disposition2

> When election officials bring ballots to their USPS site for delivery, either the entire batch of ballot envelopes or a sampling will be physically scanned – depending on where the ballots are being dropped, according to the whistleblower. If just a single ballot envelope scan does not align with the information in the portal, USPS will refuse to deliver the entire batch of ballots while the discrepancy is being sorted out.

The article certainly reads like someone took a checklist of worst practices and lessons learned during the SDLC, and decided that’s how this should be rolled out.

The chaos seems to be a feature, not a bug.

Agree to disagree.

I believe the current status quo is a direct violation of the 4th Amendment.

> Why can't we expect some level of privacy in a public place? There are some countries that confer that, to certain levels.

The US used to be one of those countries, then 9/11 happened and the loudest folks (or at least the folks with the most money to influence law) started eroding privacy and now more folks just accept our current state and views like OP’s.

It’s really interesting…you can even watch a TV crime drama series, like Law & Order, and see the privacy erosion in the TV show. That transition is basically a reflection of what happened in the US.

Thanks John Roberts!

It’s been turtles all the way down since the Citizens United decision.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._FEC

> The NAACP claims don't amount to facts.

If that were true, I doubt the DOJ would step in and attempt to squash the lawsuit

https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/trump-administratio...

Who knows.?

You’re not wrong that an average person would be in trouble with the law if they took even remotely the same action.

One could also ask where’s the EPA, since they openly acknowledged laws were being broken back in January. [1]

But xAI has added more turbines since it started years ago, and the water recycling plant is paused [2].

As for doing something about all of this, I suspect it’s even less likely now that Anthropic is using it for compute [3].

1. https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/pollution-musks-unper...

2. https://wreg.com/news/local/xai-memphis/xai-puts-water-recyc...

3. https://x.ai/news/anthropic-compute-partnership

It’s neat the amount of care and thought that used to go into just an icon or a one off dmg background screen.

I can remember styling my Windows XP and Linux machine back in the day, I didn’t have the money to afford a Mac but I could make my machine look like one or even nicer than Aqua, and it was all because the many great artists freely sharing their works (like Louie Mantia mentioned in the article).

So many great artists on Neowin and AquaSoft, I believe some even went to work for Apple.

Cool article, thanks for sharing.

Pretty sure it’s “is”, they were operating gas turbines for power and continue to do so

If this Baltimore Sun article is accurate, it's worse than that as it sounds like the FCC is overriding a law passed by Congress and not just (re)setting a rule.

> The 39% cap was established by Congress in 2004.

1. https://www.baltimoresun.com/2026/08/06/federal-communicatio...

They still have it, and just sent it out

I commend Tidal for at least trying.

I wish Youtube Music would offer some relief from the flood of AI music on their platform. My frustrations with YTM are exacerbated by the fact that it has the absolute minimum in functionality when it comes to browsing or searching.

I don't understand the user hostile nature of so many services these days when it comes to content discovery. We all know the data is there, but making it available for the user to actually browse or god forbid a modicum of search filters is like some forbidden fruit.

You could also easily opt out with the single entity that shipped that information.

Maybe many moons ago, when newspapers had an abundance of reporters, and relatively low crime / competing issues otherwise?

But I'm not sure I can recall, even in a local paper or a local TV news broadcast, seeing articles / segments about a random individual having their car broken in to or being robbed.

Edit: I take that back, I have seen reports of robberies (specifically armed robberies) in local news, but not so much car break ins.

> At the same time I see young people frustrated when their cars get broken into or when they get robbed and criminals are not held accountable. My take on this is that legacy media refuses to address these issues or plays them down and at the same time they amplify concerns about AI probably because AI is supplanting the reach and their rhetoric and reducing their ad share.

Maybe it’s just the legacy media I consume, but petty crime is rarely if ever reported (television, newspaper, radio, etc) in my experience.

And I’m not sure how you would expect media institutions to address petty crime. I guess they could ask local leaders and local law enforcement about it.?

> Users like the author

He’s a pretty interesting fella, I imagine his work influenced a lot of people over the years

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bram_Cohen

> shouldn't have to leak my residential address to private businesses to register to vote

If the 'SAVE America Act' passes, you're going to be open to leaking a heck of a lot more than that, and it'll all go in to a national database.

This wasn’t my experience, if anything, they often didn’t have stock in the store and told us to go online to buy the item.

And 800+ stores doesn’t seem like over saturation, it looks like there are more BestBuy and Hobby Lobby stores than that and they both sell stuff that most folks would feel equally comfortable buying online. Where, as you rightly stated, buying fabric online is a non starter for most folks.

My experience was similar to the author, bare shelves and 1 or 2 folks around to help customers…it honestly felt more like purposeful neglect on the part of the owners.

Probably an unpopular opinion on this forum where everyone is considering can something be done vs should something be done, but it sounds like theft to me.

But I am also very anti-AI in the artistic space, because if it weren’t for humans freely providing so much artistic content, we wouldn’t have this outcome. And I believe the only end result will be less humans openly sharing knowledge, because some heavily money backed entities will just steal all the art and put it behind a paywall or advertisement.

