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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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  • The promise is that Harris is essentially a continuation of Biden so with that in mind comparing to your list above:

    Similarities ✓ the “Muslim Ban” on air travel, employing white nationalists as staffers, packing the supreme court with extreme conservative justices, giving permanent tax cuts to the rich, expanding the presence of immigrant concentration camps, cozying up to foreign dictators, directly pursuing strikes and assassination attempts against middle-Eastern military generals and diplomats, trying to start a trade war with China, discrediting his chief medical advisor on factual statements about Covid, saying Black Lives Matter protestors were “burning down cities”, wanting to designate Antifa as a terrorist organization, declaring “far left radical lunatics” part of his “enemy from within”, sexually assaulting over a dozen women and underage girls, being a generally abusive sleazebag, also funding a genocide (Israel has always been ethnically displacing Palestinians), also building the wall, also not implementing healthcare reform (and being against what we have), also not protecting abortion rights, and also denigrating anti-genocide protestors (but not as harshly since he wasn’t the one in charge when it happened)

    Differences: X Popularizing the idea of the wall in the first place, calling illegal immigrants “murderers and rapists”, moving the US embassy to Jerusalem, being an avowed friend of Epstein, stating he wanted generals like Adolf Hitler’s behind closed doors when his own generals refused to nuke North Korea and blame it on someone else, egging on a far-right insurrection attempt, calling climate change a Chinese hoax, calling Covid the “China virus”

    They are faaaarrrr more similar than they are different as honestly some of the “differences” I’ve noted are just because the exact quotes aren’t the same, even if some similiarly spirit quotes have been said.






  • Do you want to share those “eyebrow raising” numbers?

    Best summary I can find stating the elections were “rigged” is the report from the Carter center which uses almost entirely qualitative data or hearsay arguments to support the claim and conveniently forgets to mention any of the surrounding context around US interventionism.

    In contrast the argument for fair and open elections is well summarized in the report from the NLG delegation’s report which does a good job of providing quantitative data as well as useful context to support the conclusion it was fair.

    Can you provide those quantitave arguments from these “third party left-wing governments”? Because I am having a hard time finding any of them…



  • Except that’s not even how most bus systems work because most of them are majority funded by taxes with fares originally meant to serve as a stopgap but then slowly converted into a profit engine (usually after privitization). Fares are a way to gatekeep a service which your taxes already pay for, which I would argue, is by itself a form of theft.

    As an example check out the latest MTA report only 26% of funding comes from fares, and that ones a bit in the higher end from what I’ve seen (NYC public transit, picked as the example a it’s recently been in the news for issues with fare evasion)

    All that aside, it’s also worth noting that fare increases are extremely unpopular and it’s not that easy to increase them without potential serious backlash (ie the mass protests in Chile a few years back that were in part set off by the fare hikes.)


  • From an article about a recent lawsuit

    The App Store appeared to harvest information about every single thing you did in real time, including what you tapped on, which apps you search for, what ads you saw, and how long you looked at a given app and how you found it. The app sent details about you and your device as well, including ID numbers, what kind of phone you’re using, your screen resolution, your keyboard languages, how you’re connected to the internet—notably, the kind of information commonly used for device fingerprinting.

    Notably, knowing keyboard language and monitoring tap locations allows for reconstruction of text the user types (as detailed in this article

    I do think you are correct that Apple probably isn’t actively keylogging every iOS device (just because there’s easier ways with less legal concerns that ultimately get the same outcomes), but it’s not like there’s “no evidence”.


  • This is a classic case of “tech journalism”… If you follow the sources the source of the data and it’s methodology uses the CBECI which the latest update lists a range of 75-384 TWh. (Note that the “2%” listed in the parent article is the global power consumption of the Bitcoin network compared to the US electrical network, aka a bad faith comparison). It explicitly states:

    The upper-bound estimate corresponds to the absolute maximum power demand of the Bitcoin network. While useful for providing a quantifiable maximum, it is a purely hypothetical value that is non-viable for various reasons…

    Which of course is the estimate that the journalists use for this peice.

    There’s also a bunch of likely issues within the methodology as it’s estimate is largely based on the number of ASICs produced; the assumption that “mining nodes (‘miners’) are rational economic agents that only use profitable hardware.” and that any amount profit is sufficient to keep a mining operation ongoing; and many others. It actually does a pretty good job of disclosing a lot of the methodology flaws within the link above.

    My goal is just to call out bad/lazy journalism and what I assume is oil/gas distractionary tactics. Electricity is ~38% of US energy consumption and even that maximum bound of 2% when comparing it to the global Bitcoin network is practically negligible when contextualized.






  • No, that’s the current legal precedent within the US.

    Kelly v. Arriba Soft

    The court opinion:

    “The Court finds two of the four factors weigh in favor of fair use, and two weigh against it. The first and fourth factors (character of use and lack of market harm) weigh in favor of a fair use finding because of the established importance of search engines and the “transformative” nature of using reduced versions of images to organize and provide access to them. The second and third factors (creative nature of the work and amount or substantiality of copying) weigh against fair use.”

    That “compression is transformative” principle has been pretty solidly enshrined as precedence at this point (IE Perfect 10, Inc. v. Amazon.com, Inc.) however with no real guidelines as to what amount is required to be considered transformative

    The major argument as to whether the sort of LLM training in the parent article still constitutes fair use or not depends on whether there exists “market harm” or the “substantiality of copying” is especially egregious (note that these are the two fronts that the NYT is taking.) There is precedence for copying of style not being fair use Dr. Seuss Enters., L.P. v. Penguin Books USA, Inc. which I suspect is why NYT is approaching it the way that they are…

    Now, all that being said, my personal opinion is fuck the US legal system and fuck copyright. There is no solution to the core issues surrounding this topic that isn’t inherently contradictory and/or just a corporate power grab. However, the “techbro idiots” are “right” and you’re not, but it’s because they are idiots who are largely detached from any sort of material reality and see no problem with subjecting the rest of us to their insanity.