water-data-dude

But you're wrong. The memo says they can use an administrative warrant - which is to say, a warrant signed by an immigration official, part of the executive branch - to enter a house and arrest someone. The executive branch is authorizing an executive branch official to enter a home, bypassing the judicial branch.

The CRUCIAL thing to note is that ICE gets stuff wrong. Their info is often stale or flat wrong - so even though they say "this is only for illegal immigrants, don't worry about it ;)", it can ABSOLUTELY affect citizens.

Note also that, since it's ICE and immigration officials (again: all executive branch) making these determinations, the executive is also deciding whether there's probable cause to think that an illegal immigrant is in a particular house. This damage to due process is ostensibly only aimed at immigrants, but it affects all of us.

Yeah, basically - plus there's some groundwater modeling stuff that's a PITA to run on Linux

The only reason I use Windows is probably the same reason a lot of people use Windows: the company I work for requires it. It's a small company and they don't want IT to have to support more than one OS, so I _get_ why, but man do I hate it.

Linux on my non-work machine tho. Windows 11 made me rip off the bandaid and get rid of the windows dual boot I very occasionally used for some old software.

Oh boy, lemme tell you: water management is one of those things that's More Difficult Than It Seems.

I'm going to recommend Cadillac Desert, which is by far the most entertaining and readable book on water. It goes into the history of water in the western US, a dry region that's very dependent on the Colorado River. The American West isn't a poor, war-torn area, and a LOT of money has been spent on various projects - but water is still a serious issue.

Things like "big pipelines to move water around" have been tried, but they're enormously expensive, and they don't really put as much of a dent in the problem as you'd imagine. Dams can store some excess water, but they cause problems of their own (which is why we don't build as many, and are getting rid of dams we don't need), and they're a bandaid at best. There's not a good solution to "how do we move a TON of water around", at least not now.

The mobile operating system developed by the enormous ad tech company doesn't try to prevent fingerprinting?! :O

Water policy isn't as simple as you might think. Dams aren't a magical fix, they cause a lot of issues (like crashing the salmon populations, etc.). They're expensive to build and maintain, and the water you store in a big reservoir doesn't magically stay in place - you lose a lot to evaporation and you lose a lot that ends up going into the groundwater system. A much bigger part of the problem is western water law, where water rights are assigned based on prior appropriation and are lost if they aren't exercised. That leads to a lot of bullshit, like people growing very water hungry crops (alfalfa, rice) in the middle of the desert.

The reason we don't build like the people who first came to California did isn't because we're stupid, it's because we've learned a lot of lessons the hard way. If you're interested in some of the history I'd recommend Cadillac Desert, which is about western water in general, but which focuses a lot on California (including the machinations that the movie China Town was based on).

I never interpreted the Cow Tools strip as saying "cows are too dumb to use tools", but more along the lines of "if cows could create tools could we even fathom their use?" - kinda like the Borges story, Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge[0]. On the other hand, I read The Far Side when I was small and didn't really have the scientific chops to get a lot of the humor, so maybe I cemented an incorrect interpretation.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celestial_Emporium_of_Benevole...

The people of Greenland overwhelmingly don't want this to happen:

https://www.reuters.com/world/poll-shows-85-greenlanders-do-...

Oh! I honestly didn't think about that, but that's a very good point!

It'd be difficult to prove that you hadn't leaked information to the model. The big gotcha of LLMs is that you train them on BIG corpuses of data, which means it's hard to say "X isn't in this corpus", or "this corpus only contains Y". You could TRY to assemble a set of training data that only contains text from before a certain date, but it'd be tricky as heck to be SURE about it.

Ways data might leak to the model that come to mind: misfiled/mislabled documents, footnotes, annotations, document metadata.

Massively screwing up the economy would be unpopular enough that he would lose support, even from other republicans, and we might be able to stop the slide into authoritarianism.

Ok, but fascinatingly I got hit with a popup for a Fox News browser add-on that makes it so you can "trust your search results"

Regrettably, I have to use a windows machine for work. The other day I got one where the "fact" was an offer to help me pic out the right laptop or tablet to get the most out of copilot.

To stoke my rage into an incandescent fury, if you go to settings -> Lock Screen, there's no obvious way to disable it at first. You have to change the background image from "Microsoft Spotlight", the one where the image changes to a static background image, and THEN you get a checkbox. The checkbox you uncheck is "get tips, fun facts, and more". I guess trying to sell me shit is under "more".

It sucks because i agree that having the picture change is a nice feature. Microsoft has decided to hold that nice feature hostage to ads.

Oh yeah, absolutely! I should have said that instead, but I'm so pessimistic about the courts charging LEOs with crimes that I kinda just skipped that option by default

One thing that I, and many others, have issue with is the fact that the agents are masked, which makes it hard to hold specific actors accountable. With the way they've been deploying facial recognition against citizens, I feel like using it against ICE agents would just be sousveillance.

