ipython

I just received one of these letters. I was confused as I don’t believe I applied to any jobs that used this company or one of its many subsidiaries to perform background checks or drug testing.

I called and so far it seems they may have me confused with someone else with the same name- at least that’s all they were able to find when I was on the phone with them. What a total shitshow.

Another side effect- the disclosures at the end for New Mexico residents links to a pdf to explain your rights under the fcpa that… used… to be hosted by the cfpb. https://files.comsumerfinance.gov/f/201504_cfpb_summary_your.... Good job, doge.

I just submitted this link, https://www.cbsnews.com/news/15-years-after-its-brief-existe..., which talks about the line item veto. It's disheartening to think that when this happened 30 years ago under Clinton, it was a huge scandal and controversy. It's so quaint to think about that compared to the debacle with DOGE and the current administration.

And even with those headwinds, Clinton managed to balance the budget and eke out a small surplus! I give that a zero percent chance here, sadly.

Posting this because I remember this controversy when then-president Clinton invoked the "line-item veto" to selectively void portions of bills sent for his signature before they were enacted into law. Quote from tfa:

"From now on, presidents will be able to say 'no' to wasteful spending or tax loopholes, even as they say 'yes' to vital legislation," he said at the time. "Special interests will not be able to play the old game of slipping a provision into a massive bill in the hope that no one will notice." ... Supreme Court decision or no, presidents continue to fight for the authority they say can save the nation billions of dollars. (Clinton's first use of the line-item veto alone saved $625 million, as CBS News' Sharyl Attkisson reported at the time.)

This was a huge controversy at the time and ultimately was ruled as overstepping the boundaries and the separation of the legislative and executive branches. The idea that this was a controversy seems awfully quaint today.

What a terrible idea. There is nothing “strategic” about this.

Trump & Vance didn't screw it up- this was on purpose. As the saying goes, "the cruelty is the point"

What’s wrong with transparency for advertisements? If you take offense to the “boosting” of news sites, I see the point but now we have Elon arbitrarily boosting his own content on X.

Not sure how you end up solving that issue other than perhaps a more transparent system like the original Birdwatch.

How did the smartphone based pass system work if - as tfa states - telecommunication infrastructure was also non functional?

(But not “northern” Virginia aka NoVA, where the data centers are … just to make it more confusing)

I’m sorry you feel the way you do. Reading through your post, it is deeply rooted in your view of yourself. When I turn too far inward I can relate. It’s hard because your writing indicates you like to think and analyze, and you have embraced the “warm blanket” of self loathing since it is very comfortable for you.

I hope you don’t find what I'm about to say glib. I don’t mean it that way. I truly believe that you can find meaning through shifting your focus from inside to outside yourself. I say this only because this has benefits to me. I realize that may not mean it works for you, but I hope it will.

Try giving freely of your talents to others. You mention your math career. Try finding people who struggle with math and tutor them. For free. Start slow & easy, and focus on their growth not yourself.

I also encourage you to unplug and find ways to reconnect with nature. Walks where you do nothing but notice the colors of the flower petals, or the rippling of the water. No distractions. Just practicing on focusing outward with no expectations.

I hope you can find some meaning in this crazy life. Sometimes I resort to a pascal style wager - this is by definition my only shot at life, so why not try and see what happens?

And this is why just fucking with the genome via crispr to birth “smarter” babies is such a bad idea. I’m thinking of this recent hacker news post linking to “how to make superbabies”: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43158387

(To be clear I’m not saying Felix was gene edited by birth, but rather there may be correlations between the genetic markers that “improve intelligence” and depression)

I’m tired of the old “if you’re not for this, you’re against us” absurd logic fallacies. There is no binary choice here.

It’s not like we haven’t balanced the budget before without completely destroying the whole place. Within my lifetime even. Unfortunately an entire political party and more recently a reality tv star teamed up with the richest man in the world have joined forces to throw the country into chaos in a misguided attempt at … cleaning up DEI in order to save a trillion dollars? Please.

If you scroll through the doge “receipts”, it’s riddled with elementary errors ($8m contract that is listed as $8b- ya know just a little $7.992b error), stuff that’s already been canceled before Trump even showed up, and a bunch of dei stuff.

Color me unimpressed.

But why would that information not be included in the wide crawl already encoded in the model weights before the knowledge cutoff? I believe the article mentions frontier models so we are talking about models trained on trillions of tokens here

I’m confused by the article mentioning West Virginia as a prime location for data centers along side Ohio - I am not aware of a large concentration of data centers in WV? (Unlike VA, of course)

https://westvirginiawatch.com/2025/01/16/west-virginia-isnt-...

This is why I recommend to put all devices on 5ghz and deploy additional APs for coverage. 2.4ghz is only good for low speed IoT devices.

I just had this conversation with a customer. And it’s hard to avoid anthropomorphizing ai. Once you equate the ai system with a human - a human who creates perfectly pep8 formatted python is probably a decent python programmer, whereas someone who bangs out some barely readable code with mixed spacing and variable naming styles is most likely a novice.

