Latest bookmarks (page 4 of 145)

"The economic case for solar power is stronger than ever."

"It was just last month that Brett Kavanaugh gave his explanation for why it was perfectly okay for Homeland Security goons to profile brown people and detain them based on nothing more than the color of their skin."

...by reading his own biography. Not surprisingly, it gets a lot of things wrong even when the correct information is available, and it puts a lot of emphasis on the decade-old Sad Puppies kerfuffle because apparently right-wingers are still obsessed with it or something. Some choice excerpts:
> fundamentally LLMs aren’t built for accuracy, they’re built for statistical probability, and these really are two separate things. > Having used Wikipedia for a while now, I feel reasonably sure that its biases are not “liberal,” they’re “pedantic,” > Which is to say, if you have to choose a “pedia” to trust, you might choose the one assembled by a bunch of pedantic nerds saying “well, ACTUALLY” to each other until the heat death of the universe, over the one assembled by an LLM controlled by a, insecure Nazi salute-throwing billionaire who sprints to reprogram that LLM every time it shares a fact that makes that billionaire angry or sad, or doesn’t fit into his Playskool Machiavellian ambitions and plans. In this particular case, a thousand pedantic nerds is much better than a single rich one.

An actual Unix system that's a fork of the final OpenSolaris release. Analagous to Linux in that it's a core ecosystem that distros like OmniOS and OpenIndiana are built around.

Actions to take to oppose Google's new restrictions on installing software.

Why KDE no longer posts on X:
"...4. Most of the new followers we were getting were nazi-propaganda spewing bots (7 out of 10 on average) or just straight up nazis. Our community is not made up of nazis and many of our friendly contributors would be the target of nazi harassment, so we were not sure what we were doing there and stopped posting and left."

How to donate to the Python Software Foundation

"In the end, however, the PSF simply can’t agree to a statement that we won’t operate any programs that “advance or promote” diversity, equity, and inclusion, as it would be a betrayal of our mission and our community. "

They had a grant approval for work on security from the NSF, but the contract required them to reject any efforts to promote diversity, equity, and inclusivity - even if it wasn't funded by the grant money - and gave the NSF the right to claw back money even after it had been transferred. Having integrity (and recognizing the trojan horse in the offer), they declined.

Regarding last week's 16-hour partial AWS outage:
"In this case, the race condition resided in the DNS Enactor, a DynamoDB component that constantly updates domain lookup tables in individual AWS endpoints to optimize load balancing as conditions change." Delays resulted in multiple DNS Enactors rewriting the same configs and deleting each other's "outdated" changes, breaking routing *and* the re-balancing process, requiring manual intervention.