Comment Re: Don't jump to conclusions (Score 1) 202
"Yes, comrade Stalin"
The truth has no bias
Submission + - Europe: The World's Fastest-warming Continent (barrons.com)
fjo3 writes: The latest heatwave sweeping across Europe is a stark reminder that it is the world's fastest-warming continent, stretching into an Arctic that is heating at an even greater pace.
Britain, France, Italy and Spain have issued red alerts and health warnings for much of their territory this week as the region endures its second heat episode since May.
Britain, France, Italy and Spain have issued red alerts and health warnings for much of their territory this week as the region endures its second heat episode since May.
Submission + - Helion says the 1st fusion power plant is coming soon. A cofounder isn't so sure (scientificamerican.com)
tedlistens writes: The startup backed by Sam Altman recently raised $465 million, tripling it's valuation as it races to build what it says will be the world's first fusion power plant, supplying Microsoft with carbon-free electricity in 2028.
But one of its founders—the plasma scientist whose research inspired its reactor design—has serious doubts.
But one of its founders—the plasma scientist whose research inspired its reactor design—has serious doubts.
Submission + - Bypass the polirical parties, add a new feedback to Congress (taxnvote.org)
SysEngineer writes: How would you change the US Federal budget? TaxNVote.org allows you to adjust 9 or 1000 categories of the next federal budget. The default form shows nine top-level categories (Defense, VA, Education, Health, Infrastructure, Science, Environment, DHS, Other); expand any line and you can allocate down to individual federal accounts — NASA, the National Park Service, specific research agencies, anything Congress votes on. Takes about five minutes at the top level, longer if you want the detail.
Tax N Vote (TNV) is a proposal to add a new feedback channel to the federal budget process. At tax filing each year, every taxpayer optionally submits a Tax Dollar — one person, one allocation. The IRS anonymizes submissions; the Census Bureau processes and stores them (where you can verify your own); the CBO aggregates one-person-one-vote between April 16 and May 1 and publishes "The People's Budget." A third reference point alongside the two party platforms — measurable, granular, and updated annually. Congress is not bound by it; what changes is that deviations from constituent preferences become documented, attributable, and electorally citable. The argument is system-dynamics, not partisan: changing the color of the players doesn't change the system. A simulation of the mechanism shows convergence toward whatever the People's Budget turns out to be, in both ideological directions tested. There will be a talk on the model at ISDC 2026 in Delft.
The Government-side processing of Tax Dollar documents is written in Rust — memory safety and predictable performance for government data handling. The browser-side allocation engine is a Rust WASM module inside a Vue frontend, so the math you see in the app is the same math the aggregator uses. Processing is divided across agencies that already exist; marginal cost to the government is less than renaming the Department of War.
Open source end to end. The Tax Dollar format is open, the reference implementation is at github.com/greenpdx/TaxNVote26, and anyone can build their own client, audit the aggregator, or publish pre-filled template budgets that citizens adopt with one click. Go build a budget: TaxNVote.org.
Tax N Vote (TNV) is a proposal to add a new feedback channel to the federal budget process. At tax filing each year, every taxpayer optionally submits a Tax Dollar — one person, one allocation. The IRS anonymizes submissions; the Census Bureau processes and stores them (where you can verify your own); the CBO aggregates one-person-one-vote between April 16 and May 1 and publishes "The People's Budget." A third reference point alongside the two party platforms — measurable, granular, and updated annually. Congress is not bound by it; what changes is that deviations from constituent preferences become documented, attributable, and electorally citable. The argument is system-dynamics, not partisan: changing the color of the players doesn't change the system. A simulation of the mechanism shows convergence toward whatever the People's Budget turns out to be, in both ideological directions tested. There will be a talk on the model at ISDC 2026 in Delft.
The Government-side processing of Tax Dollar documents is written in Rust — memory safety and predictable performance for government data handling. The browser-side allocation engine is a Rust WASM module inside a Vue frontend, so the math you see in the app is the same math the aggregator uses. Processing is divided across agencies that already exist; marginal cost to the government is less than renaming the Department of War.
Open source end to end. The Tax Dollar format is open, the reference implementation is at github.com/greenpdx/TaxNVote26, and anyone can build their own client, audit the aggregator, or publish pre-filled template budgets that citizens adopt with one click. Go build a budget: TaxNVote.org.
Comment Re:What is socialism? (Score -1) 122
definition of "socialism", which is: worker ownership of the means of production
Bzz, false. The dictionary definition of the term is:
a way of organizing a society in which major industries are owned and controlled by the government rather than by individual people and companies
See? No "worker ownership" — government ownership. Schools don't need to be owned by the teachers for public education to be socialist, they need to be owned by the government. And they are!
Same goes for retirement financing, and medicine for retires — with millions clamoring to expand it ("Medicare for all!!") — what GP enumerated. The "single-payer healthcare" — another euphemism — would be exactly that too.
Workers can own shares of their employers — indeed, Anthrophic employees do (and anticipate to profit handsomely). That's not socialism at all — not by the dictionary definition.
