• 0 Posts
  • 503 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 18th, 2023

help-circle
  • In the United States, if you’re going to call a man a pedo, you really need to make sure your shit is buttoned up tight. Because if it’s not, you’re going to have a tough time defending the libel lawsuit.

    Now, if you’re a homeless person on the street, or an anonymous Internet poster with “dozens” of views, you probably won’t get sued. Because the chances are you don’t have enough money to make a lawsuit worthwhile.

    For a company that has money that could be collected in such a lawsuit, it’s a lot easier and cheaper to just not say that.


  • Okay. Now go to File Explorer and right click to create a new text file and try to name it “con”. That’s three letters: con. You can’t do it. Not allowed. Because CON has been reserved (in every directory on every drive) for piping to and from console since MS-DOS 2 or so. (I think 2 is when they stole pipes from Unix)

    Okay. Now, open just about any kind of desktop window and double click in its upper left corner. In > 9 windows out of 10 that action still closes the window even though the “close window” button was moved to the upper right corner by Windows 3. Even though a bunch of modern applications don’t even have any icon there at all any more.


  • What the lawyers say is not under oath unless they go to the witness stand and swear in. The main reason is that lawyers mainly are in the court to make opinionated arguments, not to give facts.

    Lawyers do have a “duty of candor” to the “tribunal” at all times, however. This is because they have taken an oath (different from the witness oath) to become “officers of the court”. This means they cannot knowingly misstate facts or law to the court.

    But the maximum exposure on a duty of candor violation is court sanctions, like fines or adverse court outcomes, possibly contempt, and bar discipline, and so on. It’s not the crime of perjury.



  • I believe that “self exclusion” is a feature where you tell the gambling company you don’t want them to do business with you for the specified period. Then they won’t do business with you during the period, even if you try to come back to them later.

    In some jurisdictions this kind of voluntary blacklist can also be done at the gambling regulator, in which case it would apply to all gambling establishments in the jurisdiction.


  • Yeah. And far as I understand, the dinosaur fossils we pull out of the great plains are there because that was the shore line of the Western Interior Seaway. I would expect a massive Seaway to mess up whatever conditions create Tornado Alley.

    Also, even within Tornado Alley, the prevalence of big tornados is extremely sensitive to localized quirks of geography. Certain places, like Moore, OK, have been hit with F4 and F5 events several times, while apparent safe zones just a few miles away get hit rarely at all.





  • There was one particular morning in 2014 when Google dropped articles from The Daily Stormer directly into the personalized news feed widget on my phone. I grew up in the South, so I know the ins and outs of racism there. This was completely different. It was wildly genocidal anti-Semitism; straight up Nazi shit. Right there on my phone and presented as news.

    That’s when I knew that something was seriously wrong.


  • What’s going to happen is:

    • The big players know that the token pricing crisis is coming up.
    • When the price increases hit, regular users are going to scramble for alternatives.
    • Local models will be an attractive alternative for many users. The cost of hardware and energy will constrain local model power, but many will be willing to live with it.
    • So these would-be cartel members want to hit the local and open weight models with the “safety” card. Otherwise they might be holding the bag on all of those data centers.

    “You see, it’s just too dangerous to humanity to experiment with AI at home. You need to use a safe provider like Open AI.”


  • I’ve done a thousand “real” lines in a day, but it was like a 10 hour “day,” and it was just coding for the entire period. No emails, no meetings, no peer reviews, no debugging. No design or architecture work–that was all done on a previous day.

    And obviously all of that code did get tested and debugged and reviewed, but on a different day. So I can’t really say that those lines were “completed” in one day.




  • This is still a big deal result with a lot of physical significance if it holds up.

    Full Navier-Stokes are / were understood to model all of the important physics associated with continuous domain fluids. (Continuous domain here means we approximate the many, many particles of the fluid as a smooth, continuous substance).

