The overall goal is to cut the agency’s budget by fifty percent. Shedd suggested using AI to analyze contracts for redundancies, root out fraud, and facilitate a reduction in the federal workforce by automating much of their work.

I am bullish on AI in the long run.

I am skeptical that given the state of affairs in 2025, you can reasonably automate half of the federal government, via AI or any other means.

I also don’t think that the way to do this is to lay off half of the federal workforce and then, after the fact, see what can be automated. If you look at the private sector automating things, it tends to hedge its bets. Take self-service point-of-sale kiosks. We didn’t just see companies simply lay off all cashiers. Instead, we saw them brought in as an option, then had the company look at what worked and what didn’t work – and some of those were really bad at first – and then increase the rate of deployment once it had confidence in the solution and a handle on the issues that came with them.

Maybe you want to wait and see how their stuff plays out in the US before doing the same thing yourself.

You might decide that you don’t like it much.

Also Trump views VAT

I don’t know about that. The problem is that you cannot take Trump statements as straightforward representations of his views. He says plenty of things just because they’re politically useful, without regard for truth.

US trade delegate Jamieson Greer has called on American companies to report unfair trade practices by partner countries, according Budliger Artieda. This applies in particular to G20 countries and states with a strongly positive trade balance with the US.

You would not expect an efficient world market to have a zero bilateral trade balance between each pair of countries in it.

Say we have a world with three countries.

Country A is good at producing apples and consumes a lot of beans.

Country B is good at producing beans and consumes a lot of cherries.

Country C is good at producing cherries and consumes a lot of apples.

No country on there should have a zero bilateral trade balance with any other country. Country A should run a deficit with B and surplus with C. B should run a deficit with C and surplus with A. C should run a deficit with A and surplus with B.

You could, with sufficient regulation, prevent that from happening, but you’d be giving up the gains you get from comparative advantage.

Armed with this new tool, which enables raw access to Bluetooth traffic, Targolic discovered hidden vendor-specific commands (Opcode 0x3F) in the ESP32 Bluetooth firmware that allow low-level control over Bluetooth functions.

In total, they found 29 undocumented commands, collectively characterized as a “backdoor,” that could be used for memory manipulation (read/write RAM and Flash), MAC address spoofing (device impersonation), and LMP/LLCP packet injection.

Espressif has not publicly documented these commands, so either they weren’t meant to be accessible, or they were left in by mistake.

I’d kind of like to know whether these can be used against an unpaired device or not. That’d seem to have a pretty dramatic impact on the scope of the vulnerability.

There’s an open-source CLI client to download GOG games, lgogdownloader. It’s packaged in Debian.

I’ve been telling myself since about 2016 that I would save up to go all in and build a solid gaming desktop.

Finally, I was at the point of “Fuck it, I’m tired of waiting. I’m buying a 5080, even if it costs as much as 2 PS5s.”

I assume that whatever you’re running right now isn’t terribly new if you’ve been thinking about upgrading for nine years.

The 5080 is a 16GB card. A quick skim on Amazon suggests that 16GB Nvidia cards are in short supply, but that you can get a 16GB AMD GPU without problems.

https://www.videocardbenchmark.net/compare/4982vs5721vs4917/Radeon-RX-7600-XT-vs-GeForce-RTX-5080-vs-Radeon-RX-7800-XT

They aren’t quite as fast on the Passmark benchmark as the 5080, but they also cost a lot less (even if the 5080 were available), and I assume that they’d be a lot faster than whatever you’re running now.

Could go with that (or something less-fancy) and then if you felt that you wanted to spend more for more performance, do so when GPUs become available.

I mean, people do use the Web UI.

I was reading some articles the other day, and the impression I have is that that’s really not true for at least Trump.

The Trump route was more:

• Conservatives in the US felt that media had a liberal bias. Whether it did or didn’t doesn’t matter for this discussion — that was the perception.

• Fox News offers a viewpoint appealing to conservatives. It becomes essentially the only mainstream conservative media outlet. Liberal viewers watch a variety of news media, but Fox News dominates among conservatives.

• Fox News — already somewhat opinion-based from the start — starts to veer off into conspiracy land. Because so many conservatives watch Fox News, this has a major impact.

There’s some back and forth here. It’s not that Fox just pushed ideas that were out there, but that they’re willing to show material based on what people will watch, and they gained more viewers than they lost if they ran bonkers stuff.

https://www.cnn.com/2021/06/08/media/fox-news-hoax-paperback-book/index.html

There wasn’t really any major center-right mainstream news source other than Fox News, so if Fox shifts into conspiracy-land, so does the conservative public.

I dunno. Maybe the answer is something like a news source somewhere between CNN and Fox News. Something that a conservative audience is comfortable watching, but doesn’t fly off the handle to the degree that Fox has. It maybe can’t capture an audience that’s as large, but it only needs enough to be viable.

I mean, there are center-right media sources like the Wall Street Journal, but those are kinda not aimed at mass audiences.

If you start making up your own law for international waters, it runs the risk that other countries make up their own for your vessels.

The EU could maybe impose its will on most countries in the world by simply threatening retaliation. But it’d be a big step, not one I’d take lightly.

Before reaching that point, I’d aim for a new treaty adjusting the rules.

Reserved for future use: krex & krox

Poor “kryx”.