I blame the libertarians for making the definitions unclear
I blame you for pulling the definition from under your tail — and the morons upvoting you.
"anything the government does that benefits the people instead of corporations."
That's spelled "KKKorporation$". Make a note of it. Benefits the people, eh? The per-pupil spending nationwide went up (inflation-adjusted) from $9083 in 1989 to $13790 last year. And what did this expense buy us — the barely literate population unable to even define such terms as "socialism" correctly...
And they've adopted the word "democratic socialism"
The term (not "word"!!!) was adopted by "former" Communists, who've proudly elected a Senator some Congresswomen and, most recently, New York mayor. Who immediately proceeded to establish a government-owned supermarket.
Comment Are unsubstantiated accusations Ok now? (Score -1) 122
some wondering if they were being picked on by President Trump
Seriously? "Some wondering" — and it is on front page... What a contrast to Trump's supporters accusations, his electoral win was stolen in 2020 — no, any time someone mentioned those, a bunch people would jump up to add: "unproven" and "without evidence".
Comment Just Like T-Mobile Stores (Score 1) 39
Learned it from T-Mobile, and their T-Life setup.
Stores are all but useless now.
Submission + - Alan Turing developed a portable voice encryption device (popularmechanics.com)
smooth wombat writes: Alan Turing, one of the more famous people who worked at Bletchley Park to decipher the German Enigma coding machine, was also working on a separate project. His private papers, known as the Bayley papers for his assistant Donald Bayley who held onto the papers until his death in 2020, reveal Turning had produced a working model of a portable voice encryption device. He even demonstrated it by using a Winston Churchill speech recording.
“Weighing just 39 kg, including its power pack,” Copeland summarizes, “Delilah would be at home in a truck, a trench, or a large backpack.”
Turing’s work at Bletchley Park actually informed the Delilah experimentation he was doing at Hanslope Park, and not just because he used Red Forms, the Army-issue sheets Hanslope staffers were meant to use to alert Bletchley staffers to enemy signals, as his personal scrap paper for Delilah experiments. He drew inspiration from one of the German cipher machines they had decoded at Bletchley; not the famed Enigma machine, but rather the SZ42. While the former relied on Morse Code, the latter utilized a 5-bit telegraph code, which Copeland notes “was a forerunner of ASCII and Unicode and is still used by some ham radio operators.”
The SZ42 produced an obscuring key of telegraph characters, with an identical key produced to both the sender and receiver. If it could be done for text, Turing reasoned it could be done for sound as well.
This is the part of the story where one might say “Well, I’ve never heard of Alan Turing’s voice encoder, so the experiments must have failed.” But remarkably, they didn’t. Turing and Bayley actually did create their Delilah, and even demonstrated it using a recording of a Winston Churchill speech, “successfully encrypting, transmitting, and decrypting it.”
Instead, the reason Delilah fell to the wayside of history isn’t because it was a failure, but rather because it simply wasn’t needed anymore. By the time Turing had built and demonstrated his device, the war was over. What good was a portable voice encryptor if you had no major enemies trying to intercept your calls, the government reasoned. So funding for the project stopped, and Turing’s two-year experiment ended with a whimper. Turing’s time as an electrical engineer at Hanslope Park became a footnote in his story, if even that.
“Weighing just 39 kg, including its power pack,” Copeland summarizes, “Delilah would be at home in a truck, a trench, or a large backpack.”
Turing’s work at Bletchley Park actually informed the Delilah experimentation he was doing at Hanslope Park, and not just because he used Red Forms, the Army-issue sheets Hanslope staffers were meant to use to alert Bletchley staffers to enemy signals, as his personal scrap paper for Delilah experiments. He drew inspiration from one of the German cipher machines they had decoded at Bletchley; not the famed Enigma machine, but rather the SZ42. While the former relied on Morse Code, the latter utilized a 5-bit telegraph code, which Copeland notes “was a forerunner of ASCII and Unicode and is still used by some ham radio operators.”
The SZ42 produced an obscuring key of telegraph characters, with an identical key produced to both the sender and receiver. If it could be done for text, Turing reasoned it could be done for sound as well.
This is the part of the story where one might say “Well, I’ve never heard of Alan Turing’s voice encoder, so the experiments must have failed.” But remarkably, they didn’t. Turing and Bayley actually did create their Delilah, and even demonstrated it using a recording of a Winston Churchill speech, “successfully encrypting, transmitting, and decrypting it.”
Instead, the reason Delilah fell to the wayside of history isn’t because it was a failure, but rather because it simply wasn’t needed anymore. By the time Turing had built and demonstrated his device, the war was over. What good was a portable voice encryptor if you had no major enemies trying to intercept your calls, the government reasoned. So funding for the project stopped, and Turing’s two-year experiment ended with a whimper. Turing’s time as an electrical engineer at Hanslope Park became a footnote in his story, if even that.
Comment Employment is not the goal (Score -1) 74
AKA: mass layoffs.
AKA: people doing stuff, that does not need doing, having to find something else to do.
Submission + - Software engineer scored a religious exemption from using AI at work (notthebee.com)
schwit1 writes: Erin Maus is a Unitarian Universalist and Unitarian Universalists believe everything.
