The Resistance At The Kavanaugh Hearings: More Than 200 Arrests

Except Republicans didn't call everyone involved seditionists and sent people who walked around entirely peacefully or weren't even there to years in prison. And how you gonna overthrow the most powerful government in the world by (checks notes) leaving all your guns at home. Not one firearm was taken inside the Capitol. Not. One.

J6 was a Boomer parade/fedsurrection. That's right, hundreds of state and federal agents/informants were in the crowd and inside the Capitol before it was "breeched".

J6 is Birtherism for liberals.

He's gotten shots as have his kids. What he is against is untested or bad medicine. Like the very first shot a newborn gets is for an STD easily tested for in the mother. Pharma has people so propagandized they're for untested and bad medicine.

The BCG vaccine has also been found to be effective against bladder cancer. One of the two manufacturers bailed out of the market about a decade ago, limiting supply for both TB and bladder cancer.

They just opened a new manufacturing facility in Durham this past Spring to make much more. Not sure if it's producing yet, but it was a four-year build.

TB affects so few Americans that you can't even get BCG for TB prevention if you want it. Hopefully high-risk folks will be able to elect to get it soon.

The above was already quite long, but allow me to add a bit :-)

I spent a few minutes looking for the state of the art in C++/Rust interop for contexts that don't have a nice intermediary like binder. It turns out that the situation isn't as bad as I thought. The CXX project enables automatic generation of bi-directional definitions between Rust and C++ and is being used at scale by the Chromium project and that seems to be going pretty well.

There's also a Google-funded Rust Foundation project to define a better solution, though I don't see what, if anything, has happened since it was announced last year. Hopefully that's because there's a small group working too hard to waste a lot of time talking about it.

The reason I went to look is that my new team (I left Google a couple of months ago) might need such a thing. I've been asked to define an API that would benefit from being implemented in Rust and usable from C++ and Rust.

Telling people that vaccines are bad, ensuring that any parent who wishes to refuse to vaccinate their children is fully supported in that decision, and working to make vaccines harder to get, more expensive and more painful (RFK Jr. wants to separate the MMR vaccine into three shots, each of which will still require three injections, so kids will have to get 9 shots to be fully vaccinated instead of three).

This is similar to their plan to fight inflation by imposing tariffs and forcing the Fed to lower interest rates in spite of rising inflation (note that this last part hasn't really happened yet -- the interest rate cuts have been measured, cautious and justified by economic conditions -- but Trump is working on it). Though to be fully fair, by making the tariffs arbitrary and capricious so that business leaders are completely unable to plan, Trump is also causing a contraction in US economic activity that might eventually generate significant unemployment, which actually does reduce inflation. I see no corresponding "silver lining" in the mumps plan, though.

And, ultimately, slavery was a far less efficient and effective economic system. One might think that keeping a big chunk of the populace poor is efficient, since you're not "wasting" a lot of production on providing them with unnecessary goods and services, but it's really not, at least not since the industrial revolution. I think the core reason that it's so inefficient is the same reason that Marxist communism is inefficient: From an economic perspective, both systems value the masses only for their physical labor, and fail to cultivate and take advantage of their brains, which also actually tends to reduce their labor output. Harnessing the distributed ingenuity of your workforce requires giving your workforce some reason to exercise ingenuity and some way to benefit from doing so.

It's going to be interesting (or maybe terrifying, or maybe just sad) to see what happens when we fully automate ingenuity, too, which will mean that the system no longer depends on or benefits from distributed ingenuity because the machines are smarter and think faster, just as the machines are already stronger and indefatigable.

been trying to find out ever since some of the more vocal nutrition people like Jessica Knurick have started warning about UPF.
i do need to pay more attention to what & how much I eat but i'm not going back all the way to my grandma's food preparation, simply don't have that kind of time

I don't think vibe coding is going to last long as a thing, because it's just a sort of intermediate step to telling the AI to do what you want and having it do that. Right now, people are telling the LLM to write code to accomplish a thing and then running the code to see how it works, then telling the LLM to refine it, but that's a lot of unnecessary extra steps. I'm sure that in the not-too-distant future people will just tell the LLM what they want to do, which may require creating a custom user interface to make user interaction convenient, and may require creating databases or performing network queries or whatever, and the LLM will understand what they want, and do it.

In that future, it's possible that the LLM may generate code to implement the requested functionality, but if it does so that will be a compute-saving shortcut, essentially a way to cache the LLM's work and be able to repeat it with less effort. There won't be any need to show any of the code to the user, or even tell the user that the LLM chose to generate some code.

As an aside, the whole notion of leaning "prompt engineering" is another intermediate step that will die. The whole point of natural language-capable AI is that it will be able to understand what humans want when we express ourselves as we would to other humans. As the LLMs get more capable, it will become less necessary to treat them as something different from an entity that is fully capable of understanding and acting on human communication.

