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Submission + - Python Software Foundation refuses $1.5 million grant with anti DEI provision. (blogspot.com) 1

Jeremy Allison - Sam writes: The PSF has withdrawn a $1.5 million proposal to US government grant program.

"We became concerned, however, when we were presented with the terms and conditions we would be required to agree to if we accepted the grant. These terms included affirming the statement that we “do not, and will not during the term of this financial assistance award, operate any programs that advance or promote DEI, or discriminatory equity ideology in violation of Federal anti-discrimination laws.”

Comment Some perspective (Score 1) 270

23% of that debt is owned by the Bank of England ("Gilt and Treasury Bill Holding"), which in turn is owned by... the British government.

Some more background information: https://www.taxresearch.org.uk...

In short, it is a choice to be beholden to the bond markets in this way. It is a political choice to outsource the fiscal margins of government spending to the financial sector, and paying them lavishly for that privilege. And no, I'm not saying this means you can spend endlessly on anything without very bad consequences. It's just that it's a very expensive way to provide the money supply and private savings, while giving enormous budgetary power to a sector that has proven time and again that it's unable to properly manage the economy's funding (if it's even interested in that at all, rather than just in enriching itself).

Comment Can't believe the vison-impaired comments (Score 1) 65

I feel like there's a huge blindspot in the comments here. The prototype launch was instantly more capable than any other headset. even if not every feature is going to make the ultimate cut. Of course the thing to do is to double-down and keep iterating on it. We're looking at what will heavily influence the way humans interact with technology in the future. We should be cheering this on. Whether it turns out to be a descendant of this product or something that is inspired by / influenced by it, this is just the beginning, early stages. Believe.

And for the cost? It's less than the cost of a top-notch GPU, well built gaming system right now, which the users of this headset might similarly consider a 'toy' from their perspective. Different strokes for different folks.

Comment Re:News flash, subtext (Score 2) 34

AI scrapers use these residential proxies. It's not (just) VPNs and Tor routing. Several bottom-feeding companies openly advertise such scraping services, for pretty much any country you may want. I administer a wiki that's been on the receiving end of such scraping, and the majority of these scraping requests are in fact coming from residential IP-addresses rather than data centers.

I don't know whether these are hacked accounts, people getting tricked or paid to run these scraping apps on their devices, but it's impossible to block them all. Even if you let fail2ban block entire /24s for every detected hit (even disregarding the collateral damage and the fact that these blocks don't solve the issue, the fail2ban and iptables overhead starts to outweigh the apache load at some point).

Anubis seems to be taking care of it for now, but it's obviously only a matter of time before they can deal with that one too. Although its delay does enable fail2ban rules to block the IP-addresses before they get to stress the mediawiki php scripts, attempting to diff 2 revisions of a random page from 10 years ago.

Submission + - Fifteen Years Later, Citizens United Defined the 2024 Election (brennancenter.org)

NewYorkCountryLawyer writes: The influence of wealthy donors and dark money was unprecedented. Much of it would have been illegal before the Supreme Court swept away long-established campaign finance rules. Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, the Supreme Court’s controversial 2010 decision that swept away more than a century’s worth of campaign finance safeguards, turns 15 this month. The late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg called it the worst ruling of her time on the Court. Overwhelming majorities of Americans have consistently expressed disapproval of the ruling, with at least 22 states and hundreds of cities voting to support a constitutional amendment to overturn it. Citizens United reshaped political campaigns in profound ways, giving corporations and billionaire-funded super PACs a central role in U.S. elections and making untraceable dark money a major force in politics. And yet it may only be now, in the aftermath of the 2024 election, that we can begin to understand the full impact of the decision.

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