The Republicans are absolutely committed to the lie that the shutdown is because the Democrats are demanding the government pay for illegal aliens’ health care. It doesn’t matter how many times they get corrected; they’ll just keep repeating it.

It’s an interesting experiment in just how brazen a lie they’ll be able to get away with. I’m hoping this is the one that finally breaks them, and they lose credibility for good, but the right-wing media bubble is sewn up pretty tight, and so far it seems they’ll believe pretty much anything they’re fed.

This is a hideous mis-meme-ing of the original XKCD comic. The tiny pillar is supposed to represent something we all actually need – since we have built so much on top of it – but barely think about. Like curl or ffmpeg.

Trump and Hegseth are not the sharpest tools in the shed, for sure, but they’re also not the ones really making decisions. Stephen Miller is possibly in charge? JD Vance’s vassalage to dystopian surveillance tech titan Peter Thiel is another influence channel.

At least when I’m cleaning up after shit devs who used Stack Overflow, I can usually search using a fragment of their code and find where they swiped it from and get some clue what the hell they were thinking. Now that they’re all using AI chatbots, there’s no trace.

I’m convinced that the real purpose of this meeting was to gauge the willingness of top military officers to support a coup. I would be surprised if their private conversations in response to this spectacle were not spied on.

Fortunately, at least in public appearance, they don’t seem thrilled with this administration.

The ICE campaign of terror is not a distraction, in the sense that it is meant to draw attention away from something else. It is a primary ambition – perhaps the primary ambition – of this administration. Remember those “MASS DEPORTATION NOW” signs people were holding up at the Republican National Convention?

It is also unsympathetic to those being abused by ICE to call their plight a “distraction”. No! It’s something we need to pay attention to and put a stop to!

If I had to guess, I’d say there are probably many in the military’s high ranks who believe that blowing up random fishing boats off the coast of Venezuela is a violation of international law, and would refuse if ordered to do so. Maybe everyone who has such a conscience will be fired?

In all previous instances, the agents of the ruling class were totally in control of the media landscape. Mainstream media has finally ceded enough to the internet, and the influencers they rely on to deliver a single message are all off their leashes, with fully half of them unwilling to get back in line.

I’ll concede that it’s probably still wishful thinking on my part, but the current situation is significantly different that what has happened before.

The whole ‘Q’ mythos is based around the premise that liberals must be pedos because, lacking a religion-based straitjacket of a moral code, there’s nothing to keep them from doing anything.

The reality is that, while there are certainly instances of bad sexual behavior across the political spectrum, it is the authoritarian MAGA culture in which child sexual abuse is a systemic problem— a natural consequence of deference to power and the entitlement felt by those given that power.

I know it’s wishful thinking, but the Epstein obsession of the MAGA base may end up crumbling more than just the current GOP.

Governor Walz is grieving the loss of our state’s house speaker, Melissa Hortman, who was killed by someone influenced by violent extremist Republican rhetoric. As the polar opposite of the Republicans— who would never take a milligram of blame for Hortman’s death— Walz is introspective, looking for anything he might have been able to do differently to change this outcome, which is a common part of the grieving process.

So I don’t blame him for not thinking clearly here, but the truth is that the sort of rhetorical attacks he was making on the Republicans is sorely needed. Calling them “weird” was clearly a winning strategy and the campaign consultants who got him to stop are at least somewhat responsible for the fact we now live in a fascist dictatorship.

No one would ever mistake Walz’s rhetoric as an actual call to violence (even though Republicans would be certain to make that bad faith claim). We need to call out who these people are and what they’re doing in a direct, non-apologetic manner. I hope Walz comes around to understanding this and goes back to calling out the fascists.

A bill like this was proposed in the Minnesota state house, shortly before one of the co-sponsors was arrested for soliciting sex from a minor.

I only use Windows because I have to work with a corporation’s IT helpdesk staff to get on their VPN if I want to do contract work for them. They are not likely to help me get connected from Linux; they’ll just find another contract dev. Once in, I do everything in Linux because my code will ultimately run in a Linux cloud container of some sort. WSL works well enough for me to do this. I’d rather have Linux on bare metal, but whatever. I’m in; I’m coding; I’m getting paid. I’ll put up with a little bit of suck.

AppImage is the no-nonsense universal package format.

I once saw a headline that someone (I forgot who) said that “AI is weird”. All I could think was, well yeah, he’s been called “Weird Al” all of his professional life …

My bad, the illustration was supposed to be of Virginia Basora-Gonzalez, who has been accused of trafficking fentanyl. On the one hand, it seems encouraging that they had to find someone who could more credibly be presented as criminal – hopefully an indication that their claims about the pro-Palestinian students and Argentinians with tattoos they’ve disappeared were not deemed credible enough by the general public.

Still, we only have the allegation of this administration against this person, so it’s quite possible she’s entirely innocent. It’s not like they give a fuck about actual crimes or making our country safer. They just want to be seen as badasses.

When I worked an hourly job on the night shift, we would all clock out to change the time and then clock back in.

You got a link for that? I’m not finding anything online linking Rumeysa Ozturk to anything related to drugs

Upvoting for the concise summary of what the article is about (thanks!); not for the opinion expressed (which appears to conflate Russian developers with the actions of the Russian government – something I find problematic at best).

CLI is being able to speak a language to tell your computer what to do; GUI is only being able to point and grunt.

The original marshmallow experiment is so popular to cite because it is a “just so story” – that is, as typically explained, it presents a moral lesson that seems intuitively obvious. That’s one reason the result stood for so long without attempts to reproduce it.

Such attempts have now been made, and no one can reproduce the reported clarity of the original. One interpretation of this is related to the wealth of the families involved: the original subjects were, after all, children of Stanford University students, and as such came from families of relative wealth.

There are studies which reach the conclusion you’re reporting (likely popularized by this Atlantic article but it’s paywalled so I can’t check), but the way you present this as a “fun fact” is turning the test into a different “just so story”.

The reality is that, while there are some stats gathered from the marshmallow test and followups that could be interpreted that way, the actual data gathered is too messy and inconclusive to draw any definitive conclusions.