“Gigantic Asshole Ajit Pai Is Officially Gone.”
I don’t think I’ve enjoyed an article’s title this much in a while.
Here is a list of harmful nonsense Pai and his FCC did over the last four years:
- Killed net neutrality
- Approved T-Mobile / Sprint merger
- Repeatedly released reports that claimed U.S. broadband is fine
- Defended murder of net neutrality in court
- Flubbed Puerto Rico hurricane disaster response
- Slow-walked and obstructed investigation into telecom company sale of your location data
- Said FTC would protect net neutrality (it didn’t, and couldn’t)
- Falsely claimed killing net neutrality was good for broadband access (it wasn’t)
- Refused to brief Congress about telecom companies’ sale of their customers’ phone location data
- Helped Comcast and other major telecom companies in their pursuit of monopolistic power
- Oversaw America’s falling rank in an annual “Internet Freedom” index
- Allowed Verizon to throttle California firefighters’ data while they were fighting unprecedented wildfires
- Invented a DDoS attack that shut down the FCC’s net neutrality comment system
- Lied to public about that fake DDoS attack that shut down the agency’s net neutrality comment system
- Lied to Congress about that fake DDoS attack
- Didn’t detect that dead people were leaving comments on net neutrality comment system
- Refused to change the definition of ‘broadband’
- Demanded $200 to release emails about his giant mug
- Allowed scammers to submit fake comments about net neutrality under the names of two sitting senators
- Did that dumbass Harlem Shake thing with a pizzagate conspiracy theorist
- Became a rubber stamp for Sinclair Media and
- Tried to kill a broadband assistance program that subsidized internet connections for the economically unstable and poor
- Got a literal gun from the NRA for his “courage” in killing net neutrality
- Was investigated by his own agency for alleged corruption as he pushed to dismantle media consolidation rules
- Published report claiming broadband market was magically fixed by repealing net neutrality
- Ignored 22 million comments supporting net neutrality
- Tried to reclassify cell phone data service as “broadband internet”
- Allowed phone call rates for incarcerated people to skyrocket
Here are 150 articles Motherboard wrote about Pai during his tenure.
and:
Those 25Mbps / 3Mbps speeds aren’t even minimums, by the way, because the Annual Broadband Report isn’t something meant to be enforced. It’s a benchmark by which the FCC determines whether it’s doing its job of helping to close the digital divide — where as many as 1 in 3 US households don’t have broadband internet access at all. Currently, if a single ISP claims it can deliver a single 25Mbps down / 3Mbps up internet connection anywhere in your entire census block, much less your home, the FCC considers its job done. Oh, and the FCC doesn’t even audit those numbers! It’s a “fox guarding the henhouse” kind of thing.
Scientists Film Salt Crystal Formation in Real-Time.
Nakamuro and his team looked at the videos Sakakibara had captured and were the first people ever to see tiny cuboid crystals made of tens of molecules of NaCl emerging from the chaotic mixture of separate sodium and chloride ions. Straight away, they noticed a statistical pattern in the frequency at which the crystals emerged; it followed what’s known as a normal distribution, which has long been theorized but only now experimentally verified.
Just amazing.
Single-binary Compilers for Node
Nexe and pkg are two compilers that create self-contained executables out of your Node scripts.
Deno introduced this in a recent release, which got me looking for Node-based alternatives.
Your API is a Hall of Shame; You give REST a Bad Name
Dylan Beattie is my new favorite nerd on YouTube.
On Consciousness
It is remarkable that mind enters into our awareness of nature on two separate levels. At the highest level, the level of human consciousness, our minds are somehow directly aware of the complicated flow of electrical and chemical patterns in our brains. At the lowest level, the level of single atoms and electrons, the mind of an observer is again involved in the description of events. Between lies the level of molecular biology, where mechanical models are adequate and mind appears to be irrelevant. But I, as a physicist, cannot help suspecting that there is a logical connection between the two ways in which mind appears in my universe. I cannot help thinking that our awareness of our own brains has something to do with the process which we call ‘observation’ in atomic physics. That is to say, I think our consciousness is not just a passive epiphenomenon carried along by the chemical events in our brains, but is an active agent forcing the molecular complexes to make choices between one quantum state and another. In other words, mind is already inherent in every electron, and the processes of human consciousness differ only in degree but not in kind from the processes of choice between quantum states which we call ‘chance’ when they are made by electrons.
