Even though it seems like this should be obvious, it absolutely hasn't been tested yet. I guarantee you that Trump will pardon himself and his entire family, for any past or possible future crimes, before he leaves office.

Given the current makeup of SCOTUS and their previous ruling about presidential immunity, I think we can guess how that decision will go.

And yet even with all of that they lost in 2024. Golly, what a conundrum.

I like the idea of "mystery ballots" though. Sounds fun.

This has nothing to do with people ineligible to vote, but I'm sure you know that.

The question is - what about brown-skinned people or people with a "funny accent" who are eligible to vote, but who don't want to risk getting harassed or detained for hours or days without cause (or, god-forbid, shot in the head for exercising their Constitutional rights)? How many of them will decide that voting is just not worth the risk?

Using ICE and other forms of federal threat is about creating chilling effects to change the political makeup of who is voting, not preventing illegal votes from being cast. It's basically gerrymandering via jackbooted thugs.

The logic is economic autarky -- the belief that we're always better off having complete political sovereignty over every part of our supply chains than having to depend on imports for anything.

This is likely also behind Trump's trade war with Canada. His demands with Canada aren't about discirimatory tariffs -- those were negotiated away with NAFTA then re-negotiated in his first term. His demands are now infringe on Canadian sovereignty, to give US control of Canada's external trade policy, and even on its internal markets (e.g., the use of French in Canadian internal commerce). Symbolically, that's why he wants to rename Lake Ontario to "Lake America". HIs establishment of US control over the Venezuelan oil industry is his greatest foreign policy achievement -- although it's not clear he understands the legal limits on what he can do with their money.

There's a foreign and military policy angle to this too: Taiwan is absolutely critical to the US economy, so we are absolutely committed to defend them if China invades. Semiconductor autarky would mean it's not our problem.

The problem with autarky is that even if it's a good idea (which economists don't believe), you can't conjure it into existence overnight. It will take many years, possibly decades for the US to replace the Taiwan's semiconductor industry. In effect, the administration is proposing to inflict the very damage on the US economy that a Chinese invasion of Taiwan would inflict.

And, once the US has voluntarily self-inflicted that damage, China would be free to invade Taiwan.

I suspect you were just asked to be nice, and through a combination of spectrum OCD and insufficient cognitive therapy, you decided somehow you were being asked to do something wrong.

So you helped elect an ignorant sociopath. Congrats on that. Maybe you should have attended more of those cognitive therapy sessions.

For some definition of 'they', sure, there's always *someone* paranoid about the scenario.

However there's a fair amount more credible supposition over this one. Trump's sore loser reaction has paved the way for some dangerous moves.

In 2020, he only went to interfere *after* the fact, but he clearly interfered. When the results betrayed him, he sought to overturn them and when that failed he tried to ignore the electors and use their own anyway and as that failed he tried to get Pence to reject the election and as that failed he incited a mom to try to disrupt the proceedings. He learned that in a fair game he actually could lose and that was unacceptable and he was willing to do whatever it takes to replace a loss with a win.

Now he and opportunistic cohorts are already much more proactive about it. Every reason to anticipate any plausible excuse to rig or discard the elections as he has proven himself already willing to do so and is surrounded by a much more all-in administration than his first term. Already trying to mess with mail-in, already openly rigged the representative maps, already been working ICE and national guard troops to get the hang of domestic military operations. Stephen Miller once basically publicly fantasized about sending republican controlled national guard into democratic states against their will to make them bend to his will.

I do anticipate the election will be *held* and if and only if the results are a loss will they try anything like an 'emergency', but I absolutely expect ICE and national guards to be doing operations around strategic polling sites. Ostensibly about immigration or crime, but with the oh so coincidental side effect of voter suppression.

I get the feeling that Zuck is in a similar boat to Richard Dawkins and Kent Overstreet, who have gone off the deep end and believe they have LLMs which are effectively equivalent to human companionship.

