Donald Trump says random bullshit he cannot deliver on, that will appeal to his most rabid supporters.

The Biden Tariffs have way more impact on total EVs sales than reducing the EV credit to $0. The tariff blocks $6k EVs from enter the US, the credits just knocks $7.5k off a $50k car.

Like I get that us here in the United States are wary of Chinese things, but let’s all be honest, American car companies aren’t going to produce a sub $20k EV anytime soon. LiFePO₄ batteries have been a thing for some time now, the excuse the batteries are the main cost of the car is faux argument that US makers just aren’t ready to stop subsidizing their other vehicle platforms with EV sales.

Trump’s arguments won’t do shit no matter which side of the aisle you sit. The thing killing wide adoption in the US of EVs is the US EV makers.

Preheat and homogenization were not testing in these processes. Both are steps used in most US milk that would likely inactivate the virus. Moral of the story is still you are an idiot if you are drinking raw milk.

Fragments of the virus that are being found in about 20% of all milk sampled. These fragments have not been shown to be enough to make anyone sick. The fact that we’re finding fragments and not intact viruses in store bought milk is a good indication that the various processes used for milk in most locations is doing the job it was intended to do.

And most important of all: This is the current state of evidence gathered on this topic, that state could change with various factors at play and/or the addition of new evidence. Because apparently for some people they have forgotten that “things change as time progresses”.

Roney Beal, 72, a Shamong, New Jersey resident

This person has literally nothing else to do but hammer this lawsuit until their untimely passing.

When Beal told them that she would call her lawyer, they told her to get out of the casino and to not return. The Beals were then escorted off of the property, Di Croce said.

But this person is literally 72, the casino could hypothetically just wait them out.

Di Croce hopes Bally’s wants to make this situation right with Beal. After suffering a heart attack last year, Beal turned to the casino for enjoyment.

I mean and there’s a good chance the lawyers just drag for as long as they can. Odds are favorable for the casino winning on things just sorting themselves out naturally here.

There is a legal way to do this:

New States may be admitted by the Congress into this Union; but no new State shall be formed or erected within the Jurisdiction of any other State; nor any State be formed by the Junction of two or more States, or Parts of States, without the Consent of the Legislatures of the States concerned as well as of the Congress

— Article IV, Section 3, Clause 1

Nebraska and South Dakota have a compact that’s been approved by Congress that has land swap between the states based on where the river is when particular assessments happen. So land leaving one state and going to another state isn’t unheard of. If you go look at NE and SD’s border in the southeast corner of SD, you’ll see the river and the border is pretty tight. Now compare that to states that have no such compact like Arkansas and Tennessee. River and the border are all kinds of messed up.

The thing is, both Idaho’s and Oregon’s State assembly will have to vote on it as you indicated. It’s not up to the citizens to dictate when a state’s border can be redrawn. Once Idaho and Oregon have a compact, they will need to send it to DC for Congress to vote on it. If it passes both the House and the Senate, the new compact can be enforced and the new borders drawn.

From what I’ve heard Oregon will not even begin to entertain this notion.

But yes, this is completely legal in the Constitution and we’ve done it before too. And we even have had the case where we took one state and split it into two happen before as well. Virginia and West Virginia. So we’ve used this part of the Constitution enough to know exactly how it needs to go down.

Is it going to go down? IDK. California said they were going to split up into 3, 4, 5 different States, not holding my breath on that one either. Would be pretty neat to redraw Idaho though. Never liked it’s weird long edge on the west side. Now it’ll look like someone giving the middle finger or something.

What’s wild is that one of the people who write anti-cheat software was saying they needed to get their shit working on Linux like yesterday.

So I mean, it crazy that Windows is literally having some folks scramble on how to get their shit working on Steam/Linux.

Yeah, I think that’s the bigger issue here. These devices pay their way by collecting data to sell off. What this “overhual” is indicating is that they haven’t quite figured out how to make these devices not only pay for themselves, but also, generate a net background profit for the company.

