gattsuru
11mo ago
And understanding the proper use of vacuum pumps and fittings; there's a few decent gimmicks and tricks to doing it right rather than right-enough and to minimize lossages. Similarly, there's some relatively subtle mistakes you can make with home wiring, especially older installs.
But they are learnable, especially these days where there's pretty good video tutorials everywhere online.
gattsuru
11mo ago
What is your limit, here, and how far does the rule go along that limit?
If it's the intellectual property side, does the crusade go after Pirate Bay and boorus next? If it's the potential to produce slop, do Blender Kids, refried meme generators, and gposers need be next on the list? If it's the economic threat or worker solidarity, do we roll back the sewing machine or the CNC mill? If it's the spirit of art as form of communication, do we beat down the Kinkaides and Rothkos? If it's the unearned reward that aigen produces, can we hunt down Duchamp and Basquiat and force them to actually put some effort into it? If it's about people pretending, badly, to think, can we start bludgeoning bureaucrats?
(please?)
gattsuru
11mo ago
Fun, or at least !!fun!! update:
In the original indictment, Dkt. No. 1, the government charged one count of violating HIPAA under false pretenses. The allegations in the indictment were built around the idea that Dr. Haim had no reason whatsoever to have access to TCH’s electronic medical records (EMR) system after finishing a surgical rotation at TCH in January 2021 because he had no patients there. The specific allegations included that after Dr. Haim completed his rotation at TCH in January 2021, he “did not return to TCH for any additional pediatric rotations or medical care”; in April 2023, Dr. Haim sought re-activation of his TCH login to access “pediatric patients not under his care” but emailed TCH “claiming urgency for adult care services...”; Dr. Haim “did not treat or access any adult care patients during this time period at TCH”; and Dr. Haim claimed “under the false pretenses that he needed to urgently attend to adult care services”...
At the September 26 th hearing on Dr. Haim’s renewed motion for a continuance, counsel for Dr. Haim further revealed that the government should have known about the procedures Dr. Haim performed past his last full rotation at TCH in January 2021 because 1) the government in discovery had provided an audit trail from Dr. Haim’s access to TCH’s EMR system showing that he made entries for TCH patients past the rotation ending date and 2) TCH had told the government as part of a Health and Human Services Office of Civil Rights (HHS OCR) investigation that TCH considered Dr. Haim to have appropriately had access to its EMR system through the relevant times in 2023 because he was continuing to cover patients at TCH even while rotating at other hospitals.
The government has now obtained a superseding indictment. The primary changes include deleting all of the specific allegations noted above that were contradicted by the records TCH discovered and the other evidence in the government’s possession. The deletion of those supporting allegations leaves the sole allegation regarding false pretenses unsupported: “HAIM contacted TCH numerous times under the false pretense that he needed access to the electronic records system for the treatment of patients under his care.” Nevertheless, the government added false pretenses to all of the charges including counts 2–4.
Ed Whelan claims that (Haim's lawyers claim that) Texas Children's Hospital made this disclosure to the government nine months before the indictment, though I will caveat that he is a partisan in general and on this particular topic.
More subtly, the initial indictment's claim :
Instead, HAIM caused malicious harm to TCH, pediatric patients at TCH and its physicians by contacting a media contact, PERSON1.
has since been revised to :
Instead, HAIM, with the intent to use the individually identifiable health information to cause malicious harm to TCH and its physicians, obtained the individually identifiable health information and disclosed portions of the health information to a media contact, PERSON1.
On the other side of things, CBS reports:
Lau is an associate professor in the pediatrics department at UT Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, according to the UT Southwestern website. The lawsuit said she has hospital privileges at two area Children's Health hospitals. The lawsuit accuses her of "falsifying medical records, prescriptions, and billing records to represent that her testosterone prescriptions are for something other than transitioning a child's biological sex or affirming a child's belief that their gender identity is inconsistent with their biological sex." Paxton is asking the court for an injunction against Lau and for her to be fined as much as $10,000 per violation.
