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user982

2,347 karma · joined May 14, 2016

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user982··on ICE's Supercharged Facial Recognition App of 200M Images
Many of the weapons now wielded by Trump (ICE, AUMF, DHS, Guantanamo, etc) were introduced under Bush II.
user982··on A new law in Sweden makes it illegal to buy custom adult content
Also in Scandinavia, Iceland banned stripping.
user982··on Juneteenth in Photos
Someone once tried to make the argument to me that African Americans should feel eternal gratitude toward whites for fighting a war to free them. The fact of the matter is that America is one of the very few countries in history to fight a war to keep slavery.
user982··on Long live Xorg, I mean Xlibre
They're repairing damage. What word did you have in mind?
user982··on RedHat censored a lead Xorg dev – it's been forked as Xlibre
> Together we'll make X great again!

Oh?

> It's explicitly free of any "DEI" or similar discriminatory policies.

Oh.

> And I know *a lot* of people who will never take part in this generic human experiment that basically creates a new humanoid race (people who generate and exhaust the toxic spike proteine, whose gene sequence doesn't look quote natural). I'm one of them, as my whole family.

Ohhhh.

ndiddy: "From looking at his Xorg contributions on FDo, his technical work amounts to mostly code style changes and cosmetic-level refactors in an attempt to clean up the codebase. In the course of this, he's broken the master branch on multiple occasions and introduced a large amount of churn in the Xorg ecosystem, all while not fixing any bugs or improving anything user-facing. The reason why he started this fork seems to be that his changes pissed off everyone working on Xorg who could review his MRs, so they started piling up without getting reviewed."

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44202935

user982··on Curtis Yarvin's Plot Against America
The last decade has hammered in that you ignore the cranks at your own peril, because closing your eyes doesn't make them disappear.
user982··on The Books of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin
My copy came with the color illustrations stuck to their facing pages.
user982··on Crows can recognize geometric regularity
I had to stop feeding the local crows. I thought I'd been training them to come when I called, but realized that they had started training me to come out by pecking my roof.
user982··on I speak at Harvard as it faces its biggest crisis since 1636
> They're a minority. Like the people who want to relocate Palestinians from Gaza are, to my knowledge, a minority.

"Approx. 80% of Israelis support Trump's plan to relocate Gazans - survey

"Less than 15% of Israelis believe Trump's plan is "immoral," including 54% of Arab respondents and only 3% of Jewish israelis."

- https://www.jpost.com/international/article-840500

user982··on I speak at Harvard as it faces its biggest crisis since 1636
Sure, here's his characterization of the protesting students as of two weeks ago (https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=8754):

"Leftist Students and Faculty: We’d sooner burn universities to the ground than allow them to remain safe for the hated Zionist Jews, the baby-killing demons of the earth. We’ll disrupt their classes, bar them from student activities, smash their Hillel centers, take over campus buildings and quads, and chant for Hezbollah and the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades to eradicate them like vermin. We’ll do all this because we’ve so thoroughly learned the lessons of the Holocaust."

Here are Scott Aaronson's claims about Trump deportees (https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=8758):

"It’s important to add: from what I know, some of the people being detained and deported are genuinely horrible. Some worked for organizations linked to Hamas, and cheered the murder of Jews."

Here is his attempt at satire, in defense of genocide (https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=7957):

"Meanwhile, at elite academic institutions across the region, the calls for justice have been deafening. “From the Nile to the Sea of Reeds, free Egypt from Jacob’s seeds!” students chanted. Some protesters even taunted passing Hebrew slaves with “go back to Canaan!”, though others were quick to disavow that message. According to Professor O’Connor, it’s important to clarify that the Hebrews don’t belong in Canaan either, and that finding a place where they do belong is not the protesters’ job."

user982··on Trump Administration Cuts Research Funding, Claiming It Creates Climate Anxiety
Don't look up.
user982··on Lawrence of Arabia, Paul Atreides, and the roots of Frank Herbert's Dune (2021)
Superficially, there is a sequence in the film where Peter O'Toole's very blue eyes appear to glow: https://youtu.be/nBiZu5C6lCo?t=12219
user982··on Twelve months at 1.5 °C signals earlier than expected breach of Paris Agreement
> First get the US to eliminate all fossil fuel subsidiaries. And then maybe add a huge tax on the use of fossil fuels.

Instructions unclear, eliminating $7500 EV tax credit and adding $1000 tax on EV purchases: https://electrek.co/2025/02/13/oil-backed-senators-introduce...

user982··on US bill proposes jail time for people who download DeepSeek
> they went from being opposed to it to being in favor of it in a short time.

