Notices by Don Whiteside (donw@mastodon.coffee)

@inthehands “Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.”
Napoleon Bonaparte

@adora @otte_homan @zacwest you’re looking for DeDRM.

The bigger challenge is downloading all the books if you have a lot. I had to find some script on GitHub and poke at it to get it to batch download all my kindle books.

@inthehands I am relieved that I live in Arlington county, where there's very little chance there will be any advance knuckling under to this and terrified that we're in a state where the executive branch is run by a republican governor, lt gov, and ag.

It seems to me the bet the Trump admin is making - to the extent they do any planning - is that enough folks will be willing to just toss our trans brethren under the bus if it becomes costly enough. I wish i was sure it was a bad bet.

@inthehands One of the pleasures of being a programmer in my 50s is that I no longer feel the need to pretend I hate things - say, implicit returns - for anything like any objective reason. I just don’t like it! Not only won’t I argue with you about it, I don’t care if you agree or not.

Imma start a new religion that revolves around the phrase “it’s not for me.”

@mekkaokereke @acdha Hitler liked dogs. Why would we need to validate Hitler to say nice things about dogs?

“If every kid fucker in Congress resigned there’d be way more democrats left than republicans” is a super weird take from a sitting Republican.

I’m more than willing to believe it’s true, but it’s a hell of a thing to admit about your own squad.
https://www.threads.net/@takebackflorida/post/DCpjl6GyWqd

@Lana @inthehands Or a plain and simple “ew.”

@jwz See number 15. It came up a lot back when a restaurant in central Virginia told that Huckabee Sanders woman to piss off.

https://ohr.dc.gov/protectedtraits

@jwz @emag Not in SF, anyway. Don’t open a club in DC - political orientation IS protected here.

@jasonkoebler @inthehands I’d believe what I read in tea leaves before something about technology that “cops theorize.” I’ve lost track of the number of false news reports I’ve seen about technology concerns from credulous police departments.

Seems far more likely that if they can’t get a cell signal that they’re burning a lot more battery trying to connect to a tower and then running out of juice/overheating and rebooting. But the update explanation conveniently makes it someone else’s fault.

@MisuseCase @futurebird @inthehands That’s my belief, and it jibes well with the growing picture that turnout was similar to 2020 except a lot of democrats simply didn’t vote this year. “I’m not gonna put a woman in charge” abstainers explains that difference pretty well.

@inthehands I can no longer count the things that were disqualifying and now are just Tuesday. It’s mind boggling to imagine we bounced cabinet members because they didn't pay taxes on a nanny. I’m not sure keeping a nanny as an involuntary unpaid prisoner would stay in the news 3 days anymore.

I just meant to point out that the attack vector here is a very foreseeable result of that 90s era action that continues to cause problems to this day. It's easier to hide something in a haystack.

@inthehands Bills drafted by lobbyists is a thing that happens across the board. It’s in large part a function of how Gingrich and his ilk cut huge quantities of the support staff in Congress as well as fucking up pay such that it’s hard to retain skilled staff. Where thirty years ago the offices would have people inside to turn to to write legislation, now they’re much more reliant on outside resources.

@nafmo @scott The culture didn’t. Car culture did. https://www.vox.com/2015/1/15/7551873/jaywalking-history#

@inthehands hey look @jwz brought us an example. https://mastodon.social/@jwz/113092305920577266

@inthehands Shit, we can't even get the paper to stop reporting percentage changes without any basis. I can't count the number of times WaPo has published stories about a percentage increase in crime on the Metro without any indication of how many crimes there were before or after, much less a context of how many rides there are a day.

Up 43% in daily incidents! Ok.... from 20 crimes or 200,000? Compared to how many trips?

It boggles my mind that people leave j-school so innumerate.

@inthehands The whole LLM situation makes me flash back on the daily; I remember clearly what it looked and felt like siting in that software class in the early 90s, talking about expert systems vs neural networks.

The neural networks part shared the story of the tank spotting system that they trained to perfection till it consistently found the tanks. Till they “tried it in prod” and it turned out the training set tank photos were all on a cloudy day.

That data set was at least consistent.

@inthehands I think you’re right on all of this. I do wonder if perhaps it would still represent an improvement. After all, one of the biggest mistakes people make (IMNSHO) is they compare a flawed outcome to a utopian possibility, not the way something will actually happen otherwise.

I’m less worried right now about the flawed self drive solutions than I am flawed legal structures around them. This situation in Cali where nobody currently can be fined for their misbehavior is untenable.

@inthehands Our local school district has instituted a fairly aggressive policy on retakes and the dialog in local parent forums is just an astonishing wall of folks telling on themselves that way. Whenever I interact with them with my stock “are we doing better for the student long-term by working towards mastery of the subject or by issuing grades to assess knowledge at a specific point in time?” I get back various sputtering about consequences and rewards for high achievers.

@inthehands @Lana Yeah the operation that manages our meal accounts charges $2 to reload, regardless of how much you’re adding to the account. If you can afford to drop $100 at a time it’s less than the CC processing fee (which leads me to suspect they’re paid by the district above and beyond this fee) but for anyone else it’s pretty punitive when lunches are $3.50.

But the cost of these programs don’t count when they’re paid by citizens and are not on a budgetary line item, right?