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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 2nd, 2023

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  • They learned from our local high-profile crooks that if you can delay proceeding for a couple years, the process ends.

    Just fucking wild man

    Yeah, we US Americans know. We’re despairing that our justice system has finally failed after decades of active undermining be the right wing to install unqualified and ideological judges instead of people interested in a rule of law.

    The delay delay delay tactics mostly work here if you have the money and connections for it.

    I’m hopefully that Romania actually uses this case to prove their nation has a functional legal system when it counts, especially with such a high profile case. These brothers publicly derided, insulted, ignored, and put down Romania to their millions of followers. Go get them and make them pay for crimes and the insults. Show us all that Romania will enforce the law when it counts because the US barely is.




  • The Amtrak system in the US shares rail, and is low priority, than freight trains. Basically, passenger rail has always been a side business for the train companies the US. It is subsidized and used as a bribe by the federal government to even try to keep a passenger rail service alive.

    That means our trains are often kept as slow speeds to stay behind freight trains, and will be stopped to wait for freight trains if some is off schedule. The routes are also mostly only rated for 60mph speeds, so even at full speed you’re barely keeping up with cars on the highway, and then you add in stops at every podunk town that slows it down even more.

    Until the US invests in a separate passenger rail network that can support consistent speed and schedules, it will remain on par with similarly under developed nations for rail service.




  • International relations are often tough to build, especially when one side is quite rude and then wanting special benefits afterwards.

    The UK cut the ties, so the EU has more say in how relations are rebuilt. The UK had a ton of special exemptions and their own national identity in the EU then many other members and the UK still freaked out about how oppressed they were.

    The EU doesn’t really owe the UK anything that’s not in still existing agreements and if the UK wants a relationship they’ll have to come to the table bringing something, not just hurling demands.

    I’m just really glad that the UK leaving the EU didn’t devolve into armed conflict. That’s a pretty normal arc for such a big relations change.







  • That explains the noises at night! If they could just shore up our one sagging foundation corner in the back while they’re at it, that’d be great. After they do some serious manual labor in the summer sun for me, then they can go back to their country until I need more work done. Oh! Actually, no, we need them to do the harvest. And there’s this thing with some construction… shit. It turns out that hard workers are actually really needed everywhere and we shouldn’t be such xenophobic/racist assholes all the time.

    I do actually need the foundation looked at, though but I can’t afford it despite having a pretty decent and high experience required job. All the money is going to billionaires instead. Strange that those same billionaires are funding lots of media telling me to be afraid of people all the time… no relation to the whole immigration thing, I’m sure.




  • VPNs are not the security panacea that marketers would have you think they are. Using a VPN does provide some obfuscation as to your origin, but it does change your trust model. The VPN service provider may tunnel your traffic through your ISP to hide data from the ISP, but now it’s visible to the VPN service provider instead.

    There are plenty of use cases for a VPN, but just like any other technology or service, you need to know what it actually does so you know what it actually achieves or doesn’t achieve.



  • I’ve been doing a lot of using, testing, and evaluating LLMs and GPT-style models for generating code and text/prose. Some of it is just general use to see how it behaves, some has been explicit evaluation of creative writing, and a bunch of it is code generation to test out how we need to modify our CS curriculum in light of these new tools.

    It’s an impressive piece of technology, but it’s not very creative. It’s meh. The results are meh. Which is to be expected since it’s a statistical model that’s using a large body of prior work to produce a reasonable approximation of what it’s seen before. It trends towards the mean, not the best.



  • We had an ongoing project studying network communication structures within social media groups. The primary goal was to identify patterns of misinformation dissemination. We lost our ability to poll the API and pull messages to build up our data sets to work with. The cost to hit the API used to be free for a limited rate for researchers, but the new doofus in charge demanded a massive rate to get even a reasonable quantity of data so we had to fold up shop. We just routed the students to other projects, but it’s one more way to isolate and control the network so the dictator can be in charge however they like.