The stated defense is hard to take seriously -- "doctors should not have to fear being targeted by the government when using their best medical judgment" is absolutely not a rule that cuts where the ACLU disagrees with the practice -- and a steelman of Paxton's position focused specifically on the fraud bit would be pretty strong. In turn, though, these also aren't exactly the central examples of a surgical and/or sterilizing interventions, instead being purely hormonal or implanted-hormonal processes for patients between the age of 14 and 17, and it's near-certain that Paxton doesn't really distinguish these cases from his central ones.
gattsuru
11mo ago
At least in the current day, service sector work has the benefit of being relatively flexible with scheduling, and that can sometimes attract people who'd otherwise be unable to work stuff out. But especially in the 80s, yeah, it definitely wasn't the cash-maximizing option.
gattsuru
11mo ago
By dollar, the DoEd's main job (185b in 2024) is offering scholarships, grants, loan guarantees, and other higher education funding. It directly measures students. Measurements of school and program value overwhelmingly come through college accreditation, which is kinda a clusterfuck: the DoEd establishes reporting requirements and rules for accrediting bodies to follow, but those accrediting organizations themselves are technically 'private' organizations and have only begun acting against the worst-performing colleges in very recent years, and the threshold is both staggeringly low and readily gamed.
Charitably, these groups focus on process; less charitably, they're a deniable way to mandate a variety of rules that are politically costly or legally impermissible otherwise. Either way, they're not doing the job, and the DoEd isn't even the ones not doing it, just telling people to do other stuff instead.
((Colleges do not technically need accreditation to operate, but a college without accreditation is unable to receive most federal or federally-guaranteed funds and has very wide restrictions on its ability to transfer credit hours.))
For primary education, the DoEd has significant expenditures and grants (40b in 2024), but this is largely focused on perceived deserts, not on local funding availability. In some rare cases these overlap -- the Office of Indian Education has a bad reputation for other reasons than having difficulty finding poor kids -- but it's at least part of the reason that all the stories about racial education spending has a big asterisk about 'before public funding', and, more critically those schools still suck even as they often vastly outspend far better schools.
For curriculum, it's mostly just a mess. The DoEd sets up grants for individual assessments and projects, but it's neither a major focus nor really done at larger scale, for better or worse (eg, CommonCore is technically a National Governor's Association baby).
gattsuru
11mo ago
I didn't go to college until the early 90s, but it definitely would not have been possible to pay a significant percentage of one's schooling costs on a part-time McDonalds paycheque then; I'd think that the 80s were even worse?
A lot of the problem with college loans reflects a growth in school costs, rather than decreasing incomes: see here for breakdowns. Demos estimates tuition for Howard University at the time of her graduation as "Tuition Then: $3,045 ($6,668 today)", aka 2016 dollars, in contrast to $23,419 in its 2016 tuition -- maybe hard to cover if you had a lot of other expenses, but at least something you could seriously dent.
Into the mid-00s, you could still do something comparable with community colleges, but these days they're pretty pricey for a full 2-year degree, and they won't get you to a 4-year.
Though in turn, a lot of the drive against students working is that the sticker-shock prices are only really getting paid by a handful of (often international) students, ameliorated by some amount of federal student aid or in-state discounts. Burnishing your college resume with extracurriculars can be much more renumerative in scholarships than slinging fries, and these programs and school workloads increasingly are incompatible with doing both.
((eg, I'm just a mentor for some FIRST programs, and they end up 25-hour jobs at times.))
gattsuru
11mo ago
I'm another that prefers Diet over Zero. "What I thought I'd do was, I'd pretend I was one of those full-calorie sodas."
gattsuru
11mo ago
There's a pretty straightforward steelman for a Department of Education:
- There are significant economies of scale, many of which are hard to exploit at the county or even state level. Curriculum, IT, large bulk purchasing orders, software development, so on. There are dangers to overoptimizing here -- putting all your eggs in one development basket means a lot of vulnerability where errors pop up -- but it's not unreasonable.
- There are likely to be mismatches between jurisdictions with higher tax bases and those with large numbers of people who are seeking education. While I'd rather fix the parts of the Richmond Fed philosophy that has made the disparity as large as it's gotten, we demonstrably aren't doing that, so having some way to keep primary education funding from going bonkers or depending on a million local levies has both practical and political benefits.
