Flat for 15 years? Are they sure that wasn't 12 years?

14 years ago was when Congress put a poison pill in an increase to the debt limit, that required them to pass a budget that dealt with the deficit, or most (all?) federal agencies took a "sequestration" budget cut.

The cuts went into effect in March 2013.

Of course, Ewok Adventures qualifies as part of "the TV stuff"

I was going to say handle it like the various food certification groups.

They come up with some sort of mark, copyright it (so you can't use it without their permission), then do whatever checks are required for their certification.

There's multiple Kosher and Halal certification groups, rainforest alliance, etc.

Handling it like certs means that they could be checked and revokable, so that might be the better option... but having easy to identify marks would be useful, too.

"with Hegseth noting the money would better serve "healthcare for our warfighters and their families, instead of $500 an hour business process consultant.""

And yet they're cutting how many people who provide those services?

or is just the VA? So they can promise people they'll get medical for life if the serve our country, then renege in that promise?

The Library of Congress used to back up Twitter, but decided that it was either too much or not worth it back in 2017:

https://www.npr.org/sections/t...

Their last scraping of /. was 2023: https://www.loc.gov/item/lcwaN...

They have no such right. That's a right given to people, not companies.

If companies had such rights, there could be no Truth in Advertising laws. You'd have to just believe whatever a company claimed their product did, or if the product was even in the box they sold you.

Did we say it was vegan and gluten free? Free speech! Never mind the people that die because of anaphylaxis from shellfish allergies or celiacs having GI issues for days.

I'm not sure if this came out as a defense for the oil companies to tell lies about climate change, or tobacco companies who didn't want to put labels warning their products kill, but it seems like the claim that companies have free speach has been intensifying the last 20-30 years or so.

Tomorrow is a day of protests:

http://handsoff2025.com/

There are over 1k events scheduled, so it's possible that no single event will look that impressive, but it will be interesting to see how many people push for congress to do its job instead of ceding power to the president

I have a 'smart tv', I just don't have it connected to the internet

I tried putting it on an air-gapped network so I could do screen casting, but it seems that even if your phone is on the same wifi, there's some handshaking with the outside world that has to happen to use it... so I have to resort to a cable for that.

I don't know if I'd get better guide info if it were connected... and I have to go in and fix the clock drift every few months (and for DST)

I don't know about the SSA, but I went to talk at an Information Science conference about 15 years ago with someone from the IRS.

They said that the bulk of their time was trying to translate what the hell the laws that Congress passed actually meant. They had given Congress some madlibs-type templates to use, so they knew they could parse it cleanly and translate it into specific requirements in whatever language their systems used.

Even if someone were to try to write tests to duplicate the existing code, you have to ask which of these are actual requirements, and what's just quirks of how we're fulfilling those requirements.

(spent more than a decade doing data integration at NASA, and lots of legacy data stuff before then)

They compared how well it compresses relative to lossless, but is that compressed lossless, or uncompressed? And how does it affect 'doing science' with the data?

Most non-earth science imaging data (astronomy and solar physics, but also medical and even some archival document scans) uses FITS (Flexible Image Transport System) or variations of it. You can then compress the data portion of the file, with most groups using Rice (aka Golomb) compression.

It supports data cubes and higher dimensional data (you can either stack multiple data segments into a file, or define multiple dimensions and how they're organized within the data segment, then give the bytestream for the data)

VOTable is derived from FITS, but has an XML header to get around some of the quirks of the FITS header (designed for punch cards and before bytes were standardized at 8bits, so you have 12 character max on variable names; need to use continues to store long strings (which older libraries will truncate), and the headers are always a multiple of 2880 bits (with some groups padding it out so they can splice in new variables without needing to re-write the whole file). But VOTable is mostly used for data tables, not images or other binary data.

I know that DKIST (solar telescope) decided to use one of the earth science data standards ASDF (Advanced Scientific Data Format), which I think is partly derived from FITS, but uses YAML for its headers. ... but I got out of the field before DKIST went live.

(They were originally planning on using HDF5, which they might still be using for their level 0 data) ...

The big issue with lossy compression is that what's considered noise for one researcher might be exactly what another researcher is looking for. There have been compression schemes with variable loss... where they keep the features of interest in high fidelity, but compress the other parts of the image ... so you have the context for the features of interest, but without the extra storage space or trying to store it as multiple files.

Years ago, when we started seeing the shift towards 'computer vision', I proposed that we needed to make an archive of test images and detection algorithms... so that when yet another compression scheme came along, we could compress images, decompress them, and re-run the detection routines... this would then tell us if the compression scheme screwed some groups by creating an unacceptable level of false positives or false negatives. ... I unfortunately never managed to find the right ear for it, and AISRP had just shut down due to sequestration issues.

It already will.

It's AI training being fed AI created stuff, and if you intentionally use a not-very good AI for the generation, it will drag down the AI that's trying to be trained. (Garbage in, garbage out) ... but this isn't really all that new. 25+ years ago when I worked for an ISP, we had problems with crawlers that were looking for email addresses. If we saw one violating our robots.txt, we would redirect it to a CGI that would very slowly (lots of sleep calls) randomly generate bogus email addresses (host did not resolve) and about 1 in 20 was an email address would sorta resolve, but would send them to a box that was set so that if anything connected to it, it blackholed the connecting IP at the router.

Uh...

it was transGENIC mice, not transGENDER mice.

That complaint is as stupid as flagging a children's book because the author's last name was Gay: https://www.nbcnews.com/nbc-ou...

The US government used to fund a LOT of research, as they considered it necessary to keep us on top after WW2 (a lot of it had military applications), but since the 'sequestration' bullshit from years ago, grant programs got cut hard. Which then meant that people were applying for MORE grants, and the one that I had sat on review panels for had applications double when funding was halved... so administrative costs hit such a high percentage of the total funding that NASA decided to just cut it entirely.

(and I admit, my group pushed for funding one rather absurd project for a single year, because if it worked, it would have been amazing... and we also pushed against the administration's request to give two projects a 2, as that would have meant they could possibly get a little money... and we said hell no, these very clearly should get NO money)

I don't know the full details, and I'm working from memory, but there were scientists working on building local AI instances so that they could be archived along with the data being analyzed for reproducibility.

Of course, many of them are of the 'data analysis' and 'computer vision' type AI, not of the generative AI types

I have a 4k TV, but refuse to connect it to the internet, as I did it once (so I could share a video from my phone), and it decided to update its software and showing me ads on the settings screens

I'd rather stick with my xbox or a roku for the streaming content, and keep my TV off the internet.

(iOS won't stream to a TV if you have them both connected on a wifi network that's not connected to the internet... I suspect that Android is the same)

I still watch, but it's mostly PBS stations and NHK World... stuff like This Old House, woodworking, cooking shows, science shows, etc. WETA-UK has comedies and mystery shows. And I used to watch a couple hours of foreign news (BBC, DW, F24, NHK) each day. NHK also has some disaster preparedness type shows (and PSA type clips between shows, especially back in 2020-2023)

Of course, I'm going through long covid, so there was a year or so during 2020/2021 where Sesame Street was about the limit of my ability to follow. I tried catching up on the DVDs that I had collected, but it's exhausting not being able to follow it so taking 2 hrs to watch a 25min episode as you have to keep backing up to figure out what's going on.

Sometimes I'll watch ION (Bones, NCIS), MeTV (old school shows), Grit (westerns), but I miss when ION used to have cooking shows instead of just 'we'll show a full day of the same stuff' trying to appeal to binge watchers but forgetting that we'd prefer to be able to set our own schedule for that.