> 2. Democratic voters tend to be more concerned about the environment.

This is technically true but is counterbalanced by the fact rural areas tend to be extremely NIMBY. Unbelievably so. It's hard to get permission to rebuild a dilapidated strip mall, let alone build a data center.

There's a railroad near where I live that was freight only, but wanted to run passenger trains - completely unsubsidized (beyond a tax free loan, and I've never bought the argument "tax free" means subsidized, but that's for another day) - on the same lines. Virtually nothing changed. No impact on the local community. Two trains an hour tying up railroad crossings for a maximum of 20-30 seconds, a minute an hour.

Every fucking "community" North of the Miami-West Palm Beach-Jupiter metropolis raised objections. This was for an existing railroad, with zero impact beyond long sought after safety improvements and quiet zones!

You think rural areas are going to support building actual buildings?

Pffft.

Indeed, I wonder if it'd be easier, even if as you point out more expensive, to build a data center in a city. Just renovate an existing industrial building and hope nobody sees the planning notices.

Your honor, my script was a "rogue," so therefore it is responsible and I am not.

In a dire emergency, your car is the last place you should be, and the last thing you should try to hang onto. FEMA's official disaster preparedness communication calls for you to have a PORTABLE AM radio and to avoid travel unless absolutely necessary. "Let's get in the car and go to Disney" is not part of FEMA's official recommendations.

Also, to assume that AM radio will even work in an emergency or disaster is a stretch in the first place. Ancient broadcasting equipment living in swamps with hundreds of meter tall towers, seldom internet access, and nonredundant uplinks, are not reliable.

When Helene hit us in 2024, AM/FM radio was the first thing to go off the air, followed by the land-based Internet providers, followed by the cellular networks. We got by with local amateur radio operators who were able to communicate outside the zone on batteries and solar panels.

There is no "one thing" that is going to be universally reliable in a disaster. You have to have an "all of the above" mindset and prepare to communicate by different available means.

It's not about emergency preparedness.

No worse than virtually all other scripting languages! I'd be hard pressed to find a scripting language that's significantly better than JS when it comes to type handling.

If the cops receive an anonymous tip that CowboyNeal is an insensitive clod, and then decide to arrest him without checking out any of the evidence, I blame the cops. There's plenty to bitch about with Flock but "the cops don't care about doing their job" isn't one of them. That's a cop problem.

Don't treat any stupid robots as somehow "better" than an anonymous tip called in from a payphone. It's just, like, something's opinion, man.

Unpopular view: Javascript itself is a decent language, it's the fact it has to be used with the DOM in most contexts that makes it unpleasant. Give it a set of Python/PHP/Java/etc style desktop libraries and most people would have no problem with it. But because everyone encounters it within the context of a web browser as a scripting language for web pages, it gets a bad rap.

That said, I recall the original Eich JS being kinda sucky, with little or no OOPs beyond associative arrays. So there's that.

The biggest issue here is that the bigots managed to rewrite history, and managed to persuade most people that Mozilla "fired" Eich for his opinions, when in fact Mozilla ignored his blatant bigotry when it happened, and considered him worthy of promoting to CEO despite effectively calling 10% of the (blameless) people he'd lead a danger to children, co-funding a political campaign that was promoting that blood libel.

They say Mozilla fired him. Mozilla did no such thing. Mozilla promoted him to CEO. They saw blood libels against gay people as no barrier to leading a massive team of people.

The rest of the world voiced their disgust, Mozilla started to lose users at an alarming rate within days of the announcement, and Eich saw he had to go, so he quit, despite Mozilla's backing.

Mozilla isn't "woke", they're the exact opposite. That's why they've embraced fashtech so enthusiastically despite it being such a danger to the open web. They're gross. The only reason to use Firefox is literally that the alternative is fashtech and at least Firefox is second hand fashtech.

But whenever this troll posts, can we PLEASE set the story straight because I'm so fed up with seeing this bullshit that Eich was fired, when he was actually promoted to CEO. And resigned because of world wide disgust, not because of a single Mozilla employee expressing concern.

Depends. If they're afraid of heights they probably shouldn't have a job cleaning the windows of skyscrapers. And if they promote the lie that gays are a danger to children, they probably shouldn't be leading any organization sufficiently large enough that 5-10% of their employees are likely gay.