- If you're doing federal funding of higher education, you want some level of oversight to prevent it from getting used for absolute garbage, either in the sense of schools that teach nothing, or in the sense of degrees that have no value when learned.
The trouble is that's not really what our DoEd does.
gattsuru
11mo ago
And in many cases, ‘some weird libertarian third party’ is itself bad enough
I recognize my demographics and interests make it much more visible to me, but as existence proofs go…
gattsuru
11mo ago
Hard to square unless there's some wild spin going on. Which I wouldn't put past the FCC.
Specifically, the FCC collected Ookla data from 2021 and 2022, highlighting that "that Starlink’s speeds have been declining from the last quarter of 2021 to the second quarter of 2022", and then cited a single drop in average-monthly-speeds in one month of 2023 during appeal. The FCC analysis quoted by Rosenworcel in that section was from August 2022.
By late 2023 those numbers were already vastly improved (median 79/9.2 Mbps). It's currently October 2024; while I can't find a specific Ookla report, tomshardware cites them saying in September "Speed test analysis by Ookla shows Starlink seeing major gains in speed in the past few months. Median download speed has jumped from 65.72 Mbps to 97 Mbps."
Anecdotally from those who've use it in rural areas near me, they've consistently seen 100/20 or higher. I can't say for sure what the current Ookla numbers area, but I'm not seeing any good evidence otherwise.
These are compatible claims. It's just one of them is stupid: taking a two data points and extrapolating with a ruler is the sort of thing I'd caution a high schooler about.
Contrast other RDOF defaults: the Starry (bankrupt), GeoLinks (blocked by California regulations) or LTD Corporation (severe financial chicanery, heavily delayed regulatory compliance mandated in the contract), all have far clearer and more certain problems.
gattsuru
11mo ago
A lot of the initial theory was based around small business and education web services, such as video streaming, collaborative media work, so on, and at that often included multiple simultaneous users per residence.
I'm a real severe skeptic of that -- and the Cloud focus that drives no small part of it -- but having set up remote users or small offices on <5 Mbps lines or long chains of P2P microwave links, there genuinely are a surprising number of really common functionality that either doesn't work, or doesn't work consistently, in those environments. Even if you're focused on atoms rather than bits, 'simple' things like security cameras, backup systems, file shares, and all pretty much have to be hosted locally for all but the most minimal of setups.
The more you get into bits, the harder, even for stuff you wouldn't think of as online. A short internet outage can turn building a Java program into an ordeal; even moderate packet loss can make OnShape unusable for collaborative CAD, and gods help you if someone turns on OneDrive for their machine.
I think it's wrong, but it's not self-evidently crazy.
(On the gripping hand, it's very far from clear that StarLink won't be able to achieve these results by 2026, if it doesn't already.)
gattsuru
11mo ago
Some previous discussion here, second header.
The steelman is that StarLink was genuinely new technology at the time, and dependent on a number of other downstream systems that were in turn new technology -- if you cut this chart at late 2021 numbers, a lot of people would not guess remotely accurately the later ones. But given that Starlink has, as far as I can tell, completed the requirements now, still before the actual time target, and that awards to 'settled' technologies aren't always retracted even after a due date has come and gone, it's not a terribly strong steelman.
((By contrast, the EEOC-SpaceX lawsuit is probably politically motivated, but the underlying principle that some types of legal residents are not banned from access to ITAR-covered materials predates the Biden administration. So it might not be politically motivated, albeit unlikely.))
gattsuru
11mo ago
Lott's website has a better breakdown of how the revision applied, and it's worth noting that there were both decreases in the (non-rape?) 2021 numbers and increases in the 2022 ones.
More subtly, it shows that only through such third-party groups can such revisions be visible at all.
There's a deeper problem where everyone apparently knew this metric was bullshit, so there's no reason to think the newer numbers are 'real', but it's a little aggravating to see these things getting used as both political and policy sledgehammers on one hand and dismissed wholesale in the other.