Remember Zuck celebrated that people could have AI "friends" and employees could talk to AI impersonations of their management and it would be just as good as actually getting to talk to management.

Nothing quite as publicly really off the deep end as Overstreet and Dawkins (who both seem to have decided that their favored LLMs must be 'girls', which strongly suggests they needed to gender it to make their "crush" make sense for them), with Overstreet getting extra creepy points for insisting his LLM is essentially a teenage girl. I would not be surprised if he at least more privately holds similar feelings and thus doesn't view this as "apocalyptic" bad.

It has happened under both.

If you were worried about being chased by kill bots, go and watch some videos from drone operators in Ukraine. Robots don't need feet for that job.

I would have figured this would have happened a long time ago, shocked it took until now to have a machine beat a human at running bipedal.

We aren't even the fastest bipedal animal.

I would not go *that* far. Sure an artist can flop out of the industry, and new artists have to come from *somewhere*, but the music industry has more and more successfully "manufactured" the performers rather than "discovered" them.

Also, lots of working it from other angles, the music is a relatively small part of the picture for the biggest musicians. Other media or just a celebrity for the sake of celebrity type things. Co-hosting some reality show that has nothing to do with music, for example.

He's not done much in the field in over a decade now, and even then arguably it was mostly riding on the remembered success from the 90s.

Translating garbage code creates even worse garbage code. I remember years ago a company I was with hired a company to translate COBOL to Java.

It was still crap when it was all over and the project was flushed. The biggest sin was the naming conventions used by the original code were maintained.

I've migrated code from one language to the other, and the best end results I've achieved were when I reverse engineered the original code and wrote the new code from scratch. It took longer, but in the process we discovered bugs that were then corrected in the new code. I loved it when the QA people would come back to me and say the results weren't the same, only to discover the original program had an undiscovered error.

I'm sure simple programs can be converted this way. My prediction is the big programs that no one wants to work on will still be crap code no one wants to work on after being converted. If they even run right.

The report included a patch, but the patch was completely wrong based on a random guess of how a certain software could behave. It 'worked' for the reporter by also swallowing all errors and silently continuing, despite the particular call failing. It was a check to see if a particular action would be needed, and so it silently assumed the step would not be needed, which happened to be true for the reporter so it looked 'fixed' to them.

Problem is that there are more than two people that are stakeholders, and and it would be nuts for me to just let the codebase get screwed up to try to prove a point for one very minor stakeholder who won't even get bitten by the mistake because their situation doesn't hit the bug inflicted by the change. If I let a random user patch a codebase, I rightfully get blamed, not them. And AI assessment of the report would likely agree with the submitter, because the AI generated a plausible rationale, and AI gives the benefit of the doubt to the material in the prompt fodder.

There actually is a project that I used to be a part of but no longer use or work on, but left my notifications active, because why bother changing and it was largely a "done" project, almost no new issues, not much in terms of code changes. Some guy decided to go all in on LLM giving free reign. Was not confident to be a developer but declared AI made it possible for him to change things. Suddenly lots of code changes, and also a sudden flurry of external issues of users who had been using it for a long time asking why random stuff was broken. Near as I could tell when I got around to disabling all the notifications, he just kept feeding issues into LLM and releasing updates and getting a new wave of issues and repeating. What was a boringly stable project became an eternally random messed up mess because he let LLM take over everything and it breaks as much as it helps. I'm not letting any of my active projects turn into that.

I hadn't even thought about this but now their resistance to enabling contactless or allowing other payment apps makes a lot more sense. Scumbags.

I like WinCo and shop there when I can (also far enough away to be a special trip). The stores sometimes have a K-Mart feel to them (poor upkeep, minimal customer support, that kind of thing) but they are very often cheaper and carry less popular products, and their deli and bulk foods offer a lot of unique stuff. Produce is usually better than Walmart but less consistently good than Kroger (which sucks at everything else).

That said, I can't imagine Walmart dropping credit cards. Too many people have abandoned every other way to pay these days.