Boncuk the Doggy
A devoted dog has spent days waiting outside a hospital in Turkey where her sick owner was being treated.
The pet, Boncuk, which means bead, followed the ambulance that transported her owner, Cemal Senturk, to hospital in the Black Sea city of Trabzon on 14 January. She then made daily visits to the facility, the private news agency DHA reported.
Senturk’s daughter, Aynur Egeli, said she would take Boncuk home but the dog would run back to the hospital.
A hospital security guard, Muhammet Akdeniz, told DHA: “She comes every day around 9am and waits until nightfall. She doesn’t go in.
“When the door opens she pokes her head inside.”
On Wednesday, Boncuk was finally reunited with Senturk when he was pushed outside in a wheelchair. “She’s very used to me. And I miss her too, constantly,” he told DHA.
Senturk was discharged from the hospital on Wednesday and returned home with Boncuk.
We do not deserve dogs.
The Kobayashi Maru Test
[…] the simulation takes place on a replica of a starship bridge, with the test-taker as captain and other Starfleet members, officers or other cadets, in other key positions. […] the cadet receives a distress signal stating that the civilian freighter Kobayashi Maru has struck a gravitic mine in the Klingon Neutral Zone and is rapidly losing power, hull integrity and life support. Sensor readings are indeterminate and there is no way to verify the distress signal. There are no other vessels nearby. The cadet must quickly make a decision:
- Attempt to rescue the Kobayashi Maru’s crew and passengers, which involves violating the Neutral Zone and thereby provoking the Klingons into hostile action or possibly an all-out war; or
- Abandon the Kobayashi Maru, preventing war with the Klingons but leaving the crew and passengers of the freighter to probable death.
[…] The objective of the test is not for the cadet to outfight or outplan the opponent but rather to force the cadet into a no-win situation and simply observe how they react.
I wondered how this related to the Trolley Problem and came by this great post by Tom Ingram.
Living Wages for Essential Moochers
An Absolutely Lovely Photo of The University of Iowa in Winter
♥️♥️♥️ Via @uiowa
A Malarkey-Free America
Here’s to a Malarkey-Free America 🇺🇸🍦😎 Things won’t magically start getting better. He isn’t perfect. But he certainly is a decent human being, if only because he isn’t malevolent narcissism incarnate.
And unless your career depends on democratic dysfunction and systemic ineptitude, cruelty, and dishonesty that sow and sustain rancour1, you at least ought to be relieved you won’t have to say “God what the fuck did he do now?” with the exhausting and dismaying frequency you did over the past four (THOUSAND) years. That’s something.
🙏♥️🇺🇸
Special 📣 to some #techbros and their engagement targets 💸↩︎
Saw with CK. Didn’t expect to like the movie as much as I did. Tilda Swinton and Ben Wishaw were brilliant. “Pure Christian pleasure.”
Bernie Being Wholesomely On-Brand at the Inauguration
Wait, is Bernie is wearing the same jacket from his meme at the inauguration?
The pose. The mittens. The social distance.
Bernie dressed like the inauguration is on his to do list today but ain’t his whole day.
And about those mittens:
Bernie’s mittens are made by Jen Ellis, a teacher from Essex Junction, Vt. She gave them to him 2+ years ago and was surprised when he began wearing them on the campaign trail. They are made from repurposed wool sweaters and lined with fleece made from recycled plastic bottles.
A little more backstory:
Jen Ellis, a teacher from Essex Junction, made the mittens and gave them to Sanders. She used repurposed wool from sweaters and lined them with fleece. She generally sells mittens at craft fairs or gives them to friends. Sanders’ daughter-in-law, Liza Driscoll, runs Ellis’ daughter’s daycare, so one holiday season, Ellis made mittens for all the teachers — plus Bernie.
“I just put in a little note that was like, ‘I believe in you, I’ve always believed in you and I hope you run again,’” Ellis said. “And now he is running again, and he apparently is wearing the mittens that I made for him!”