Apropos of nothing, still no response from the ProPublica author from a few weeks back. Her coworker was so certain "Reporters love talking to people about journalism", too.
gattsuru
11mo ago
The Heltec v3s are really nice boards, whether you want to use them in a Meshtastic setup or just for direct Arduino programming. The API for the latter is a little rough, but unfortunately pretty much every LoRA board is like that given the underlying chips. Only big complaint is that the external antenna cable placement sucks: there's no good way to just zip tie some strain relief in place, so if you end up wanting to use the external antenna (and you should!), either use some potting compound (if permanent), silicone rubber (if semi-permanent) or hot glue (otherwise) the thing into place or it will inevitably work its way loose.
A number of the Heltec CubeCell boards have a built-in solar charge circuit. I'm most familiar with the AB02S, but I think you can get displayless and GPS-less versions with the same capability with options like the AB01. Much more annoying to develop with, given the lack of display, though.
If you're interested in guerilla installs, I'd also look at the LilyGo T-Beams. Including both an 18650 battery slot out of the box is really convenient and a lot more robust than those tiny JST-SH battery leads on Heltec boards (and most competitors like Adafruit offerings). And you can get the simpler version cheap. Avoid other LilyGo equipment, though; the LilyGo TTGO boards are famously bad for batteries.
It's kinda a grab-bag of weird. One is either so broad as to be meaningless (if 'others' includes every small business) or going to get caught up in the courts for a years at best, two is almost a good idea until it hits 'become teachers' and then it's a joke, three even the crypto people aren't that gullible, four has been standing policy for decades, and five is... uh, gonna be funny when Trump tries it and is called a racist for it?
Not the only recent bizarrely incompetent result from Dem-leaning campaigns recently. Most of the recent social media focus has been on a particularly embarrassing set that could have just been some wacky enthusiast (or outright troll, it's so bad) generally unrelated to the campaigns, but see Walz trying to emasculate himself with a Beretta on a pheasant hunting trip, President Obama's "speaking to men directly"' , and Witmer's... uh, charitably, porn reference for the CHIPs Act (and at least it doesn't involve a milk jug)?
It's be convenient if this was a result of the complete exclusion of politically moderate Red Tribers (but I can readily point to heavily Dem-favouring trans furries who consider sharing Snap-Ons past a red line!) or the last minute candidate swap leaving a lot of conventional expertise out in the cold (but a lot of people were bending over backwards for Biden) or enough Connected people pissed (both Israel/Palestine, and tech capital gains fears), but I'm not that optimistic. Probably just downstream of a particularly empty campaign, or just random noise swinging together.
gattsuru
11mo ago
On one hand, there's a fun discussion about how this stuff does genuinely seem to ebb and flow, both at large scale and at small ones, such that people can point to different cruxes and changes and be genuinely correct.
On the other hand, there's a certain tendency for this to be... hard to discuss. It's easy to fall prey to a Great Man of History argument -- you yourself jump from "delegitimize and disenfranchise" in general to Clinton specifically -- in ways that obfuscate the comparisons you're making (eg, for gunnies, Clinton opened his Presidency with Ruby Ridge and the Waco Siege, then jumped over a controversial and painful assault weapons ban, all while ). That's true even where it limits your own political aisle! (eg, the early 90s gay politics were Not Great Bob)
On the gripping hand, it's worth discussing the extent political power has grown from this sort of delegitimization. In the Dubya and early Obama era, there were long and compelling arguments about the tradeoffs between helpful persuasion -- hoping for political change by providing the best arguments and understanding and respecting opponents -- against change as churn -- where political success comes from emphasis on recruiting incoming players while the opponents age out.
And the answer pretty resoundingly has become neither, to such a point that the question is an obvious Morton's Fork and false dilemma today: whether gay marriage, trans rights (from the right and left!), public education (ditto!), college debt, the Affordable Care Act, statues, public protests (ditto again!), it's not just possible but obvious that victory could and did come by persuading people not that your cause was correct, but that opposition or even caution to it was so evil that it could not be tolerated in even hushed whispers. Whatever concern backlash might once have had, it's wrapped up around situations like BLM or school vouchers where the 'backlash' to (sometimes literal) arson was at worst not maximizing territorial gains, or matters like the rise of Trump or Coates that justified only more and harder.
It's Dan Savage's world -- bullying kids as part of your anti-bullying campaign, smearing your opponent's name in literal shit, and all. We're just stuck living in it.
