Once it’s all tallied, something like $100 million will be spent on a single state’s judicial election. That is insane. Ten million would have been insane just a decade ago.

I imagine that’s why things are close. A lot of voters are being bombarded with (mis)information. The people who are undecided probably have no idea what’s true or false.

My theory is that for-profit social media companies push conflict and controversy because it increases “engagement.” So, people are conditioned to be hostile and hiss like a cat at the first sign of disagreement (real or imagined). Lemmy, obviously, has different incentives.

It’s happening on Mastodon and BlueSky too. I try to respond with kindness and sincerity. (I don’t always succeed. I kind of suck at it, to be honest. But if we all even can halfass human decency, it’ll be better than most of the internet.)

I think long term, the changes in scientific research will be the big story. They made it so grants can only request something like 15% of facilities funding. Some universities can eat the cost of a lab but 95% can’t. So, it’s going to destroy any sort of research that’s mostly done in labs.

To give a hypothetical example, you could imagine a novel battery chemistry that really only needs a few humans to run the experiments but an expensive lab to just run the battery through 10,000 charge/discharge cycles to see if it degrades. That research probably won’t be done in the United States.

The executive order allows wavers so maybe it won’t be batteries — Elon Musk needs those — but a lot of basic science research will be done in Europe, Canada, China, etc. who are more than happy to accept brilliant scientists and fund their research. It’s basically pocket change in the context of a national budget and the payoffs are potentially huge.

For international readers or Americans unfamiliar, Wisconsin has a state Supreme Court vote. It’s probably 50/50 and is the important one. Florida has 2 special elections for vacated House of Representative seats in Congress. The districts both voted heavily for Trump so the Republican candidate should win.

So, in Florida, don’t necessarily expect the Democrats to win. But if it’s even close, Republicans will be filling some diapers. They should be winning these districts by 20 or 30 points. Winning with 53% or whatever would be a really bad result for Republicans.

We’re aware. People who get all their news from Fox or ignore politics in general probably aren’t but even my conservative family members are embarrassed about the threats to Canada and Greenland. Canadians are generally considered super nice and polite by Americans so pissing them off crossed a line. Even apolitical people probably know the U.S. National Anthem is being booed at sporting events.

There’s elections in several states today that will provide some data to know more. Louisiana had an election on Saturday and rejected 4 constitutional amendments supported by Republicans. None even got 40%. Louisiana is an oddball state so I’m not sure it’s a harbinger of today’s elections but if voters in Wisconsin and elsewhere vote like Louisiana, it’ll be very telling.

Braaaaiiiinnns. And a 16 piece family deal, spicy, with a side of red beans, mashed potatoes, and extra biscuits.

With this kind of speed, we could invent Call of Duty games where the Zombies want slightly more than brains. Generative A.I. uses internet data for training so at first, the zombies will probably request Doja Kat in the racial chat rooms showing feet but human progress marches ever forward. Within a decade, Zombies might just want to get drunk and go to Popeyes.

I’m confused by the map. Why aren’t parts of Colombia and (maybe) Peru ditching the U.S.? I love Cartageña but I don’t expect them to side with us when society collapses.

Also, if we’re fighting, we get Pablo Escobar’s hippos. I don’t know the right balance or if the rift hits Medellin but the hippo gap must be even before we fight.

A jambalaya v.7.3 ratio spreadsheet exists:

https://www.tigerdroppings.com/rant/food-and-drink/latest-fandd-board-cookbook-parts-1-and-2-plus-the-jambalaya-calculator/110548628/

Here’s the food/drink topic section:

https://www.tigerdroppings.com/rant/food-and-drink/

It’s insane (compliment) and also insane (derogatory).

The Android rom ones like xda forums are active.

This is definitely not what you’re looking for but college sports forums are active if you want to read the dumbest shit ever.

I’m from Louisiana so I’ll pick on my own team and link to to Tiger Droppings:

https://www.tigerdroppings.com/rant/lsu-sports/

The recipe posts are actually good. It’s basically a forum for insane people who get mad about LSU gymnastics recruiting but then post an alligator sauce picante recipe that’s better than anything you’ve ever put in your mouth.

He died as he lived: rad as fuck.

Denver

I’m hoping in 500 years, my DNA sequence is found on a perfectly preserved micro SD card and my clone gets to meet President Camacho and take on Beef Supreme and the Dildozer on Monday Night Rehabilitation.

