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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • Biden’s next move: Nothing.

    while 76% said a not-guilty verdict would have no impact

    And this is playing pretty true with where I live. Pretty much Trump was found guilty, everyone spent 37.1839 seconds processing that new bit of information, and then went on with their day with the needle on how they will vote in November moving 0.3nm in either direction.

    Like, how everyone is going to vote. That’s already done. There are very, very, very few people who are left in the undecided category. So, this whole thing wasn’t going to change the calculus of anyone running for office.


  • Do you use autocomplete? AI in some of the various ways that’s being posited is just spicy autocomplete. You can run a pretty decent local AI on SSE2 instructions alone.

    Now you don’t have to accept spicy-autocomplete just like you don’t have to accept plain jane-autocomplete. The choice is yours, Mozilla isn’t planning on spinning extra cycles in your CPU or GPU if you don’t want them spun.

    But I distinctly remember the grumbles when Firefox brought local db ops into the browser to give it memory for forms. Lots of people didn’t like the notion of filling out a bank form or something and then that popping into a sqlite db.

    So, your opinion, I don’t blame you. I don’t agree with your opinion, but I don’t blame you. Completely normal reaction. Don’t let folks tell you different. Just like we need the gas pedal for new things, we need the brake as well. I would hate to see you go and leave Firefox, BUT I would really hate you having to feel like something was forced upon you and you just had to grin and bear it.




  • Yeah, I think that’s the bigger issue here. These devices pay their way by collecting data to sell off. What this “overhual” is indicating is that they haven’t quite figured out how to make these devices not only pay for themselves, but also, generate a net background profit for the company.

    The only thing I’m reading from this story is that Amazon is just aiming for more dollar signs from Alexia. I’m going tell you in the day and age of Siri and Whatever Google’s thing is, this is going to backfire massively on Amazon. This will likely collapse whatever paltry Alexia that’s out there. And I have a good feeling they’ll look at this collapse as “well the technology just isn’t a good money maker.” No you idiots, it’s not a mass profit driver. I get how something not drawing double digit percentage gains is a mystery to you all, but just because you cannot buy your fifteenth yacht from it, doesn’t mean that the technology is a failure.

    But it’s whatever, Amazon’s ship to wreck.


  • This issue is a bit more complex than just “hospitals shouldn’t be for profit”. Not to dismiss that’s a big driver here, but there’s a lot more going on.

    Rural communities tend to have lower insurance coverage, that means for the people who do show up, their debt will eventually go into collections or be completely written off as a loss. Rural communities have vastly less access to better insurance and many just completely forgo insurance altogether.

    Additionally, rural communities have a tendency to enter a death spiral between visits and costs. The number of people showing up at the hospital is low, but for the ones that do they show up with incredibly expensive conditions.

    A lot of the financing and extended lines of revenue for rural hospitals is tied into the expanded Medicaid offerings under the Affordable Care Act (ACA). There’s clear demonstration that states that have opted to not expand Medicaid are the ones overwhelmingly facing hospital closures. States that have expanded still face issues, but states that have not are facing worse outcomes for rural hospitals.

    Finally, costs for healthcare have steadily increased at rates that outpace pretty much every program out there. Pharmaceutical companies are ever shifting costs of materials and medication making long term planning difficult. These companies cite new regulation requiring a remixing of their costs of products. Basically, if some state mandates $30 insulin, that makes cancer treatment go up some, massive percentage. So a requirement to reduce cost to consumer in one area induces an increase in cost somewhere else.

    And no just telling hospitals they can’t drive a profit won’t fix the issue. The doctors, insurance, coverage, politics over the ACA, the education of those doctors, the supply chain of the hospitals, and the production of medical supplies all have played a role in this. There’s just thousands of things that have to change or we’re going to see more of this.

    The entire thing is predicated on a completely unsustainable economic model. This system we have is completely unsustainable. It was never sustainable, it’s just that the losses had to eventually add up enough to run the thing into the ground. And this isn’t limited to just Red States, it’s just that the Red States are the ones least prepared for this slowly building problem. This issue is coming for everywhere. There’s no hospital that’s going to survive this if we do not fundamentally change the system upon which our healthcare is built on.

    There are just too many flaws to band-aid here. We have to have a massive overhaul of our system or people are literally going to die. The problem is, that we can’t tell who is going to be at the steering wheel to direct those changes. There has to be a shared vision between the two major political parties that can endure for decades to ensure that whatever new systems is made, is actually built. If the two parties that run our government can never agree, hang it up folks, we’re done here. I know some people are going to take that as an invite to bash the other party, but at the end of the day, we either all work together or we don’t.