((On the other gripping hand... this is a post where it's really hard for me to resist pulling quotes from the past. Really, Clinton?))
gattsuru
11mo ago
While I'm generally pretty skeptical about credentialism, since I've seen even well-regarded doctors make pretty bad mistakes, and especially trans-related stuff you tend to either get vastly over-hesitant (like your mentioned brain fog combo, I've also seen docs prescribe combos that have known cancer risks) or under-cautious, it can definitely be worthwhile to have a second set of eyes for a lot of the endocrinology stuff.
You're far enough along that you're not likely to see the 'whoops I accidentally a whole order of magnitude' level problems that come up in newbies, but even people who have good access to blood testing for things like liver function often find themselves least able to think through the numbers if there's a problem.
Sorry, you've probably already considered these tradeoffs, but the downsides are severe enough that I'm bound to offer it anyway in case you haven't.
gattsuru
11mo ago
I think it's bad that we have a political class we can tell are lying because that's what they do, but yeah, he's a politician and his mouth is moving.
Assuming he can't say "yes" because Trump won't let him, what else should he say?
I'm actually vaguely curious why "Biden was appointed President on January 20th, 2021" isn't the goto approach. Maybe it polls badly, maybe there's some obvious counter I'm missing, maybe MAGA doesn't like it, maybe they just don't remember the appointed-not-elected chants of 2000 and 2004, but it seems kinda an obvious dodge that doesn't concede anything people care about, while 'answering'. Maybe Vance and company want the easy question to keep getting repeated?
gattsuru
11mo ago
The Acting Governor of Hawaii certified the election on November 28th, both slates of electors sent notice that they were 'duly elected' on December 19th, with the GOP electors including the certificate of election. It was only after appeals and a court order (December 30th) that it was recertified the other direction on January 4th, and then Congress recognized the electors that had been fake at the time they were sent.
Part of the problem is that we do have precedent that the House of Representatives can choose to not use the certified slate of electors, even if the corrections are done after the Electoral Count Act safe harbor date.
The other part, and a large portion of what the Eastman memos depended on, was that there's clearly some point where Congress can look at a slate of electors and go 'no', and barring very specific approaches to federalism, there probably should be. Most alternative schema either devolve to state executives being able to pick their electors, and/or a barrage of randos calling themselves electors and inundating Congress -- poetic, but not better.
The Kennedy approach was more colorable (though given what we've since learned about Texas and Chicago, it's still far from clear Kennedy legitimately won), but in both 1960 and 2020, the court cases were still ongoing when the electors sent their slates.
Ah, I stand corrected then. Last time I tried was early in the .NET Core 5 days, and turning off everything but x86_64 and using aggressive trimming still left >30MB deployments for some of the common projects I was working with at the time. They were admittedly weird in ways I can see the linker panicking about, but they weren't that weird. Will have to try it out again.
It all just works, it's about 20% faster on the critical path, my binary size went from 1MB to about 1.5MB, and it took me a day instead of a month to add the new feature I needed. It's great.
Yeah, if you're doing anything even moderately performance-, security-, or complexity-dependent, Desktop or Core make a lot more sense. It's mostly light apps like the 'write data from interface to text file' or your standard CRUD that a lot of the bennies just aren't going to come up.
((And I'll admit I've abused the fuck out of AppDomain.UnhandledException, given how hard it is to get error reports with actual details from Microsoft.))
It's infinitely more tolerable than the other garbage desktop front-end frameworks excreted and subsequently rug-pulled a year or two later by Microsoft in the last few years (UWP, MAUI, WinUI x where {x ∈ N, x < ∞}), it's not a website and some WASM in a trenchcoat (Blazor, ElectronNET), and you still get all the WPF goodness (and WinForms, if you really want it).
Definitely agreed there. For simple GUI applications, the .NET ecosystem as a whole is just incredibly convenient. Even looking at competitors outside of Microsoft, it's vastly more convenient than trying to fight with JavaFX or Swing for almost every case excepting where absolutely need (reliable) Linux support (and I'd be tempted to say fuck it and try mono even there), it's a lot more robust that using JS and pretending your web browser is a reliable application, and the less said about QT the better.
