Joe ❌👑

(he/him) Aging tech nerd, living in Silicon Valley. I'm an avid hiker and geocacher.

I've recently retired after 30+ years working in electronic design automation. After retiring last year and doing the training, my new part-time gig is as a park docent at Big Basin Redwoods. You might find me at the visitor center or on the trails.

Instagram: not2b_joe
BlueSky: joe-not2b.bsky.social‬

Public Key

npub1wc5dayhk6slu44gj78xl5ec6gjpgghywcy40zemgcpg9evwkza8qxqdgz2

NIP-05 Address

not2b_at_sfba.social@momostr.pink

Profile Code

nprofile1qqs8v2x7jtmdg07265f0rn06vudyfq5ytj8vz2h3va5vq5zuk8tpwnspz3mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuerpd46hxtnfduqs6amnwvaz7tmwdaejumr0dsrt9pty

Publishing to

relay.damus.io

nos.lol

Author Public Key

npub1wc5dayhk6slu44gj78xl5ec6gjpgghywcy40zemgcpg9evwkza8qxqdgz2

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Last Notes

2026-04-07 17:13:57 UTC

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I wish, just once, that some journalist who is burnt out, pissed off, and who doesn't care if they get fired, would follow up a statement like this with something like "But Mr. Trump, you control nuclear weapons and based on recent behavior you are demented!"

2026-04-06 23:46:29 UTC

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It is particularly dangerous for mushroom loving immigrants/expats, because a mushroom that looks just like a delicious edible you're familiar with may destroy your liver. This happened to Vietnamese refugees in California who ate death caps, which look like an edible Southeast Asian mushroom but live up to their name.

2026-03-31 05:45:18 UTC

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It's posted to YouTube now: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QkC1aK7jfLo

2026-03-03 18:32:15 UTC

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The EU is one trading bloc. He can't cut off Spain without cutting off the EU as a whole. But he will probably back down on this threat after his people explain it to him.

2026-02-28 16:51:25 UTC

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Yes, but we will need people who will use the rules as aggressively as possible. We need prosecutions (while following due process). We're almost certainly going to need to expand the Supreme Court, which will probably require eliminating the filibuster at least on that issue, otherwise the Court will just make like the Iranian Council of Guardians and ban any efforts to repeal Trumpism. We'll need to replace some Dems via the primaries if they aren't up to doing what must be done.

2026-02-22 17:44:28 UTC

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If you are getting this because this post has reached your server and the quoted post has not, it seems like a bug. The server should fetch the quoted post and produce an informative message if it can't be retrieved.

2026-02-19 04:09:54 UTC

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That's great progress, though! Gained 2.5 years of reading level in one year. Way to go, Beth's kid!

2026-02-02 01:50:40 UTC

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I think you misunderstood me. Texas redrew their districts to get a GOP majority in more districts, *provided* that voters vote the same way that they voted in the past. If suddenly we see a 10 point swing in the D direction, the GOP could wind up with fewer seats than they would have had with the old district lines.

2026-02-01 15:31:32 UTC

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This is a sign that the recent gerrymander may backfire. To pick up more seats they made their margins slimmer.

2026-01-24 03:10:32 UTC

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Trinidad is a beautiful place. Glad to hear that you found good people there.

2025-12-09 01:59:55 UTC

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If a dementia patient who needs care manages to wander off, he or she is at severe risk, might die if the weather is bad, so I'm cool with issuing alerts for that.

2025-12-06 02:20:24 UTC

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Also he removed MLK day and Juneteenth from the list of free admission days. What do those days have in common?

2025-12-03 04:06:52 UTC

He's talking to you, Chuck and Dick. About time.
#uspol #BarackObama
https://www.salon.com/2025/12/02/get-out-of-the-way-obama-calls-on-old-folks-in-power-to-trust-young-activists-lawmakers/

2025-11-30 05:48:30 UTC

It's that time of year for banana slugs. Here's a pair that is preparing to mate. They have a ritual that can take hours. They are hermaphrodites, with both male and female organs, and both of these slugs might wind up pregnant and lay eggs. This was in Big Basin Redwoods Park, where now that it's the wetter time of year people report seeing hundreds on a hike, particularly just after a rain. #BananaSlugs #BigBasin #redwoods #photography
https://files.sfba.social/media_attachments/files/115/637/073/253/872/132/original/98af3797419e7702.jpg

2025-11-18 21:26:22 UTC

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Trump saw that it was going to pass no matter what he did, so he decided to tell them to pass it. He will come up with something else to prevent the dirt on him from coming out.

