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Joined 2 months ago
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Cake day: July 4th, 2025

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  • Yeah. There would be a way to do it that I feel like might potentially be useful. The described method (doing clustering instead of just having a similarity threshold to group tabs together, vectorizing the entire tab title through a whole fucking network instead of just tokenizing it and calling two tabs similar if they have uncommon tokens that are within a certain similarity level) really sounds to me like people who have no real idea what they’re doing, just being “ML experts” all over the codebase and fucking things up, and probably walking away very proud of themselves while helping themselves to bunches and bunches of the Mozilla Foundation’s Google-money.


  • Like why should including a feature with “AI” in it get them VC money?

    Spoken like someone who’s never interacted with Silicon Valley VCs… just imagine someone with tons of a money, a moderately competent business background, and very little understanding of even the basics of technology that you and I take for granted. And then make them stupid and greedy.

    “AI? Yes please! Here’s some money, I’ve heard of Firefox so I know you’re good for it.” It’s not really any more complicated than that, I don’t think.


  • Plenty of people have died in ICE custody since this started. If you hear from people who have visited and seen the conditions, it’s pretty clear why. The camps in Germany were the same: A lot of the deaths weren’t “on purpose” but just the natural outcome of conditions so harsh that they can’t sustain the basic functions that are necessary for life.

    The camps were already running in 1939, probably some people had died “not on purpose” by then. Gerhard Kretschmar was just notable because he was the first one “on purpose.”




  • It’s a lot more sinister than that.

    He started with the immigrants, because there was a tenuous theory under which his personal police force was allowed to fuck them up and do whatever they want. Some little speedbumps aside, that worked out okay, no one stopped it. Now he’s talking about federalizing the police force in one particular place, and moving on to the next target, who are citizens, American people, and where there’s not even that vague theory that he’s got a right to be throwing them in detention and letting them die of the natural conditions there.

    If no one stops that, then it moves on to the next group.


  • Back into the global game?

    They collapsed from being a global superpower, to selling off their natural resources to enrich a couple of hundred of the worst people on the planet, and beating up their neighbors for oil money and mostly being ignored by most of the rest of the world unless there’s an Olympics or something. Putin didn’t cause all of that of course, but he had a huge amount to do with entrenching the systems of corruption that doomed any chance they would have had of recovering their superpower status as China or Europe did after major catastrophes happened to them.

    And now, as of the last few years, they can’t even beat up their neighbors anymore. Sure, they still have a huge impact on the world stage in the form of destabilizing foreign democracies. You’re not wrong about that part. But that’s another example of my point: The whole shtick is just weakening everyone else. It won’t do anything at all to increase their military power, increase standards of living for either oligarchs or common people. It won’t help them win any of those regional wars. And it definitely won’t help them against any threat that comes from “outside the sphere” (bird flu or climate change or whatever). It’s just more Tanya Harding shit.


  • All the Putin jokes aside, I don’t think he’s doing it for geopolitical or treasonous reasons. I think it’s mainly just a by-product of his style of interaction and competition, which exists for very logical (“logical”) reasons and which he’s been able to make work pretty well for himself.

    https://snyder.substack.com/p/the-weak-strongman

    Snyder says it better than I can, but basically, he is weak and stupid, but he needs to be able to dominate people around him, and so his whole strategy is to attack and weaken, because that’s his only way to be able to compete effectively. He can usually dominate the weakened version of whatever he’s attacking, in a way he never could if it was at full strength. It’s why he shows such innate and passionate violence against anything or anyone that is organized, effective, or popular: Because someday, they might turn against him, and if they did they would definitely win, and so he has to Nancy Kerrigan them before they get a chance.

    Again Snyder summarizes it better, but it is also the exact same model that Putin uses, and it’s had exactly the same effect on Russia (taking it from at least a regional powerhouse and functioning country that could accomplish significant things, to being a pariah state that barely functions in the first place even internally.) The strategy only works for as long as there is no one “outside the wall” who can come into the sphere of influence in un-weakened form, and if that ever happens, then the strongman crumbles instantly into impotent rubble. To ever let one of these people get control of your country or organization is basically just a nonstop rolling catastrophe that just gets worse and worse the longer they hold on to power.





  • Yeah, I’m not saying it doesn’t happen, I just don’t know of it.

    I also like that judge, AI voice aside I feel like he has a perfectly valid point. I also have a feeling he was the same judge I saw scorching a prosecutor one time for cutting a plea deal where it seemed like they could have prosecuted the guy and he was getting away with sexual assault with a pretty minimal sentence, and he was furious at the prosecutor for not doing their job. He couldn’t exactly just take over the prosecution’s job for them, I think he sent the lawyers away to work out a new plea deal instead, and they came back with one that was still pretty minimal but I think added in some jail time. He sort of yelled at the guy some more and then just approved the plea deal, but if that is the judge I’m thinking of, it seems like he cares a lot about the purpose of what he’s doing, which is a really good thing.


  • I linked to the full bodycam video, the officer clearly says that there were two reasons for the stop: Headlights and seat belt.

