Owen O’Malley

Tonight was a very bad night.

Starter Villain - Wikipedia

I loved Starter Villain by @scalzi.com. Bonus points for the intelligent cats. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starter...

The benevolent dictator model feels tempting for #OSS - faster, fewer debates. Then a PR argument with the single person in charge reminds me:

Speed isn’t health. Community is.

#A_NewHope ✊

I have the opposite problem. Most of the places in England have mirrors that show my chest.

We’re two hours away in Cochem going down the Moselle.

One of my mom’s coworkers, who was a non native English speaker mashed up “People who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones,” and “You shouldn’t kick a dead horse,” to “People who live in glass houses shouldn’t kick dead horses.”

Head over heels?

Me also!

Court papers filed Wednesday state that Mr. Abrego Garcia was beaten, deprived of sleep, and subjected to psychological torture during the nearly three months he spent in Salvadoran custody. It is unacceptable to send people to other countries to be tortured!

I tend to agree that ranked choice voting is widely preferable to our (general) current system in the US, but I think it's important to note every electoral system has quirks and vulnerabilities and ranked choice doesn't mean bad/incompetent/just plain evil folks can't still win elections/majorities

Chatbots — LLMs — do not know facts and are not designed to be able to accurately answer factual questions. They are designed to find and mimic patterns of words, probabilistically. When they’re “right” it’s because correct things are often written down, so those patterns are frequent. That’s all.

👇

A Friendly Reminder...

The US Is Storing Migrant Children’s DNA in a Criminal Database Customs and Border Protection has swabbed the DNA of migrant children as young as 4, whose genetic data is uploaded to an FBI-run database that can track them if they commit crimes in the future.

NEW: The US government has collected DNA samples from 133,000+ migrant children and teenagers and uploaded them into CODIS, a national criminal database originally built for convicted sex offenders and violent criminals, according to documents reviewed by WIRED.

We really need to remove the pardon power. The president shouldn’t have the power to incite a rebellion against the United States and then pardon the guilty. The same applies to bribes and selling pardons for personal profit.

Wrote a piece for @opensource.org based on my experiences in open source over the last 20 years (!).

A man who holds the title of President of the United States, who took an oath to protect and defend the Constitution, who then says he doesn’t know if he’d uphold the Constitution, is unfit to be president and should be removed.

I agree with the responses saying that it isn’t worth responding, but the comment is just wrong. Even very good programmers make mistakes with C and C++. The first time I used valgrind on my code was quite humbling.

The 5 largest single day $DJIA drops and their corresponding President.

There seems to be a pattern here but I can’t quite figure it out.

The image is a heatmap titled "Measles," showing measles cases across U.S. states from 1928 to 2003. States listed on the y-axis include Alaska, Arkansas, California, Connecticut, Delaware, Georgia, Iowa, Illinois, Kansas, Louisiana, Maryland, Michigan, Missouri, Montana, North Dakota, New Hampshire, New York, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, Utah, Vermont, Wisconsin, and Wyoming. The x-axis spans years from 1928 to 2003. A vertical line marks the introduction of the measles vaccine around 1963. The color scale at the bottom ranges from blue (0 cases) to red (4,000+ cases), with shades of green, yellow, and orange indicating intermediate values (1,000, 2,000, 3,000 cases). Before 1963, many states show frequent high case numbers (yellow to red), while after 1963, cases drop significantly, with mostly blue indicating near-zero cases.

And yet Joe Rogan puts guests on who say "Vaccines aren't actually responsible for the reduction in infectious diseases.”

Top FDA Vaccine Official Resigns, Citing Kennedy’s ‘Misinformation and Lies’ Dr. Peter Marks, a veteran of the agency, wrote that undermining confidence in vaccines is irresponsible and a danger to public health.

Breaking News: The top vaccine official at the FDA abruptly resigned, saying that Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s “misinformation and lies” were irresponsible.

I think the way to paraphrase would be: “Signal does not put our military personnel at risk. Stupid people not knowing how to use Signal puts our military personnel at risk.”

Right now there are a lot of new eyes on Signal, and not all of them are familiar with secure messaging and its nuances. Which means there’s misinfo flying around that might drive people away from Signal and private communications. 1/

🔑 under-discussed point — why they were on signal:

Everything you say to your Echo will be sent to Amazon starting on March 28 Amazon is killing a privacy feature to bolster Alexa+, the new subscription assistant.

Corey Doctorow: "Even by Amazon standards, this is extraordinarily sleazy: starting March 28, each Amazon Echo device will cease processing audio on-device and instead upload all the audio it captures to Amazon's cloud for processing, even if you have previously opted out of cloud-based processing"