    We have to have some sort of change to our system like yesterday. It needs to be a massive change that take effect at ALL of the layers within the healthcare system. We cannot keep making minor incremental changes, it’s just plugging one hole in the dam only for another one to spring forth.


  • I looked at that picture that they had up for that “100,000” headcount. All I know is that there’s a lot of people on Trump’s team and in Wildwood, NJ who are extremely bad at estimating headcount. That picture of the crowd at it’s largest is (being absolutely generous here) is roughly 20,000 tops. 100,000 people is a massive amount of people, like it is a lot of people. There are zero ways there’s 100,000 in that picture. When you hit 100,000 people, you know it, because it’s an ungodly amount of people.








  • And just so we’re clear, I’m not saying everything Leah said is golden. Humans are human and say things that don’t jive 100% of the time. It’s entirely possible for something to have both folks handle a situation in a manner that is less than ideal. All I’m indicating is for you to step back for a second. It will absolutely help you out here.

    Ideally you can perhaps look at this from Leah’s point of view. But that’s solely up to you. Best thing for you though is to just bring it down a notch. That’s the only thing that I’m pretty sure is a good idea right now. What’s past that, I think only you can best determine that. But I honestly think some deep breaths are what’s immediately needed.

    I’m pretty sure post that you’ll have it handled. And I don’t know how old you are but I’ll say that panicked hyping a situation only gets worse as you age. So developing ways to deal with it is just part of growing up for 30 to 50 year olds. This notion that we’re done “growing” at some magical number is bunk.

    I had my car start stuttering on the highway once and thought for sure that I was going to die. My brain just spiraled a situation where I needed to just pull over and see what was wrong into a flight or fight response. Ultimately, it was just a loose hose and I fixed it. But for a moment there I was panicking myself way past a point of being reasonable.

    It just happens and sometimes we just need to force ourselves to take a pause. That’s all the advice I think I can give you here. I think once you chill for a bit, you’re smart enough to figure out the what’s next part.


  • when I was really just frustrated

    Buddy that all reads as harassing. The IRC logs are especially a bad look for you, because you said:

    im looking to add this board to my resume

    And now that entire chat log is tied to it.

    I’m not sure why you thought hounding someone and harping about it for nearly eight hours on IRC was a good idea. But now you’ve come to the Fediverse to find some absolution or something.

    You can be frustrated, that’s fine, but when that frustration turns into that long of a hanging on the bell that’s evident in that chat log and then two hours later you came here with this, that is past frustration.

    Leah also indicated:

    if i give in to you now, you will try to harass/abuse me again in the future.

    And Leah has a point. You’ve shown no sign of taking a moment to collect yourself. I get you are upset. Sometimes the best way to handle upset is to just shut up for a day or two. And trust me, I struggle with doing that myself.

    Like everything you’ve done in your frustration, I’ve been down that road. And I’m pretty sure in your head you are telling yourself, but the difference is that… because that’s exactly what I’d say to someone telling me this. That my situation is different somehow and that I must rectify this injustice immediately!

    and if it was bullying, I apologize then.

    What you need to do is two things. One, learn from this so that in the future you can do… Two, chill out. I think you’ll find in more professional environments sorry is okay, but I have learned from my mistakes and will do better is more preferred.

    This whole thing could have been max three messages on IRC. “Why wasn’t I credited? What was wrong with my submission? How do I improve going forward?” The end.

    I think the biggest thing here for me is that in open projects, leads are fielding multiple people and working on their stuff. Every message you send is “Hey stop what you are doing and pay attention to me!” So you really want to be respectful of their time by really trying to be succinct on whatever is bugging you.

    And you are on the contrib page.

    All round good guy, an honest and loyal fan.

    And I think you’re wondering how “testing” vs “developed” looks on your resume? But that chat log is now going to be front and center no matter what’s said on the contrib page. It really doesn’t matter if you got “developed” pasted on the contrib page.

    All of this Mastodon interactions and IRC logs isn’t a good look. It’s not the end of the world. I think everyone has felt frustration like this before, like there’s some magical set of words to say that’ll fix everything. But you’ve got to let it go. You’re just digging down with posts like this. And you don’t have to let it go forever, just you’ve really added a lot of friction to have this go surface of the sun warm. You need to let it cool, come back refreshed, and maybe see if you can repair the relationship you have with the team.