2025-11-10 02:02:01 UTC

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I am fine with your C program, a web app, a mobile phone app, whatever you want to use. But what your C program and a web app have in common is that no big corporations have to sign off for you to be able to use it and share it. That is the part that I like.

2025-11-10 01:41:32 UTC

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Probably. But this discussion started about PWAs. PWAs for Mastodon are no more at risk than Mastodon itself.

2025-11-10 01:36:51 UTC

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You are certainly correct, and a Mastodon PWA is even more insignificant, and probably couldn't be broken without collateral damage to things Google cares about.

2025-11-10 00:43:55 UTC

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But there wouldn't really be much difference between using that power to kill phanpy, or using that power to kill Mastodon. The HTTPS traffic basically looks the same. The JavaScript looks very similar.

2025-11-10 00:32:41 UTC

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Google can't kill the phanpy PWA without killing JavaScript support. It doesn't need any special privileges or any access to the user's device. It looks just like using Chrome, which is exactly what it is. And it is no slower than using the server directly.
There are other PWAs that do need privileges that Google might revoke, but this is just web stuff, nothing complicated.

2025-11-04 17:14:15 UTC

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kudos to the moderators of that person's instance for acting so quickly. For a ban to come that fast it must have been pretty damn terrible what they wrote (probably used vile terms that triggered a filter).

2025-10-17 15:36:00 UTC

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That is so strange. There must be something else going on with her to provoke such extreme reactions.

2025-10-17 02:26:17 UTC

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So sorry you're having so much trouble getting your kid's school to accomodate you; my daughter also had huge trouble when she was young (there was the week that she was sent home from school four times!). We did get her the help that she needed, but it was a fight, and we paid for most of it (this was 20 or so years ago). Fortunately her school wound up being a lot more cooperative than yours, if I'm understanding correctly what you've been going through, but not at first.

2025-09-27 12:13:39 UTC

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The simplest explanation is that he doesn't believe what he is saying, but he wants to recruit Christian right allies to stop regulation that could cut into his profits.

2025-08-29 20:28:06 UTC

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Alternative: for the alt text, give a link to an online text version if one exists.

2025-08-29 20:25:24 UTC

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Suggestion: include as much of the text as you can, end with [continued in comment below] or some such , and put the rest in a comment on the post.

2025-08-19 15:57:55 UTC

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Could this create problems for people who accidentally let a domain lapse but then recover it themselves? How do they re-verify if they never provided PyPI with anything but an email address? Or do they have some form of two factor authentication?

2025-08-02 14:41:30 UTC

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Tanning is also a big factor, the deep tans that used to be fashionable age the skin. I think that if 80s teens could see what people look like today, they'd all be asking why the white people are so pale.

2025-07-25 02:03:08 UTC

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Please include Mastodon as an option for sharing to social media. The simplest way to do this is via mastodonshare.com; this has a clever way of saving the instance so someone only has to enter their instance name once.

2025-07-20 01:46:32 UTC

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Originally Fortran would only look at the first 72 columns out of the 80, so the last columns could be used for sequence numbers, to fix things if you dropped the deck. I had a summer job in the 70s at a government lab where I dealt with this.

2025-07-16 04:02:49 UTC

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Because he was an Israeli who had fought for the IDF. He had to overcome that upbringing and the propaganda he was raised with. But he got there.

2025-07-14 22:39:10 UTC

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Up to a point. I don't expect someone like George Takei to follow 50k or more people and I am glad that he is here.

2025-07-06 04:11:53 UTC

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Yes, that is what I meant to say. But it will not do this for a post that already has an image, so some people have been using that to avoid an irrelevant preview.

2025-07-05 17:39:21 UTC

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The demo exposes the Mastodon oddity of always creating a preview for the first link if there isn't already an image in the post, so there is a gratuitous photo of Tim Bray. @npub1lq6…nf7e often adds a pic of his cat to defeat that.

2025-06-25 03:54:33 UTC

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Adams is also running an independent and the Republicans will also run someone. So people who think Mamdani is too left might split three ways. So, no idea how that will turn out.

2025-06-16 22:12:58 UTC

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Almost every city in the country, even most mid size towns, had a No Kings protest that was, at least in part, anti-ICE. So no money for anyone?

2025-06-12 00:50:03 UTC

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A historical artifact from when a call to someone more than 25 miles or so away was expensive, so it was thought that in exchange for paying for the call, the recipient should always know who called. But these days, a call of any distance is essentially free for the caller, who is billed by the month for the ability to make any calls at all. So maybe 800 numbers should just go away.

