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Cake day: August 9th, 2023

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  • I’m glad they reported on this, but the author needs to look into federal regulations for people who work on or hold federal contracts. There’s a ton of qualified language in there that makes it clear they didn’t do a ton of research. It’s actually much more black and white than they make it seem.

    I’ve worked as a federal contractor, and before I could even start onboarding, they do an intensive background check and interview where they ask probing questions about substance use (among many other things) and then they check up on your answers with a number of third parties (acquaintances, colleagues etc). Nearly without exception, if you want a job in the civil service, any prior drug use is almost always automatically disqualifying. Telling the truth about it doesn’t win you any favors with investigators either, so the general recommendation is that if you’ve smoked weed in the past, you must consistently lie about it, or you won’t get a federal job (or contracting job).

    And that’s just weed. This guy does and talks about doing hard drugs in public.

    The fact that it doesn’t seem to be a problem for someone who has pocketed such absurd amounts of taxpayer money from federal contracts, to openly use schedule 1 drugs in public, is one of the best examples of the legal double standards the rich have come to expect. Anyone who isn’t a billionaire would be prosecuted and jailed for the behavior Musk brags about. And they’d obviously never be awarded a federal contract.

    Drugs should be legal. But until they are, these double standards have got to go.



  • I come back to this problem every year or so because I’m never satisfied with my music metadata. Years ago I had my musicbrainz picard settings dialed in really nicely, where I could drag folder over and it would spit out the right thing like 7 out of 10 times. It still required a lot of doubled checking and manual oversight though, so I was never satisfied.

    I tried mediamonkey for a while, because it has decent metadata support and plugs into most of the expected APIs. But when all is said and done, all these tools use the same data sources, and none of them are exactly consistent with each other so matches aren’t as straightforward as they should be.

    Lidar never quite did it for me, so I haven’t looked at my install in a couple years. But based on @skoberlink@lemmy.world’s recommendation I’ll try a fresh install and see if get I better results this time. I’m always happy in the arr interfaces.


  • This may be splitting hairs, but this is being pushed on EPA scientists by the political appointees. This is why the politicization of these agencies is so critically dangerous. EPA scientists are incredibly talented and their recommendations are largely driven by good science. They know their shit. This is not that, this is political appointees forcing “interpretations” that the scientists themselves would undoubtedly take issue with.

    I’m not making excuses, this is bad no matter how you slice it, but blame should be directed at the political appointees.




  • I find Kenyatta’s comments to be pretty disingenuous, to be honest. He talks about how important it is that everything have the same source of truth, but then says shit like this:

    “We’re not for the incumbents; we’re also not for the challengers,” he said. “We are for listening to our voters who make the decisions about who they want our nominees to be.”

    That’s just laughably untrue. The DNC has almost always favored incumbents and establishment candidates, that’s why it’s so incredibly unpopular and why most Democrats don’t believe it represents their actual values.

    “You look at every story that’s written about this, and it’s, ‘Oh, my gosh, the party is doing this to David.’”

    No, I haven’t seen that narrative anywhere. What I have seen is a lot of disillusioned leftists pissed off on Hoggs’s behalf because of the intra-party double standard he has helped expose. Kenyatta harps about how unhelpful all the infighting is while he contributes to the infighting.


  • It’s not just that it was written by an LLM, it’s that you didn’t write it.

    This platform is for reading stuff written by people. Whether that’s news, comments, whatever. You’ll find plenty of AI communities here, but each community has a culture and norms, and you’re now feeling what it’s like to push against those norms.

    There’s an obvious difference in language and tone between LLMs and a genuine comment written by a living breathing human being. Most of your comments read like they were written by a PR firm, and that’s just not fun for anyone.

    Don’t rely on a machine to filter and improve your thoughts. Use your own thinking and writing to do that, otherwise you’ll quickly be blocked by all the humans here who actually participate.





  • I’m furious about this, and I don’t live in Georgia. The way the state treated opposition to this fascist fever dream was abhorrent and Anti-American. When I think about what these facilities are like, I can’t help but picture those propaganda videos of Al Qaeda training in the desert. I mean, they will certainly be training police to perfect the terror tactics that have kept Georgia law enforcement so racist and untrustworthy (no-knock warrants, swatting, shooting before asking questions, killing every dog they see for fun, etc. etc. etc.).

    Curious though, why include this part? Without any explanation it seems completely out of place. Also, why is this true, tariffs?

    It’s estimated that Atlanta’s 85-acre, $118 million training center — an increase from the previous estimate of $90 million — would cost more than double to build today.


  • It has definitely become more obvious lately, but this isn’t new. Anti-Zionism has been conflated with Antisemitism for as long as I can remember. I remember being called a “self-hating Jew” more than 20 years ago, for probing the myth that the IDF was the “most precise and humane army in the world.” That was a common trope in the 90s and 00s, but has always been utter bullshit.

    I was told I couldn’t be Jewish and called an “Arab-lover” for talking about my countless positive experiences being friends with Arabs, Palestinians, and Muslims in general. That they thought this was an insult just exposed their bigotry.

    Terminology changes, but there is rarely logic to raw hatred.


  • This is really well said. Throughout history, you can reliably find people on both sides of moral and humanitarian issues like this. There were Roman elite who spoke out against slavery in antiquity, there were Brits who mocked the American Colonies for owning slaves while founding a country based on freedom, there have always been men who believed in equal treatment and rights for women. Right and wrong is usually pretty clear, and in general regular people throughout the ages have been able to recognize which is which. Our values haven’t changed much, but our systems of power and accountability have.

    That said, I also believe a good amount of the right wing backlash against the internment camps was performative. Because up until relatively recently, many racists themselves understood that their beliefs were terrible, so they at least tried to hide their true feelings and spoke out against obvious atrocities like this in public. But that was only so they could be accepted by the wider culture, and so they could continue to participate in left-coded spaces. They don’t need to hide how awful they are anymore because the president is leading by example.




  • This is state-sponsored terrorism. Absolutely despicably evil that anyone would wake up one day and think to themself “what should I do today….oh I know, let’s go traumatize some Palestinian kids by kidnapping and torturing them.” What the fuck.

    What sets this government apart is the level of support and encouragement it provides to settlers, whether through supplying them with weapons or funding the creation of new outposts. This backing has enabled and emboldened settlers to carry out attacks on Palestinians, with the aim of displacing communities and annexing their land.