@ignirtoq - eviltoast
  • 0 Posts
  • 82 Comments
Joined 7 months ago
cake
Cake day: March 3rd, 2024

help-circle


  • He and his allies have made the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan a central focus of their criticisms of the Biden administration’s handling of national security and foreign policy.

    What I consistently don’t see brought up is the fact that the “chaotic withdrawal” was directly set up by Trump. He signed the agreement with Afghanistan that put a fixed date on the withdrawal squarely in the next President’s term. This gave enemies a clear timetable of US actions beforehand, which gave them a significant advantage. So Biden was left with the choice of either fulfilling the US promise, despite it being in every way a bad construct, and executing an extremely difficult withdrawal, or harming the US image on the global stage by reneging on an already agreed upon deal.

    I would go so far as to say this, like the expiration of the middle class portion of the Trump tax cuts, was specifically designed to make the next administration, which was always very likely to be Democrat, look bad regardless of the cost or collateral damage.


  • 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.


  • The problem is the battery, and how they have a finite lifespan. Usually that’s about 400 recharge cycles, and after that the batteries are finished.

    And if you can’t replace it, then it’s the end of the line for the gadget, and it’s tossed onto the e-waste pile.

    It is so incredibly aggravating that it’s 2024 and unreplaceable batteries are still a thing. I guess Apple didn’t get enough shade when they did this in phones so it just became industry-standard. It’s both horrible for the environment and for the consumer.

    I guarantee the engineers could easily make it replaceable for little to no added cost, they’re just specifically instructed by business leaders not to.





  • Edit: I was thinking about the wrong “immunity” in this comment (the recently granted Presidential immunity to prosecution, not immunity to prosecution for law enforcement officers). I’ll leave the comment for context, but it’s not what the original commenter was talking about.

    Actually it will be very easy for the Supreme Court to give Trump a win and keep qualified immunity. If Biden didn’t directly order the raid on Mar-a-lago, then the immunity they granted doesn’t apply.

    Remember, these rulings don’t need logical consistency because they are bad faith justifications for any actions taken by their team. So when a Republican is in office they can extend the immunity to basically the whole Executive branch, but when a Democrat is in the White House that can shrink to just the President’s actions. And even there only those that are “official acts,” which only the Supreme Court gets to decide, so they can shrink it to almost nothing.





  • put up posters urging customers to “close the door” behind them

    Do customers read postings in the UK? Because they certainly don’t in the US.

    They should install some kind of mechanism to automatically close the door when it’s not being held open. If the higher-ups don’t want to pay for it, he should calculate how many bags of crisps it would take to pay for it, and then say when Steven has been prevented from stealing crisps for X days it will have paid for itself.








  • 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.