We use these signals to indicate how much we should trust the code - same with written text. Poorly constructed sentences? Gaps or pauses? Maybe that person isn’t as knowledgeable.

These shortcuts fail miserably on a system that generates perfect grammar, so when you bring your stereotypes gleaned from dealing with humans into the ai world, you’re in for an unpleasant surprise when you unpack the info and find it’s only about 75% correct, despite the impeccable grammar.

What would searching the Internet provide the models that they don’t already have? Most likely data sources such as stack overflow, documentation on the language it’s targeting, and a variety of relevant forum posts are already part of its training set.

Unless someone else came along and said “here’s how to solve x problem step by step”, I don’t see how additional information past its cutoff point would help. (Perhaps the AI could post on a forum and wait for an answer?)

Yes, iterative programming could help via access to tools- I can see that helping.

No need to worry about running deficits when the tax cuts realized by the richest individuals and corporations “trickles down” to the rest of us. Still waiting for that magic rain…

I have to respectfully disagree - turning over basically unlimited power to reshape the entire bureaucracy to an unelected person isn’t the way to do it either. It’s not a binary choice.

Doesn’t help the situation when you the very senators entrusted to run the legislative branch of government were the ones in charge of organizations that defrauded Medicaid and Medicare for billions of dollars. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rick_Scott

Perhaps we should be barking up the tree of the private medical-insurance complex which is the real problem when it comes to healthcare costs.

Wait, you’re alleging Bill Clinton downsized the government by measures more callous than randomly firing workers, forcing them to en masse justify their positions to an unelected billionaire? I was alive then and I don’t remember any of that. Citation needed.

And he actually did manage to balance the budget. Too bad that didn’t last long under Bush.

Thank you for your service.

And don't worry, the House is ready to extend and expand tax cuts to more than extinguish any potential "savings" - to the tune of over $3 trillion in extra deficit spending. But don't worry, they've planned for that- just increase the debt limit by $4 trillion to cover the difference!

After all, now that the Democrats aren't in charge any longer, increasing the debt limit is no biggie - we'll just grow ourselves out of the hole! Once we enact those tax cuts, it'll be hard to justify even more debt spending on such silly things like "education" and "research". We've got to pay the interest on the money we borrowed to provide those tax cuts after all.

The problem is that the real perpetrators of the fraud are just trying to redirect the blame to regular citizens. The biggest source of fraud is the insurance and hospital industry itself. See the example of Rick Scott: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rick_Scott, yes, that Rick Scott- current Senator from Florida.

> Scott was pressured to resign as chief executive of Columbia/HCA in 1997. During his tenure as chief executive, the company defrauded Medicare, Medicaid, and other federal programs. The U.S. Department of Justice won 14 felony convictions against the company, which was fined $1.7 billion in what was at the time the largest healthcare fraud settlement in U.S. history.

I would need to see a citation for this story. Medical malpractice/negligence premiums are very high - OBGYNs pay some of the highest rates. Just a few google searches shows that rates can exceed $200k (annually) in some locales in 2024.

So to claim in 2004 that there are doctors paying > $1m/year in malpractice insurance is at least an order of magnitude away from what casual googling discloses.

I agree that the whole system is fucked, but I would like to make sure we are working on a solid set of base facts.

I found this article [0] from the NYTimes in 2005 that highlighted a neurosurgeon who was paying >$200k/year in malpractice premiums around that time

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/22/business/behind-those-med...

I don't know, but there are plenty of illegitimate lawsuits intended to harass or intimidate people all the time, directed at folks who aren't covered under qualified immunity. Why protect one class of people from nuisance lawsuits and not another?

Ha. TIL that if you XOR the car emoji with 0x20 (ie. you make it "lower case"), you get the "no pedestrian" emoji. It probably won't encode below but this was copied and pasted from tfa. It seems too coincidental to be an accident - anyone who has insight to know whether this was done on purpose?

If you take this too far, you might get strange ideas, like the lower-case version of the car emoji being a ‘no pedestrians’ sign:

    >>> chr(ord('') ^ 32)
    ''

Ok? Your point is? The fbi also allegedly paid infiltrators into the blm protests. https://www.yahoo.com/news/fbi-paid-informant-sow-discord-00.... The fbi has a long history of infiltrating what they consider to be “extreme” groups - going back decades.

It is unacceptable that there have been no arrests for the pipe bombs. Do I think that’s evidence of some sort of deep state cover up “false flag” operation? Nope.

Didn't you hear? Three or more crying eyes emojis in a post on X negates any potential unlawful acts by an official of the United States government, as that official has invoked the new 28th Amendment enshrining the Right To Troll The Radicalized Publick, upheld by a ruling by the newly merged DOGE-Supreme Court in August 2026. (/s if it's not obvious)

Was promised "receipts" on Valentine's Day, then that passed... and was then replaced with "coming over the weekend"... well now it's Monday, still nothing. Surprise, surprise, it's the emperor with no clothes.