The only thing I’m reading from this story is that Amazon is just aiming for more dollar signs from Alexia. I’m going tell you in the day and age of Siri and Whatever Google’s thing is, this is going to backfire massively on Amazon. This will likely collapse whatever paltry Alexia that’s out there. And I have a good feeling they’ll look at this collapse as “well the technology just isn’t a good money maker.” No you idiots, it’s not a mass profit driver. I get how something not drawing double digit percentage gains is a mystery to you all, but just because you cannot buy your fifteenth yacht from it, doesn’t mean that the technology is a failure.

But it’s whatever, Amazon’s ship to wreck.

Quick things to note.

One, yes, some models were trained on CSAM. In AI you’ll have checkpoints in a model. As a model learns new things, you have a new checkpoint. SD1.5 was the base model used in this. SD1.5 itself was not trained on any CSAM, but people have giving additional training to SD1.5 to create new checkpoints that have CSAM baked in. Likely, this is what this person was using.

Two, yes, you can get something out of a model that was never in the model to begin with. It’s complicated, but a way to think about it is, a program draws raw pixels to the screen. Your GPU applies some math to smooth that out. That math adds additional information that the program never distinctly pushed to your screen.

Models have tensors which long story short, is a way to express an average way pixels should land to arrive at some object. This is why you see six fingered people in AI art. There wasn’t any six fingered person fed into the model, what you are seeing the averaging of weights pushing pixels between two different relationships for the word “hand”. That averaging is adding new information in the expression of an additional finger.

I won’t deep dive into the maths of it. But there’s ways to coax new ways to average weights to arrive at new outcomes. The training part is what tells the relationship between A and C to be B’. But if we wanted D’ as the outcome, we could retrain the model to have C and E averaging OR we could use things call LoRAs to change the low order ranking of B’ to D’. This doesn’t require us to retrain the model, we are just providing guidance on ways to average things that the model has already seen. Retraining on C and E to D’ is the part old models and checkpoints used to go and that requires a lot of images to retrain that. Taking the outcome B’ and putting a thumb on the scale to put it to D’ is an easier route, that just requires a generalized teaching of how to skew the weights and is much easier.

I know this is massively summarizing things and yeah I get it, it’s a bit hard to conceptualize how we can go from something like MSAA to generating CSAM. And yeah, I’m skipping over a lot of steps here. But at the end of the day, those tensors are just numbers that tell the program how to push pixels around given a word. You can maths those numbers to give results that the numbers weren’t originally arranged to do in the first place. AI models are not databases, they aren’t recalling pixel for pixel images they’ve seen before, they’re averaging out averages of averages.

I think this case will be slam dunk because highly likely this person’s model was an SD1.5 checkpoint that was trained on very bad things. But with the advent of being able to change how averages themselves and not the source tensors in the model work, you can teach new ways for a model to average weights to obtain results the model didn’t originally have, without any kind of source material to train the model. It’s like the difference between Spatial antialiasing and MSAA.

Okay for anyone who might be confused on how a model that’s not been trained on something can come up with something it wasn’t trained for, a rough example of this is antialiasing.

In the simplest of terms antialiasing looks at a vector over a particular grid, sees what percentage it is covering, and then applies that percentage to to shade the image and reduce the jaggies.

There’s no information to do this in the vector itself, it’s the math that is what is giving the extra information. We’re creating information from a source that did not originally have it. Now, yeah this is really simple approach and it might have you go “well technically we didn’t create any new information”.

At the end of the day, a tensor is a bunch of numbers that give weights to how pixels should arrange themselves on the canvas. We have weights that show us how to fall pixels to an adult. We have weights that show us how to fall pixels to children. We have weights that show us how to fall pixels to a nude adult. There’s ways to adapt the lower order ranking of weights to find new approximations. I mean, that’s literally what LoRAs do. I mean that’s literally their name, Low-Rank Adaptation. As you train on this new novel approach, you can wrap that into a textual inversion. That’s what that does, it allows an ontological approach to particular weights within a model.

Another way to think of this. Six finger people in AI art. I assure you that no model was fed six fingered subjects, so where do they come from? The answer is that the six finger person is a complex “averaging” of the tensors that make up the model’s weights. We’re getting new information where there originally was none.

