advocacy

Republicans Vote To Destroy Boundary Waters In Giveaway To China’s AI

Republicans Vote To Destroy Boundary Waters In Giveaway To China’s AI:

Traitors. Republicans in the Senate just voted to permit the construction of a heavily polluting mine in the headwaters for Minnesota’s Boundary Waters Canoe Area. The region’s ecosystem will be destroyed, taking with it $1.1 billion in annual economic activity, 17,000 jobs, and one of the last unspoiled slices of nature left in this country. What does America get in return? Nothing. Profits will go to Chile, the copper will go to China where it will help that country race head of us in its AI buildout, and any jobs created will go to workers from outside the state and country. Polluted water will also flow into Voyageurs, Canada’s Quetico Provincial Park, and Lake Superior.

[Miserable bastards.]

The Destruction Of The Boundary Waters Is Nigh

The Destruction Of The Boundary Waters Is Nigh:

Should that vote prove successful, and should the man who just anointed himself the second coming sign it into law, that measure will repeal the U.S. Forest Service Land Management Plan governing 225,504 acres of national forest in northern Minnesota. The current land management plan includes a mineral leasing withdraw that’s preventing Chile’s biggest mining company from building a heavily-polluting copper mine smack dab on top of the headwaters for the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness. And if that gets built a process will begin that will eventually destroy that area’s currently pristine ecosystem by dumping sulfuric acid into it.

That’s incredibly stupid not only because destroying America’s most popular wilderness area will cause more economic harm to the region than the income it will net, but also because all of that is being done in order to give Minnesota’s copper to China, so it can continue to build out its renewable power grid, and continue to race ahead of America on the development of artificial intelligence.

I dove into all that in more detail at this link.

Because Republicans are using the Congressional Review Act to get around the filibuster, and disapprove of that LMP with a simple majority vote, the other thing their success will do is permanently shift all USFS LMPs into being legally considered agency “rules,” which must be approved by Congress. Because the CRA is retroactive, that will apply to any LMP written since 1996, and any permit issued as part of one. Any standing LMP or permit issued since 1996 may no longer be valid should this vote be successful. And the CRA specifically prohibits any “substantially” similar replacement, so not only could this grind industrial operations on USFS land to a halt as all of this winds its way through federal court, but it could also set USFS the task of re-doing 30 years of work, and force them to start from scratch. LMPs usually take about two to three years of research, public hearings, and stakeholder input to create. And the crazy thing is that this is the exact problem they’ve already created for the BLM, with some legal experts stating that move also applies to USFS. But, a yes vote here would definitively apply that same problem to USFS.

[Wes Siler does a great job. Go support his journalism.]

Interesting and weird

Scripting News: Wednesday, October 16, 2024:

I thought that was both interesting and weird. I don’t get how anyone I know can be a fan of the that team. An American League team in a National League city. Kind of like rooting for Staten Island. Anyway, the Yankees may win the ALCS, but what does it mean? It’s not going to make New York love them.

[Dave’s been cracking me up with his love of the Mets for a long time. My father grew up in Yank’s territory and so while Dave rambles on about philosophy and love of his perenially underdog team and how it’s a NL city, I grew up with a team that seems to win a lot. Including the ALCS this year of course. And while the Mets have gone home for the season, the Yanks still have potential for greatness in this season. While I’m at it, congrats to the New York Liberty who just one the team’s very first WNBA championship in a messy, but somehow classicly NY game.]

So many feed readers, so many bizarre behaviors

So many feed readers, so many bizarre behaviors:

So many feed readers, so many bizarre behaviors

It’s been well over a year since I started serving 429s to clients which are hitting the feed too often. Since then, much has happened, and most of it is generally good news.

I’ve heard from users and authors alike of feed software. Sometimes the users have filed bug reports and/or feature requests and have gotten positive results from the project (or vendor). Other times, the authors of such software have gotten in touch, did some digging, found a few nuances of how their libraries work, and improved the situation.

Some of them are trying but are still not quite making it right.

Here’s some of what’s been going on.

[Facinating how we keep looping around…]

Scripting News: One way is always better than two

Scripting News: One way is always better than two:

It’s not mentioned in the Wikipedia page on RSS that I had a format that does what RSS does, a year before it existed, but I gave it up so that Netscape and UserLand would build on the same format, RSS.

[I can attest to this. I don’t remember the context, but Dave and I had a conversation about the two formats. His was, from my perspective, clearly better*. I think he had already made up his mind about the situation (we only talked formats, not the larger context of what he was trying to accomplish and with whom), but I didn’t know it at the time. Still the “Scripting News format” was being used by Dave back then.]

[* My perspective was as a developer who had a native desktop editor for blogs. The very first I believe. It was beautifully simple to use. I miss it a lot. But it was written as a personal project, not a business, and I chose an environment and language that didn’t last. It also led to the creation of Really Simple Discoverability, the XML format I created to make it easier to use editors with blogs. Allez!]

