...there was extensive documentation on how Biden pressured social media companies to silence everyday American citizens. [ ... ]

Couple 'o things:

1. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof,
2. Assertions made without evidence may be dismissed without evidence.

Not even ordinary evidence was provided. So we can set that nonsensical statement aside.

The Truth: The Biden Administration was seeking to remove maliciously posted lies and falsehoods concerning COVID-19's risks and how to mitigate them, so that people without mad Google sk1llz searching for information on staying healthy would be less likely to encounter false, life-threatening information.

Example: Back in 2020, there was this slob who suggested on national television that the best way to avoid COVID was to inject disinfectant , and that the disease could by treated by ivermectin -- which is a horse de-wormer (i.e. an anti-parasitic, not an anti-viral). Both claims were absolute bullshit , but nevertheless got repeated millions of times on social media by "everyday Americans." It was this kind of LIFE-THREATENING GARBAGE that the Democratic Administration was seeking to mitigate. So that people wouldn't, y'know... die.

Well. It seems that Google has been cowed by -- or now is under the complete control of -- fascist filth.

Post links to viable substitutes for Google's various services here.

The way I read it, the 100k fee is an "investment" in bringing someone over.

You pay it when you get someone in, and it gets recovered over the 3 years that the H-1B is active. Don't know if you have to then fork over another 100k, or if the +3 rollover is covered under the original 100k. After 6 years, presumably the applicant is well on their way to applying for permanent residency, or they've had enough of living in the US and want to go home.

If amortized over 3 years, that's 34k/yr, if over 6 years, that's 17k/yr. Not peanuts, but not an obscene amount of money either.

This would basically be a tariff on foreign workers, I guess? And to your point, yes, it should be indexed to something that doesn't require endless political wrangling to keep at a reasonable market value. At least tie it to inflation, or maybe to a number reflective of the number of US workers attempting to find jobs in the given field...

https://www.theregister.com/20...

"The H-1B program was created in 1990, and presently allocates 85,000 spots annually for temporary non-immigrant workers to come to the US â" ostensibly to fill gaps in the American labor force. Counting other exemptions like those afforded academic institutions, the program awards about 130,000 visas per year to foreign workers, and renews about 300,000 previously awarded visas â" which typically last for three years and can be extended for another three.

The process works as follows: Eligible H-1B applicants, or companies representing them, register to enter the H-1B cap lottery. Some 20,000 advanced degree petitions and 65,000 general petitions get selected. For selected registrants, employers can submit H-1B petitions on behalf of prospective employees. USCIS then processes the selected petitions and those approved can then come and work in the US.

Previously, employers submitted completed H-1B petitions in March and USCIS conducted its H1-B cap lottery at the end of that month to determine which petitions would be processed for the 85,000 slots."

ve never seen a software distribution mechanism as careless and sloppy as NPM. Bazillions of dependencies and no signing of packages. [ ... ]

Rust's cargo packaging system is almost exactly the same way. And the last time I looked, Go's packaging was very similar. And package signing won't help if the maintainer's key/cert has been exfiltrated and cracked.

This is what you get when you embrace DLL Hell -- the idea that you should pin your program to a single specific revision of a library, rather than, y'know, doing the engineering work to ensure that, as an app author, you're relying only on documented behavior; and, as a library author, to be responsible for creating backward compatibility for old apps linking to old entry points. Sticking to that principle lets you update shared system libraries with the latest enhancements and bug fixes, while remaining relatively sure none of the old clients will break.

"Sometimes you have to break backward compatibility." Agreed, but the interval between those breaks should be measured in years, not days.

While I understand that sometimes it's a communication skill, or a habit thing, I wonder if sometimes the lack of an explanation is itself a red flag that whoever opened the PR or made the commit lacks understanding of what they were supposed to do, and what they actually did...

On the other hand, ticking off a checkbox item so that the linter passes by putting in useless information is the same as a garbage test written to make sure there's sufficient code coverage to make a linter pass. A waste of time and further muddying the waters by forcing someone to read through both the code, the documentation, and the test, to determine that there's no additional value to the documentation or the test over the code.

I guess this would be the point in time to discuss how aggressive to be in terms of adopting forced syntax reformatting, pre-commit and commit linters, and tests? And god forbid, checklists for each commit?

