“They’re obviously not going to admit that the reason that they’re protesting is because they’re receiving fraudulent money, or that they’re the recipients of wasteful largesse, they’re gonna come up with some other reason, but that is the real reason for the protests,” said the billionaire.

Musk and DOGE have slashed the agency that manages Social Security, as he’s falsely criticized America’s core safety-net program as a “Ponzi scheme.”

They probably receive or expect to receive funds from Social Security or some other government program. The filthy swine.

Somehow, I don’t think that this is going to do a great deal to heal any brand damage with progressives.

Frankly, I think that Mr. Musk would be considerably better off if he would simply stop tweeting or publicly-saying things before running them past a PR team.

I’m sure that there was maneuvering for influence, but he’s a grown, competent adult. Most of his wealth is associated with a company that has made its products an identity symbol for progressives. It should not be that hard to see that becoming a colossally-important financial supporter of, very-visibly palling around with, and performing some of the more-unpopular actions for the extraordinarily-unpopular-with-progressives Trump was going to piss people off. Having Trump do a sales pitch for said products on the White House lawn is just icing on the cake.

He was not trapped in that situation. Hell, even if he wanted to make huge donations, lots of wealthy people donate money to presidential campaigns — albeit not normally at the level that Musk did — and they don’t normally engage in the kind of incredibly-visible association that Musk did. He could have walked away. He could have even just asked Trump to appoint someone who he agreed with in the role, rather than taking it himself.

And this isn’t Musk’s first high-profile brand management screw-up. With Twitter, he was roundly criticized for the rebrand to X, given that Twitter had a very-well-established, valuable brand. Like, after the first time around, you’d think that he could reasonably have someone sanity-checking some of this for impact on brand.

I don’t expect Musk to be mistake-free, but I really think that if you placed most business leaders in his shoes, they’d have had an inkling that this was quite likely to be trouble.

If death weren’t a thing, I suppose that that pitching someone into lava or something like that would be pretty bad then.

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/sarah-palin-russia-house/

Did Sarah Palin Say: ‘I Can See Russia from My House’?

2008 GOP vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin did not say ‘I can see Russia from my house.’ That line originated with an SNL spoof.

The basis for the line was Governor Palin’s 11 September 2008 appearance on ABC News, her first major interview after being tapped as the vice-presidential nominee. During that appearance, interviewer Charles Gibson asked her what insight she had gained from living so close to Russia, and she responded: “They’re our next-door neighbors, and you can actually see Russia from land here in Alaska, from an island in Alaska”:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diomede_Islands

Big Diomede Island on the right is part of Russia.

Little Diomede Island on the left is part of the United States.

March 21, 2025:

https://www.npr.org/2025/03/21/nx-s1-5327595/trump-order-fema-states-disaster-response

President Trump has signed an executive order directing state and local governments to “play a more active and significant role” in preparing for disasters. For months, Trump has said he’s considering getting rid of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the country’s disaster response arm.

“I say you don’t need FEMA, you need a good state government,” Trump said while visiting the Los Angeles fires in January. “FEMA is a very expensive, in my opinion, mostly failed situation.”

But emergency management experts say Trump’s order technically wouldn’t do much to shift responsibility. Currently, local and state governments are already in charge of disasters. The question is whether the Trump administration will begin withdrawing the federal resources and funding that states rely on.

Two weeks later, the tornado outbreak and floods of April 2–7 occurred:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tornado_outbreak_and_floods_of_April_2–7,_2025

From April 2–7, 2025, a slow-moving weather system and a stationary front caused both a widespread and devastating tornado outbreak and historic, life-threatening flash flooding across much of the Southern and Midwestern United States.

Most states hit voted for Trump.

At some point in the mid-late 1990s, I recall having a (technically-inclined) friend who dialed up to a BBS and spent a considerable amount of time pinging and then chatting with Lisa, the “sysadmin’s sister”. When I heard about it, I spent quite some time arguing with him that Lisa was a bot. He was pretty convinced that she was human.

http://bbs.hmvh.net/hmvh/lisa/LISA.HTM

http://textfiles.com/bbs/install.txt

You are either extremely confused or trolling. I very strongly suspect you are intentionally trolling, especially since you created a throwaway account to make this post.

The post you are complaining about appears to be this one:

https://lemmy.today/post/27979434

Here is your complaint:

https://lemmy.today/post/27979434/15777591

The OP in that post posted an image taken from a well-established website from a 2014 article, long before anything approaching today’s image generation AI existed.

You accused the images of being generated by an AI, based on a “probability rating” from an AI image detection website.

The person who posted those pointed out the date of the article. You then ignored this and claimed that the article consisted of a mix of AI generated images and real photographs.

Being extremely generous and assuming that there is a slim chance that you are not trolling, even aside from the issues with the date on the source, there is no reliable mechanism to detect AI-generated images. The best you’re going to get are heuristics.