"Some wonder why there was such overwhelming support for us to shut down TikTok..." (https://x.com/wideofthepost/status/1787104142982283587)

user982··on The Conundrum of Life's Origin
It's programmers all the way down.
user982··on TikTok preparing for U.S. shut-off on Sunday
The sudden resurgence of the years-dormant campaign to ban TikTok, and its rapid legislative success this time around, were directly because of Israel and Gaza. From the mouths of senators: "Some wonder why there was such overwhelming support for us to shut down (potentially) TikTok...if you look at the postings on TikTok and the number of mentions of Palestinians relative to other social media sites it's overwhelmingly so among TikTok broadcasts, so I know that's of real interest..." (https://x.com/wideofthepost/status/1787104142982283587)

  Jacob Helberg, a member of a congressional research and advisory panel called the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, has been working on building a bipartisan, bicoastal alliance of China hawks, united in part by their desire to ban TikTok. Over the past year, he says, he has met with more than 100 members of Congress, and brought up TikTok with all of them.
  
  [...]
  
  It was slow going until Oct. 7. The attack that day in Israel by Hamas and the ensuing conflict in Gaza became a turning point in the push against TikTok, Helberg said. People who historically hadn’t taken a position on TikTok became concerned with how Israel was portrayed in the videos and what they saw as an increase in antisemitic content posted to the app.
"How TikTok Was Blindsided by U.S. Bill That Could Ban It" (https://www.wsj.com/tech/how-tiktok-was-blindsided-by-a-u-s-...)
user982··on Edwin Cohn and the Harvard Blood Factory
TIL that albumen and albumin are different things, with the former containing the latter.
user982··on Things we learned about LLMs in 2024
You can find out, you can learn about, but you can't learn out about.
user982··on US judge finds NSO Group liable for hacking journalists via WhatsApp
Omer Bartov is an Israeli-American Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies. He is considered one of the world's leading authorities on genocide.

Here is a 15-minute clip of him explaining that what Israel is perpetrating in Gaza is systematic genocide: https://x.com/amanpour/status/1869818758501675259

user982··on ICC issues warrants for Netanyahu, Gallant, and Hamas officials
What effort?
user982··on Two new books on John Calhoun and his rodent experiments
Rats (and other rodents) physically cannot vomit. If they're not careful about what they eat, they don't get a second chance.
user982··on Octopuses seen hunting together with fish, punching those that don't cooperate
Children of Ruin.
user982··on Supreme Court says presidents have 'absolute' immunity for clearly official acts
"When the President does it, that means that it is not illegal." - Richard Nixon
user982··on The Forgotten History of Chinese Keyboards
I was reading a Wikipedia page (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twelve_Metal_Colossi) and was struck by the difference in length of the Chinese quotes and translations. E.g.:

  收天下兵, 聚之咸陽, 銷以為鍾鐻金人十二, 重各千石, 置廷宮中. 一法度衡石丈尺. 車同軌. 書同文字.
was translated into

  He collected the weapons of All-Under-Heaven in Xianyang, and cast them into twelve bronze figures of the type of bell stands, each 1000 dan [about 30 tons] in weight, and displayed them in the palace. He unified the law, weights and measurements, standardized the axle width of carriages, and standardized the writing system.
user982··on Israel shuts down local Al Jazeera offices
The congresspeople who voted to shut down TikTok have been very open about the reason: https://twitter.com/wideofthepost/status/1787104142982283587
user982··on Israel shuts down local Al Jazeera offices
I don't know how to interpret the front page saying "More than 100 journalists killed in six months in Gaza" directly above a "real time" abuse barometer saying that 12 journalists have been killed worldwide in 2024.
user982··on [dead]
Nancy Fraser is a woman.
user982··on The challenges of building modern open source software on PowerPC Mac OS X
What's the best, most seamless option for this kind of LAN-hosted browser? X11 forwarding, Apache Guacamole, something else?
user982··on Rare eleventh-century astrolabe discovery shows Islamic–Jewish sci. exchange
This was Jerusalem in 1896: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1vaIK8wlAl0
user982··on [dead]
This is the source article: https://prospect.org/world/2024-03-14-aipac-talking-points-r...

It goes more in-depth into the talking points direct from AIPAC:

> The lobbying files promote the familiar though contested line that “Israel does not target civilians.” This has been questioned due to the sheer body count of Palestinian civilians, women and children, during the war, compared to members of Hamas, along with the stated intentions by several Israeli officials to “eliminate everything” in Gaza. The IDF has justified the high casualty numbers by saying that Hamas weaponizes civilians as human shields. Yet the IDF has authorized airstrikes on sites with dense civilian populations such as hospitals and refugee camps, most recently at the “Flour Massacre” at the end of February, when the IDF opened fire on civilians gathered around an aid truck delivery, killing over 100.

> But even more controversial is that AIPAC is telling members of Congress that “Israel is not blocking the delivery of aid to Gaza,” and that “reports that people are starving in Gaza are false.” Neither claim is supported by findings of international authorities, nor by recent actions undertaken by the United States government. Just last week, the U.S. air-dropped aid packages into Gaza, circumventing Israeli border officials, and at the State of the Union address President Biden announced intentions to set up a port for deliveries. These actions were only necessary because Israel has made it difficult to get aid through checkpoints, such as during one recent incident where the Israeli navy fired at an aid convoy. The EU’s foreign-policy chief last week said that starvation in Gaza is being used as a weapon of war.

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