As much as I appreciate the easy search (because actual useful search has become nonexistent since AI) and the ability to ask AI to find some metadata from a large data payload, I also dislike AI, because it has effectively broken the open internet and the willingness for humans to be open to freely sharing knowledge.

Something I’ve noticed about technology companies, and it’s bled into just about every facet of the US these days, is the consideration of if an action *can* be executed upon vs *should* an action be executed upon.

It’s very unfortunate and a short sighted way to operate.

I’m not saying it is historically accurate, but I would encourage anyone who didn’t experience interactions with law enforcement pre-9/11 (in the US) to watch early seasons of Law & Order.

It is pretty informative, even in the dramatic context of the show, to see police interactions and the respect for / erosion of individual rights when you view the seasons before 9/11/2001 and after 9/11/2001.

I think maybe OP was using the traditional definition of the word, and hopefully not trying to imply we have Treblinka’s across the US.

But there is some cause for concern regarding the detention centers and the lack of oversight.

For example, even Congress members have to provide 7 days of notice if they wish to visit a center [1]. So, the only real oversight is from the executive. And these centers are often ran by private companies somewhat notorious for bad conditions and lawsuits related to bad conditions / civil rights violations.

Here’s a story about where we’re holding families and children:

https://www.mprnews.org/episode/2026/01/27/inside-the-dilley...

1. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/ice-facilities-homeland-securit...

For Windows & Mac, you can do foobar2000.

For MacOS, you can use Vox, https://vox.rocks/mac-music-player

I personally use MPD (or something like moodeAudio), and then use clients to listen on various platforms.

Any time I see an article about music streaming, I pour one out for Rdio.

It had all the benefits of streaming and the properties that one would expect from library ownership. When I compare the 'features' offered by all the streaming services (I've encountered thus far), things have regressed drastically.

A few of the benefits I recall (from memory) that Rdio had:

- when setting a radio station and when you 'downvoted' an artist or a song, it only effected that particular station. So, if you wanted a 70's metal radio station, downvoting Metallica wouldn't affect your general 'metal' radio station or your 80s Metal Radio station.

- You could search by numerous parameters, including Label. So if you were looking for classical albums by Deutsche Grammophon, you could actually find those albums or songs.

These are just a couple of things I can recall from memory. I think it's also important to point out (this is based on memory and vibes), that the Rdio algorithm actually respected the user's wishes and didn't try to force things you might not want. Said algorithm was bought by Pandora (IIRC) and based on my experience with Pandora (and past experience with Rdio)...Pandora seems to have thrown it in the trash.

Compare all of these awesome UX experiences vs YouTube Music...where you can't even filter out AI trash from New Releases.

Suffice to say, Rdio was the crest of the wave for music streaming / discovery and everything since has been a regression. But you do get a bit more control if you go down the path of owning your library.

Not sure if you missed it in the article, but the author acknowledges buying from Bandcamp in the article

> Buy music on Bandcamp or download it from Soundcloud, stick it in the Music app, and you're off!

The GOP being mum about the razing (with zero outside review) of a building built during the administration of Teddy Roosevelt…to build a ballroom that only one man wishes for…is probably one of the more apropos events regarding our current affairs.

Just want to point out this is someone (in leadership) from the FDA, not the FCC.

> Prasad, a former hematologist-oncologist at the University of California San Francisco, is now *head of the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research (CBER), which makes him the chief vaccine regulator in the US.*

This will probably be a unpopular, wet blanket opinion...

But anytime I hear of Grok or xAI, the only thing I can think about is how it's hoovering up water from the Memphis municipal water supply and running natural gas turbines to power all for a chat bot.

Looks like they are bringing even more natural gas turbines online...great!

https://netswire.usatoday.com/story/money/business/developme...

Thanks and apologies, I searched for the article link prior to posting but didn’t look for articles from other sources and didn’t see anything in the first few pages on the site

The actual complaint (PDF)

https://whistleblower.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/08-26-2...

From the article (emphasis is mine):

> According to Borges' complaint, on June 10, days after the Supreme Court ruling, a former DOGE employee at the SSA named John Solly requested that the agency make a copy of its Numerical Identification System (NUMIDENT) database to a private cloud that would be located within the SSA's Amazon Web Services — Agency Cloud Infrastructure.

> *The NUMIDENT database is the master file for all information submitted in applications for Social Security cards. The database includes applicant names, place and date of birth, citizenship, race and ethnicity, and parents' names — along with the Social Security numbers.*

I can see the value in actual AI. But it seems like in many instances how it is being utilized or applied is more related to terrible search functionality. Even for the web, it seems like we’re using AI to provide more refined search results, rather than just fixing search capabilities.

Maybe it’s just easier to throw ‘AI’ (heavy compute of data) at a search problem, rather than addressing the crux of the problem…people not being provided with the tools to query information. And maybe that’s the answer but it seems like an expensive solution.

That said, I’m not an expert and could be completely off base.