    But you’ve got to understand. Your post here paints one picture and your interactions with Leah on Mastodon and IRC are something else. And that difference between the is especially not good as it comes off as a lot of sour and bitterness on this “slight” that you perceived as such an injustice.

    And hell’s bells. If you sit on this for seventy-two hours and you still feel massively wronged, go fork you a project and call it FOSSITboot or whatever and show everyone your prowess. If you’ve got skills to pay the bills, then if you build it they will come.

    Lots of love for you, but just take a moment from everything. I assure you, it’ll do you wonders to decompress.


  • It absolutely could. Heck, RPMs and DEBs pulled from random sites can do the exact same thing as well. Even source code can hide something if not checked. There’s even a very famous hack presented by Ken Thompson in 1984 that really speaks to the underlying thing, “what is trust?”

    And that’s really what this gets into. The means of delivery change as the years go by, but the underlying principal of trust is the thing that stays the same. In general, Canonical does review somewhat apps published to snapcraft. However, that review does not mean you are protected and this is very clearly indicated within the TOS.

    14.1 Your use of the Snap Store is at your sole risk

    So yeah, don’t load up software you, yourself, cannot review. But also at the same time, there’s a whole thing of trust here that’s going to need to be reviewed. Not, “Oh you can never trust Canonical ever again!” But a pretty straightforward systematic review of that trust:

    • How did this happen?
    • Where was this missed in the review?
    • How can we prevent this particular thing that allowed this to happen in the future?
    • How do we indicate this to the users?
    • How do we empower them to verify that such has been done by Canonical?

    No one should take this as “this is why you shouldn’t trust Ubuntu!” Because as you and others have said, this could happen to anyone. This should be taken as a call for Canonical to review how they put things on snapcraft and what they can do to ensure users have all the tools so that they can ensure “at least for this specific issue” doesn’t happen again. We cannot prevent every attack, but we can do our best to prevent repeating the same attack.

    It’s all about building trust. And yeah, Flathub and AppImageHub can, and should, take a lesson from this to preemptively prevent this kind of thing from happening there. I know there’s a propensity to wag the finger in the distro wars, tribalism runs deep, but anything like this should be looked as an opportunity to review that very important aspect of “trust” by all. It’s one of the reasons open source is very important, so that we can all openly learn from each other.



  • NOTE: This is to add some context to the whole Special Counsel argument.

    28 CFR 600 is what covers all the ins and outs of a Special Counsel appointment. Note the CFR there? That stands for Code of Federal Regulations. Regulations are created by the various Executive offices, but you might ask yourself, how can the Executive create something without Congress being involved, and this gets into the fine details of how the US Government works.

    As you know LAW requires that Congress pass a bill in both chambers and then send it to the President for a signature or a veto. And if vetoed then Congress can override it with a ⅔ vote. LAWs usually don’t get into a lot of detail, they’ll usually do something along the lines of:

    The United States Department of Defense shall build unto Congress an army worthy of Mordor and it shall not exceed the cost of $14 bazillion. Additionally, the following units are required to be purchased (insert a lengthy list of things Lockheed-Martin sent to Congress)

    And that’s about it. Now the exact method for “who’s going to the local fighter jet store to pick up a few F-15s, who’s building the antitank missles, where is this all being delivered to, etc” All of that falls into whoever was named, in this case it’s the DoD. So now the DoD will begin issuing RULES and REGULATIONS on how to get that LAW done. How that happens is way longer than I want to talk for, but it’s complex.

    Okay. So we’ve covered CFR. There is also USC which stands for United States Code. This is those LAWs “codified”. A law comes out of Congress as Public Law (or private law, but we’re not going to cover that). This is usually listed as Pub. L (Congress number)-(Number of law that has successfully been enacted). We are currently on the 118th Congress, thus the first law passed by this Congress would be called Pub. L 118-1 (note this does not apply to public law prior to 1901) All public, private, and everything else that comes from Congress gets put into a giant collection of books called the United States Statutes at Large (Stat), this is everything that has ever come from Congress. It is in the format of (volume) Stat. (numbered item), so the 5th thing in volume 23 is 23 Stat. 5 All of this eventually get codified so if one Pub. L cancels another prior Pub. L or amends it or whatever, the sum of all of those changes are in a final form in USC. Which that format is (title) USC (subsection). A title is a BROAD (and boy do I mean that word) subject matter. So like Title 16 is “CONSERVATION” and that is like National Park, endangered species, and just a smattering of all kinds of other things that remotely relate to that subject. Title 26 is all about taxes!! Subsection is a great way to drill down to a single thing in USC, but there’s also Chapters, Subsections, and so forth. And each title uses it’s own little scheme of subdivision, so boy oh boy is it fun to go through.