    Your video has the AI voice claiming that failing to give a Miranda warning before opening the door is a “clear 4th amendment red flag.” That’s a load of steaming crap. Moving on to the actual issue at hand, the charge there was for unlawful carrying of a weapon. The judge’s decision is that by the officer randomly opening the door of the guy’s vehicle, and then seeing the weapon, that means it was an unlawful search (it was “in plain view” according to the officer / prosecutor, but the judge says it wasn’t in plain view until you opened the door). That has literally nothing at all to do with the initial stop being unconstitutional, or failure to ID or anything. It’s just to do with how the cop found the gun.

    Do you have one where the person failed to ID on a traffic stop, and their lawyer was able to make the argument that the initial stop was improper, and so they didn’t have to, and it worked? I feel like those would be super-easy to find, if that argument ever worked, since it is very commonly what people say while they are refusing to ID, and so if their lawyers were able to make it work we would have examples of it working.


  • https://www.hg.org/legal-articles/what-is-an-unlawful-police-stop-23464

    If the cop sees you (allegedly) not wearing your seat belt, and then pulls you over for a seat belt violation, that’s a legal stop. I sort of agree with you that the headlights thing is bullshit (and briefly looking at the internet I think you’re right). For all I know the officer realized that the headlights was bullshit, and randomly added in the seat belt thing. But, regardless, him saying the issue was the seat belt is going to hold up in court completely, and so refusing to ID based on that is going to get you in trouble. Your lawyer is going to have a hell of a time making that argument, especially if you then obstructed and resisted arrest.

    IDK where this “if I don’t agree, then I need to physically resist the cops, because it’ll be okay” thinking came from, but that’s not how it works legally. That’s part of why I am taking time to disagree with this, because people do get busted for crimes because of listening to what the internet told them.

    And to answer yoir question, if you find footage where the initial stop was deemed unconstitutional, but the subsequent conviction fir failing to ID stands, I will accept that I am wrong.

    What was a stop where the initial stop was even deemed unconstitutional? If I knew that, then I might be able to answer you. Except for some landmark cases, I don’t really know of it happening. I feel like that doesn’t happen very often. I feel like people getting charged for failing to ID is very common (including where they are trying to argue on the side of the road that the stop is improper in some way, and that’s why they are failing to ID and it’s okay.) That’s sort of my point.




  • Because if I fucking recall, George Floyd was not fighting back.

    Yeah, and that’s why the cop is in prison right now alongside everyone who was with him that day. That was my point.

    Pre-2014, charges for the cops were very rare even when they straight-up just shot somebody for more or less no reason. After that, it was intermittent, until 2020 was the inflection point where charges became practically universal, and also, those big walls of names of people who hadn’t done a damn thing who the cops had killed started drying up, because stuff had actually changed.

    There’s a lot that still needs to change, a lot of bad things baked into the system still. But of course some dickheads can only hold one fairly simple type of world model in their head at one time, and so whenever any type of police interaction goes sideways in any manner, even one like this where it is objectively about 90% the guy in the driver’s seat who causes the whole issue in the first place, they start screaming BLACK LIVES MATTER, BLACK LIVES MATTER like that’s going to help everything get better.

    This guy isn’t solving police brutality. He is helping to justify it, by diluting the examples of people who actually didn’t do anything, and providing a good example for people who want to say Breonna Taylor deserved it or whatever. Stop making him out as making some bold anti-racist stand because of what some other people did, successfully.



  • BECAUSE PEOPLE STARTED PROTESTING AFTER THIS SHIT KEPT HAPPENING, AND PEOPLE FUCKING DIED.

    Yeah, sounds great. Among other things I think burning down the 3rd precinct had a lot to do with changing the overall dynamic, just because like a lot of things, if people are dealing with some population that can fight back, they react differently than if the people can’t. I am saying that starting to yell at every cop that pulls you over and refuse to ID yourself is not really going to change the system, if you did it for a thousand years.

    I know people with way worse than your experience. Yes, it sucks. It would have been much worse if you’d decided “You know what, I think this is a bunch of crap, no you can’t have my ID and I’m not getting out of the car”. That’s part of my point.

    IDK why you’re yelling at me, like I’m saying that the cops never did/do anything wrong. I’m saying this dude created his own situation, and people who are one-side-is-fine-other-side-did-everything-wrong, like you are here, are enabling other people to go down his same path, ignore the laws and cops that are reasonable, and then pretend they did nothing wrong and it’s shocking and surprising that they got yanked out and arrested. It’s all everyone else’s fault. Don’t be like this guy.


  • Used by some power tripping asshole it’s their easiest path to making the stop violent.

    Ding ding ding

    The system still has some massive problems. If your goal is less police brutality and reform of the system, though, committing crimes in front of the police and refusing to cooperate with them in any way unless they use force is not going to be a real good way to go after that goal.

    I’ve seen situations that are way worse than this one. One guy got spooked (like legitimately spooked, you could tell he was for-real scared that the cops were going to do something to him) when he got stopped for an open container in the car. They asked him to get out of the car, he took off instead, crashed his car, foot chase, they tackled him, he ended the night with a bunch of felonies and his car totaled. That’s one reason I think this stuff is so absurd and dangerous when people say it on the internet; sometimes it translates to real world behavior too. You could tell that he was influenced by it, and that’s part of why he thought stomping on the gas and making the situation a hundred times worse was the right play.