I spent a while when choosing a laptop a while back trying to compare based on how many watt-hours the battery could provide, so I think that that’s a useful metric, but I don’t know how easy it’s going to be to mechanically dig that up for all the laptops out there.

The overall goal is to cut the agency’s budget by fifty percent. Shedd suggested using AI to analyze contracts for redundancies, root out fraud, and facilitate a reduction in the federal workforce by automating much of their work.

I am bullish on AI in the long run.

I am skeptical that given the state of affairs in 2025, you can reasonably automate half of the federal government, via AI or any other means.

I also don’t think that the way to do this is to lay off half of the federal workforce and then, after the fact, see what can be automated. If you look at the private sector automating things, it tends to hedge its bets. Take self-service point-of-sale kiosks. We didn’t just see companies simply lay off all cashiers. Instead, we saw them brought in as an option, then had the company look at what worked and what didn’t work – and some of those were really bad at first – and then increase the rate of deployment once it had confidence in the solution and a handle on the issues that came with them.

I don’t think that she personally thinks that it’s a good idea not to be vaccinated. She’s just willing to play to the crowd to the extent of harming it.

https://www.newsweek.com/marjorie-taylor-greene-refuses-reveal-if-she-has-been-vaccinated-when-quizzed-1611704

Marjorie Taylor Greene Refuses To Reveal If She Has Been Vaccinated When Quizzed

Armed with this new tool, which enables raw access to Bluetooth traffic, Targolic discovered hidden vendor-specific commands (Opcode 0x3F) in the ESP32 Bluetooth firmware that allow low-level control over Bluetooth functions.

In total, they found 29 undocumented commands, collectively characterized as a “backdoor,” that could be used for memory manipulation (read/write RAM and Flash), MAC address spoofing (device impersonation), and LMP/LLCP packet injection.

Espressif has not publicly documented these commands, so either they weren’t meant to be accessible, or they were left in by mistake.

I’d kind of like to know whether these can be used against an unpaired device or not. That’d seem to have a pretty dramatic impact on the scope of the vulnerability.

There’s an open-source CLI client to download GOG games, lgogdownloader. It’s packaged in Debian.

I’ve been telling myself since about 2016 that I would save up to go all in and build a solid gaming desktop.

Finally, I was at the point of “Fuck it, I’m tired of waiting. I’m buying a 5080, even if it costs as much as 2 PS5s.”

I assume that whatever you’re running right now isn’t terribly new if you’ve been thinking about upgrading for nine years.

The 5080 is a 16GB card. A quick skim on Amazon suggests that 16GB Nvidia cards are in short supply, but that you can get a 16GB AMD GPU without problems.

https://www.videocardbenchmark.net/compare/4982vs5721vs4917/Radeon-RX-7600-XT-vs-GeForce-RTX-5080-vs-Radeon-RX-7800-XT

They aren’t quite as fast on the Passmark benchmark as the 5080, but they also cost a lot less (even if the 5080 were available), and I assume that they’d be a lot faster than whatever you’re running now.

Could go with that (or something less-fancy) and then if you felt that you wanted to spend more for more performance, do so when GPUs become available.

I mean, people do use the Web UI.

I was reading some articles the other day, and the impression I have is that that’s really not true for at least Trump.

The Trump route was more:

• Conservatives in the US felt that media had a liberal bias. Whether it did or didn’t doesn’t matter for this discussion — that was the perception.

• Fox News offers a viewpoint appealing to conservatives. It becomes essentially the only mainstream conservative media outlet. Liberal viewers watch a variety of news media, but Fox News dominates among conservatives.

• Fox News — already somewhat opinion-based from the start — starts to veer off into conspiracy land. Because so many conservatives watch Fox News, this has a major impact.

There’s some back and forth here. It’s not that Fox just pushed ideas that were out there, but that they’re willing to show material based on what people will watch, and they gained more viewers than they lost if they ran bonkers stuff.

https://www.cnn.com/2021/06/08/media/fox-news-hoax-paperback-book/index.html

There wasn’t really any major center-right mainstream news source other than Fox News, so if Fox shifts into conspiracy-land, so does the conservative public.

I dunno. Maybe the answer is something like a news source somewhere between CNN and Fox News. Something that a conservative audience is comfortable watching, but doesn’t fly off the handle to the degree that Fox has. It maybe can’t capture an audience that’s as large, but it only needs enough to be viable.

I mean, there are center-right media sources like the Wall Street Journal, but those are kinda not aimed at mass audiences.

