Relative to a second currency, as a derivative on the foreign exchange market.

(For math people: this can be modeled as a hypergeometric distribution with N=48, K=13, n=8, k=0.)

I suspect most people haven’t heard these terms. But they should have studied basic combinatorics in high school, and that’s all it really is. You had a pool of 48 people from whom to choose 8, but you happened to choose them from the specific pool of 35 not up for reelection. So the likelihood of that happening randomly is just 35 choose 8 / 48 choose 8, which is indeed 6.2%.

And then there’s the federal minimum wage for tipped workers, which is a paltry $2.13/hr. If the tips don’t bring that up to at least match the normal minimum (the $7.25/hr figure) then employers are supposed to pay them more to make up the difference, but they basically never do. Tip theft is also super common, including with some of the online ordering apps.

Doing it on a weekday means it can be more disruptive to the status quo, but that also means more divisive. Doing it on the weekend means it’s easier for more people to participate and it can come across as more of a statement of unity.

I don’t think one is strictly better than the other. I do think this one will have an impact.

Ritalin isn’t methamphetamine, but Desoxyn is, and that’s also used for ADHD.

🎶 The dream of the 90’s is alive in Linux🎶

Maybe punished for incitement, on the grounds that it was “directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action”? Tough to prove in court but as a bystander I’m frustratingly unsurprised the one thing followed the other.

It’s because, for the most part, it doesn’t actually have access to the text itself. Before the data gets to the “thinking” part of the network, the words and letters have been stripped out and replaced with vectors. The vectors capture a lot of aspects of the meaning of words, but not much of their actual text structure.

Introducing the new Amazon Ring Defender–the only doorbell with a live video feed and live ammunition! Don’t like what you see happening on your doorstep? Now you don’t have to be home to defend your castle!

Why would you think it’s only foreign agents who would use ICE as cover to disappear politicians they don’t like?

Yeah, I definitely read that as an effort to preempt the folks who were going to yell about how clearly this means the Flipper Zero should be illegal. Hacking has been so poorly represented in TV and films that there are a distressing number of people who don’t realize the term can even have a positive connotation.

So, the EPA sets emissions rules for the country, on the grounds that it would be problematic for industry if there was a patchwork of 50 different sets of rules about this stuff. California got the feds to agree to let them set their own stricter limits, though, and allowed other states to sign on to also use California’s rules if they wanted to, which several did.

So I think what’s happening here is that the waivers are being rescinded. They’ve been in place for ages (at least 50 years, I think?) so it’s a huge departure from business as usual, but you know how Trump loves stomping on norms.

This article has some of the relevant points: https://www.npr.org/2025/05/22/nx-s1-5387729/senate-california-ev-air-pollution-waiver-revoked

Seriously. This is exactly what people object to about Windows Recall. In its re-released version at least it’s opt-in for now, but it’s still eerily close to this.

Good news on the latter front, actually: https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/tsmc-expands-investments-in-the-u-s-to-usd165-billion-with-new-fabs-and-r-and-d-center-a-closer-look

I guess I sort of agree? It’s a bit tricky to get it set up, for sure. Even just installing windows is probably beyond the average user, and this has a few more quirks and gotchas than normal.

E.g., in IoT LTSC 11 (which is what I’m actually currently using), when you connect a controller, it’ll bring up an error message about not having a handler for ms-gamebar, and fixing that calls for regedit. (One it’s fixed, though, it stays fixed.) It also got itself into a bit of a weird state during the initial installation where it wanted me to log in with a kind of account I don’t have, and while I was able to bypass that, I don’t think I did it in quite the right way, and it broke something in the install and I had to do an in-place repair install to fix it before it would install certain updates successfully. It was also failing to download the in-place repair install, so I had to look up how to do it manually using the install DVD I’d burned previously. But that fixed it, and it’s been fine since.

So, yeah, it’s got pitfalls and quirks and glitches. That’s also been my experience with other Windows installs, though, so it didn’t seem all that different in general.

But once you get those initial hurdles sorted out, it’s really just like normal Windows. Better, even, since it doesn’t have all the cruft built into it, like Cortana, Teams, OneDrive, start menu ads, nag screens about upgrading to 11, the Microsoft Store, etc. (Though you can add most of those if you really want them.) My aging parents aren’t willing to upgrade to 11 because they’re afraid too many things will have changed, and I’m thinking I’ll probably switch them to 10 IoT LTSC instead. I’ll just have to be careful to make sure everything they want to do works before I leave them to it. It still gets monthly security updates and everything.

Unless you switch to IoT LTSC, which will continue to get security updates until 2032. It’s kinda bullshit that they’re still making the security patches and then just refusing to give them to consumer 10 users.

He actually does have one positive trait: he’s open to the idea of psychedelics for the treatment of mental health disorders. Past administrations have had way too much love for the Nixon-era “War on Drugs” DEA schedule, which treats magic mushrooms as more dangerous than fentanyl. It doesn’t make up for all the other damage he’s doing, and even this one thing he probably won’t handle in an appropriate way, since he’s also, y’know, incompetent. But it’s conceivable that this one thing could move in a good direction despite his leadership.

There will probably be some slant in that direction, but there’ll be a much bigger slant towards killing the elderly, the immunocompromised, those who can’t afford medical care and time off, etc. As usual.

As far as I know there’s not a way to just add it to the house supply, like they do with water softeners in some places, but you can get drops you can add to an individual glass of water. There are also tablets you can take. What I do at this point is use a fluoride mouthwash in the evening (the purple listerine; you have to avoid eating or drinking for 30 minutes after using it, so the evening is convenient that way) and also get the fluoride treatment at my dental hygienist appointments, along with using a fluoride toothpaste (which you’re most likely already using).

It’s a hassle, though, especially during the transition. When I moved out here, my teeth got worse in a hurry until I adapted to this new routine.

Yeah, I started to write about that, but it’s unclear that this guy would have actually gained anything by getting out of the courtroom. A lot of folks are released pending trial, in which case there’s really no advantage to getting your friends to grab you out of court, rather than just, y’know, skipping town. If he was already in police custody, I imagine there actually would have been more checking of the authority.

But yeah, making court a place where your enemies know you’ll be there and they’re free to come and grab you is a terrible precedent anyway. If you can’t expect due process even in the courts, what does the rule of law even mean anymore?