2025-06-08 16:57:59 UTC

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Not for me, but a crisp crust is important to me. That's why if I reheat pizza I use the oven. The microwave usually makes the crust soggier. But if it works for you, great.

2025-06-03 22:53:27 UTC

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This is partly right but not entirely. The innovators at Bell Labs were given a lot of freedom, but they were trying to solve real problems that the company had: information theory was developed to figure out how to communicate as efficiently as possible, likewise a cellular telephone system which I don't think was on the list. The microwave echo of the Big Bang was discovered as part of an effort to figure out where noise in radio communication was coming from. More promising efforts were given larger budgets. So, while Bell Labs researchers had a lot of freedom, there were also constraints that made it more likely that the work would pay off.

2025-05-31 15:25:58 UTC

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I am afraid this kind of thing is only going to get worse. Suppose most people figure out how to disable Google's AI overview or learn to go straight to the city of LA's official site. But meanwhile the city has been sold a chatbot system to answer questions, and the chatbot confidently spews out wrong answers.

2025-05-22 02:22:53 UTC

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My wife and I loved the books. As for the show, we have only had two short episodes, so I think it is too early to judge whether they really pull it off or not; so far I think there were things they did well and things I am more iffy about (the "space hippie" aspect of the crew being stressed so much more strongly for example).

2025-05-21 02:46:51 UTC

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I think reports of its death have been greatly exaggerated, and those investing in "vibe coding" will be very disappointed in the results.

2025-05-19 15:35:03 UTC

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I immediately thought of Emmy Noether's theorem. Is there a symmetry related to the conservation of helicity?

2025-05-13 23:46:46 UTC

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Does he have any authority to do that? I thought dentists were regulated at the state level.

2025-05-13 02:52:49 UTC

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Perhaps there is a language issue but it seems you completely misunderstand me. I am not a fan of LLMs and don't use them.

2025-05-13 02:06:33 UTC

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The LLMs can generate text in all kinds of local dialects, but that isn't what a student who is trying to cheat would turn in.

2025-05-13 01:46:38 UTC

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US schools are organized by local districts and there are huge variations in resources and quality of training. Teachers are doing the best they can given the limitations.

2025-05-12 16:05:35 UTC

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Given how frequently students are falsely accused of use of LLMs I suspect that teachers aren't as good at detection as they think they are. At least, not yet.

2025-04-29 02:40:24 UTC

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Just today, Trump did a tweet or a truth or whatever you call it saying Canadians should vote for a leader who would make Canada the 51st US state. It was worded like he thought they could write him in, and that he didn't know that Canadians don't directly elect the PM.

2025-04-23 17:25:18 UTC

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Was it really simultaneous, or shortly after? My guess is that the person who made the account was penetrated by the person who tried to log in from Russia. If it happened almost immediately, then perhaps there was code to do that.

2025-04-23 16:28:05 UTC

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The Russian link appears to be the reason the whistleblower caught the suspicious DOGE activity, because it set off an alarm. I don't know why. One possibility might be that the Russian hacker didn't know exactly what the new account would provide access to and just wanted to find out. Maybe they saw security being disabled and a new account being created, so they thought they could get into a new system without detection.

2025-04-23 02:00:23 UTC

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The Russians didn't get in. The intruders were DOGE. My guess is that some DOGE person was penetrated by a Russian hacker, who tried to exploit the hole the DOGE person set up. I wouldn't be surprised if someone at DOGE is using a machine or phone that has all its traffic intercepted and fed to someone working for Russia, not on purpose but because of sloppiness. State actors may have decided to exploit the fact that a bunch of idiots are being given admin access to all government systems.

2025-04-21 16:49:44 UTC

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He wasn't a progressive, but he was much less regressive than others in the church, which is why conservative Catholics have been praying for his death for many years.

2025-04-18 15:21:49 UTC

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I thought I had remembered that the Trump administration threatened Ukraine with exactly this (disabling US planes they were given). So all the Russians have to do is repeat the threat.

2025-04-14 16:57:24 UTC

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Because Trump told him to refuse.

2025-04-10 15:38:19 UTC

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Does the bill still make it extremely difficult for a married woman who changed her name and doesn't have a passport to vote?

2025-03-31 20:45:31 UTC

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That law review article seems to have missed the following text from the 12th amendment: "But no person constitutionally ineligible to the office of President shall be eligible to that of Vice-President of the United States." So no, Trump cannot run for VP.

2025-03-27 20:34:33 UTC

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It's not suitable for the purpose they were using it for, so he is sort of right.

