paimapi

justice is defined and propagated by the people in their time who show up and do the work. the overturn of Roe v Wade was a 40-year-old project and one of the driving forces that created the Federalist Society, a society which now dominates the Supreme Court and many other courts of law [0]. they are also responsible for things like Citizen's United, the rise in 'tort reform' (ie corporate escape holes from liability), and a lot of other anti-populist case law

they out-organized the progressive legal types (with the help, of course, of the ultra-wealthy who saw a lot to be gained from defanged tax and labor law)

there's no taking things for granted at anytime. you either grit your teeth fighting for your rights, out-organize your opponents, and stay fighting or you get trod on and lose it all. the parable of the tortoise and the hare does a lot of work here

[0] https://theintercept.com/2022/05/10/roe-v-wade-federalist-so...

"While popularly pilloried because of her paymaster, Steinem defended the CIA relationship, saying: “In my experience The Agency was completely different from its image; it was liberal, nonviolent and honorable.”

Less cloak-and-dagger and more a young, energetic, global representative for American values and freedom"

was part of the Cold War-era soft power projection for the US since Communist countries were uplifting their women a lot more intentionally and structurally, especially compared to their historic baseline [0]. it looks pretty bad if your primary values are freedom but they don't apply super well to half of your entire population

there's also a further-left critique of Steinem [1] as being the public face and visage of pro-American, capitalist feminism, someone who took it from being the more Emma Goldman/Combahee River Collective rooted form - a kind of 'JFK' for the masses to substitute for the more revolutionary ideals of, say, Malcolm X or Dr. King, both of whom were very unpopular in their time and often derided as 'asking for too much' [2]

[0]https://kristenghodsee.scholars.harvard.edu/sites/g/files/om...

[1]https://publicseminar.org/2016/06/feminisms-of-the-left-poli...

[2]https://news.gallup.com/vault/246167/protests-seen-harming-c...

I think if you summed up measures of intelligence as 'can it do basic symbolic logic in a chain with memory' then yes, you've now achieved the intelligence of an e. coli colony [0], congratulations

[0] https://journals.aps.org/prx/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevX.10.03...

that is if your probabilities are actually correct, that the anthropological or archaeological or sociological field for that specific region and demographic is robust (and there is good primary evidence for supporting the claims), and you're not some vibe-coded AI tool that spits out a convincing lie constructed on not even educated guesses, casting shadows on the wall of the Platonic cave where the people who trust slop uncritically are chained to their ignorance for perpetuity

it's so fun and user-friendly

https://hackaday.com/2025/09/26/detecting-surveillance-camer...

that Charlie Day conspiracy board meme comes to mind lol

you start small with things like data poisoning, intentional signal creation, etc. that looks like mistagging geos on social media, clipping your favorite BLE tracking device to your indoor/outdoor cat that you also borrow for your own keys, scripts/macros that will randomly click-through ads, etc

another idea I had was just using those magnetic bumper stickers to confuse things like Flock cameras in combination with IR/reflective bumper covers since those services tend to profile cars based on a lot more than just the plate - wish this was something I could test but alas, an insider with an ethical backbone has yet to leak their source code

I know a couple of very tech savvy crews that war-drive and collect data on ALPRs in my city and they were the ones who mapped most of our city back in the day. there's been a big post-50501 DeFlock movement, though, so it's possible that more recent results are lower quality backed by lower subject matter expertise but it's not hard to set-up a good-enough scanner with something like Flock-You: https://github.com/MaxwellDPS/Flock-You-Android

even then, Flock cameras are visually distinctive compared to the Clearview/Motorola solutions that are more traditionally orb-like or are just straight tube CCTV housing. if you see a long black camera attached to a black pole with a solar panel attached, 99.9% chance you've spotted a Flock camera: https://www.wpr.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/Flock_Safety_...

now they said they didn't sell their data to LEOs but their founders also literally used to work for the CIA (it was bragged about in the initial interviews)

I wouldn't be surprised if companies of that kind are a dime-a-dozen

1) a lack of refrigeration (eg fruits rotting produce a much stronger odor than vegetables esp if concentrated under a fruiting tree) and

2) the revolutions we've had in agriculture wrt breeding for taste and nutrition, and the scale at which this is done now. I'm thinking specifically about the ability to quantify, isolate, and breed out the genes that result in high concentrations of phytotoxins (and the accordant pesticides that must be applied now that the natural defenses are gone)

undercooked beans contain high levels of phytotoxins, for example, and lead to gastrointestinal distress and sometimes even death. if all plants/vegetables/etc in the past had comparably elevated levels of these toxins, it's not hard to imagine that people in the past were doing their best to pattern recognize and thus avoid things they had little-to-no systemic understanding of which then are extrapolated and grown into popular consciousness by word-of-mouth

the obsession with 'health' as measured by the four humors is definitely silly from an empirical POV but the innate drive to not want to shit your guts out after your morning porridge seems like a very normal and valid motivator

