I’m in Australia (and before that, New Zealand). So I’m in the same boat - seems lofty, but I’m really hopeful that it happens!

We’re not as isolated as you might think, though. The MAGA movement has, sadly, helped to shape the development of our own right-wing parties here. I don’t just hope that the US gets it shit together for their sake - they’re corrupting our politics as well.

Bonus points for hitting all categories in a single sentence.

I’m still hoping that, if the Democrats win the next election (and, if there is a next election!) that the US is able to do some serious soul-searching and reject things like …

• Military action without a declaration of war by Congress.
• Executive orders to push through legislation that’s otherwise unconstitutional.
• Court-stacking.

Administrations on both sides have done this since FDR and the New Deal (and possibly before; I don’t know). They’ve been setting the scene for someone like Trump to come along and continue the tradition with some astoundingly vile abuses of power.

Instability in my WIndows NT 4 development machine. I’d been using Linux as a hobbyist for several years, but switched to it at work so I had a machine that didn’t crash every few hours.

You don’t win elections by appealing to your opponents.

If there is just one lesson non-Republicans should take from Trump winning two elections, it should be this one!

Your suffering is not a KPI

Some days I doubt that.

I did this some time ago - I have a very heavily filtered Mastodon feed, and a carefully curated RSS feed - both mostly around tech news, and as little to do with LLMs as possible.

Don’t regret this for a minute from a mental health perspective, especially when something happens like this.

Speaking as a non-American with an interest in politics and philosophy: I really hope that if (if!) you have free elections again, and if the Democrats win, that you start taking your Constitution seriously for the first time in a century.

That means no more going to war without Congressional approval. No more extrajudicial executions of American citizens. No more commerce clause loopholes to regulate that which clearly shouldn’t be a matter for the Federal govt. to regulate. No more executive orders as an end-run around Constitutional limitations, instead of Constitutional amendments.

Someone will always argue that it’s just pragmatic politics. That you couldn’t have had the New Deal, or the EPA, or Obamacare, or the War on Terror, whatever, without court-stacking, executive orders, illegal invasions, etc.

But you know what? Every time you did that, every time you got what you wanted despite the Constitution and laws in the way, you weakened the system, and you weakened respect for it amongst voters and their elected representatives.

In the end, you got Trump and MAGA wielding power that you helped to normalize.

Please don’t make that mistake again.

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Can confirm! Chickens, dogs, and children - all noisy as hell in their own way, and all make our garden sound great :)

Neighbours had a rooster for a while, until someone complained to the Council and the “rooster police” made them get rid of it.

But I loved it! Waking up early in the AM for meetings with folks in the US, and hearing a rooster, just started long days the right way.

Boy the original NAZIs would have loved to have genetic data on everyone, once they got rolling on the Holocaust.

I wonder if IBM will help with the next one, too?

First there was nothing

That might be the cause of your agnosticism, here. The big bang certainly didn’t happen from nothing; we’re just not up to working out what it did come from, yet - and there’s a chance we may never be able to know. But that didn’t mean it came from nothing.

Australian here - we have this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_of_the_Year

Sincerely hope he’s awarded the next one.

Just on the laptop.

Born in London, grew up in New Zealand, living in Melbourne. The socks were a gift :)

Yeah. It just … worked out of the box on the 200, IIRC.

Australian here: can confirm that all kangaroos are tankies.

The studio behind it says they ‘hardly slept’ for several weeks

Are they acknowledging that crunches and sleep deprivation lead to poor results? 😀

I mean … if he’s using Cisco gear, he’d better be praying.

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/cisco-botches-fix-for-rv320-rv325-routers-just-blocks-curl-user-agent/

Cisco’s mitigation consisted of making the router firmware blacklist the user agent name for the ‘curl’ command-line tool …

“Standing up for American women who were raped at 14, trafficked and used by rich powerful men, should not result in me being called a traitor and threatened by the President of the United States, whom I fought for,” she said.

But the current President is one of those rich powerful men raping the trafficked. What did she expect would happen?