to work for cheap for their megacorp donors."

Come on now.

You didn't say it was popular, you said it seemed to you like Democrats were trying to reconstruct a form of slavery. That's incorrect.

I have thought about what Trump got a lot of legal immigrant votes. I believe it's because a) he lied, playing on fear in order to get people to think he could save them from a non-existent threat and b) people didn't think he was going to do what he promised to do.

Ileana Garcia, Florida State Senator and co-founder of Latinos for Trump, just said "This is not what we voted for." She's wrong -- it was very clear to me during the campaign that Stephen Miller's goal was exactly what we're seeing now. However, I am fundamentally sympathetic to people who were fooled.

Huh. The most recent Democratic Presidential nominee was clear that she supported comprehensive immigration reform, seeking pathways to citizenship for immigrants in the U.S. without legal status, with a faster track for people living in the country illegally who arrived as children. So sort of not without legal status at all.

And as one might not realize given the rhetoric, border crossings in 2024 plummeted (although not reaching pre-pandemic levels) thanks to increased arrests on the US side of the border and more efforts from Mexico to control the flow of refugees.

I think there are cases of people using keystroke expanders to automate the -- to em-dash conversation outside word processors. Not so common among technical folks, though, for postfix operator reasons.

The comment we're talking about doesn't read like AI to me because of the use of parenthetical asides, although that just means I haven't seen a LLM that tends to use parentheses heavily.

"Communication" has a fairly big surface area, and "at the same time" is not sufficient if there's any ability for the LLM to persist data. E.g.: if it can write to a file, it could check for outside communication ability and upload that file only when that ability exists.

And then, depending on what threat profiles you're concerned about, you may need to be thinking about side-channel attacks.

Ha! yeah, you can't make people happy all the time. And I mean, I found the link, so I can't complain too much.

Yeah, absolutely. FWIW, the repo notes:

"Direct File interprets the United States' Internal Revenue Code (26 USC) as plain language questions, the answers to which should be known to taxpayers without need of external instructions or publications. Taxpayers' answers are then translated into standard tax forms and transmitted to the IRS's Modernized e-File (MeF) API, which is available for authorized public use."

So in theory it's useful now, but as you say it could easily change.

For those who want a better explanation of Sky's capabilities, I recommend Federico Viticci's article (linked from the Tao of Mac article but the links are not distinctive): https://www.macstories.net/stories/sky-for-mac-preview

He goes fairly deep based on two weeks of usage.

Yeah; you’re missing that USAID work included developmental work as well as pure relief. There’s a process for closing missions in countries that no longer need assistance, even.

One factual note here: mRNA vaccines were not brand-new with the COVID ones. The first human clinical trials using an mRNA vaccine were conducted in 2013.

IHOP is good too!

If I were Waffle House, I would be thinking "hm. This is a one person project; what are the odds that it will break/go down eventually, and people will assume it was ours and get angry at us? Could write a clause about rights returning to us, get the code in escrow... but then we might wind up maintaining some random project using a stack that isn't part of our core competencies..."

And then I'd try to work something out anyhow, cause this is a cool project. But I sadly get the caution.

This law does not compel anyone to spy. It does say that priests, like teachers and psychologists, have a duty to report if they have "reasonable cause to believe that a child has suffered abuse or neglect."

I see arguments on both sides of this but it's not compelling priests to spy. It's removing religious freedom protections from a long-standing precedent.

Speaking as someone who grew up in the United States Waldorf community, I would say that the type of community you and I have experience with isn't tightly aligned with the right/left political spectrum. The political environment of the 60s and 70s was such that earthy-crunchy devotees found lots of commonality on the left; as such I'd agree with your statement. But ideologically, there's no reason at all why people focused on returning older ways -- for reasons of health or otherwise -- wouldn't align with a movement that rejects modernity.

I recommend Leah Sotille's new book Blazing Eye Sees All, which looks at New Age figures who have drifted into the MAGA movement. It's kind of wild seeing the channelers I remember from my childhood going hard right.

The article documents delivery, and a little searching told me that Washtenaw Fiber Properties is still in business at https://washftth.com/ and serving customers.

