ignirtoq

If it’s dangerous to repair it, it’s dangerous to own. That’s the domain for regulations by the government, not arbitrary software restrictions by software manufacturers.

They don’t implement these to keep you safe. They do it purely to make more money.

Before my comment I want to make clear I agree with the conclusion that abortion bans are clearly killing women at statistically significant rates.

That said, the stats reporting here doesn’t make sense:

Among Hispanic women, the rate of women dying while pregnant, during childbirth or soon after increased from 14.5% in 2019 to 18.9% in 2022. Rates among white women nearly doubled — from 20% to 39.1%. And Black women, who historically have higher chances of dying while pregnant, during childbirth or soon after, saw their rates go from 31.6% to 43.6%.

There’s no way 14.5% of Hispanic women in Texas who got pregnant died some time during pregnancy, during child birth, or soon after. That would be unprecedented for any time since the advent of modern medicine. And the chart above this paragraph does not agree with it either. It’s a chart of deaths per hundred THOUSAND live births, and the numbers for all racial groups are all under 100, so less than 0.1%.

The way it’s stated also doesn’t suggest it’s a percent increase because it says it rose from 14.5% to 18.9%. I can’t figure out what they’re trying to say, but they should definitely have been more careful with presenting the numbers.

If the pig option included immune suppression drugs for the rest of your life, or for like 10 years until it wore out and you had to have another major surgery to replace it, mechanical valve plus blood thinners and a yearly blood draw sounds like the much better deal. I know blood thinners come with their own long term effects, but nothing compared to immune suppression.

The judge also noted that the cited study itself mentions that GitHub Copilot “rarely emits memorised code in benign situations.”

“Rarely” is not zero. This looks like it’s opening a loophole to copying open source code with strong copyleft licenses like the GPL:

1. Find OSS code you want to copy
2. Set up conditions for Copilot to reproduce code
3. Copy code into your commercial product
4. When sued, just claim Copilot generated the code

Depending on how good your lawyers are, 2 is optional. And bingo! All the OSS code you want without those pesky restrictive licenses.

In fact, I wonder if there’s a way to automate step 2. Some way to analyze an OSS GitHub repo to generate inputs for Copilot that will then regurgitate that same repo.

next year when the Trump tax cuts expire

It’s worth repeating again that the middle class Trump tax cuts expire next year. The Trump tax cuts for the wealthy have no expiration date and are permanent.

Also, they’re not “Trump” tax cuts but Republican tax cuts, but at this point the distinction doesn’t really mean anything anymore since Trump has completely taken over the party.

I don’t recommend making significant changes to activity levels at the same time as making diet changes. Weight loss comes from changing what you eat. Exercise is absolutely necessary for a healthy lifestyle, but it is not the major factor in weight loss. And increasing exercise behaviors can destabilize eating habits, making it harder to stick to any good changes you do make with either diet or exercise.

I think that’s actually good UX from a safety standpoint. It means the button is “idempotent”: doing an operation the first time puts it in a state, and then doing it again leaves it still in that state.

If you’re in a moment of panic and want the brake on, you might push the button a bunch of times in quick succession to “be sure.” If it were a regular button, this would rapidly toggle it on and off, which would leave it in an uncertain state after you pressed it so fast. This way it turns on and stays active until you are ready to turn it off, and then you do another idempotent operation to turn it off. I don’t think all buttons should be like this, but I think it’s a good design decision for a button used in an “emergency.”

No laws have been changed. Court decisions are not considered the passage of a law, so ex post facto doesn’t apply. Changes to how laws are interpreted don’t factor into ex post facto considerations.

Ex post facto is for if a new law is passed making something a crime, and the act was committed before its passage. This is all about interpretation of already passed law. It’s basically the justices saying that this was against the law the whole time. Ex post facto doesn’t apply here.

Ironically if he did that and appointed new liberal justices, there’s a good chance the new Court would overturn this Court’s decision, and he could be convicted of murder and probably violating several other federal laws for that act.

No, we’re in this position because of a failure of leadership. Leaders can unite people behind doing things they don’t want to do. It’s how rationing was tolerated for years in WWII. But we have an entire political party built around telling people what they want to hear while working against their interests for the wealthy’s short term gains. We could have conquered this from the top-down with a good plan and charismatic leaders supporting it.

People need to start changing their behavior about this heat. I know this sounds like victim blaming. I know people shouldn’t have to change their behavior because we saw global warning coming for 30 years and should have prevented this from happening. But it’s happening. You can’t go into Death Valley in the summer anymore. You just can’t. Please don’t put yourself in this position.

It’s a tragedy that this death happened. We absolutely need to adapt our emergency services to this heat to try to prevent something like this from happening again. But we also need to change our behaviors so we don’t end up in that position in the first place.