Especially with the second video, it seems like there should be enough footage of the guy's face to figure it out. Ideally her relatives could then SUE, but qualified immunity is some powerful bullshit. At the very least, maybe we could track bad actors. Does the guy regularly use unnecessary force?

The counter argument is "if you DOX people, especially unpopular people, they'll be subject to death threats, possible violence, etc. and you'll be partially responsible", but man, it's obvious that the agency itself isn't holding its people accountable. I'd want to know if he was in my city, still performing ICE activities.

I think most of them suffer from deeply rooted insecurity. Like, consider: you're BAD at stuff. You know, in your heart of hearts, that you're the bottom of the barrel.

You can accept that, or you can get swept up into an ideology that says "the subgroup I'm in is better than all the other subgroups", and then, WOW! You're automatically better than most other people without having to do anything!

If you were able to JUST "move the kids out of this area", that would be one thing, but we can't do it without treading on the rights of adults - especially their right to privacy and anonymity.

There are technically some implementations that will let adults prove they're adults while staying anonymous, but none of those implementations have gained serious traction with an actual government. The actual, REAL result is "you can't go online anonymously" - because governments and ad tech companies are DYING to know everything you look at and say online.

The kids are an excuse, just like they've always been.

I don't assume that another country would LOVE to have me, I'd assume that I'd have to be an exemplary citizen to make it clear that I'm not another "ugly American".

The reason why I personally have been rolling the idea of leaving the country around in my head is because I'm gay and Hispanic (though born here), and I am NERVOUS about the direction this country is going. I do feel guilty about the idea of jumping ship, but it seems like it might be legitimately dangerous for people like me in the near future.

I probably won't leave, all my family and friends are here and it hurts to think about uprooting myself and leaving them, but it's NOT unreasonable. It's scary to be in an outgroup right now.

Is/was copy/pasting from Stackoverflow considered harmful? You have a problem, you do a web search and you find someone who asked the same question on SO, and there's often a solution.

You might be specifically talking about people who copy/paste without understanding, but I think it's still OK-ish to do that, since you can't make an entire [whatever you're coding up] by copy/pasting snippets from SO like you're cutting words out of a magazine for a ransom note. There's still thought involved, so it's more like training wheels that you eventually outgrow as you get more understanding.

Did you buy them off Amazon, or from a reputable reseller? I ask because Amazon mixes third party inventory together with first party inventory, so it's impossible to tell if you're getting a genuine product or a counterfeit.

The real tragedy would be the loss in shareholder value for DuPont if we allowed concerns about PFASs accumulating in the environment to impact their bottom line

The transformer architecture was introduced in 2017, so they send in a bunch of 8 year olds to "fix" the technology ;)

The power dynamic is very asymmetrical. Disney is ABSOLUTELY free to negotiate with him to continue distributing the movie, running the ride, etc.

It has been 35 YEARS and Disney's failed to do anything else with the IP. The original creator wants to make a sequel, and now he's able to.

Also: you mentioned a scenario where you might make a video game and wanted to be able to distribute it in perpetuity. Unless you based the video game on some pre-existing creative work that someone else came up with (Roger Rabbit's Raucous Riot or something), you WILL retain the rights. Termination of copyright doesn't apply to works made for hire [0] (i.e., if you pay your employees to create the IP, it doesn't apply).

TLDR; fuck the mouse.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Act_of_1976#Terminat...

But there would be other consequences too, just consider the philanthropic organizations that Larry Ellison supports! Like the Ellison Medical Foundation, a non profit whose sole purpose is to keep Larry Ellison alive as long as possible!

Texas state laws make regulating groundwater use very difficult. The Trinity aquifer is probably going to go dry in ten years.

Absolutely. It's probably worse than you think though. I work with some groundwater conservation districts in Texas. Texas has some aquifers that they rely heavily on, and they're being depleted at an unsustainable rate. Efforts to regulate the rate at which groundwater is consumed are met with mixed results because of state laws that make it very difficult to regulate pumping.

One particularly depressing example from the recent past is what happened in Hays County. The groundwater situation in Hays County is bad, to the point that springs are going dry.

Hays County managed to push something through the state legislature that'd give the Hays Trinity Water Conservation District more power to manage groundwater use (it passed overwhelmingly), but then Greg Abbot vetoed it - likely at the behest of Aqua Texas, a big water utility company that pumps a TON of water and has been pretty blatant about ignoring pumping caps and generally acted in bad faith.

Source: https://archive.is/b1bp1

Whataboutism isn't a good argument.

"Decreased crime" under an authoritarian regime is probably only true if you don't consider anything the state does a crime.

No, it's a very specific thing and not at all applicable here. Blood libel was something along the lines of "the Jewish people are murdering children to use their blood for secret ceremonies"[0]. The "libel" part should give it away - it doesn't apply to someone revealing true facts.

The people calling it blood libel because the facts are inconvenient and make Israel look bad are being disingenuous.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_libel

For the shareholders of a few companies (in the short term).