If anything, this just illustrates the issues with software that tries to detect AI-generated images using any heuristic — you’re going to get false positives and negatives, and invariably people out there are going to misinterpret it (or attempt to leverage the false positives or negatives to encourage other people to misinterpret them, like to claim that an AI-generated image that passes a detection website must be a photograph or that a real photograph that fails must not be evidence of what is shown).

Grego was part of an independent panel set up by the American Physical Society, which took a look at missile defense. Earlier this year, they concluded a constellation of about 16,000 interceptors would be needed to attempt to counter a rapid salvo of about 10 solid propellant ICBMs similar to North Korea’s Hwasong-18 missiles.

Sounds like Brilliant Pebbles.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brilliant_Pebbles

Brilliant Pebbles was a space-based ballistic missile defense (BMD) system proposed by Lowell Wood and Edward Teller of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) in 1987, near the end of the Cold War. The system would consist of thousands of small satellites, each with missiles similar to conventional heat seeking missiles, placed in low Earth orbit constellations so that hundreds would be above the Soviet Union at all times. If the Soviets launched their ICBM fleet, the pebbles would detect their rocket motors using infrared seekers and collide with them. Because the pebble strikes the ICBM before the latter could release its warheads, each pebble could destroy several warheads with one shot.

Brilliant Pebbles is named as a play on “Smart Rocks,” a concept promoted by Daniel O. Graham under the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI).[2] Smart Rocks envisioned large orbital battle stations equipped with powerful sensors and carrying numerous small missiles. However, deploying at least 423 stations to maintain coverage over the Soviet Union was impractical due to limited space lift capabilities at the time. Edward Teller dismissed the idea as “outlandish”[3] and vulnerable to anti-satellite attacks, a sentiment shared by the SDI Office (SDIO). But after their own project, Excalibur—an X-ray laser system powered by a nuclear warhead—failed critical tests, Teller and Lowell Wood recognized the limitations of directed-energy weapons. The SDIO then revisited missile-based concepts akin to Smart Rocks. Wood introduced “Pebbles,” proposing that advances in sensors and microprocessors allowed missiles to operate independently without central stations.

To intercept missiles promptly, the autonomous pebbles are kept in continuous low Earth orbit near the edge of the atmosphere. This low-altitude placement makes them susceptible to anti-satellite attacks. However, it also reduces the risk of contributing to Kessler Syndrome and space debris, as pebbles decay automatically due to atmospheric drag, re-enter the atmosphere, and are regularly replaced—a form of planned obsolescence. Because of their low orbit, the pebbles must travel at high velocities to maintain altitude, which prevents them from remaining fixed over a single location. Consequently, a constellation of many thousands of pebble satellites evenly distributed around the Earth is necessary to ensure sufficient coverage, making it inherently a global system.[4] Critics contend that this global distribution renders the majority of satellites ineffective during a conflict, thereby making the system less efficient compared to localized or regional missile defense systems.[5]

Pebbles replaced Rocks as the baseline SDI design and in 1991 it was ordered into production and became the “crowning achievement of the Strategic Defense Initiative”.[6] By this time the Soviet Union was collapsing and the perceived threat changed to shorter-range theatre ballistic missiles. Pebbles was modified, but doing so raised its weight and cost; the original design called for around 10,000 missiles and would cost $10 to $20 billion, but by 1990 the cost for 4,600 had ballooned to $55 billion.[3][a] Fighting in Congress through the early 1990s led to Pebbles’ cancellation in 1993, but elements of the concept re-emerged with the Space Development Agency in 2019, and later in 2025.[7]

That can probably do a pretty good number on an ICBM, as the article mentions. But I’m not at all sure how well it’d work against SLBMs launched from near-offshore ballistic missile submarines in a depressed trajectory.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ballistic_missile#Throw-weight

Depressed trajectory

Throw-weight is normally calculated using an optimal ballistic trajectory from one point on the surface of the Earth to another. A “minimum-energy trajectory” maximizes the total payload (throw-weight) using the available impulse of the missile.[27] By reducing the payload weight, different trajectories can be selected, which can either increase the nominal range or decrease the total time in flight.

A depressed trajectory is non-optimal, as a lower and flatter trajectory takes less time between launch and impact but has a lower throw-weight. The primary reasons to choose a depressed trajectory are to evade anti-ballistic missile systems by reducing the time available to shoot down the attacking vehicle (especially during the vulnerable burn-phase against space-based ABM systems) or a nuclear first-strike scenario.

I think that you’ve really hit the nail on the head here. A bit of distance and etiquette is clearly needed in situations like this.