We have to remember that these models ARE NOT databases. They are just multidimensional weights that tell pixels from a random seed where to go to in the next step in the diffusion process. If you text2image “hand” then there’s a set of weights that push pixels around to form the average value of a hand. What it settles into could be a four fingered hand, five fingers, or six fingers, depends on the seed and how hard the diffuser should follow the guidance scale for that particular prompt’s weight. But it’s distinctly not recalling pixel for pixel some image it has seen earlier. It just has a bunch of averages of where pixels should go if someone says hand.

You can generate something new from the average of complex tensors. You can put your thumb on the scale for some of those weights, give new maths to find new averages, and then when it’s getting close to the target you’re after use a textual inversion to give a label to this “new” average you’ve discovered in the weights.

Antialiasing doesn’t feel like new information is being added, but it is. That’s how we can take the actual pixels being pushed out by a program and turn it into a smooth line that the program did not distinctly produce. I get that it feels like a stretch to go from antialiasing to generating completely novel information. But it’s just numbers driving where pixels get moved to, it’s maths, there’s not really a lot of magic in these things. And given enough energy, anyone can push numbers to do things they weren’t supposed to do in the first place.

The way models that come from folks who need their models to be on the up and up is to ensure that particular averages don’t happen. Like say we want to avoid outcome B’, but you can average A and C to arrive at B’. Then what you need is to add a negative weight to the formula. This is basically training A and C to average to something like R’ that’s really far from the point that we want to avoid. But like any number, if we know the outcome is R’ for an average of A and C, we can add low rank weights that don’t require new layers within the model. We can just say, anything with R’ needs -P’ weight, now because of averages we could land on C’ but we could also land on A’ or B’ our target. We don’t need to recalculate the approximation of the weights that A and C give R’ within the model.

For instance, this includes minerals for battery and other components to produce EVs and wind turbines – such as iron, lithium, and zinc

I found nothing within the IEA’s announcement that indicates a shortage of those three elements. Iron is like the fourth most abundant thing on the planet.

In fact, this story literally reports this whole thing all wrong. It’s not that there’s a shortage, it’s that the demand for renewables is vastly larger than what we’re mining for. Which “duh” we knew this already. The thing this report does is quantify it.

That said, the “human rights abuses” isn’t the IEA report. That comes from the Business and Human Rights Resource Centre (BHRRC).

Specifically, the BHRRC has tracked these for seven key minerals: bauxite, cobalt, copper, lithium, manganese, nickel and zinc. Companies and countries need these for renewable energy technology, and electrification of transport.

These aren’t just limited to the renewable industry. Copper specifically, you’ve got a lot of it in your walls and in the device that you are reading this comment on. We have always had issues with copper and it’s whack-a-mole for solutions to this. I’m not dismissing BHRRC’s claim here, it’s completely valid, but it’s valid if we do or do not do renewables. Either way, we still have to tackle this problem. EVs or not.

Of course, some companies were particularly complicit. Notably, BHRRC found that ten companies were associated with more than 50% of all allegations tracked since 2010

And these are the usual suspects who routinely look the other way in human right’s abuses. China, Mexico, Canada, and Switzerland this is the list of folks who drive a lot of the human rights abuses, it’s how it has been for quite some time now. That’s not to be dismissive to the other folks out there (because I know everyone is just biting to blame the United States somehow) but these four are usually getting their hand smacked. Now to be fair, it’s really only China and Switzerland that usually does not care one way or the other. Canada and Mexico are just the folks the US convinced to take the fall for their particular appetite.

For example, Tanzania is extracting manganese and graphite. However, he pointed out that it is producing none of the higher-value green tech items like electric cars or batteries that need these minerals

Third Congo war incoming. But yeah, seriously, imperialism might have officially ended after World War II, but western nations routinely do this kind of economic fuckening, because “hey at least they get to self-govern”. It’s what first world nations tell themselves to sleep better for what they do.

Avan also highlighted the IEA’s advice that companies and countries should shift emphasis to mineral recycling to meet the growing demand.

This really should have happened yesterday. But if they would do something today, that would actually be proactive about the situation. Of course, many first world nations when they see a problem respond with “come back when it’s a catastrophe.”

OVERALL This article is attempting to highlight that recycling is a very doable thing if governments actually invested in the infrastructure to do so and that if we actually recycled things, we could literally save ⅓ the overall cost for renewables. It’s just long term economic sense to recycle. But of course, that’s not short term economic sense. And so with shortages to meet demand on the horizon, new production is going to be demanded and that will in turn cause human rights violations.

