sojournTime @sojournTime@qoto.org

oh wow. powerful piece, and well said. they're right, they're well-suited to this task because of long experience parsing through this kind of bullshit.

https://www.techdirt.com/2025/03/04/why-techdirt-is-now-a-democracy-blog-whether-we-like-it-or-not/

This email from Sen. Chris Murphy is making the rounds this morning.

Report from the Senate Floor:

“Last night in the Senate, something really important happened. Republicans forced us to debate their billionaire bailout budget framework. We started voting at 6 PM because they knew doing it in the dark of night would minimize media coverage. And they do not want the American people to see how blatant their handover of our government to the billionaire class is.

So I want to explain what happened last night and what we did to fight back. The apex of Republicans’ plan to turn over our government to their wealthy cronies is a giant tax cut for billionaires and corporations. And they plan to pay for it with cuts to programs that working people rely on. Popular and necessary programs like Medicaid, Medicare, and SNAP, are all being targeted.

In order to pass the tax cut, Republicans have to go through a series of procedural steps. Last night, they took the first step which requires them to pass an outline of their plan, but with it, any senator can offer as many amendments as we want. So my Democratic colleagues and I did just that.

Now, we knew that Republicans would largely unanimously oppose them, but we had two objectives here. One, Republicans were forced to put their opinion on record — many for the first time — on the most corrupt parts of Trump and Musk’s agenda. Two, as I’ve been saying, I am going to make every process and procedure as slow and painful as possible for as long as my colleagues choose to ignore the constitutional crisis happening before our eyes.

So what did we propose? We proposed no tax cuts for anyone who makes a billion dollars a year. We made them vote on whether or not Elon Musk and DOGE should have limitless access to Americans’ personal data. We made them vote on whether to protect IVF and require insurers to cover it. Every single amendment Democrats proposed was shot down. On almost every single amendment, Republicans universally opposed it. Every Republican voted against our proposal to prevent more tax cuts for billionaires. The corruption and theft is happening in the open here.

The whole game for Republicans is taking your money and giving it to the wealthiest corporations and billionaires — even if it means kicking your parents out of a nursing home or turning off Medicaid for the poorest children. They know what they are doing is deeply unpopular. They are offering a tax cut to the most wealthy that is 850 times larger than what they are offering working people. Oh and by the way, any tax cuts for working people are going to be washed out by higher costs for basic necessities, like health care and food. It’s a fundamental injustice.

Thanks to your pressure and support, many of my Democratic colleagues have joined my effort to do everything we can to make sure they cannot destroy democracy and steal your money in the dark of the night. We are being loud about what is happening. I’m going to continue to grind the gears of Congress down as much as possible to make it that much harder and slower to get away with this corruption. That’s why the votes lasted until nearly 5 AM.

This is a five-alarm fire. I don’t think we have two years to plan and fight back. I think we have months. It’s still in our power to stop the destruction of our democracy with mass mobilization and effective opposition from elected officials. So we can’t miss any opportunity to take advantage of opportunities to put Republicans on the record and shine a light on what is happening.

And you have a role to play in this as well. I need you to amplify what’s happening, support the leaders who are fighting for you to make sure they can continue speaking truth to power against Musk and Trump’s billionaire cronies, and show up at rallies and town halls. Use every tool at your disposal to send a message loud and clear about how you expect my colleagues to lead and fight in this moment.

Every best wish,” US Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT)

@johncarlosbaez Both alchemy and deep learning:
* operated without an understanding of fundamental principles of what they were studying
* made many experimental advances, often by accident
* lacked any predictive power
* sought to create mystical machinations
* were not reliable methods of producing outputs

Makes me wonder what the chemistry of deep learning is.

Fun fact I just learned: gunpowder was created by alchemists as a byproduct of trying to create the elixir of life.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gunpowder

For those who don't know, Sunday editions for comic strips are generally done 6 weeks in advance of publication. This edition was done before Musk began his rampage, so it worked out even better.

https://www.gocomics.com/nonsequitur/2025/02/23

Surely this new video won't make me seem like a crank.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QEJpZjg8GuA

Android calculator FTW!

"But what Boehm and co came up with is 100% correct, and gets 99% of the way to the perfect UX at only 1% of the implementation complexity."

calculator-app - Chad Nauseam Home
https://chadnauseam.com/coding/random/calculator-app

Proposed new Laws of Robotics:

1. A machine must never show an advertisement to a human, or through inaction allow an advertisement to be shown to a human

If I think of a second Law of Robotics I'll let you know

At least until someone makes them take it down, the USDA has a great little site tracking the stats on bird flu by state. Just a reminder that bird flu is not only a potential threat to humans but it's also a major reason for the high price of eggs.
https://www.aphis.usda.gov/livestock-poultry-disease/avian/avian-influenza/hpai-detections/commercial-backyard-flocks

Oh no the Chinese are doing the useless thing that gives wrong answers cheaper

https://www.cnn.com/2025/01/27/tech/deepseek-stocks-ai-china/index.html

presented without comment

@caten Linear programming was basically invented for this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonid_Kantorovich

@masukomi just in case: https://www.reddit.com/r/csMajors/comments/1i7v7hg/my_teams_intern_just_found_a_critical_bug_by/

how an interns attempts to familiarize themselves with a codebase, and spice up the comments resulting in finding a major security vulnerability. Via Reddit, via

Upon Googling, I discovered that Ben #Garrett did not come up with the repulsive phrase "the #sin of #empathy": there has for several years existed a whole cottage industry of right-wing Christians dedicated to propagating the idea that empathy is a sin. I've been calling out #Christian #hypocrisy for as long as I can remember, but I think never in my life have I seen any doctrine quite so contrary to the #Gospels as this.

In light of US tech oligarchy setting its sights on Wikimedia Foundation, a historical detail I did not know before: #Wikipedia became the non-profit it is today partly as the result of a labour strike of Spanish Wikipedia editors who disagreed with the proposed inclusion of advertisements. Initially, it was not clear what revenue model Wikipedia would get, and Wales moved towards a for-profit model already a year after launch. However, rather than working for free, so Jimmy Wales could profit from their labour via advertising, Spanish contributors forked Spanish Wikipedia as the Encyclopedia Libre Universal. Under the threat of losing the editorial community of such a large language, Wales conceded and set up the non-profit.

That is to say, however imperfect they are, all the digital commons we have are the result of ongoing struggle and hard work to keep them as commons.

Via Las Redes Son Nuestras (https://www.consonni.org/es/publicaciones/las-redes-son-nuestras) by @teclista

Update with more info:
https://post.lurk.org/@rra/113873611500414068

Update: the National Archives have preserved the old whitehouse.gov site, including the PCAST report page at https://bidenwhitehouse.archives.gov/pcast/documents-reports/

As of today, the reports of the #PCAST committee I served on are no longer available on the whitehouse.gov web page. As a temporary solution, my former PCAST colleague, Eric Horvitz, has made them available on his page: https://www.erichorvitz.com/PCAST_reports_2020-2025.htm

I feel like there were about 100 easier ways of doing this but I fully buy that OK Go actually went to these lengths because it's *no fun* otherwise and this is why I don't believe that anyone will ever give a shit about AI art

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MOEULOSVNK4