    In particular, Navier-Stokes are supposed to fully model fluids with turbulence. Turbulence is an everyday phenomenon that you can reproduce for yourself in your kitchen sink, and yet it is extremely difficult to formulate a mathematical function for it. Turbulence appears to be random if you look at it, and yet if it is produced by NS, then it is not random. Solving even the numeric approximations of NS for turbulent flows is difficult because the flows exhibit severe variation in velocity over wide ranges of time and distance scales.

    Anyhow, if NS is a good physical theory it has to have a physically realistic solution to every physically-possible set of initial conditions and environmental forcing functions. In math terms this mainly means that all of the velocities, pressures, and forces have to be finite and smooth at all times. Step discontinuities don’t really occur in the real physical world (although they do approximately occur).

    This result would mean that NS is not the end all final theory for classical continuum fluids. The scenario constructed by OpenAI is claimed to be one that can (at least theoretically) be setup and run in the real world. But if we did that, the real world is certain to do something else besides the infinite flow velocity vortex that OpenAI claims NS predicts. What would really happen in that experiment? Who knows. We’re gonna need to find some new physics to find out.




  • compel” limits bit is limited to US citizens

    This is completely not true. The 4th and 5th amendments apply to everyone.

    that even then, they can confiscate your phone

    If they do this without getting a search warrant from a judge, you can sue for the return of your property. You can make them justify to a judge why there is probable cause that your property will yield evidence of a crime.

    they can refuse to let you fly

    This is a thing that can happen, but you can also sue the federal government to challenge your wrongful placement on the no fly list. People have sued and won and been awarded costs and attorneys’ fees

    confiscate your passport,

    This can happen if they think the passport is fraudulent, invalid, expired, stolen, or if you owe taxes, or are a sex offender that needs an annotated passport, or sadly if they think you are trans.

    For many of these causes, the simplest solution is to apply for a new passport. For the trans victims, the issue is currently in federal court, and I am hopeful for a positive outcome.

    deport you to the country of their choice.

    At this point I assume you are talking about non-citizens, non-LPRs. If such a person is refused admission they are preferentially deported back to wherever they came from. At land borders, that is cheap and easy. Air carriers are required to transport passengers back to origin at the air carrier’s expense when CBP so demands. (This is why airlines check your documents thoroughly before they let you go.)

    If for some reason the person’s travel origin refuses to accept them, then the next preference is a country where they have citizenship or strong residence ties.

    With the exception of the original set of CECOT flights, which were done in actual contempt of court, true third country removals are the last resort both in law and in actual (however fucked up) practice.

    The people who have been sent to the strange African countries have problems with no documents, no proof of citizenship, their true home country refuses to accept deportations from US because of bad relations, or they have withholding of removal because of a legitimate fear of torture or persecution in their home country. That’s not something that’s going to happen to the vast majority of people that show up at an airport with actual good documents.


  • Here’s an important point from the activist distress code case: CBP had a plan to target him for this treatment in advance before he showed up at the border checkpoint that day. The airlines send them passenger manifests 72 hours in advance.

    100% of the time, if they take you to the little room, start asking you questions, and want to look through your phone, they already believe you’re guilty of something specific.

    If that happens to you, you need to understand that you have already been the “target” of an investigation. There is nothing you can do or say in that room that will convince them otherwise. The best thing you can do is shut the hell up, do as little as possible, and don’t make their case for them.

    And don’t believe anything they’re telling you either. The cops can lie to you, but you can’t lie to the cops. It’s a crime.


  • I think I’m at low risk.

    I power my phone off prior to arriving in the US and keep it off until I leave the airport.

    Under US case law, you can be compelled to give up a thumb print or face ID with a search warrant. But you cannot be compelled to give an unlock code, because the code information is testimony, and you have the right to remain silent.

    If they insist on seizing my phone unless I unlock it, my plan is to ask for a lawyer, shut the fuck up, let them seize the phone or whatever, then sue them later to return it.

    This plan works for me because I’m a US citizen, and I have an absolute right to enter the country. If you are not a citizen or LPR the local CBP officer has the discretion to refuse admission even if you have a visa. So that’s a real consequence to non cooperation.

    Don’t lie to the feds about not having a phone if you really have one. That’s a separate crime all by itself.