2025-03-10 18:27:58 UTC

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That's deeply concerning, but graphs need to start the Y axis from zero to avoid giving an inaccurate impression. 30 million to 35 million is a roughly 16.7% increase, which is bad, but the image makes it look like it's just exploded.

2025-03-06 01:30:38 UTC

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At this stage, while free speech still mostly exists, perhaps the best response to this kind of lie is ridicule: say that Trump's an idiot, too dumb to know or care about the difference between truth and lies, and also thinks you're an idiot, and if you believe him you are, and if you're going along because you're afraid of him you're a coward. Opponents should just be saying this at every opportunity, that you can't believe a word out of his mouth. Satirize the crap out of him, make him angry.

2025-02-27 15:22:45 UTC

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Wired magazine and @npub1qmg…s6k5 did most of these identifications first.

2025-02-27 00:02:11 UTC

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It's possible for someone who only has access to a library computer but no smart phone to decode the QR code, but it's painful (screenshot the QR code, find a QR decoding site, upload the scan, etc) and that may be extremely difficult for many people to handle, and near-impossible without help for the vision impaired.

2025-02-25 18:10:11 UTC

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I know that there is a former Soviet spy claiming this, but I don't believe it, because if he were a controlled agent he'd be less stupid and blatant about his pro-Russian position. He's just what the Russians call a "useful idiot", who adores dictators and is easily manipulated.
That said, I suppose it is possible that the KGB had a code name for him, not because he was a knowing spy but because they were manipulating him.

2025-02-12 16:22:52 UTC

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What was your favorite question?

2025-02-12 02:19:00 UTC

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As you know, there's no law against having a DEI program no matter how much Trump's people claim otherwise.

2025-02-01 02:06:25 UTC

Trump's screwing his own people: farmers in the southern Central Valley, who vote GOP. He ordered water that needs to be saved for the summer to be dumped now, just for a photo op, and he seems to think it has something to do with wildfire fighting.
https://www.latimes.com/environment/story/2025-01-31/trump-california-dams-opened-up

2025-01-31 16:30:52 UTC

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We import $20 billion worth of fruits and vegetables from Mexico annually. A 25 percent tariff is $5 billion, dividing that by the 100 million or so households gives $50 per household, and that's before additional markups the grocery stores will add to preserve their profits.

2025-01-22 05:34:00 UTC

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He has only a couple of votes majority in the House, and some of that thin majority is California Republicans, some of whom represent very fire prone districts. Trying to take hostages may fail.

2025-01-21 03:15:25 UTC

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Three times, apparently.

2025-01-19 04:30:14 UTC

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It was I.F.
Stone. He worked on his own because he was blacklisted, though eventually he was allowed to be published again. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I._F._Stone

2025-01-13 18:30:14 UTC

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While that may be the case, the fire conditions were so extreme that something was guaranteed to set off big fires. If anyone reading this thinks that if there were no fireworks celebrations, LA County would not be burning up right now, sorry, that's just not the case.
And the Palisades fire is just one of many in the area.

2025-01-11 02:44:03 UTC

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I give monthly to them. Here is another one that I just made a donation to: https://www.calfund.org/funds/wildfire-recovery-fund/

2025-01-10 19:17:24 UTC

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If someone already has the app, does the law require that ISPs and wireless carriers block the traffic? Not if I understand correctly. Seems users can keep using it but won't get updates. So perhaps a VPN would only be needed to get an updated version?

2025-01-04 18:14:17 UTC

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You are right, of course. The possible fallback from the fairly simple and reliable unit conversion system to the unreliable chatbot system undermines what they had before. But at least I do know what to write to do certain kinds of conversions.

2025-01-04 18:07:53 UTC

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I suspect that the pattern [number] [unit] to [unit] triggers an older, non LLM system that Google has had for years. It generally works well for metric to imperial conversions.

2025-01-04 17:47:10 UTC

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Just tried it and confirmed. Makes me think of Hannah Arendt. One of the things fascism needs, she wrote, is for no one to know what the truth is. In her day the Big Lie was the answer. We have that now, but reliable search engines that push the correct answers to the top would undermine that. So they must go.

2024-12-31 21:02:04 UTC

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They don't sell it directly, but they sell highly customizable ads. Intelligent and devious advertisers can use that to get what they want. And it can be subpoenaed by any government.

2024-12-31 19:18:06 UTC

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I am confident that they work very hard to control access to the data that they collect. But they make it available, at least indirectly, to advertisers and data brokers, and governments can subpoena it. The very existence of this massive trove is a risk.