1. Obtain a pair of Montblanc 149 fountain pens.

2. Fill one with something with a bit of executive class, like Diamine Oxblood.

3. Fill the other with something a bit fun-and-quirky, like Noodler’s Southwest Sunset.

4. Obtain a nice, high-resolution C-mount camera of the sort frequently used for computer vision work.

5. Obain a Bantam Tools NextDraw 8511, a pen plotter capable of using arbitrary pens and making use of tilt.

6. Obtain a computer with a substantial amount of GPU capability.

7. In the secretary’s office adjacent to yours, install the OCR-capable computer vision LLaVA model on the machine. Attach the camera, and aim it at the desk. Install motion, the motion-detecting software package. Have motion run a script that, on motion, feeds the most-recently-captured image into LLAVA to convert it to text, and from there into ChatGPT. Attach the NextDraw 8511. Place the Southwest Sunset-loaded Montblanc 149 in the NextDraw pen plotter. Obtain a monoline font appropriate for handwriting pen plotter use, and feed ChatGPT text responses into text2svg, then feeding the resultant SVG file to your lpd, which has the NextDraw pen plotter set as its output.

8. Pen your first note with your Oxblood-loaded fountain pen. Have your executive assistant carry your note next door and place it on the table under the camera. Your virtual secretary will read it and write her response. Your executive assistant will wait for the note to be written, then carry it back to you.

This is the sort of decorum and professional class that one would expect in a proper office environment.

That’s a website that was never intended to be viewed by anyone other than a 30+ year old sysadmin who owns at least one beard grooming product.

Somewhere, a !unixsocks@lemmy.blahaj.zone denizen looks offended.

Yeah, sucks. :-/

For anyone else in the same boat, let me go see what that enclosure is with a physical power button that I wound up ultimately getting.

goes to look

This:

https://www.amazon.com/Swapable-External-Enclosure-Support-Capacity/dp/B0DCDDGHMJ

Probably others one can find — just an 8-bay JBOD enclosure with a variable speed fan and physical power switch.

But unlike the non-powering-on-after-power-loss enclosures, I haven’t had problems with it.

I have a ton of USB devices, and drive enclosures — the one thing that I really do not want to stay offline — are the only thing I’ve ever seen that doesn’t power up again on power loss. Maybe there are some USB displays that might also do so, but I don’t care about that if I’m not physically present.

Both The Economist and the Wall Street Journal have been quite critical of the tariffs. Not only that, but those articles have been posted here.

I was reading an article talking about how the people most-severely being taxed by the tariffs are relatively poor. First, tariffs are a regressive tax anyway — it’s a tax roughly linked to consumption. Consumption taxes are regressive anyway, and I’ve talked about that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consumption_tax

Flat consumption taxes are regressive (shift the tax burden to the less well-off). The ratio of tax obligation to income tends to shrink as income increases because high-earners tend to consume proportionally less of their income.[25] An individual unable to save will pay taxes on all his income, but an individual who saves or invests a portion of his income is taxed only on the remaining income.

But secondly, what the article was pointing out was that it’ll hit inexpensive household goods out of China, stuff like clothing and whatnot, and the people who get whacked by that the hardest are people buying inexpensive everyday items.

It’s kind of amazing, actually. West Virginia was the most pro-Trump state in the elections. But they have the highest rate of Medicaid dependence, something that will take a hit, and then they’re going to take a clobbering from tariffs on inexpensive items. The tax cuts that Trump’s passing that all this is paying for are principally for the wealthy, aren’t going to be very helpful for them.

Well, you’ve posted three things. The first saying goodbye to Reddit, the second asking which of two instances to use, and the third saying that most posts aren’t relevant to you. Might post some things that are relevant, as it’d help generate conversation on those topics.

I think limiting one’s sense of smell is probably the least-restrictive.

Well, I guess when everyone in it is dead and everything they did is totally forgotten, which will presumably happen at some point.

If what you’re asking is “could the US hypothetically cut off the Internet in a worst case scenario”, like a war or something, the answer is “sure”. If the US were bent on destroying Internet infrastructure – submarine cable interchange stations, satellite uplink stations, major international cables, whatever, all of those are not hardened not realistically protectable targets and could be physically destroyed. Taking out communications infrastructure in Iraq was our first target in the Gulf War.

That’s probably also be true of a number of major military powers, but I’d be particularly confident of the US’s ability to knock out communications.

I was reading an article from a retired Navy officer a while back where he was talking about how submarine cables were vulnerable, and he pointed out that in past wars, we’ve destroyed them, and should also assume that an opponent would do the same.

One point: if it matters to you, you might want to confirm your enclosure’s behavior under power-loss conditions. I had one that did not come back to a powered on state or have an option to do so when power was restored. Not something I’d thought of, since I’d assumed this behavior. Eventually, after some looking, found an enclosure with a mechanical-toggle power switch that did restore prior state.

I mean, there was a point in time, quite some years back, when I had to do up modelines, but Xorg can generally handle things without an xorg.conf.

A slightly-modernized animals.bas is in current Debian in the animals package, binary animals. I had no idea that the thing was that old.

It sounds like this 101 BASIC Computer Games version might be the original; there’s no reference to a prior implementation here:

https://medium.com/@alexey.medvecky/ai-in-the-80s-how-a-simple-animal-guessing-game-pioneered-machine-learning-before-it-was-cool-2f4a63dfe762