1) there was a hiring glut during COVID-19 for SWEs [0] that is now seen as a period of overhiring

2) private equity and larger institutional shareholders are seeing their commercial property investments bleed out [1]. research points to increased (or at least not diminished) efficacy of being fully remote [2] so there's obviously a trade-off that's pushing companies to assume that risk and personally I'm not convinced that it's due to the anti-social desire by execs for high-control alone

[0] https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/software-engineer-jobs-fi... [1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/COMREPUSQ159N [2] https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/intentional-insights...

there's a fun Excel artifact where it auto-selects the 'relevant' range with no adjustment for how proportionally close to 0 the values are - a professional researcher publishing to a journal should know better (and should be ridiculed for not incorporating best practices) but for a personal blog by an SWE this really isn't the worst sin

[0] https://digitalblog.ons.gov.uk/2016/06/27/does-the-axis-have...

for all of it's vaunted 'big data' and 'metrics-driven outcomes' and whatnot, as soon as a single medium-to-large user starts complaining about an obscure component or wanting new features it was all hands on deck, roadmaps be damned, data out the window, who cares about CVEs/tech debt/fixing MVPs, let's do it MVP (again) instead of building something maintainable and extensible and then forget all about it like a child with ADHD when the next largeish user sends your C-suite an angry DM

meanwhile the core features that most people are happy with and the entire reason they chose your solution gets ignored and one day you look in your lunchbox and the food is all gone and C-suite's golden parachuted out to some cushier job somewhere else

there's good skills to write test suites but each codebase needs its own bespoke implementation paired with so much institutional knowledge. but companies keep laying off those knowledge holders and QA to boot

it's almost like shareholders > leadership > middle managers see 'enshittification' as aspirational and are doing their best to implement a systems-level strategy in pursuit of it

for eg. consider the synonyms for 'load-bearing'. if you want construction motifs: keystone, linchpin, cornerstone, foundational, structural. if you want earthy: bedrock, root. if you want ten-dollar words: axiomatic, sine qua non. if you just want to-the-point: vital, key, tenet, crucial

each of those words contain nuance. vital is used a lot in medicine (vital signs) so health, the heart, etc are evoked. pair it with specific usage like "this point is vital, the argument would die without it" and it rings different than "this point is load-bearing, the argument would be refuted without it"

you'd need to exist as a purely logical, probabilistic semantic parsing machine with no innate feeling or cultural attunement to prefer the lack of color and nuance. language as fully utilitarian with no artfulness is dreadful - if all I had to read all day was a self-important tech manual, I too would be frustrated and want for better craft in output prose

which isn't to say that this is right or just. it's simply the state of things given the way we've decided to arrange our society

most of the things that private enterprise contributes is cost reduction and manufacturing capacity (important in their own right for ubiquity) but having extremely well-funded R&D and universities still seem like the primary driver for truly evolutionary and revolutionary breakthroughs rather than useful but not necessary optimizations

IP law very much aims to protect the latter so that breakthroughs can be capitalized on but aren't a necessary motivator for researchers to continue frontier work

(0)https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_SSEC (1)https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Defense_Research_Comm... (2)https://www.allaboutcircuits.com/textbook/semiconductors/chp...

which is to say that the last thing our planet needs is another universalized technology that outputs as much total emissions as cars

in an ideal world, we'd keep LLMs/CNNs/etc specialized and academic until we are hitting diminishing returns on optimizing fundamental microprocessor tech like GAA. but the pursuit of market dominance and mass adoption is our current operating philosophy, and so we have things like this top graph: https://hai.stanford.edu/news/inside-the-ai-index-12-takeawa...

>Grok 4's estimated training emissions reached 72,816 tons of CO2 equivalent, or roughly the same amount of greenhouse gas emissions created from driving 17,000 cars for one year

incredible work. I can only imagine what it was like standing here getting the images, the smell of the must wafting from the corners that haven't been cleaned in a decade, the microbial colonies thriving off pipe condensation above with entire universes of births and deaths and rebirths

1000/10, every bathroom is an entire story

I wish there was a 'ranking' feature that periodically (maybe daily?) pulled down star/contributor numbers so you could at least look at projects that are more likely to receive continuing support and have basic hygiene like Dependabot alerts

that said, migrating off so many of the Google-native or phone manufacturer apps has been such a liberatory feeling. I do some community organizing in my free-time and am a huge FOSS evangelist in those spaces. there's so many similar values, namely anti-surveillance, and but for resistance to change and preference for hyperpalatable UX, it's such a natural fit

if you assess the original claim against the facts, is it as ludicrously out-of-step as someone claiming that Trump found A Modest Proposal persuasive?