And it worked.
Her employer granted her the religious exemption. Now, she's coding vibe-free.
‘I'm writing my code and reviewing my code by hand, which seems crazy to say,‘ she told Business Insider.
‘Just two years ago, how else would you do it?'
But it's not just the Unitarians who could file for the exemption. Pope Leo has also condemned AI as unethical, particularly the huge numbers of people enslaved at data labeling centers around the world who are forced to work in near slave conditions teaching AI.
And the number of people suddenly finding religion just so they don't have to use AI is kind of hilarious.
The funny thing is, U.S. citizens don't have to prove their sincerely held beliefs. All these heathens don't have to actually convert to get the exemption.
Besides, at some point the companies will realize what Maus did: Maus found that completing her coding tasks without AI was just as quick as her colleague, who used AI, telling the publication that ‘AI doesn't really seem to be this game changer.'
And it worked.
Her employer granted her the religious exemption. Now, she's coding vibe-free.
‘I'm writing my code and reviewing my code by hand, which seems crazy to say,‘ she told Business Insider.
‘Just two years ago, how else would you do it?'
But it's not just the Unitarians who could file for the exemption. Pope Leo has also condemned AI as unethical, particularly the huge numbers of people enslaved at data labeling centers around the world who are forced to work in near slave conditions teaching AI.
And the number of people suddenly finding religion just so they don't have to use AI is kind of hilarious.
The funny thing is, U.S. citizens don't have to prove their sincerely held beliefs. All these heathens don't have to actually convert to get the exemption.
Besides, at some point the companies will realize what Maus did: Maus found that completing her coding tasks without AI was just as quick as her colleague, who used AI, telling the publication that ‘AI doesn't really seem to be this game changer.'
Submission + - Fox to buy streaming device maker Roku for $22 billion (cnbc.com) 1
schwit1 writes: The combination will merge Fox’s sports and news networks, as well as its free ad-supported streamer Tubi, with Roku, which makes streaming devices and has The Roku Channel.
The deal is expected to close in the first half of 2027.
The deal is expected to close in the first half of 2027.
Submission + - Trump's "Made in the USA" Phone is just a reskinned HTC U24 Pro 1
necro81 writes: The heavily promoted, $499 T1 "Trump Phone" was originally said to be "Made in the USA" and ship in September 2025. Later, that was downgraded to "Assembled in the USA". Given the Trump Organization's lack of engineering or supply chain expertise, many assumed the "T1" would just be a private-label phone made by someone else. After a number of delays, the first phones are finally shipping.
iFixit has performed a teardown and concluded that the T1 is a just gold-painted 2024 HTC U24 Pro — a device from a Taiwanese company, probably using mainland China design and supply chains. In collaboration with NBC News, the iFixit team examined both phones using CT scans, side-by-side teardowns, and even reassembled a working T1 using a U24 Pro main board. As for "assembled in the USA", that may be true, in the same sense that your phone's repairman can "assemble" a phone from a handful of subassemblies sourced from someone else. Or it may have been assembled in Guangdong, China like the other U24 Pros.
iFixit sums it up: "What you have is not an 'American-Proud Design', but a phone designed in China, made in China, with the vast majority of parts sourced from China. I’m failing to find any stirring of American pride within me. I’ve certainly felt it before, so I can confirm that it is absent at this time."
iFixit has performed a teardown and concluded that the T1 is a just gold-painted 2024 HTC U24 Pro — a device from a Taiwanese company, probably using mainland China design and supply chains. In collaboration with NBC News, the iFixit team examined both phones using CT scans, side-by-side teardowns, and even reassembled a working T1 using a U24 Pro main board. As for "assembled in the USA", that may be true, in the same sense that your phone's repairman can "assemble" a phone from a handful of subassemblies sourced from someone else. Or it may have been assembled in Guangdong, China like the other U24 Pros.
iFixit sums it up: "What you have is not an 'American-Proud Design', but a phone designed in China, made in China, with the vast majority of parts sourced from China. I’m failing to find any stirring of American pride within me. I’ve certainly felt it before, so I can confirm that it is absent at this time."
Comment Can do something fun too! (Score 0) 49
it is relieving workers of tedious old chores but creating new ones
Bot-sitting does not require as much attention as doing it myself requires. While the AI is handling the tedium, I can do something fun — both work-related and otherwise...
A co-worker next to me is doing cross-word puzzles, for example...
Comment Re:Doesn't ring true (Score -1) 61
Apparently a *lot* of people on Slashdot are completely fooled by the CCP propaganda.
And some of them are CCP propaganda, using multiple "sockpuppets" to both post and moderate.
Decades earlier — during Vietnam war — USSR was financing all of "peace" movements in the West in particular, while attacking the "Capitalist way of life" in general. It'd be quite foolish for China to not be doing the same now. Even more foolish would be for us to not realize, that they do.
Comment Yep, out 27 months (Score 1) 1
And while I am still working on OpenWater and Alignable, the only thing I've gotten from LinkedIn in the past year is rewrite-your-resume scams