I am also going to acknowledge that the new executive order filed on 4/4 is clearly a violation of the law. Or, I suppose, completely meaningless, depending on how you look it.

The law provided for a a 90-day extension on the deadline at the President's discretion. However, the extension required certain things to be true (significant progress made on the divestiture, legally binding contracts in place, and so on) -- so I'd agree that this wasn't faithful execution of the law.

That's more probable, but that's also the reaction that should compel us to consider the possibility that we're looking at an insurance scam. If I owned a Tesla dealership in a country that was seeing sales drop the way they are, and if I didn't have ethics, I'd be thinking about the potential to get rid of unsalable backstock at no charge.

Also not all models support it. I think only gpt-4o and gpt-4o-mini support it, although I haven't triple checked that.

Oh, I dunno. A lot of people were aware of Ruby Ridge and Waco and most of them did not radicalize to the extent of blowing up federal buildings.

I think that's an eternal mystery, if there was in fact an unidentified co-conspirator. Elohim City is a convenient place for conspiracies to coalesce, but there's a lack of hard evidence as opposed to "well, it would make sense."

I feel like it's worth noting that this is not a universal dynamic. Tim McVeigh didn't need a fed to turn into the kind of person who kills 168 people. I'm sure we're all aware of the way this occasional dynamic gets turned into an excuse for any radicial behavior: "must have been a false flag, must have been talked into it." Which, to be clear, you did not say -- but we see it often.

It wasn't; the key part of the piece is the revelation that $50K was not in fact a huge sum of money for someone in her socio-economic class. The thing that caught Patrick's eye originally, if I'm reading correctly, was that she didn't get the usual "come back in a day so we can get the funds together" message.

I suspect although I can't be sure that this is one reason why he's elliptical in this piece. The core piece of information is that she misrepresented her wealth in the original article. Personally if I'd just been scammed I would also want to minimize myself as a target, so I can't blame her, but it's the discrepancy that caught his eye.

Yeah, I see where you're coming from. For my part, I'm very wary of accelerationist tendencies and there are hints of that in the two cases I noted. Only hints, though, neither of those guys made a point of leaving full-on manifestos. (Livelsberger came kind of close with his letter talking about how he needed the country to wake up: "This was not a terrorist attack, it was a wake up call. Americans only pay attention to spectacles and violence. What better way to get my point across than a stunt with fireworks and explosives?")

Hold on.

Livelsberger's uncle said "He loved Trump, and he was always a very, very patriotic soldier, a patriotic American." He was also very dissatisfied with the government but I don't see strong indications that he was criticizing from the left.

Crooks donated once to ActBlue. He was also a registered Republican and the FBI deputy director described his social media activity as anti-semitic and anti-immigration. Again, case seems open.

Routh is certainly reasonable to classify as a leftist.

https://basicincome.stanford.edu/research/ubi-visualization/ is a pretty good place to start on reading studies.

The cited examples are Reagan and Bush, both of whom relented to some degree after Congress pushed back. Obama fired one IG, with stated cause. And of course, in 2022, Congress passed a law requiring 30 days advance notice to Congress. So perhaps traditional but also fairly clearly violating the 2022 law.

We've been "foolish" enough to try UBI. Studies show that it doesn't tend to increase spend on alcohol or tobacco.

The hope is that UBI would prevent him and people like him from falling into homelessness in the first place.

They could be using the existing motion capture technology used for sports analytics [1]. The Australian Open did something similar this year to convert skeletal tracking data into animation to get around broadcasting rights issues [2]. I would bet small money that the Open was using the same Hawk-Eye tracking system the NBA is, because both articles mention "12 cameras and 29 tracking points in the skeleton."

I don't care so much about the tabletop view shown, but if we get to the point where I can choose my viewpoint from anywhere on the court I'd be excited. I want to pause the game and rewind and watch Jayson Tatum's jab steps up close, to get a better sense of how he fakes out the opposing player. Put me in the action.

1. https://www.sportsvideo.org/2023/03/09/nba-taps-sonys-hawk-e... 2. https://www.npr.org/2025/01/17/nx-s1-5261006/australian-open...