@futurebird History sheds light. No-fault divorce was made legal in most US states by the 70s. Awareness of family ills like abuse was also growing through this time. Likewise, severe social prohibitions against sex before marriage were also dissolving outside of conservative religion. Hence […]
The load-bearing myth at the heart of UK politics is that the politicians and media are tolerant and decent and working people are knuckle-dragging bigots, but it's actually completely the other way around.
ejsarge.bsky.social (@ejsarge.bsky.social)
@metlstorm.risky.biz Was listening to this week’s Risky Biz on trying to fight state attackers without escalating and very much reminded of the smoke and mirrors of a John le Carré novel. Maybe this is a cyber Cold War?
I just wanna grab this part of my ramble about AI from all of this; I think it's insufficiently understood the extent to which AI models as they are currently being commercially deployed are an effort to commercialize a specific novel technological discovery - the transformer - for funding
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🧵 Authoritarianism, Democratization, and Coalition Politics. The consensus around here is, more or less, that the United States is currently a consolidating authoritarian regime controlled by a mix of reactionary populists and fascists.
Image generators are designed to mimic their training data, so where does their apparent creativity come from? A recent study suggests that it’s an inevitable by-product of their architecture. www.wired.com/story/resear...
ejsarge.bsky.social (@ejsarge.bsky.social) reply parent
I was looking at some very old JavaScript code this week which depends on a very old library that hasn’t had a new release in about a decade. I thought about refactoring it - but, yeah, the code still works so what’s the value? What was the library, you ask? Scriptaculus…
ejsarge.bsky.social (@ejsarge.bsky.social) reply parent
In school, in NZ, we’re taught that’s why most of our British ancestors left in the 19th Century
ejsarge.bsky.social (@ejsarge.bsky.social) reply parent
In the end Samoans have agency and they figured it out and fixed it for themselves.
ejsarge.bsky.social (@ejsarge.bsky.social) reply parent
TBH I feel blaming RFK for the Samoa disaster is a bit overcooked. They did have two babies die from a vaccine. At least one of those was because the nurse mixed it wrong. The vax panic there was understandable, the resulting epidemic also was but blaming it *all* on RFK is too much.
As someone who entered the job market right around the dot com bubble bursting, I believe the correct question is "Do you think every major CEO could be wrong *for a third time in my lifetime*?"
The killing code: strange symbols in a WA settler’s diaries lay bare frontier atrocities www.theguardian.com/australia-ne...
Important details from this story: 1) Yet another news-break by student journalists (this time @theharvardcrimson.bsky.social) www.thecrimson.com/article/2025... 2) Harvard saying "see you in court," not "let's make a deal." 3) Per Garber, WH/MAGA leaked news of a "deal." NYT then ran with it.
ejsarge.bsky.social (@ejsarge.bsky.social) reply parent
Not English but Kiwi but maybe close enough to explain. People display ninja swords in their homes because they look cool. They don’t display European swords - they’re not as popular. So if you wanted a sword to use as a pointy thing to hurt people with - then there’s a ninja one on your wall.
If I had to predict the evolution of programming languages as a whole, my guess is that the single defining characteristic of the next generation of languages will be increasingly ubiquitous and integrated support for ancillary metadata.
The man predicted the future and he told you exactly how it was going to happen, too
Chrome vibes, metal beats, and 3dfx Glide like it's 1999 all over again.
lmao get her
ejsarge.bsky.social (@ejsarge.bsky.social) reply parent
Isn’t this literally the plot of 2001? The computer goes crazy because of contradictory instructions.
fascinating story about why "spring cleaning" is spring cleaning
Tiangong Ultra, developed by Chinese company UBTech & the Beijing Humanoid Robot Innovation Center, finished the race in 2h 40m—the only robot that finished before the human cutoff time. It changed the battery 3 times and fell once, but was the only participant that didn't switch a new robot in.
Tariffs xkcd.com/3073
So the reason Norfolk Island copped a dramatically higher tariff than the rest of Australia is two shipments of Timbaland boots from the Bahamas and some aquarium supplies from the UK that had their point of origin mislabeled or misrecorded. www.theguardian.com/australia-ne...
Harvey Price time then. In 2016, I had an ill fated stint as the Social Media Producer on Loose Women on ITV. It was a disaster, I should never have applied for the job, I certainly shouldn’t have been given it. I could do the actual job standing on my head, but the politics of the place…woof.
There's a lot of talk about 'vibe coding' at the moment. Andrej Karpathy's tweet that introduced the term is often mentioned. I suspect, however, that many people who are promoting the idea in the context of commercial product development may not have read the whole tweet.
Most fun I had was this one dude who was threatening to DDoS a major target on a specific date. Using our tracking, we were able to identify which botnet was his based on small test attacks launched a week prior. We waited until an hour before his deadline, then wiped out all his infrastructure. 5/?
ejsarge.bsky.social (@ejsarge.bsky.social) reply parent
Not anymore… although the interesting recent thing was the destruction of the centre-right BC Liberals in one election cycle and their replacement by the BC Conservatives- who were nowhere before and are now the Opposition
ejsarge.bsky.social (@ejsarge.bsky.social)
This Liberal Currents article is the best overview of the whole housing issue I’ve ever read
I am a former incarcerated firefighter. I served in a California fire camp from 2009 to 2012. Misinformation is afire on the internet, so here are facts about the prison firefighter program, all in one place. A thread.
ejsarge.bsky.social (@ejsarge.bsky.social) reply parent
But you’ll do neither because you just voted to give most of your money to massively rich people. I get the increasing anger at insurance companies. It’s literally not their fault. It’s the fault of Americans.
ejsarge.bsky.social (@ejsarge.bsky.social) reply parent
Just because the 2nd biggest carbon emitting country on the planet had a vote to ignore climate change doesn’t mean it’s not actually happening. The richest country on the planet can also find ways to remedy the costs of the issue.
ejsarge.bsky.social (@ejsarge.bsky.social) reply parent
The difference is you can’t choose the body you get born into; but you can, mostly, choose where to live. The people with the million dollar homes have had 30 years to sell and move somewhere else. The insurance companies are rationally pricing the risk within the limits their regulator sets.
This story is wild. It's funny and entertaining. But it's also real. I've had a couple of situations where I realized I was dealing with someone who was not entirely well. It can be a bit scary. But it also requires a lot of empathy to keep them safe until you can get them some help.
The USA does not have a decent educational system. It is terrible at educating Black students. Because racism. And it's bad at educating poor kids, and most Black kids in the US are poor. Because racism. Few nations* spend more per poor student, for worse educational outcomes. (No nation?)
Slavery has a new format: "convict leasing" -- https://apnews.com/article/prison-to-plate-inmate-labor-investigation-alabama-3b2c7e414c681ba545dc1d0ad30bfaf5
ejsarge.bsky.social (@ejsarge.bsky.social) reply parent
Canada is Austria. He’s trying for an Anschluss
"Celebration of ignorance."
This kind of coverage is why I read @techdirt.bsky.social all the time
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