Interesting that Edit This Page came up the day before or so. One of the things I loved about using “Archipelago”, the editor I had written and mentioned above, was exactly this feature. There was a link on every page of the blog, and if you clicked it the magic was performed to open that page in the editor. No matter how long ago that page was created you didn’t have to go searching for it in order to edit it, the link was always there. Days like this make me feel that so much was lost along the way to today. The open web is making a bit of comeback these days… who knows? Maybe we’ll catch up with the past.

Daring Fireball: Harvard, M.I.T., and Penn Presidents Under Fire After Dodging Questions About Antisemitism

Daring Fireball: Harvard, M.I.T., and Penn Presidents Under Fire After Dodging Questions About Antisemitism:

The reckoning has come for the bizarro-world political climate that’s taken hold at these universities in the last decade or two. This patently offensive equivocation — when the correct answer was obviously an unambiguous “Yes” — makes sense in the context of the insular far-left worldview where the oppressed are viewed as inherently just, but comes across as absurd to everyone living in the real world. All three of these elite university presidents are obviously utterly tone-deaf and detached from the real world.

[The disease has risen all the way to the top. Imagine substituting another race, creed, religion, etc. for the word “Jew”. I believe the answer would have changed. Thank goodness there were only a couple of these sorts of people teaching when I went to college. Most of my professors were/are brilliant. ]

We are drowning in Google’s magnanimity

We are drowning in Google’s magnanimity – kpassa.me:

In reality of course OKRs are just fine. At least they’re fine for Google. For a company with its particular needs and structure, sure, it’s a fine way to run things.

For the rest of us, though, this well-intentioned subtle reinvention of goal setting just creates confusion. It makes us abandon the right tools for the job. It promises to help us think, but only provides us half-ideas without the context that made them work in the first place.

Lately I’ve been feeling the exact same thing about Kubernetes.

[I could not move people off of “it works for Google”… as if that meant it has to work elsewhere. I’ve seen enough shopping lists in my life to understand how little that is true. Same for Kubernetes. We gave a lot of things a try in one little corner of dev, but the principle that we always applied was “did it improve anything?” If the answer was no, with our own sense of priority (for whom did it improve and how much or not etc. etc) we killed anything that didn’t add up.]

New York May Require a Background Check to Buy a 3D Printer

New York May Require a Background Check to Buy a 3D Printer:

The New York bill, called AB A8132, would require a criminal history background check for anyone attempting to purchase a 3D printer capable of fabricating a firearm. It would similarly prohibit the sale of those printers to anyone with a criminal history that disqualifies them from owning a firearm. As it’s currently written, the bill doesn’t clarify what models or makes of printers would potentially fall under this broad category. The bill defines a three-dimensional printer as a “device capable of producing a three-dimensional object from a digital model.”

[I commented on Instagram… but of course, also here on the blog. I don’t disagree with the problem, but I do disagree with this attempt at solving it. It’s too broad…
]

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FCC moves ahead with Title II net neutrality rules in 3-2 party-line vote | Ars Technica

FCC moves ahead with Title II net neutrality rules in 3-2 party-line vote | Ars Technica:

The Federal Communications Commission today voted to move ahead with a plan that would restore net neutrality rules and common-carrier regulation of Internet service providers.

In a 3-2 party-line vote, the FCC approved Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel’s Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM), which seeks public comment on the broadband regulation plan. The comment period will officially open after the proposal is published in the Federal Register, but the docket is already active and can be found here.

The proposal would reclassify broadband as a telecommunications service, a designation that allows the FCC to regulate ISPs under the common-carrier provisions in Title II of the Communications Act. The plan is essentially the same as what the FCC did in 2015 when it used Title II to prohibit fixed and mobile Internet providers from blocking or throttling traffic or giving priority to Web services in exchange for payment.

[Yeah baby!]

Musk’s process

I find Musk very off-putting to say the least. But I still think this processis worth considering. (From Walter Isaacson’s book)

  1. Question every requirement. Each should come with the name of the person who made it. You should never accept that a requirement came from a department, such as from “the legal department” or “the safety department.” You need to know the name of the real person who made that requirement. Then you should question it, no matter how smart that person is. Requirements from smart people are the most dangerous, because people are less likely to question them. Always do so, even if the requirement came from me. Then make the requirements less dumb.
  2. Delete any part or process you can. You may have to add them back later. In fact, if you do not end up adding back at least 10% of them, then you didn’t delete enough.
  3. Simplify and optimize. This should come after step two. common mistake is to simplify and optimize a part or a process that should not exist.
  4. Accelerate cycle time. Every process can be speeded up. But only do this after you have followed the first three steps. In the Tesla factory, I mistakenly spent a lot of time accelerating processes that I later realized should have been deleted.
  5. Automate. That comes last. The big mistake in Nevada and at Fremont was that I began by trying to automate every step. We should have waited until all the requirements had been questioned, parts and processes deleted, and the bugs were shaken out.