His denial of climate change evidenced by his holding of a snowball on the congressional floor in winter was the moment I realized that memes are now more important than facts.

This whole thing sucks because this kind of tech has the potential to be revolutionary. For people with paralysis, or those experiencing vision loss due to eye issues, the tech to interface nerves with sensors and inputs will be absolutely revolutionary. On the other hand, Musk has a terrible track record with safety and regulation, develops tech by abusing researchers and workers with unrealistic timelines and expectations, overpromises and under delivers, and responds with hostility to even the most measured criticism. Having his name tied to the version of this tech leading the news cycle will paint it in a dystopian light, raising the regulatory bar to "panic" levels with no nuance, and will likely result in pushing more realistic approaches to the tech back a significant amount of time, hurting those it would help most.

Man pushing the narrative that Trump sent the military into a liberal state to fix things with positive results is surely not a precursor to anything sinister...

I'm super happy and excited for GIMP 3.0. I hate that this info was presented in a youtube video. I can gleam what I want to know from an article with bullet points (which I could find) but I'm sick of half the information I search for being returned in a video, with a fixed time commitment and imprecise "scrolling" to skip. I feel like in search and link aggregators, more and more content is video instead of text and I'm not here for it.

There's a lot of snark, but the idea is this only inhibits pain in the peripheries, so it isn't so psychoactively impacting. You don't get sedated, the addiction profile is way less, and the LD50 means OD'ing is much harder. I'm sure there's dependency potential, but it seems this is NOT recreational, which is huge, and if the sedation is less and you can take this and still function, it could be a game changer, allowing people impacted by chronic pain to re-enter the work force and have a better quality of life:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suzetrigine https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39775738/

I think this is exactly what I want to see, news orgs (not just "mainstream" news, but let's say, professional orgs in an industry) hosting their own instances with closed signups for accounts with JUST relevant topics. I tried to find some journalists on journa.host to fill in tech and local news, and while I found the people, it was way too much personal/personality content and not as much news.

This legendary excerpt from his Wikipedia:

Mitnick served five years in prison—four-and-a-half years' pre-trial and eight months in solitary confinement—because, according to Mitnick, law enforcement officials convinced a judge that he had the ability to "start a nuclear war by whistling into a pay phone", implying that law enforcement told the judge that he could somehow dial into the NORAD modem via a payphone from prison and communicate with the modem by whistling to launch nuclear missiles.

As a Californian, the state should sue for damages and use the funds for high speed rail. The entire hype around this stupid tech was to torpedo high speed rail in the state so Musk could sell more cars. I get that this is Branson's spinoff, but the tech isn't viable and all the investor hype around it was just a smokescreen for public policy control and that HAS to result in some sort of reparations, it's basically fraud in my opinion. The assets should be sold off and put towards public transit.

I disagree with this. A more nuanced take is that you should consider any beehaw communities read only unless refederation happens. The defederation was not out of ill will, it was about self preservation in a growing ecosystem and the reasons were clearly communicated and a path to refederation was left open. Read only posts are still valuable, and even though there is a more complex mechanism at play than true "read only" understanding that you can view is better than just blocking them in reverse. We are all friends here, and I think in the long run refederation will happen as this platform matures.

Universities have huge endowments and investment portfolios. These are generally broad and in support of keeping the financial backing of the school stable; this is extremely prevalent in the large older universities like Harvard or Columbia (but almost all universities have one in some form or another). They support both students and ongoing academic research.

While many of these portfolios consist of wider funds, many have specific investments in specific companies and industries. That means that the university is invested in, and taking benefit from, areas of industry. The main request is to divest the investment portfolios from companies owned by or supporting entities connected with Israel's war on Gaza. In some cases this may be possible (move a ton of stock from a defense contractor making weapons sold to Israel to an energy company) and in some cases it may not (they're invested in a wide market fund that itself invests in specific funds, but you can't easily cherry-pick which stocks are actually in it). It's also possible that there are research grants funded through companies who the students want to apply negative pressure to; cancelling a grant sends a message to the company, but also leaves entire teams and time-dependent science without funding, potentially ending it outright unless alternate funding can be found. There also may be contracts involved for specific research and engagements, and breaking a contract is more complicated than just ripping it up (especially if there are early termination policies outlined).

Realistically, the best students can hope for is a commitment to investigate and divest where possible, which is frustrating but also makes sense. I've worked in higher education for 20 years and have seen this on a smaller scale around defense contractors during the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The endowment is a slow moving leviathan, but I think it's a good place for the students to apply pressure.

Cloud. Businesses went all in on cloud under this illusion of stable costs, but costs go up and contol/support have gone down, and I'm seeing businesses spin on-prem back up.

I mean this is the world he wants, you can't dog whistle people to take up arms against tyranny without a comfortable acceptance of the irony pool you are filling. Everyone will try to spin this to their political advantage but the truth is this is the level of political discourse the right has been driving towards.

Part of the free-market attitude though is that you should be allowed to buy policy, so in that regard it's consistent, you just have to account for corruption in the cost of doing business.

This video is extremely relevant and points to reasons his is impossible, and the Italian government being currently run by an actual Nazis bodes poorly to any megaproject https://youtu.be/ei-bG4XfB4s

The headline does not do justice...like this is tied to the cult that the former prime minister of Japan was assassinated over.

Wonderful, set precedent that the 2nd amendment is totally subject to the whim of the president. Then let's flip all of government in 2028 and work on fixing this gun problem once and for all.

There is a spectrum. Trump/Maga/Conservatives are the worst and are actively marching us towards fascism. Corporate Democrats are the second worst. They're not making the change we need and are prioritizing the wrong people. Progressives would be the best.

We have a 2 party system. If you spend cycles looking at #2 and saying why you shouldn't vote for them, you hurt everyone. If the choice in this 2-party system is #1 or #2, you vote for #2, you swallow the medicine and take the pill, you tell yourself it's a vote against #1.

Newsom wouldn't be the best candidate, but all this psy-op crap about demonizing a Democrat front-runner is how you get the progressives to stay home and hand Trump (or his ilk) a third term. Low voter turnout for the left has to be fought. Sitting back and smugly criticizing why Democrats should do better literally killed Ukrainians, Palestinians, and American protesters. Getting people out to vote down-ballot is how we make the change we want and actually push to get a voting system that allows minority candidates to have a shot.

That is insane. If it costs the same to make, then lower range isn't a reasonable area to pitch a lower cost vehicle. Wanting to lower the cost is fine. Putting in cheaper/smaller components to get there is fine. If you are using the same components and just software locking them to nickle and dime the users later, that's anti-consumer and should not be tolerated. I can't believe how people look at micro-transactions in games and think "wouldn't this be cool with IRL stuff?"

I really dislike this headline. A vulnerability was found, responsibly disclosed, and the vendor was responsive and is planning/pushing a fix. The headline drowns a successful mitigation in flowery language of controversy. The article also shows how this can happen on other vendor devices, but the headline here looks like just Framework messed up, when they're the only vulnerable vendor with a fix in the pipeline (based on the info in the article). I really hate headline-bait journalism.

We started with Win10 e-waste, and started with Ubuntu Mate. Java Minecraft was the trick. Got them motivated, reading, doing math. Then wanting to install mods taught them about the filesystem and such. Age 4 and 6, they both got on board and are now top tier computer users. Giving them access to gimp, inkscape, and tinkercad got them using it for art and 3d modelling to get involved in the 3d printer, and they use blockbench to make custom models...which you configure with json in a resource pack. They're now 9 and 11 and are motivated to play on computers.