One of the things Android did very right with the Rust transition was to set up a small team of people who were entirely focused on Rust support. It wasn't a large team, only 2-6 people (it varied over time) out of approximately 1500 engineers. Having that core team who either were or became deep Rust language and toolchain experts was critical to smoothing the path for everyone else. It provided a group that had the knowledge and bandwidth to solve the problems that inevitably came up, as well as to offer advice and code review support to the early adopters.

That group no longer provides code reviews and design advice because Rust knowledge is now widespread enough that teams have their own, homegrown, Rust experts (not people designated as Rust experts, just engineers who became enthusiastic and dived deep), but the group still exists to resolve complex technical problems with language integration and to work on improving tooling and performance.

I think any shop adopting Rust (or any new language or complex tool) needs to have some people who become deeply expert in it and are allowed the time and freedom to support others who are picking it up.

So does Android. Google has been a primarily-C++ shop since its inception and although I'm not sure if Android had a lot of C++ in it when Google bought Android in 2005, it definitely became a C++-based system as soon as that happened.

The highly-segmented architecture of Android really helped facilitate the transition. Most of Android is structured as a web of collaborating services that communicate through a common language-independent [*] IPC mechanism (binder). Implementing Rust binder IDL generation and support libraries was a moderately big job, but once that was done it was easy to begin writing new system components (or replacing existing system components) in pure Rust, generally without any unsafe blocks at all.

If your code runs as a monolithic process, or has a lot of different IPC mechanisms, or uses a lot of existing libraries, it will be a lot harder, and the benefits will come slower. You'll have to wrap a lot of C interfaces in Rust -- and they will have to be C, not C++, since there isn't a good way for Rust to interoperate directly with C++. People are working on that, but it's a very hard problem and at present the best option is to layer a C interface on top of your C++ code, then wrap a Rust interface around the C interface. Yuck. Or, in the alternative, insert some other language-agnostic boundary between them.

So in a lot of ways Android got lucky because of its modular architecture and single, language-agnostic IPC mechanism. OTOH, that wasn't really "luck", it was a lot of work, done for good reasons, one of which was cross-language compatibility, notably between Java and C++.

[*] Language independent-ish, maybe I should say. The binder IDL is definitively Java-based, but this maps fairly nicely onto OO languages that support common primitive types (int, char, enum), basic composite types (array, vector, class/struct, string (which is just a vector, but used enough to be worth treating as a first-class thing)) and Java-like methods (fixed argument list, single return value). Further, it's based on "old" Java, before Java acquired functional extensions, when doing things like passing method references as argument was uncommon, and therefore not supported. So it's moderately-expressive but avoids things that get weird and complicated. My one big complaint about it is that I wish it supported unsigned integer types. That's my biggest gripe with Java, too.

> The software had a built-in limit of 200 bot detection features. The enlarged file contained more than 200 entries. The software crashed when it encountered the unexpected file size.

A built in limit is:

if ( rule_count > 200 )
    log_urgent('rule count exceeded')
    break
else
    rule_count++
    process_rule

This sounds like it did not have a built-in limit but rather walked off the end of an array or something when the count went over 200.

I don't think I'd mind if important sites went:

Requirements are a minimum of ten characters containing two of blah blah categories of characters, AND IT CAN'T BE STUPID.

Then checked against a list of the top couple thousand well-known passwords and just said "no".

But maybe there's a good reason to not do that. Dunno. Designing security isn't my job.

to free the source code

When in the history of humanity has there not been a big problem coming? Or occurring, for that matter.

As it happens, I live near a major stopover in Ontario and almost 50 years ago I had a school field-trip to the provincial park they use. It was wild. I get it, we'd feel completely different if they weren't pretty, but... they are. It's shaming to think about what's happened to this very visible species and realize we've done it to countless others who don't happen to have massively visible orange and black wings.

I do understand environmentalism pushback. I mean... if we only occupied 1% of the world's surface and only made extinct one species, that'd be one thing. If we occupy 100% of the world's surface and kill everything that isn't food, that's obviously insanely unacceptable. So... where in the middle is "okay"? How many humans costing how many non-human species is where it's sort-of okay? Different people have different answers. For some we've gone too far (I buy into this), and for others we're far from over the line. Shrug. And sigh.

I heard earlier today that a court has determined that since governments are using all of this data, including license plates, that a FoIA request for all of the license plate data gathered from Flock in a city area for a range of dates was valid.

They want to have a power advantage over their serfs but turning their advantage into a burden changes that dynamic. Something to look into for those so inclined.

We seem to be well past the point of being able to expect them to follow the Law or "do the right thing".