how I wish the Republicans stayed in their reservations…

we’re so past 5D chess that we’ve hit the Curse of Dimensionality…

it’s an enhanced driver’s license. I showed my passport and everything. if you look ar that fee schedule, I paid the “upgrade” fee ($7) because I already had a regular driver’s license, and it expires two years from now, so $7*2=$14.

it’s taboo up here too among the Salish people (Pacific Northwest.) interesting how it’s shared.

I only had to pay $14 here in WA. maybe it’s different depending?

hungry constituents will pressure their representatives to revoke the tariffs.

I’m fine with automation if we can have fully automated luxury communism!

China is likely to get AI before the US does. Innovation here is slowing down.

the 8bit FOX interview with Tucker Carlson felt incredibly on theme. you could seriously remake Papers, Please with these aesthetics.

I’m a big fan and longtime reader of Derek Lowe. He called attention to suppression of grant funding for hypotheses that challenged the amyloid hypothesis, and the shockingly partisan and dogmatic behavior of journal referees and NIH advisors in the field. I’ve been following his coverage ever since he started reporting disappointing readouts from clinical trials on the anti-amyloid mABs.

His concern that this class of therapy is “pathological science” (think cold fusion, or EmDrive, or string theory - not outright quackery, but hypotheses that are endlessly tweaked to justify the latest failures) are valid.

However, the newest mABs really do seem to have a small but statistically significant effect on slowing disease progression. Enough to justify the risks of brain swelling? Or the cost? Probably not. But I think Derek has perhaps swung too far in the opposite direction. It’s too early to call time on this therapeutic target. If it’s marginally but truly effective, we should try to figure out why, and keep tweaking the drugs to see if they can be improved.

Donepezil was a dead end, but it’s too early to say if Aduhelm is too.

So tired of hearing that the right is a champion of free speech.

nix collect-garbage, comrade! there’s also another command to clean up older generations. if you’re using git to version your nix config, you only really need to keep two generations: the current, and your last successful boot, since you can recover by git checkout.

look into NixOS! there might already be a package for it. and NixOS can be very good about not duplicating dependencies.

the pie is getting smaller but the oligarchs are getting bigger slices.

usually when politicians use Signal it’s because they don’t want their messages FOIA’d or audited. I can’t really imagine Vance or Hegseth worrying about that, though, which makes me wonder if it’s just horrible opsec, if they can’t be bothered to use a SCIF or what?

fun fact: Windows uses 9p for bridging the Windows and Linux filesystems with WSL2. the devs had excellent taste in protocols.

you’re right, apparently. from Wikipedia:

The U.S. Army defines assault rifles as “short, compact, selective-fire weapons that fire a cartridge intermediate in power between submachine gun and rifle cartridges.”

AR-15 is semi-auto rather than selective fire, so it’s not an assault rifle. I had mistakenly conflated assault rifles with “assault weapons,” which is a separate (and more vague and contested) term.

you can still buy an M-16 or AK-47, but it has to be transferrable (grandfathered in before FOPA) and you need extra paperwork.

you can buy an AR-15 in any gun store. they even make a “JR-15,” for kids. no, I’m not kidding.

that they’re willing to let some of their kids die rather than get a vaccine they think might turn them trans or autistic shows how much they value the lives of trans and autistic people.

darkly hilarious that all they had to do was put a red bar behind the “APPROVE” and it tricked the three remaining brain cells of their viewers.