At 8:16 a.m. on August 10, 2019, an anonymous 4Chan user posted…

It beat ABC News journalist Aaron Katersky’s post about Epstein’s death on Twitter, now known as X, by 38 minutes

Is that in any way surprising? Someone with insider knowledge posted about it before a journalist was informed?

In the Wikipedia article about his death they said that he was rushed to the hospital and pronounced dead at 6:39 AM. More than 90 minutes before even this post on 4Chan, he’d already been taken out of his cell, rushed to an ambulance, driven across NY, taken to a hospital, rushed into the emergency room, and pronounced dead. There were so many opportunities for someone to notice that and post it somewhere.

In a sense, this means you pretty much clear the jail guards, ambulance drivers and emergency room doctors, nurses, orderlies, etc. of suspicion. Can you imagine that they saw a dead Epstein, but sat on that for 90 minutes before posting it to 4Chan?

What’s surprising here isn’t that it was posted first to some forum used by random Internet chuds. That’s what you’d expect. What’s surprising is that they were competent enough to keep the news quiet for nearly 2 hours.

On the other hand, we all know he did not commit suicide and got killed by the Pedoresident following the playbook of his BFF putin to try to save his fat orange pedo ass

No, we don’t. That’s a dumb conspiracy theory.

Yeah, it’s more: “Oh, you want to renounce? Guess we better audit your last 5 years of tax returns with a fine-toothed comb.” In addition, you have to do two separate interviews with US officials, plus pay a $2.5k USD fee. Plus, you might be hit with an exit tax if you have any wealth – and that includes retirees who are counting on using that wealth for their retirement.

You have to file taxes with the US, most people with US citizenship living outside the US don’t actually have to pay anything.

As for why to keep filing:

• renouncing your citizenship is difficult and expensive
• it’s hard to avoid the US

Let’s say you have no plans to ever live in the US again. Does that mean you never want to visit friends or family you left behind? Does that mean you’ll never go to a sporting event, concert or professional conference in the US ever again? If you’re flying internationally, will you always be willing to pay extra and do extra work to avoid being on a plane that makes a stopover in the US?

For most people it’s a few hours of work, and/or a hundred bucks or so once per year to keep their options open and avoid major headaches.

The 40% that didn’t vote would probably have also broke 50/50 for Trump vs. Harris if they’d bothered to vote. But, most of them probably live in states like Massachusetts or Wyoming where one party’s lead is so huge that their vote really wouldn’t have had any effect.

Stop deflecting and trying to blame non-voters when the real problem is the people who voted for Trump.

“If you count third party candidates who have absolutely no hope of winning, it turns out that Trump didn’t win the popular vote in 2024. Sure, more people voted for him than voted for the perfectly normal democratic candidate, but if you add her votes to the votes for the Green party candidate, the Libertarian Party candidate, the Socialism and Liberation party candidate, and RFK Jr. Combined, they all got very slightly more votes than Trump. So, America isn’t cooked.”

That’s his argument, but I don’t really buy it.

For example, what would Hollywood do if Canada suddenly stopped respecting copyright? (I know we’re talking about the anti-circumvention provision of the DMCA, but the C in DMCA is “Copyright”, so this would definitely be framed as Canada not respecting copyrights.) A lot of movies and TV shows are now made in Canada. I imagine a lot of those companies would pull their productions out of Canada. So, whichever politician passed the law would be labelled as the one who killed Canada’s entertainment industry.

If Canada allowed jailbreaking John Deere tractors, or HP printers, they might stop selling them in Canada. If Canada allowed people to bypass Apple’s App Store, Apple might ban all apps from Canadians and Canadian companies. That might piss off farmers, or CTOs, venture capitalists, etc.

Taking this step might create a lot of new jobs, but that’s a big unknown. How many jobs? How well paying? How long would it take for them to be established. They’d have to weigh that against all the people whose jobs might be disrupted. So, it’s much easier to stick with the status quo, even if that status quo means just bending over for the US.

At least 3.

Exactly, so this wouldn’t make things any worse.

Except that no country is likely to take him up on that suggestion because they’re afraid of how the US would react. Cuba’s already heavily sanctioned, so they have less to lose. Maybe nothing to lose.

Imagine if they focused on creating tools that could jailbreak iOS devices, John Deere tractors, HP printers, etc. I bet they could sell that as a service. What could the US or American companies do to stop them? They could be Disenshittification Island.

I remember looking at some point, and Gnome had roughly 4x the number of developers that KDE had. If you want the best (most stable, most well tested, most feature full, etc.) programs, you basically have to use some Gnome programs. That was one of the deciding factors that pushed me to go with Gnome. If I was going to have to use Gnome programs anyhow, and they worked best with Gnome, then I thought I should use Gnome. My experience was that Gnome programs don’t really play well with KDE, but that KDE programs generally work OK on Gnome.

I really like the customizability of KDE, but I like many of the defaults of Gnome. Unfortunately, if you don’t like some of Gnome’s defaults, it’s real pain in the ass to change them. Personally, even though I liked a lot of Gnome’s defaults, I absolutely hated some other ones. If it weren’t for extensions there’s no way at all I could use it. Luckily, some of the biggest misfeatures are so widely recognized that there are dozens of extensions to choose from to fix them. OTOH KDE’s customizability led to some issues too. I remember having some weird interactions between things because settings A, B and C don’t necessarily work well together. But, at least those settings are built into the desktop environment, and you’re not relying on some random dude’s hobby project for a critical system setting.

At the moment, I’m pretty happy with Gnome, and most days it just gets out of my way and lets me do what I want to do. That’s something I never ever got with Windows. It was always a pain in my ass. And, it’s something that was only ever 90% true with OSX. Great defaults, but that last 10% is a real pain in the ass. Gnome’s extensions let me get much closer to 100%. I have to admit though, that I do dread the day that I have to upgrade it and all the extensions break.

Aaaaaaaand let me tell you, I had a sleepless night last night knowing there were no detectors installed.

This seems really weird. Smoke detectors are important, but the odds of a fire any given night are incredibly low. To me, replacing a detector would be a chore I’d get to within a week, and I definitely wouldn’t lose sleep over it.

I’m pretty sure Google’s AI is fed by the same spider that goes out and finds every new or changed web page (or a variant of that).

As soon as someone writes an article about how AI gets something wrong and provides a solution, that solution is now in the AI’s training data.

OTOH, that means it’s probably also ingesting a lot of AI generated slop, which causes its own set of problems.

It’s not literally guessing, because guessing implies it understands there’s a question and is trying to answer that question. It’s not even doing that. It’s just generating words that you could expect to find nearby.

3 in 10 people get this wrong‽‽

Maybe they’re picturing filling up a bucket and bringing it back to the car? Or dropping off keys to the car at the car wash?

It’s also the case that people are mostly consistent.

Take a question like “how long would it take to drive from here to [nearby city]”. You’d expect that someone’s answer to that question would be pretty consistent day-to-day. If you asked someone else, you might get a different answer, but you’d also expect that answer to be pretty consistent. If you asked someone that same question a week later and got a very different answer, you’d strongly suspect that they were making the answer up on the spot but pretending to know so they didn’t look stupid or something.

Part of what bothers me about LLMs is that they give that same sense of bullshitting answers while trying to cover that they don’t know. You know that if you ask the question again, or phrase it slightly differently, you might get a completely different answer.

Too Many Cooks was the best thing to just start watching without any expectations. Even having someone say “hey, you should watch this” sort of ruins it.

Those are 2 exceptions out of how many?

I’m not actually laughing at it.