Where traffic lights were dark, drivers treated the intersections as four-way stops.

Good job, North Carolinians.

My local experience has been that when traffic lights are dark, drivers – who have a questionable understanding of “traffic takes turns a car at a time in clockwise order at a stop sign”, much less “treat a flashing red signal as a stop sign”, much less “treat an out traffic signal as a stop sign” – just enter a state of total confusion and start randomly driving however.

I don’t see people “forming a cult”.

• Apple does a walled garden that I don’t want but some people are fine with. If you give them a bunch of money and these days entrust them with a bunch of your data, they will give you a pre-set-up environment that works well. That’s fine for a lot of people.

• Valve does a successful electronic storefront that has synergized well with the Linux world. God forbid Microsoft were in their position. They aren’t DRM-free, but you can use GOG if you want that, and the commercial game world was not going to go DRM-free.

• Kagi takes money, provides privacy for a search engine and some perks; they let their customer be a customer rather than the product. I use it myself, am happy with it. That’s a tradeoff that I’d wanted for a while, and would like Google to provide with YouTube.

• GitHub wouldn’t be my own choice for source hosting in the Microsoft era, but so far they seem to be getting along reasonably well. They provide functionality that’s needed, source hosting plus issue tracking, and their system is pretty usable.

• Mozilla does Firefox, which is much more customizable than Chrome. I use it!

• I don’t know what 404 Media does. Some sort of tech reporting, looks like. Okay, fine.

If you don’t want to use any of those, you can probably avoid all of them, other than maybe GitHub if projects you use are hosted there.

I decided in the late '90s, when Apple killed the Mac clone market and took things towards a single-vendor platform, that it wasn’t where I wanted to be, but for some people, it’s fine. Other than 404 Media, which I don’t know about, I don’t have any problem with the others here, and some are companies that I’m fairly happy with.

The prophecies say that one day, all vehicles in the region will be parked at the Pawnee County courthouse.

Note, just to be clear, that this is federal legislation, not Oregon state legislation.

It’s not in some counties in Nevada.

But everywhere else in the US, this is a no-no.

Yeah, I have family who say that they’re gonna be out for an estimated three days. But, hey, that’s doable. They’re gonna lose climate control for a few days, lose stuff in a refrigerator or freezer. But it’s not too bad.

I’m assuming from the fact that you can post that you still have some form of Internet access going. IIRC cell towers have diesel generator backups that come on automatically. And a lot of folks out there have some kind of emergency inverter generator, cars can provide a small amount of accessory power (maybe 100W or more) and lithium batteries, and small solar panels are more widespread than they were just a few years back. Not enough to do a lot of things, but getting light and communications is a lot easier, even in power outages, than it once was.

I don’t know whether Altman or the board is better from a leadership standpoint, but I don’t think that it makes sense to rely on boards to avoid existential dangers for humanity. A board runs one company. If that board takes action that is a good move in terms of an existential risk for humanity but disadvantageous to the company, they’ll tend to be outcompeted by and replaced by those who do not. Anyone doing that has to be in a position to span multiple companies. I doubt that market regulators in a single market could do it, even – that’s getting into international treaty territory.

The only way in which a board is going to be able to effectively do that is if one company, theirs, effectively has a monopoly on all AI development that could pose a risk.

https://viewer.weather.noaa.gov/water#layers=42904+40090+42133+41707+41708+41709+41631&x=-92.96832&y=40.68848&z=8.4&panel=legend

Has kind of a nice visualization of the flooding and related information.

I’d guess that they mean that they reliably show up in an assortment but aren’t many people’s favorite.

Wikipedia is under a Creative Commons license.

I’d probably be a softie here and just pick something obscure that would cause a minimal ripple. There are songs out there that I don’t like, but if they get much play, it’s because there are people who do like them, and they should be able to listen to their favored music.

I don’t know about that. It seemed to have a pretty rapid impact on the phone in that video, and it’s not like those are exactly open. And they weren’t pressurizing it.