And finally (via KP):
Update
This is the best one I’ve seen so far (via JK):
There’s also a collection (via CK) and another called “The approximate size of various ocean animals with a Bernie for scale” (via Deepu), and a Zillow listing.
An Owl’s Eye Color is Related to When It likes to Hunt.
Dark Brown or Black: Nocturnal (helps with camouflage.) Orange: Dawn and Dusk. Yellow: Daytime. There are no Blue-Eyed Owls.
Dog Years
By Cameron Spires.
2021 Things
New Years resolutions for 2021 are gonna be like:
- travel to the other side of the room
- wear a different shirt
- cut screen time from 12 hours a day to 11
- eat a vegetable
- bathe
On Chernobyl and COVID
any history of COVID-19 in the US should really start off with an anecdote about how the chernobyl miniseries came out in 2019 and there was immediately a conclave of pundits smugly declaring that we would never respond to a disaster with such epic and malicious mismanagement
Tesseract is an Open-Source OCR Engine
Here’s a short overview but I found it as easy as
brew install tesseract
# See output.txt
tesseract -l eng input.png output
The Narcissist’s Prayer
That didn’t happen.
And if it did
It wasn’t that bad.And if it was
That’s not a big deal.And if it is
That’s not my fault.And if it was
I didn’t mean it.And if I did
You deserved it.
We Love America the Mostest
I’m always curious what exactly Conservatives mean when they say they “Love America” because you hate most of the people who live here, you hate the civil liberties afforded by the Constitution, you hate the separation of Church and State. You might claim to love its economy but you hate all of the states that make up the largest part of it. You hate the Government, you hate people who are anti-Government, you hate the rich because they’re part of a conspiracy…, you hate the poor because you think they’re lazy. You hate this country’s natural beauty because it gets in the way of industry, you hate industry because it keeps giving jobs away to immigrants. You hate immigrants for taking things you feel entitled to, you hate liberals because you feel they’re too entitled. You hate Government interference for getting in the way of Big Business, you hate Big Business for being too globalized. You hate Globalism for taking jobs away from American workers. You hate American workers for unionizing and demanding better jobs. When you say you “love America”, what aspect of America are you actually talking about?
Via CK. Cached.
A Conservative Plan
By Amii James (Instagram). Context was the Tories but applies to our fine people stateside as well.
Tory ministers saying “we owe it to children to keep schools open” might want to explain to me why they closed my youth centre, cut mental health services, underfunded my secondary school, stripped free school meals from my peers, tripled uni fees, demonised climate strikers…
This is the best octopus fossil ever found.
It was found in 1982 in France. It’s 165M years old. Researchers reconstructed it in 3D using “synchrotron microtomography.” I was unable this reconstruction because the system of scientific journals is a money-grubbing bullshit system run by greedy people. Here she is though ♥️
Absolute garbage. Another self-indulgent snooze-fest. A total waste of Sienna Miller and Alec Baldwin’s talents. Makes you mad at yourself for finishing it.
On Gender Fluidity
ROSS: “And Sasha you’ve got… is it two girls and a boy?”
COHEN: “Too early to say, really.”
On What to Live For
Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind. These passions, like great winds, have blown me hither and thither, in a wayward course, over a great ocean of anguish, reaching to the very verge of despair.
I have sought love, first, because it brings ecstasy - ecstasy so great that I would often have sacrificed all the rest of life for a few hours of this joy. I have sought it, next, because it relieves loneliness–that terrible loneliness in which one shivering consciousness looks over the rim of the world into the cold unfathomable lifeless abyss. I have sought it finally, because in the union of love I have seen, in a mystic miniature, the prefiguring vision of the heaven that saints and poets have imagined. This is what I sought, and though it might seem too good for human life, this is what–at last–I have found.
With equal passion I have sought knowledge. I have wished to understand the hearts of men. I have wished to know why the stars shine. And I have tried to apprehend the Pythagorean power by which number holds sway above the flux. A little of this, but not much, I have achieved.
