For serious comments, my true audience is the unknown reader. For jokes, my audience is myself alone.

Lemmy dev suggestions: Remove all downvotes. User blocks should keep the blockee from seeing the blocker.

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: September 27th, 2023

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  • We don’t know the exact circumstances, but CBP stands for Customs and Border Protection.

    I’ve heard of Customs agents demanding people let them search phones without a warrant and without probable cause, and so foreigners can be refused entry. We probably all heard the story of it happening for a person who had a meme of JD Vance on his phone.

    But the article says that this guy is based out of Atlanta, so I’m guessing he’s a US citizen. I’m not sure they can refuse entry to a US citizen based on this.

    Either way, you should never give permission to anybody to search your phone. Maybe you’ve broken a law that you didn’t know was a law, and you’ve just handed the evidence over to the police. Or maybe you have evidence that can convict somebody else who didn’t know they broke a law.

    I don’t know what this means for people crossing the US border. Now is a bad time to enter the United States.




  • It’s more like the ancient phenomenon of spaghetti code. You can throw enough code at something until it works, but the moment you need to make a non-trivial change, you’re doomed. You might as well throw away the entire code base and start over.

    And if you want an exact parallel, I’ve said this from the beginning, but LLM coding at this point is the same as offshore coding was 20 years ago. You make a request, get a product that seems to work, but maintaining it, even by the same people who created it in the first place, is almost impossible.




  • Skandalakis (I can’t believe that’s actually his name) said he appointed himself to the case because every other prosecutor refused the case.

    Skandalakis was forced to either appoint himself or let the case be dismissed because there are no prosecutors.

    I’m not sure why he asked the judge to dismiss the case. Considering it already got several convictions, it seems ridiculous. Maybe Skandalakis is also corrupt. Maybe he’s scared. Maybe it’s because it’s too hard to prosecute while Trump is president.

    Regardless, I’m tired of seeing all of these criminals go unpunished. Everybody who is letting them off is a collaborator.







  • Oh there definitely is a way to defend it.

    Reading your comment, I have realized that you are correct, there are at least several ways to defend it contrary to what I said, but I think your specific example is flawed.

    Trans people are evil incarnate trying to destroy humanity.

    I said it was impossible to defend “without basing it on bigotry,” and that is simple bigotry. I do agree with you that this is almost certainly the sort of argument you’d hear from a Trump supporter.

    Like I said, though, reading your comment, I did realize that it’s theoretically possible to defend without bigotry, just as long as you allow fantasy and insanity as defenses. Like, if they say, “God told me it was the job of religious people to take away the pensions of trans people,” that would not be bigotry.

    Also, sheer ignorance and stupidity can be a non-bigoted defense. You know, like, “Trump would never do something evil. Therefore, this must be good.”

    There may even be some sort of pedantic defense, something like, “People who are dishonorably discharged are supposed to lose their pension.” (I don’t know that they were dishonorably discharged, or that people who are dishonorably discharged are supposed to lose their pensions. It’s just an example of how there might be a pedantic argument.)

    I’d be interested if there was actually an argument that could be used to defend Trump that didn’t insult everybody’s intelligence, though.




  • The question isn’t whether a flung sandwich can cause bodily harm. It’s whether that flung sandwich did cause bodily harm. They do make that clear in the article. The title simply doesn’t reflect that.

    Also, like they talked about in the article, the evidence didn’t match the officer’s testimony. He said that the sandwich exploded all over him and got mustard everywhere. But pictures of the sandwich after it landed showed the wrapper still fully covering the sandwich.

    The guy who threw the sandwich probably committed some sort of minor crime, but it wasn’t the one he was charged with, and it’s hard to believe the prosecution when their star witness seems to be lying his ass off.