I'm gonna second 'troll'. There's definitely righties willing to make argument this bad, but they're not going to make this argument. In particular:
- There are way too many better examples of biased output from media than the New Republic -- an openly leftist media org is nowhere near as demonstrative as a 'centrist-claiming' one -- and too many better examples of TNR bias exist than quoting something technically true. CNN had a dem talking head online saying Trump "would absolutely try to exterminate people". Cfe the recent ProPublica abortion piece NaraBurns highlighted. And for TNR, 'do you know who else played in Madison Square Garden' is literally on the front page now.
- "the truth is that Trump, being president and having access to top secret information, knows things we don't" is... the sort of thing that looks like it got pulled from a discussion on the classified documents trials. It makes some approximation of sense there; it's too unrelated from even the often-schizophrenic theories for voter stuff, if only because it would paint Trump's post-J6 unwillingness to declassify whatever more transparently fake than the UFO stuff.
- People who care enough about this to write at length aren't going to dismiss sketchy witnesses without naming them or some shape of what they're supposed to be lying about. I recognize I'm at the upper end of grudge-holding, here, but there's just been so many incredible claims that just shrugging about who or what makes for a weird bit.
- A lot of the other terminology is way too hesitant to spell things out. "then the demographics of the next elections will favor the Democrats" is passive voice in the sort of way that ... uh, is a lot harder for Blue Tribers to not passive voice. "stuck with a notion of equality that is anything but" and "it's central to a nation that it defends its borders" are currently google-bombs pointing here today, while other framings of the same concept are well-established in other fields.
- "my own mental health" isn't as much of a Blue Tribe shibboleth as 'for mental health reasons' or 'mental wellness reasons', but it's still weak evidence.
- And, yes, the author's word choices and topics of focus don't match any of the right-wing long-term posters who had been present here and then deleted their accounts. This is not a Zontargs post.
It's probably worth letting it through anyway, but it's worth spelling out that it also should be collapsed and ignored unless someone pulls a silk purse from this sow's ear.
gattsuru
11mo ago
The default settings for almost any .NET Core gui (WinForm or WPF) app will give you ~120mb+ files, and a mess of them. Bundling almost the whole runtime into each deployment is supposed to avoid the pain of a separate runtime installation, but it's a messy tradeoff either way.
There's an 'app trimming' config that tries to reduce bloat a bit. It's kinda annoying and doesn't do a great job even in the best-case scenarios, though.. Unfortunately, one of the better arguments for sticking with .NET Framework, especially if considering mass deployment -- if you can get away with .NET Framework 4.x- or earlier features, Win10 and Win11 have it included by default and still leave (admittedly bulkier-than-necessary) <10MB executable.
gattsuru
11mo ago
A bunch of families will set up cars with various candy handouts from the trunk, usually in a moderately sized unused parking lot (eg church) or near some event space. Usually some sort of decoration around each participating car, though I’ve seen some nearly at the level of lower end convention booths.
It’s more popular in rural areas or where there are messy traffic spots between suburban subdivisions, since conventional house-to-house trick or treating can be kinda hard for younger kids there. But it’s sometimes done for weather reasons, too.
While I think Tennessee would love to have the legal question ride on whether these particular procedures are Good or not, that question only really comes up after resolving several others first: what level of sex-based classifications raise heightened scrutiny under the 14th amendment, whether trans-related classifications count as sex-based classifications, if these trans-related procedures count, what level of scrutiny that all rolls out into, and only then whether the procedures are Good or Not.
There's a lot of ways to punt, on either direction, about the underlying validity of these processes and procedures, and especially given the makeup of the court right now, I would not be very confident that they will not punt to some extent.
Meanwhile, the rule that legislatures can overrule medical consensus is pretty-well-established, no matter what happens. See matters like right-to-try laws, or the entire existence of the DEA. Even if SCOTUS jumps whole-heartedly in favor of trans rights on the matter, the questions presented here are solely about sex discrimination; the case does not argue a right to specific medical practices in general.
((I'm also separately very skeptical of the negligence/malpractice route as 'better', from either direction. Malpractice and negligence lawsuits have wonky rules and impacts: doctors have good reason to practice extremely defensively even where they may eventually win the case, and can avoid liability for pretty bad behavior so long as it falls within certain standards.))
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