Previous comments have been drawing analogies to Black Mirror, but this "idea" goes back much further...

...This is an episode of Max Headroom (US version).

Specifically, S02E02: "Deities." A company claims to be able to bring past loved ones back to "life" as an AI, for a modest recurring fee. But Bryce (the creator of Max Headroom) opines they can't possibly have the compute power to do it, as it requires a large mainframe just to run Max's highly flawed, glitching bust.

Wouldn't surprise me if the "visionaries" behind this saw that episode, and saw an opportunity to fleece gullible rubes.

Pretty sure there are US collaborators that are helping to facilitate these types of setups in order to get their candidates to pass.

Otherwise, there would be a lot of demonstrably lax HR departments that are letting these phony employees in.

https://edition.cnn.com/intera...

"One American woman, Christina Marie Chapman, was last month sentenced to eight-and-a-half years in prison for helping these operatives land jobs at more than 300 companies, generating over $17 million for Kim’s heavily sanctioned regime.

A prolific TikToker, Chapman charted her remarkable rise in public videos from poverty to international travel, courtesy of a new job in “a computer business,” that US investigators used to build their case.

Chapman is not the only US resident to have participated in the scheme.

Recently unsealed federal indictments show other US-based facilitators played a crucial role in the operation – laundering paychecks, stealing identities and running “laptop farms” that allowed North Korean workers to appear as if they were physically present inside the country. "

Thankfully, he was mostly wrong...

Um, when was the last time you stayed at a hotel?

There's a microprocessor in every doorknob.

I'm self-hosting Vaultwarden on my LAN, a Bitwarden-compatible backend written in Rust. I have it running inside a jail on TrueNAS Core (which, alas, is now end-of-life). It hosts its own Web interface, but also is compatible with Bitwarden's Android app and browser plugins.

So far, it's worked out pretty well for me.

...Because no one uses Edge.

Clearly you have never worked in a large corporate environment that has shackled itself to the entire Micros~1 ecosystem -- Office, Outlook, Exchange, OneDrive, Teams, Engage, SharePoint... The whole ball of earwax.

Can it manage reduce gridlock and improve traffic flow by improving signal coordination during rush hour?

https://ladot.lacity.gov/proje...

City of LA is already equipped with sensors and remote signal synchronization. Next logical step would be to couple it with slightly better adaptive prediction to squeeze a few more percentage points out of the existing traffic patterns...

I thought that's what the front page was. It keeps wasting space with things I'm not interested in, or actively dislike.

New Video from The Primagen!
<block channel>

NotAIHonestly Gets Rare Interview with The Primagen!
<block channel>

FrierenFan04 Reacts to !AIH's Interview with Primagen!
<smashes keyboard>

I've seen what is clearly automated scraping of other channel content being used to generate "highlight reels" with AI created thumbnails. Basically they're hijacking content with views, repackaging it in order to present it as new, and then spamming YouTube with variations on it to see what sticks. The algorithms will help trend anything that gets traction - if you scrape enough interesting content and then throw it at the wall, you can get some instances to trend.

The one instance I can say was probably AI generated video was one of those fake livestreams that pop up claiming to be associated with Elon Musk and SpaceX, that push cryptocoins. This is a particularly good area to exploit because the official stream is only on X, so there are no official streams on YouTube.

https://www.popsci.com/technol...

https://mashable.com/article/f...

Mind you, this was old-school fake-ai where some human probably had to do the work to stitch it all together. I haven't seen any of the "new" 100% ai generated video yet... as far as I know.

It arguably accomplished its goals of bailing out the major auto makers by forcing people to buy new cars (the "cash" was actually just a trade in credit - you couldn't get rid of an old car without buying a new one.)

https://www.investopedia.com/t...

"The formal name for the program was the Car Allowance Rebate System (CARS). The CARS program gave people who qualified a credit of up to $4,500, depending on the vehicle purchased and its improvement in fuel economy over the traded-in vehicle."

Yes it punished poor people by destroying the traded in cars (not to mention saddling them with the debt of buying a new one if they couldn't otherwise afford it.) This robbed the market not only of used cars for resale, but the parts to keep cars that weren't traded in working (since the traded in cars had to be crushed, and the engines destroyed by deliberately seizing the engines.)

https://www.cnet.com/roadshow/...