Three-letter words that can be typed with one hand, since I have to type them frequently.

$ egrep "^([qwertasdfgzxcvb]{3}|[yuiophjkllnm]{3})$" /usr/share/dict/words

My understanding is that pressure on both Ukraine and Russia was basically part of the Trump administration’s plan.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keith_Kellogg

In June 2024, Kellogg and Frederick H. Fleitz, who had also served on Trump’s National Security Council staff, presented Trump with a detailed peace plan to end Russia’s war in Ukraine.[30] The plan proposes a ceasefire on the current front lines, forcing both Russia and Ukraine into peace talks, and continued military aid to Ukraine if it agrees to a ceasefire and peace talks. If Russia did not also agree to a ceasefire and peace talks, the United States would increase arms supplies to Ukraine. Ukraine would not have to formally cede the occupied and annexed territories to Russia, but would postpone its plans for NATO membership for a longer period of time, and the territories currently under Russian occupation would remain under de facto Russian control. Kellogg and Fleitz said their main concern is that the war has devolved into attrition warfare that could wipe out an entire generation of young men in both countries.[31][32]

In November 2024, President-elect Trump selected Kellogg to be his special envoy for Ukraine and Russia.[2]

Michael Kofman’s has been skeptical of Trump’s direction here, has said that he’s likely to have problems getting Russia to go along with anything that isn’t total capitulation for Ukraine, because the Kremlin thinks that it’s going to win this militarily. He’s also pointed out that Ukraine doesn’t have any incentive to go along with something that puts it in a weaker position, which basically anything that Russia would accept, as things stand, would. And the war only stops if both sides feel that they’re better off with it stopping.

The US has a finite amount of leverage here, unless it’s willing to do something like put troops in, which it isn’t willing to do.

EDIT: I also watched an analysis the other day from someone taking the position that Trump really views this in terms of scoring domestic political points — like, he’s the peacemaker president, and Biden is the incompetent war president, which is a theme that he’s been campaigning on. If one agrees with that, he also wants the war ended quickly, which places even more impractical constraints on Rubio and similar.

So, to expand on that, at least in US law (and I’d assume elsewhere), if you let people use your trademark for other products and don’t legally challenge it, the trademark can become genericized, which means that you lose the exclusive right to use it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generic_trademark

I don’t know if that was the concern here, but generally, it’s true that there’s an obligation on trademark holders to actively defend their trademarks or lose them.

Hey everyone,

Unfortunately, I have to take down this project. The team at Playstack reached out to me in a very polite and professional manner, requesting its removal, and I fully respect their wishes.

My understanding is that Canada has selected their items to target politically-sensitive areas that have favored Trump tariffs on Canada.

It occurs to me that it would probably also be possible for Americans who disagree with Trump’s tariff policy to avoid buying these things as long as Canada has them blacklisted, which would probably have a larger economic impact than merely Canadians doing so. Probably would need someone to do up a list of the items that Canada has blacklisted and publish it.

That would be a way of contributing to the leverage that Canada has in trying to push for open trade between Canada and the US.

The manufacturer of Jack Daniels has already been complaining.

Google and Apple and others already do that ad hoc, using signal strength from Bluetooth and WiFi beacons. Can contribute to that by just setting up a wireless access point or several near where you want more signal. Doesn’t even need to be Internet-connected.

Reddit will now issue warnings to users who “upvote several pieces of content banned for violating our policies” within “a certain timeframe,” starting first with violent content, the company announced on Wednesday.

Hmm. What does this pertain to?

kagis

https://www.theverge.com/news/606904/reddit-rules-bans-violence-doxing-elon-musk-doge

Reddit has seen an increase in rule-breaking posts across “several communities,” and it has issued a temporary ban on one that featured users calling for violence against people who work for the Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).

That community, r/WhitePeopleTwitter, was given a 72-hour ban on Tuesday, as reported by Engadget. Screenshots shared on X show multiple examples of the threatening posts. Musk later reposted the screenshots, claiming that the users have “broken the law.”

In a note on the subreddit, Reddit says it was banned “due to a prevalence of violent content” and that “inciting and glorifying violence or doxing” violate Reddit’s rules. An unnamed Reddit admin said the ban was meant to be a “cooling-off period” for the community.

Reddit also gave a full ban to a subreddit called r/IsElonDeadYet for violating rules “against posting violent content.” The unnamed admin said Reddit is taking steps “to ensure all communities can provide a safe environment for healthy conversation” in a post on r/RedditSafety.

Ah.

Ehhh. I mean, technically yes, but a proxy for search engine requests is probably functionally equivalent to the end user.

Also, if users don’t know that such a thing exists and goes looking for a “search engine”, they likely also want this.

One of my personal pet peeves is power stations — a big lithium-ion battery pack hooked up to a charge controller and inverter and USB power supply and with points to attach solar panels — being called a “solar generator”. It’s not a generator, doesn’t use mechanical energy. But…a lot of people who think “I need electricity in an outage” just go searching for “generator”. I don’t like the practice, but I think that the aim is less to deceive users and more to try to deal with the fact that they functionally act in much the same role and people might not otherwise think of them.

I am less sympathetic to vendors who do the same with calling evaporative coolers “air conditioners”. Those have some level of overlap in use, but are substantially different devices in price and capability.