They really worded the whole thing oddly and used the word shortage, like we’re running out, when they meant shortage as in “we can’t keep up without new production”. They got the right idea here, I just maybe would have worded all of it a bit differently.

Because they sure as hell not getting it from any of the Republican leadership.

Crazy. The zombie apocalypse started from people wanting to become infected.

Seinfeld has publicly supported Israel following the 7 October Hamas attack, and traveled to a kibbutz in December to meet with hostages’ families

In case you’re wondering what the argument is. You should still read the story though.

The case literally has zero to do with an affair. The alleged affair could be a complete fabrication. The point of the case is that Trump directed his lawyer to use money for XYZ. Trump then put that money down on the ledger as ABC. That he claimed it was ABC and not XYZ is the entire point of the case.

The WHY he decided to commit fraud is a nice detail but literally has zero bearing on if Trump actually did the whole I said the money was for ABC but it was really for XYZ.

Open the door HAL

Oh don’t even get me started. Hall effect has been known since 1879, those JoyCons didn’t use it because it was cheaper to use shitty graphite. They literally went the cheap ass route because they didn’t even care.

“Nintendo sues” oh look it’s a day that ends in Y. The only person Nintendo isn’t dead set on suing is Nintendo.

Here’s you 937th remake of Super Mario Bros 2 that you can only rent, have a nice day.

And our online service is absolute trash but you’ll pay anyway to have a legal emulator until we also discontinue that for Super other garbage online service!

Yes I saw some shit the other day about, “such and such reporting that sales are drastically down since blah blah blah. Where did it all go wrong?”

Or “Gen whatever is choosing to part ways with blah blah blah. Here’s our guesses as to why!”

And it’s just, NOBODY HAS FUCKING MONEY!!! That’s it. That’s all it is. There’s no preference. There’s no secret wokeness. There’s no underlying meaning. We are all just fucking broke!

They took all the money, they refuse to give it back in wages, they jacked up the price, and we are tapping out. HOW THE FUCK IS THIS STILL A GODDAMN MYSTERY?!?!?!

The only way someone can still be confused about what’s going on is if they’re on purpose being ignorant about it because, “mah market indicators!”

We are all broke. That’s it, that’s the answer. Media needs to stop with the bullshit. The headline every day needs to be “The world is on fire by rich asshats and the rest of us are too fucking broke to do anything we are all going to die painfully because of those rich asshats.” And that should be all that’s on the news every hour on the hour. The end.

And just so we’re clear, I’m not saying everything Leah said is golden. Humans are human and say things that don’t jive 100% of the time. It’s entirely possible for something to have both folks handle a situation in a manner that is less than ideal. All I’m indicating is for you to step back for a second. It will absolutely help you out here.

Ideally you can perhaps look at this from Leah’s point of view. But that’s solely up to you. Best thing for you though is to just bring it down a notch. That’s the only thing that I’m pretty sure is a good idea right now. What’s past that, I think only you can best determine that. But I honestly think some deep breaths are what’s immediately needed.

I’m pretty sure post that you’ll have it handled. And I don’t know how old you are but I’ll say that panicked hyping a situation only gets worse as you age. So developing ways to deal with it is just part of growing up for 30 to 50 year olds. This notion that we’re done “growing” at some magical number is bunk.

I had my car start stuttering on the highway once and thought for sure that I was going to die. My brain just spiraled a situation where I needed to just pull over and see what was wrong into a flight or fight response. Ultimately, it was just a loose hose and I fixed it. But for a moment there I was panicking myself way past a point of being reasonable.

It just happens and sometimes we just need to force ourselves to take a pause. That’s all the advice I think I can give you here. I think once you chill for a bit, you’re smart enough to figure out the what’s next part.

when I was really just frustrated

Buddy that all reads as harassing. The IRC logs are especially a bad look for you, because you said:

im looking to add this board to my resume

And now that entire chat log is tied to it.

I’m not sure why you thought hounding someone and harping about it for nearly eight hours on IRC was a good idea. But now you’ve come to the Fediverse to find some absolution or something.

