Several years ago at this point, Congress passed a bill, and that bill was signed into law by the President. What that law says, is that TikTok cannot continue under Chinese ownership. Byte Dance either have to sell the American video app business so that it is controlled by Americans, or they have to shutdown Tiktok.

Byte Dance did not sell the business, so under the law TikTok has to shutdown. This law was lawyered all the way to the supreme court, and the court said it’s a valid law, and must be followed.

Despite all of these facts, the law is not actually being followed. And Tiktok is still operating in the United States. There is no legally valid reason for it to do so. President Trump has issued extension after extension, even though he has no legal authority to do so.

The latest here is the top law enforcement officer in the US telling the app stores, “yes we know it’s illegal to keep Tiktok in your app store, but I am pinky promising we won’t go after you.”

I’ve done some work with near infrared spectroscopy on a similar problem to the tricorder “molecular scan.”. There are two-three main problems as I see it.

1. A typical lab spectrometer might collect on 3,000 different frequencies to cover the spectrum. Meanwhile the sensor that is cheap enough to put in a tricorder has around 10 channels.
2. The lab instrument probably has expensive and fragile optics. You can’t do the same thing on the tricorder because the optics will break when you drop it.
3. Lab procedures rely on carefully controlling the illumination so it’s the same every time. Hard to do in the field, even in relatively benign field environments. This even comes down to using sample cuvettes that are precision machined to have two sides extremely parallel. You can’t make a tricorder that dispenses precision cuvettes for sample collection. If you can’t control the illumination, you have to measure it and calibrate.

But on the plus side, it’s a kind of actually readable font.

If LLMs train on text output from LLMs, the results will degenerate into total garbage over time. The people that buy reddit data for LLM training know this. They will stop buying if they think there’s a lot of LLM text on Reddit.

He can’t let people poison the training data, or else his site will have no value to its customers.

If you want top speed, Fortran is faster than C.

The source character set is implementation defined.

You could even choose the name this.

Probably better to use Grok, because that’s what’s going to read these things.

Do you mean that the script was written by the family, and it was only “performed” by generative AI? That’s very interesting, and not something I heard anywhere else.

Legally speaking, this was a victim impact statement.

Convicted criminals have long had the common law right of allocution, where they can say anything they want directly to the judge before sentence is passed.

Starting a few decades ago, several states decided that the victims of crime should have a similar right to address the judge before sentencing. And so the victim impact statement was created.

It’s not evidence, and it’s not under oath, but it is allowed to influence the sentencing decision.

(Of course, victim impact statements are normally given by real victims).

Sheesh, imagine being that priest, doing daily status updates skipping about 23 levels of chain of command.

This Pope had a personal charity underling who would walk the streets of Rome and hand out cash to people who needed it. The money came from selling autographed indulgences. So I’m not surprised in the least.

When I installed Linux for the first time around that time frame, I had to write X configs (for XFree86, not X.org) by hand. And be sure to get your monitor timings exactly right or risk permanent damage, said the scary warning.

Yep, on the grounds that the dragon is not an allegation, a claim for damages, or a request for relief.

Now the branches come too close to grinding irrevocably against one another in a conflict that promises to diminish both. This is a losing proposition all around. The Judiciary will lose much from the constant intimations of its illegitimacy, to which by dent of custom and detachment we can only sparingly reply. The Executive will lose much from a public perception of its lawlessness and all of its attendant contagions. The Executive may succeed for a time in weakening the courts, but over time history will script the tragic gap between what was and all that might have been, and law in time will sign its epitaph.

• Judge Wilkinson. Circuit Judge. 4th Circuit Court of Appeals. Appointed by Ronald Reagan.

Xkcd comics are published under one of the CC licenses (forget which one). It’s arguable this kind of thing may be an intended reuse.

At least it’s all on the far side of the garage door thingy that everyone has to roll under at the last second.

Guy looks kinda like he’s wearing a jacket with a gap at the waist. That would totally not work. You can’t have a gap that lets air out. The Apollo suits were one piece designs; two piece with a hard shell locking waist ring came later.

We’re talking nowadays about compression suits that are only inflated around the head and maybe some upper body. Those would help a lot with mobility, but nothing like that has been deployed yet.

At least you don’t need to worry about hills in New Orleans.

I bet they had crappy throws or no throws, too.

For those who may be from the Frozen Nawth, Mardi Gras parades, particularly in New Orleans, are all about the free giveaways.