No argument there. It's just that taxation _also_ apparently discourages the addictive behaviors. Coercion sucks, exploitation sucks, but criminalizing has been historically much worse.

Because we lost the war on drugs, and bans (which imply criminalization) don't work. For comparison, here is a map of smoking rates per-capita. While there are some exceptions (oh Russia, you crazy), generally speaking those taxes _do_work_.

www.indexmundi.com/blog/index.p...

It's just the easiest path to collect a ton of PII. The normal hiring process involves a TON of disclosure of sensitive information by the applicant, and very little by the "employer". That asymmetry is exactly the kind of interaction that pays off the best for scammers.

Buying into the "who deserves a smiting" narrative is counter-productive. How about we pillory them for:
1. Republicans cut funding to the services which warn about this,
2. Republicans ignored the warnings that WERE issued,
3. NWS was created to predict these kinds of events.

Chestertons fence...

Never underestimate how awesome L-systems can be. :)

I _strongly_ agree that housing policy needs a substantial amount of work to fix it's inequity issues. That's all on the heads of politicians and government workers though. Again, there are bad landlords out there, but that's no reason to paint all (esp. middle class) landlords as villains.

During the organ harvesting you mean?

Unfortunately, the corporate/wealthy owning homes ship has long since sailed. There are many reasons why homes are so much more expensive (carrying cost as a % of income) than they were 40 years ago, but that's a big one. Houses SHOULD cost 30% of income, but it's more likely to be 60%+.

There are terrible landlords out there, no argument...
But there are also plenty of people in a situation where the rent payment is needed to make up an income shortfall, and the lack of a rent payment would mean that both the renter AND the homeowner end up homeless.
It's not always so clear cut.

Worth a watch:

Head of Signal, Meredith Whittaker, on so-called "agentic AI" and the difference between how it's described in the marketing and what access and control it would actually require to work as advertised.

Inspired by alexcodesart.com I put together a noisy-circles sketch with Nannou/EGUI/Rust. Perlin noise progressively modifying the radius of concentric(ish) circles.
#generative #generativeart #creativecoding #nannou #rust

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accusat...

Heh. I got bitten by Poe's law again.

Whenever somebody states "I did some research with $AI_LLM", you have to take it with a huge grain of salt. This is not an engineering analysis, but instead a questionable AI summary.
The replies point out some inconsistencies.

Nope. My brain has been mostly empty except for thoughts of mountain bikes. :D

Judging from the current level reading... did somebody already pull the trigger on this one?

Yeah. BLE and deep sleep on an ESP32. It uses an e-ink display for persistence, and wakes up periodically to get current song info. Ends up being pretty low power (think weeks of battery life). It's also sitting in bits on my desk right now, unloved.

I'm oddly not doing anything interesting right now. I did start on a little handlebar remote for my cellphone, but that's been shelved for weeks.
I'm basically a lazy lump, riding my bike, and doing nothing really techy right now.

I still wear mine. It folds up small in a backpack for cold mountain biking days.
The only residual value I am getting out of all that time spent working with Openstack, tbh.

Hehehe, not sure if will fail, so will make sure it will fail.

You misspelled it. It's not R-A-D-I-C-A-L, it's R-A-T-I-O-N-A-L.

Our leaders aren't for sale either.
I mean, you can have Premier Smith for free I guess? No backsies though.

I mean, if we assume that purple is heading to the right on a graph of the wavelength of various colors... maybe there is some metaphor for the damage caused by deeper UV...

Sorry to say, but that list is a bit short.

My understanding is that they're moving to cloud storage, which would cost about... (clicky clacky noises)...
$3 million/MONTH for the equivalent amount of data, assuming 10TB/tape, ie: older LTO-8 or similar.

Note: In no way am I conceding that AI generally writes good code. I am saying that even if it did, it's not sufficient for building good software.

There is no Vibe Engineering This article explores the relationship between vibe coding and software engineering.

serce.me/posts/2025-3...
This has been a constant topic of discussion with a lot of my peers, but I think this post hits the nail on the head.

TL;DR: Your AI engine can't engineer a good system, even if it does write decent code.

I'll admit that there was a time there during the lock-down when every time I saw our flag, I got angry at people appropriating the shared symbol for their own idiocy. That feeling is _gone_ now, and I just feel like we're all on the same team.

Username checks out 👍

Temu Millhouse!!!!! 😂