Love and knowledge, so far as they were possible, led upward toward the heavens. But always pity brought me back to earth. Echoes of cries of pain reverberate in my heart. Children in famine, victims tortured by oppressors, helpless old people a burden to their sons, and the whole world of loneliness, poverty, and pain make a mockery of what human life should be. I long to alleviate this evil, but I cannot, and I too suffer.
This has been my life. I have found it worth living, and would gladly live it again if the chance were offered me.
The Human Flamethrower
by Unknown
Surprising in many ways!
A dinner at REDACTED is an unforgettable experience, not to be missed. It’s a beautiful restaurant, the food is fantastic, and you’ll be thinking about it long after the meal is over.
We started with the Date & Almond Naan, which was sweet and delicious.
The Butter Chicken, known in some places as Makhni, was tender, moist pieces of dark meat chicken, smothered in a delicious sauce with tomatoes, honey, cardamom, and what I’m assuming was a pound of laxatives.
The Three Greens Saag was wonderful, and not loaded with butter or cream – just fresh and delicious kale, spinach and mustard greens. Hearty, bold and certainly capable of demolishing even the stiffest of constipation.
White dude working the tandoors: you go, sir. The Tandoori Prawns were cooked beautifully, seasoned to perfection, and tore through me with the awesome fury of the horsemen of the apocalypse, Bravo.
The Duck Biryani, a special not on the menu, I would say, is not worth it. It’s two cups of rice and a duck thigh, and we were surprised to discover later that it cost $28. My wife thought it was going to be around $8. My sense of remorse doubled this morning as it ripped its way out of me in a raging fiery whirlwind of poopy terror.
This meal was delectable, exotic, and incinerated everything in my intestines. My morning was an unforgettable thrill ride.
The exotic flavors and aromas of India came flooding back to me as I literally peed out of my butt.
4 stars for the truly delicious food and unimpeachable service, minus one star for expensive biryani, and for turning me into a human flamethrower.
What Do We REALLY Learn?
Via CO. Succinct and appropriate for a gamut of events.
“I have to do this.”
I made a bet at work that involved me eating my Crocs (if I lost, of course), prompting my co-worker to send me this story about Eric Taylor, a “former Magic: The Gathering player and highly regarded Magic columnist, especially during the earlier days of the game” (MTG Wiki), who made a similarly hasty bet and honored its terms:
He went so far as to guarantee Kai couldn’t emerge victorious again, promising to eat his hat should he be proven wrong.
[…] By now a sizeable crowd had gathered to watch the spectacle. EDT began by biting into the rim, but couldn’t tear the material with his teeth. In a quick burst of speed, he reached into his bag, and pulled out a full bottle of Heinz Ketchup and a pair of scissors. Deftly slicing a swatch of material from the top of the hat, he masticated on the felt but found the taste to be offensive.
“This is terrible!”, he exclaimed, unleashing a destructive stream of ketchup all over the table and his headwear. He resumed devouring his hat, making chewing faces akin to Popeye the Sailor eating rotten spinach.
[…] Around the third mouthful, EDT began to wish he had a nacho hat. “This is terrible”, he screamed, banging his jaw against the table to force the hat down. This attracted the attention of Rob Dougherty, from the Boston. “You’re crazy!”, he admonished in the typical Your Move Games tone. Eric just shook his head, gritted his teeth, and said, “I have to do this.”
A Custom “Linux Router, Firewall and IDS Appliance”
The focus of this project is to build a super reliable, durable, and stable network device from tried and tested tech. This is not a project for pushing the limits or testing out flashy new stacks. This affinity for ‘boring’ technology will reflect on most of the choices made here, from the hardware to the way we configure services and daemons.
Sounds lovely. (Cached)
Positive, Nonseditious, Non-Facist Outlets
by Marc de Wolf
Idiots Out Walking Around - III
At the Iowa Statehouse. Via State Senator Joe Bolkcom. Installments One and Two (the latter features the verysame “Informed Choice” idiots.) More on this tantrum by The Register.
Hazel for macOS is an automation tool that lets you watch folders and apply all sorts of rules to them.
By a single dev. At $42, an absolute steal for all the things you can do with it. Perpetual license, no bullshit subscription model. 😍
On Winters
Taken completely out of context, for the letter itself is a lot of bro-y “locker room talk.”