You can be frustrated, that’s fine, but when that frustration turns into that long of a hanging on the bell that’s evident in that chat log and then two hours later you came here with this, that is past frustration.

Leah also indicated:

if i give in to you now, you will try to harass/abuse me again in the future.

And Leah has a point. You’ve shown no sign of taking a moment to collect yourself. I get you are upset. Sometimes the best way to handle upset is to just shut up for a day or two. And trust me, I struggle with doing that myself.

Like everything you’ve done in your frustration, I’ve been down that road. And I’m pretty sure in your head you are telling yourself, but the difference is that… because that’s exactly what I’d say to someone telling me this. That my situation is different somehow and that I must rectify this injustice immediately!

and if it was bullying, I apologize then.

What you need to do is two things. One, learn from this so that in the future you can do… Two, chill out. I think you’ll find in more professional environments sorry is okay, but I have learned from my mistakes and will do better is more preferred.

This whole thing could have been max three messages on IRC. “Why wasn’t I credited? What was wrong with my submission? How do I improve going forward?” The end.

I think the biggest thing here for me is that in open projects, leads are fielding multiple people and working on their stuff. Every message you send is “Hey stop what you are doing and pay attention to me!” So you really want to be respectful of their time by really trying to be succinct on whatever is bugging you.

And you are on the contrib page.

All round good guy, an honest and loyal fan.

And I think you’re wondering how “testing” vs “developed” looks on your resume? But that chat log is now going to be front and center no matter what’s said on the contrib page. It really doesn’t matter if you got “developed” pasted on the contrib page.

All of this Mastodon interactions and IRC logs isn’t a good look. It’s not the end of the world. I think everyone has felt frustration like this before, like there’s some magical set of words to say that’ll fix everything. But you’ve got to let it go. You’re just digging down with posts like this. And you don’t have to let it go forever, just you’ve really added a lot of friction to have this go surface of the sun warm. You need to let it cool, come back refreshed, and maybe see if you can repair the relationship you have with the team.

But you’ve got to understand. Your post here paints one picture and your interactions with Leah on Mastodon and IRC are something else. And that difference between the is especially not good as it comes off as a lot of sour and bitterness on this “slight” that you perceived as such an injustice.

And hell’s bells. If you sit on this for seventy-two hours and you still feel massively wronged, go fork you a project and call it FOSSITboot or whatever and show everyone your prowess. If you’ve got skills to pay the bills, then if you build it they will come.

Lots of love for you, but just take a moment from everything. I assure you, it’ll do you wonders to decompress.

It absolutely could. Heck, RPMs and DEBs pulled from random sites can do the exact same thing as well. Even source code can hide something if not checked. There’s even a very famous hack presented by Ken Thompson in 1984 that really speaks to the underlying thing, “what is trust?”

And that’s really what this gets into. The means of delivery change as the years go by, but the underlying principal of trust is the thing that stays the same. In general, Canonical does review somewhat apps published to snapcraft. However, that review does not mean you are protected and this is very clearly indicated within the TOS.

14.1 Your use of the Snap Store is at your sole risk

So yeah, don’t load up software you, yourself, cannot review. But also at the same time, there’s a whole thing of trust here that’s going to need to be reviewed. Not, “Oh you can never trust Canonical ever again!” But a pretty straightforward systematic review of that trust:

• How did this happen?
• Where was this missed in the review?
• How can we prevent this particular thing that allowed this to happen in the future?
• How do we indicate this to the users?
• How do we empower them to verify that such has been done by Canonical?

No one should take this as “this is why you shouldn’t trust Ubuntu!” Because as you and others have said, this could happen to anyone. This should be taken as a call for Canonical to review how they put things on snapcraft and what they can do to ensure users have all the tools so that they can ensure “at least for this specific issue” doesn’t happen again. We cannot prevent every attack, but we can do our best to prevent repeating the same attack.

It’s all about building trust. And yeah, Flathub and AppImageHub can, and should, take a lesson from this to preemptively prevent this kind of thing from happening there. I know there’s a propensity to wag the finger in the distro wars, tribalism runs deep, but anything like this should be looked as an opportunity to review that very important aspect of “trust” by all. It’s one of the reasons open source is very important, so that we can all openly learn from each other.