One good thing about BlueSky’s moderation over Mastodon’s is that it’s (partially) chosen by users. Mastodon/Lemmy instance hosts almost all do an admirable and often thankless job by defederating and booting people but in the end, you’re relying on your instance host and your own one-off blocks.

BlueSky currently does have centralized moderators who kick people off all the time. But if the law changes in any country, BlueSky has the fallback of relying on user-created blocklists and user-created algorithmic feeds. In the U.S., Section 230 is apparently hated by Congress and, while I agree it could be updated and reformed, I’m not confident our corrupt gerontocracy will strike the right balance.

I’d love it if the future of ActivityPub-based platforms uses that approach. Even Instance moderators would probably be thrilled.

Yeah, I have more faith in the Fediverse long term. But we’ve all been through multiple enshittification cycles where everyone abandons a platform and settles on a new one. At least BlueSky is currently open source.

I don’t want to make too much of this but BlueSky is registered as a B-Corps and not a C-corps. For those unfamiliar with US corporate setups, a C-corps is a typical corporation where maximizing shareholder value is the goal. People can disagree on what that means — long term value or short term value, for instance — but ultimately, C-suite executives serve shareholders and only shareholders.

A B-corps (in the U.S.) is a “Public Benefit Corporation” and executives have a duty to serve all stakeholder in the company, from shareholders, to customers, to employees. So, theoretically, BlueSky doesn’t have to be evil.

That being said, it’s not something to rely on. We just saw it with OpenAI, which started as a project at a non-profit and is now a regular ass company that the old non-profit happens to have shares in. A few corporate lawyers can fuck up a good thing very quickly.

I obviously support ActivityPub or I wouldn’t be posting this here but one of the AtProtocol developers bought a Raspberry Pi with 8GB ram and added an NVME drive. He’s trying to prove (or possibly make) this point wrong. https://bsky.app/profile/why.bsky.team

So far, it seems like it’s “working” but he’s found some things that are way too slow and needs to be fixed for it to run on a Raspberry Pi. But that gives me some confidence that the developers, at least, aren’t trying to make it so only people with deep pockets can run an instance. (I don’t know what the investors want but the developers aren’t scheming assholes.)

It’s probably going to ultimately be a situation where anyone with a high end PC (by today’s standards) can run their own instance. It’s definitely not an A.I. situation where you have to reopen Three Mile Island and piss away more water than Nestle to self-host.

To start, I’d recommend checking out Flathub and seeing what’s available there. Flatpaks are relatively new but anything there can be installed on basically any Linux distro. It’s organized by category so you can see your options.

Chrome is available on Linux if you’re worried about switching. Firefox is usually the default and what I use just because I’ve always used it (plus, it fully supports ad blockers whereas Chrome now cripples them). Also, Chromium is essentially the exact same as Google Chrome. Both are made by Google and Chrome is just Chromium before Google adds all its branding and stuff.

Don’t worry about antivirus. ClamAV is there if you want to run a scan but you don’t need anything like Norton.

VPN: check your provider. Most work with OpenVPN or have a Linux client.

Gmail obviously works in the browser but there’s a ton of desktop email clients. To give three examples I’ve used:

• Geary is a simple, clean email client that just does email does it well. Not very customizable, though.
• Thunderbird (made by Mozilla) has more features/options and supports extensions. If Geary is too simple, Thunderbird is a good middle ground.
• Evolution is like the Microsoft Outlook that comes with the paid Microsoft Office Suite. It has a calendar and all that enterprise-focused stuff. Probably overkill but it’s there if you need it.

Windows 10 is listed and I’m not quite sure what you mean but you can always run it in a virtual machine if you need it. I use Gnome as my Desktop Environment. Gnome Boxes is super simple. VirtualBox is more complex but has every option I’ve ever needed.

Don’t worry too much about the Desktop Environment thing. KDE and Gnome are the biggest two and both are pretty much equally capable. (You can also always install stuff made for the other if you want. It just might not match the theme.) There’s loads of desktop environments but don’t be intimidated by all the choices. Some are stripped down and designed for older or low-spec computers. There’s one focused on Chinese users. You can ignore most while you get your feet wet.

Half the 2000s Silicon Valley star executives seem to be there. Mark Zuckerberg even dresses like he’s in a Limp Bizkit cover band now. They’re not irrelevant due to money/power but they aren’t culturally relevant anymore and are seemingly all having a collective midlife crisis.

I’m now boycotting GEO Group. Henceforth, I will only do IRL heist missions in places where there’s a public prison option.