My mind is dried up, exhausted. I’m disgusted to be back in this damned country where you see the sun in the sky about as often as a diamond in a pig’s asshole.
And especially when you simply don’t have any say in the matter:
On Partying After 35
once you reach a certain age if you pull an all-nighter, you die
Four Months of Frontend Development
This is a new personal record. Will go six months the next time 🎸
Conversion Table
by Prof. Kieran Healy
| A | B |
|---|---|
| No one could have predicted this would happen | Many people have been saying something like this would happen |
| I never thought I’d live to see this day | I have been asleep for the past five years |
| Anarchists | Trump Supporters |
| This is not who we are | This is exactly who we are |
| Our 250 year experiment in freedom and democracy | Our 280 year experiment in de jure or de facto apartheid |
| It’s not a coup because it doesn’t meet the technical conditions of the military branch attempting to seize power in a coordinated effort to remove the President from office… | I have a very comfortable job |
| We are better than this | We are exactly like this |
| We need to turn a page and move on | I am incapable of grasping and this determined to memory-hole these events |
| It’s time for healing and reconciliation | I fear I may not be in power much longer |
| This is America | This is America |
Definitely Not Octopuses
From this book that features 14 animals. Which are definitely not octopuses.
Decoding the flags and banners seen at the Capitol Hill insurrection
Confirmation that I did, indeed, see a “No, Georgia the country, idiot” flag. And then there’s this surprising tidbit:
The flags of Canada, Cuba, Georgia, India, Israel, South Korea, and South Vietnam were spotted in the mob. It’s unclear why many of these flags appeared, though a number of the white supremacist and militia groups that were present have international chapters.
India? Ah, yes of course
Eleventh Hour Courage
After profiting off him for four years. People and organizations appear to have found quite a bit of courage to do the right thing these days.
Stop Words
In computing, stop words are words which are filtered out before or after processing of natural language data (text). Though “stop words” usually refers to the most common words in a language, there is no single universal list of stop words used by all natural language processing tools, and indeed not all tools even use such a list. Some tools specifically avoid removing these stop words to support phrase search.
Any group of words can be chosen as the stop words for a given purpose. For some search engines, these are some of the most common, short function words, such as the, is, at, which, and on. In this case, stop words can cause problems when searching for phrases that include them, particularly in names such as “The Who”, “The The”, or “Take That”. Other search engines remove some of the most common words—including lexical words, such as “want”—from a query in order to improve performance.
I was hitting Algolia’s search limits had to remove words I didn’t care about searching like “and”, “only”, “there”, or “I’ve” in an attempt to shrink the size of the posts on this site in the search index. There are quite a few lists on the internet and I ended up using a few of them for significant (> 65% average) size reductions in the search corpora.
The Scunthorpe Problem
The Scunthorpe problem (or the Clbuttic Mistake) is the unintentional blocking of websites, e-mails, forum posts or search results by a spam filter or search engine because their text contains a string of letters that appear to have an obscene or otherwise unacceptable meaning.
Examples would be: shitake mushrooms, Herman I. Libshitz, magna cum laude, Arun Dikshit.
On Debugging
I’m not a great developer, I’m just really good at finding the magic one-liner fix on the 14th page on a repo’s GitHub Issues
They Pushed Me Out And Maced Me
Perfection. By @schmoyoho and via KP.
THIS is America
Lord of our lives and sovereign of our beloved nation, we deplore the desecration of the United States Capitol building, the shedding of innocent blood, the loss of life, and the quagmire of dysfunction that threaten our democracy.
These tragedies have reminded us that words matter and that the power of life and death is in the tongue. We have been warned that eternal vigilance continues to be freedom’s price.
Lord, you have helped us remember that we need to see in each other a common humanity that reflects your image.
You have strengthened our resolve to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies domestic as well as foreign.
Use us to bring healing and unity to our hurting and divided nation and world. Thank you for what you have blessed our lawmakers to accomplish in spite of threats to liberty.
Bless and keep us. Drive far from us all wrong desires, incline our hearts to do your will and guide our feet on the path of peace. And God bless America. We pray in your sovereign name, amen.
And please get off this gentleman’s lawn and out of his city.