2024-12-31 02:17:29 UTC

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I don't want that shit either. But if I understand correctly, if a site federated with Threads, the federated feed will only show posts from Threads that are followed by someone on the local instance, and there is no "push" mechanism that overwhelms the instance with slop from Threads. Do I have that wrong?

2024-11-26 22:04:06 UTC

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Were you talking about this? Sounds a bit different though.
https://www.reddit.com/r/ZeroWaste/comments/nvdexb/many_japanese_toilets_have_an_attached_sink_so/

2024-11-16 01:18:51 UTC

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Trump wants to bypass the whole process: get the Senate to adjourn, so he can then make all the recess appointments he wants to, with no hearings, good for two years. If the Senate doesn't want to go along, there's horrific and obsolete language in the Constitution that he can use if he gets the House's cooperation, to force an adjournment. House passes a concurrent resolution to adjourn Congress. If the Senate goes along, Trump gets to recess appoint Gaetz, RFKjr and others. If the Senate doesn't go along, there is disagreement between the houses over whether to adjourn. The constitution gives the president the power to force adjournment in this case, evidently for an arbitrary period of time.

2024-11-14 01:00:45 UTC

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Perhaps the report can be turned over to the Senate committee that will need to sign off on his nomination for Attorney General.

2024-11-10 02:50:49 UTC

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I used Teco back in the 70s on a PDP-10 (yes, I am old). You had to type a lot of dollar signs.

2024-10-27 00:38:50 UTC

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Maybe he thinks that if he sucks up and helps Trump win, he will get a pardon.

2024-10-22 16:37:59 UTC

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My instance is still on 4.2.10 so I haven't seen it yet.

2024-10-22 16:30:16 UTC

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What is the Mutual tag for? And if I don't use it am I unmutual?

2024-10-20 04:22:48 UTC

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I have been using [@phanpy](https://hachyderm.io/@phanpy ) for a while, which has had the bundling from the beginning (and it appears that the phanpy implementation inspired the Mastodon 4.3 version) but the same thing happens there. If there are a lot of responses to post #1, then post #2, then post #1 again you get separate bundles.

2024-10-19 00:54:28 UTC

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It's their web crawler. I suppose you could block it.

2024-10-11 18:05:49 UTC

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Right, that's how the law is written. But SpaceX is a private company and Musk owns the majority of it. That's a huge loophole, as any contractor can incorporate and have the corporation fulfill the government contract while the owner essentially bribes the government to give the company the contract. The only people who are restricted by the law are employees of companies with a government contract that are working on fulfilling it. So only the workers but not the lords are constrained.

2024-10-09 00:51:43 UTC

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"Pay $400 for the hardware, get the first month of service free" is hardly a charitable offer. Saying "not entirely free" is an understatement.

2024-09-23 00:40:06 UTC

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So, people should keep right on using gasoline powered cars forever and cook the planet because EV range goes down by 15% when the temperature exceeds 95F? Yes, I know that there are lots of problems, but we are engineers. We are in the problem solving business. So the message has to be about how to fix it.

2024-09-22 23:49:07 UTC

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Oh, they are worried about it, which is why Harris decided to be pro-fracking to help with Pennsylvania. But it means that to keep the fascists out, we will cook the planet. The public just isn't willing to accept the necessary changes. So it seems that they won't happen.

2024-09-21 03:50:23 UTC

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I don't think Wet Leg are more talented as guitarists, just fun. Probably shouldn't have tossed that in. It was an example of how people way younger than me are doing interesting music. But I think Garcia was way overrated as a guitarist. Prince was a lot more skilled. Here's one you might want to check out: Mdou Moctar.

2024-09-21 03:38:37 UTC

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You appear to have very specific musical tastes that are somewhat out of fashion. Sorry.

2024-09-21 03:24:23 UTC

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Wet Leg.

2024-09-21 03:20:54 UTC

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Rodrigo y Gabriela.

2024-09-21 03:08:41 UTC

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The talent still exists, but it is a lot harder in the current environment for the best to break out.

2024-09-19 16:39:05 UTC

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Ah. Sounds like you live in a red state. The law seems to be about making things just as bad in blue and purple states.

2024-09-19 15:51:51 UTC

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According to what I've read, the bill says that a passport is proof of citizenship. People without passports need a birth certificate with a state seal and the name must match. If it doesn't, they want proof that the name was legally changed, like court records, but most women who change their names after being married don't go to court because that isn't needed in most states. So they might have to get a passport before they can vote.

2024-09-19 15:22:40 UTC

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The bill claims to be about forbidding non-citizens to vote, but that's already the law. Its real effect is to make it much harder for married women who changed their names to vote.