I use Authy for 2FA but know little about the underlying technology. Does this mean my accounts that use Authy for 2FA may now be compromised? Or is it just my phone number? Because my phone number has been out in the wild for a long time already…

Viruses evolve, some quite quickly. The flu isn’t the fastest (looking at you, HIV), but it’s up there. Over time, existing vaccines train your body to fight something that doesn’t quite match what’s in the wild (i.e. efficacy goes down with time). That’s why there’s a different seasonal flu vaccine every year.

They create flu vaccines on a yearly cycle, and a pandemic can kick off in a matter of weeks and months, so if it doesn’t match the preplanned cycle, they’ll have to invest more resources to creating the most up to date vaccine off-cycle.

The 10th amendment doesn’t change the supremacy clause. It simply makes explicit what’s implicit in the supremacy clause: federal law takes precedence over any and all state laws and constitutions when they are made in pursuance of the US Constitution, so the 10th amendment clarifies that if it’s not a power granted to the federal government by the US Constitution, then it’s reserved for the states. To invoke the 10th amendment in this case you would have to prove the federal government is acting beyond its constitutional scope, which would require either proving it’s going beyond EMTALA or that EMTALA itself is unconstitutional. They are not making either claim in this case.

and whether you like it or appreciate it or not, he’s got a history of public service

Would that be the charity that’s a front for embezzling charitable donations, or the presidency that he used to enrich himself by vacationing in his own properties, requiring the federal government to pay exorbitant, arguable falsely inflated, prices with taxpayer money for housing the Secret Service in Trump properties and selling national secrets to hostile governments?

Republicans in Idaho asked the Supreme Court to decide whether state bans or federal law take precedence.

This is absurd. Federal law always takes precedence, even if it’s a section of a state constitution versus a law passed by Congress. Period. It’s the supremacy clause of the US Constitution, and it’s quite clear. The supremacy clause doesn’t cover executive order, but this case is about EMTALA, a law passed by Congress.

Now if they want to argue the Biden administration’s enforcement of that law is going beyond the bounds set by the law, that would be something SCOTUS would need to decide. But as far as I can tell they aren’t arguing that. They’re saying if the Court lets the Biden administration require emergency abortions in opposition to state law, then that will let them require elective abortions as well, which is an even more absurd claim since the scope of EMTALA is strictly for medical care when the health or life of the patient is at risk without it.

This will be an unpopular opinion here, but Biden has been backed into a corner on this. The immigration system is fundamentally broken and not equipped to deal with modern needs, but that has to be fixed by Congress. Biden had legislation he was favoring, and regardless of what your opinion on it was, Republicans made it clear they won’t let absolutely any changes to immigration happen with a Democrat in the White House, no matter how much they may agree with them.

His options under executive action are extremely limited. The strategy of letting the system flounder to illustrate the need for reform has only worked against him, so now he’s trying something else. I don’t agree with the current system, the reforms that he proposed, nor this executive order, but man, there just isn’t a good solution here, and he’s feeling the political pressure on it, which while it may be misdirected is nonetheless real.

I find the very term “content” fascinating, because the exact definition you choose puts it on a kind of spectrum with “useful” at one end and “measurable” at the other.

When Daniel Ek talks about “content,” he means any pile of bits he can package up, shove in front of people, and stuff with ads. From that definition, making “content” is super cheap. I can record myself literally screaming for 30 seconds into the microphone already in my laptop and upload it using the internet connection I already have. Is it worth consuming? No, but I’ll get to that. And content under that definition is very measurable in many senses, like file size, duration, and (important to him) number of hours people stream it (and can inject ads into). But from this view, all “content” is interchangable and equal, so it’s not a very useful definition, because some content is extremely popular and is consumed heavily, while other content is not consumed at all. From Daniel’s perspective, this difference is random, enigmatic, and awe inspiring, because he can’t measure it.

At the other end of the spectrum is the “useful” definition where the only “content” is good content. My 30 seconds of screaming isn’t content, it’s garbage. It’s good content that actually brings in the ad revenue, because it’s what people will put up with ads to get access to. But what I would consider good content is not what someone else would consider good content, which is what makes it much harder to measure. But we can all agree making good content is hard and thus almost always expensive (at least compared to garbage passing as content).

And that’s what makes Daniel Ek look like an out of touch billionaire. The people who make good content (that makes him money) use the more useful definition, which is difficult to make and expensive and actually worth talking about, while he uses the measurable definition that’s in all the graphs on his desk that summarize his revenue stream.

I don’t think our current system is nearly as robust as you think. Trump’s first term laid that bare.

So many laws dictating what the president can and can’t do don’t have any actual repercussions for breaking them written in them because it was assumed impeachment would be sufficient. Trump showed that with our current system that means if you can’t guarantee you’ll have 67 votes in the Senate, then those laws may as well not exist. And every week the Supreme Court shows how much “settled case law” isn’t anymore, so with a corrupt high court in his league, even the laws that do have teeth may be subverted.

We absolutely need to make changes to shore up the system and plug the gaps, but we have to do so with care that we don’t end up handing new, more powerful weapons to the very bad actors we’re trying to protect against.