She’s a House Representative. As long as the public in her district in, I believe, Georgia, keeps wanting her to be the one to speak for them, she’s gonna stay.

checks

Georgia’s 14th district.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgia's_14th_congressional_district

Reserved for future use: krex & krox

Poor “kryx”.

Three-letter words that can be typed with one hand, since I have to type them frequently.

$ egrep "^([qwertasdfgzxcvb]{3}|[yuiophjkllnm]{3})$" /usr/share/dict/words

Well, in Zelenskyy’s defense, I don’t think that anything he’d have done differently would have likely substantively have altered the outcome.

In the past, there have been some pretty unpleasant regressions.

My own home instance, lemmy.today, had some time where it was more-or-less unusable, because every release for a while had some new regression. The lemmy.world guys were a lot more conservative, just backported some critical fixes and waited for a while after each new release to wait and see if problems showed up. They didn’t crash into the regressions.

Granted, some of this could probably be picked up by better automated testing. But to some extent, I think that for at least big instances, it’s good to hold off, wait, and see if a new release has a bunch of issues.

Also, my understanding is that at least for some (all?) past updates, there’s no downgrade path. Once you upgrade, you’re committed.

Maybe you can back up the instances and restore them, but I suspect that that may break state across instances, since you’d get instances with conflicting views of what’s on an instance.

I’m not familiar with Berlusconi’s domestic politics, but I do recall people saying during Trump’s first campaign that he was similar to Berlusconi.

One of the things that concerns me about Trump is that his politicking strategy may be an effective one in an era of social media. If that is true, it may be that other politicians will take it up.

Trump is done in four years. But having highly-misleading-but-attention-attracting narratives can live on for a very long time, absent a change in the media environment.

The UK also said that it’d send a “peacekeeping” force – I use the quotes here, because that’s the phrase they used, though it wouldn’t really fit the technical definition of a peacekeeping mission – but only if the US backstopped it…but the US has already said that it won’t backstop European forces in Ukraine, so it’s kind of not much of a commitment. I was watching a video on YouTube of someone hammering a British defense official…maybe John Healey? about that point. He kind of kept sidestepping the question.

And I’ve seen a lot of discussion in European news and discussion that seems to be less about Ukraine – a near-term concern – and more about how this impacts Europe on a much-longer-timeframe, like talking about reinvigorating defense industry, which doesn’t make me incredibly hopeful that the top priority here is Ukraine.

John Mearsheimer had some recent video that was completely dismissive of Europe, said that the UK and France are definitely not going to send any forces into Ukraine. He’s always been pretty negative on Ukraine, but it was another datapoint.

Michel Kofman said recently that Europe does have the ability to draw a line in Ukraine. I think that the real question is political will. This would require decisive movement in a limited time window.

Google and Apple and others already do that ad hoc, using signal strength from Bluetooth and WiFi beacons. Can contribute to that by just setting up a wireless access point or several near where you want more signal. Doesn’t even need to be Internet-connected.

This doesn’t sound like it’s really a new proposal:

Though variants of the proposal have been discussed without making progress since Russia launched the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, a fresh version of the plan has gained renewed impetus this week after Zelenskyy’s acrimonious meeting with US president Donald Trump on Friday.

So it’s already been discussed. I don’t know how much weight to ascribe to “renewed impetus”. It doesn’t sound like there’s yet a commitment.

That being said, it certainly beats there not being a “renewed impetus”. It could potentially develop into something real.

But at this stage, I don’t think that it’s yet over that hump.

Well, that’s a pleasant piece of news among a number of not-so-pleasant news items.

Reddit will now issue warnings to users who “upvote several pieces of content banned for violating our policies” within “a certain timeframe,” starting first with violent content, the company announced on Wednesday.

Hmm. What does this pertain to?

kagis

https://www.theverge.com/news/606904/reddit-rules-bans-violence-doxing-elon-musk-doge

Reddit has seen an increase in rule-breaking posts across “several communities,” and it has issued a temporary ban on one that featured users calling for violence against people who work for the Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).

That community, r/WhitePeopleTwitter, was given a 72-hour ban on Tuesday, as reported by Engadget. Screenshots shared on X show multiple examples of the threatening posts. Musk later reposted the screenshots, claiming that the users have “broken the law.”

In a note on the subreddit, Reddit says it was banned “due to a prevalence of violent content” and that “inciting and glorifying violence or doxing” violate Reddit’s rules. An unnamed Reddit admin said the ban was meant to be a “cooling-off period” for the community.

Reddit also gave a full ban to a subreddit called r/IsElonDeadYet for violating rules “against posting violent content.” The unnamed admin said Reddit is taking steps “to ensure all communities can provide a safe environment for healthy conversation” in a post on r/RedditSafety.

Ah.