    So quick recap, Congress passes various kinds of bills, the public law bills that get enacted are Pub. L, those are filed into Stat., and then any that cancel/update/amend/change previous ones are coalesced into USC. So you’d find all the historic tax brackets in Stat., you’d find the current tax brackets in USC. And all of those were established by Pub. L.

    Okay, so I think that’s everything background you need. Sorry if you already knew it.

    So 28 CFR 600, since its a regulation, has to state whence it gets its authority. That’s a requirement of all regulations. 28 CFR 600 cites the following:

    • 5 USC 301
    • 28 USC 509
    • 28 USC 510
    • 28 USC 515-519

    5 USC 301 is a broad grant that basically says each department head may create regulations that they are granted power by law to do. It also bars, by default, the withholding of information from the public (but that’s not material here).

    28 USC 509 and 510 are things about what the Attorney General (AG) can do and says that the AG is officially cleared to cite Title 5 powers (see that whole 5 USC 301 thing).

    28 USC 515 is the first time we hear about Special Counsel. 516 to 519 indicate who can summon up one and who a Special Counsel can talk to etc. So specifically, all the various paragraphs in 28 CFR 600 fall into 28 USC 515(a) for Trump.

    The Attorney General …, or any attorney specially appointed by the Attorney General under law, may, when specifically directed by the Attorney General, conduct any kind of legal proceeding, civil or criminal, including grand jury proceedings and proceedings before committing magistrate judges, which United States attorneys are authorized by law to conduct…

    Which Trump’s legal team says the President cannot be one of those brought under this law. Because separation of powers.

    So since 28 CFR 600 cites power from 28 USC 515, which cannot possibly have a President in there, 28 CFR 600 fails because 28 USC 515 fails. Or at least that’s the theory.


  • This gets complicated because the media does indeed summarize it as just simple “Presidential immunity” but Trump’s lawyers are approaching this legal theory from various angles all which have different underlying basis.

    There are two cases to note here. A civil trail related to the January 6th attempted coup and a criminal case related to the same event. The US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit denied cause for dismissal in that case based on the legal theory that Trump was immune from CIVIL prosecution on that mater for having been once the President. Trump was granted the ability to carry the three judge ruling to SCOTUS to which Trump’s legal passed on moving on that appeal by allowing the time period to elapse.

    The criminal case is being handled by Special Prosecutor Jack Smith, that is in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia and is being handled by Judge Tanya Chutkan. Trump’s legal team has recently filed with the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit a request for dismissal based on the legal theory that Trump is immune from CRIMINAL prosecution on that matter for having been once the President. That is pending schedule upon the docket.

    Okay with that background. This case is being heard in the United States District Court Southern District of Florida, this is related to criminal charges that Trump mishandled classified documents in violation of the Presidential Records Act. This story circles around Trump’s legal team filing a request with the aforementioned court, a request for dismissal based on the legal theory that Trump is immune from questioning about the classification of records for having been once the President.

    Interestingly, part of the cause for dismissal that was also filed in this filing were the following (and no, I shit you not):

    • The law is vague and cannot be ruled upon, therefore the law should be ruled unconstitutional. (Basically vague laws = unconstitutional).
    • The law targets Presidents to which, a law cannot regulate Presidents and thus should be ruled unconstitutional. (Presidents cannot be restricted by laws passed by Congress)
    • Special Counsel appointments are not well founded in law and are therefore unconstitutional. (* I’ll have a second comment on this if you really, really want to know the basis for this one.)
    • The Presidential Records Act in it’s entirety is unconstitutional. (Kitchen sink attempt.)

    There were additional motions filed with the court but those were done via email and have not been released by the Court at this time.

    Yeah, it’s easy to be confused because there’s a lot of this going around. But so far, SCOTUS hasn’t actually ruled on the matter to put the nail into the proverbial coffin. But we don’t hear about the Trump legal team basically starting every court case thus far with a motion to have the Judge recuse themselves because it is impossible for them to be fair. Why is it impossible for them to be fair? Changes from Judge to Judge, but the most recent one was because of an opinion the Judge had shared in her personal capacity that Trump’s legal team felt was too Democrat-ish to render fair rulings. It was summarily dismissed.

    So Trump’s legal team uses a lot of various arguments with slight changes a lot in various venues. So that might be why you keep hearing them in the news.