Hydrogen

This says that hydrogen isn’t just a problem, just helium:

https://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/669763/why-is-a-mems-device-affected-by-helium-but-not-hydrogen

It seems that MEMS is very sensitive to helium, but only helium. This Link stated that hydrogen does not affect MEMS, which surprised me.

Hmm.

That seems like it’d open a lot of potential abuses.

I wonder what the failure mode of various electronic locks is when they’re exposed to helium?

I’d be fine with hissy fits if they were about something real.

He fought to keep his job on First Amendment grounds.

looks dubious

One of the exceptions to “the government cannot restrict your right to speech” is the government acting in a “government-as-employer” role. There, they can act like any other employer, and don’t have special constraints just because they’re the government. Employers can normally let people go because they think that they’re bad for their image, and that’s what the article said happened here.

…university leaders said he sullied the school’s reputation and had to go.

https://www.nyclu.org/resources/know-your-rights/speaking-out-public-employee

Different rules apply if you are making these comments in your personal time as a private individual. Generally, your statements about topics that are of general interest to the public, including current events, are protected by the First Amendment. However, a public employer in New York may discipline you if your comments either disrupted its work or have the potential to disrupt its work, including by affecting public perception of your employer if you frequently interact with members of the public in your job.

Now, I suppose you can ask whether the professor publicly releasing porn videos of himself is actually damaging to public perception of the university, but the rationale they used is a legit rationale.

?

Plastic recycling isn’t fake. It’s often not been economical, so it often doesn’t make any sense to do it. But you can recycle plastics.

Plus, is this sending my data to HP to be processed remotely as a cloud service, or is this AI stuff being run locally? I don’t especially want to have the contents of my print jobs being sent to HP.

I haven’t been following this or US politics much, but looking at other stories, it looks like “manhunt” may be a bit over the top. It sounds like this relates to serving a subpoena:

https://www.newsweek.com/fani-willis-nathan-wade-missing-1959447

“The committee issued the subpoena on Friday, attempted to serve the subpoena to Nathan Wade’s lawyer, who declined, and subsequently the committee tried to serve the subpoena via email through Nathan Wade himself, never heard back. As a result the committee had to use the assistance of the U.S. Marshals, who have also not been able to find Nathan Wade,” Dye told Newsweek via phone Wednesday evening.

The committee spokesperson also told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution that the Republican-led committee has “served over 100 subpoenas this Congress. We have done so, for the most part, without controversy or the need to use the U.S. Marshals.” He added that “Nathan Wade’s evasion of service is extremely unusual and will require the Committee to spend U.S. tax dollars to locate him.”

Newsweek reached out to the Fulton County District Attorney’s Office for comment via email on Wednesday afternoon.

Andrew Evans, Wade’s attorney, and Dye have differing views on what transpired over the past few months as the committee has tried to get Wade to testify. Evans told Newsweek in a phone interview on Wednesday that his client previously “voluntarily agreed to go up to Washington, D.C., and the Republicans canceled it.”

Like, I don’t think that normally having a process server involved is described as a “manhunt”.

If you remember, Rudy Giuliani had been very openly dodging process servers for while until a few months ago, and I don’t think that anyone called it a “manhunt”:

https://www.politico.com/news/2024/05/18/giuliani-birthday-indictment-papers-00158783

Rudy Giuliani received a different kind of surprise at the end of his 80th birthday bash Friday night when he was served with a notice of indictment in Arizona’s 2020 election subversion case after weeks of successfully evading the state’s prosecution.

Arizona prosecutors had been attempting to locate the former Trump attorney since his indictment at the end of April, along with 17 other Trump allies, including former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, and lawyers John Eastman and Boris Epshteyn. The indictment, which also names former President Donald Trump as an unindicted co-conspirator, includes felony counts of conspiracy, fraud and forgery.

In a since-deleted post to X in the middle of the celebration, Giuliani taunted: “If Arizona authorities can’t find me by tomorrow morning: 1. They must dismiss the indictment; 2. They must concede they can’t count votes.”

But around 11 p.m. as the festivities wound down for the night, agents from the AG’s office arrived and served Giuliani with indictment papers outside the house, causing several of the guests to express outrage.