Regardless, Eich wasn't fired by Mozilla, he was promoted to CEO. Mozilla explicitly endorsed his views. It was the rest of the world that voiced their disgust, and Eich resigned after it became clear more than 5-10% of humanity was going to have nothing to do with Mozilla if he continued in that position.

Mozilla should be ashamed of itself, for its blessing of homophobia and endorsement of a blood libel, not for something it never did.

He wasn't fired, he was promoted, to CEO.

Unbelievable this lie continues to be spread that he was fired from Mozilla. The reality is he quit after it became obvious that nobody saw promoting someone to CEO who co-funded a campaign saying gays were a danger to children as a sign Mozilla was for "everyone". But nobody at Mozilla pushed him out, the rest of the world voiced their disgust. Something they had every right to do.

Because he was an awful person. And certainly unqualified to lead a diverse open source business.

If they're the copyright holder, they can, legally, do whatever they want. And closing the Github repo isn't against any OSS license I'm aware of: they may, depending on whether they've accepted contributions without copyright assignment, be required to provide the source code to those who have obtained binaries from them directly, but that's about the extent of it. I don't know if their Github had binary releases, but assuming it didn't, nobody really has a legal case against them.

The best that can happen is what the article is talking about: people fork the last known good version.

FORTRAN? TIL.

The old joke was that Python was basically COBOL++, but thinking about it it did actually end up replacing FORTRAN the same way Java and C# replaced COBOL.

Regardless, Python was a decent language. It has quirks I'm not overly happy about, but there's no denying it was a useful addition to programming, as is Rust, and as was Java and C# and a host of other popular languages. And while there are some communities I might avoid, the fact that people's advocacy gets tiring after a while isn't an excuse to boycott a technology, especially as you can safely assume that the better something is, the more likely it'll have its advocates.

Though never did understand the love for Arch Linux...

Yeah. I get the impression there are a hell of a lot of people who just make up reasons to hate Rust because of some perceived (rightly or wrongly) annoying habits of those who advocate it.

Which is ironic because Python zealots literally had the same reputation as Rust advocates today 20-25 years ago.

Rust is theoretically a massive step forward if we use it properly. People spend far too much time getting tribal because of whether they want to be associated with advocates or critics rather than the tech underneath.

We now live in a fully connected world where most users are connected through web browsers and are the intended victims.

This particular story is an exception to that. Remote software, accessed through a web browser, normally does not have read/write access to your local filesystem. But people are granting local filesystem access to proprietary AI services.

I think that granting such access is .. wow. I wouldn't do it, though I can see how if you use a specialized account for it, and if you're confident that your OS has no local user priv escalation bugs, it might be ok. In your sandbox you trust.

But GP's comment is about whose decision that is. If you use Linux, then it's your decision. If you use iOS, then it's Apple's decision. And MacOS is becoming less Linuxy and more iOSy every year. I think it makes plenty of sense for stories like this to result in people dumping MacOS for Linux. (But daaamn, their values surprise me. You wanna make your computer less secure instead of more? Oh well, like Rumsfeld said, freedom is untidy!)

No, if the state were renamed, it would be to Old America. NM might not be the true original, but if you look at it through the eyes of European colonization and continuous governance, then New Mexico has the best claim of the fifty. (Though if you take a less racist view, then I guess Alaska had the real OGs.)

Randi McGinn, a lawyer for New Mexico, said applying the full $5,000 penalty to the number of violations would create too large of a penalty under the US Constitution's protections on due process.

I ass/u/me this refers to the Eighth Amendment, but I don't remember seeing any monetary constants encoded within that text.

Google's telling me Meta is worth about $1.8 trillion so how would a mere $40B be "excessive?" It's only about 2% of their worth! Civil penalties in excess of 2% of someone's worth are routinely accepted as constitutional, aren't they? If this case were about me driving drunk and killing a whole family, I bet no one would flinch at the 8A implications of taking 2% (!?!) of my assets, and everyone would laugh at my lawyer if he brought up 8A for such an insignificant fine.

I understand why we have 8A, and everyone deserves mercy, but I don't see why Meta deserves exceptional mercy as a singular special case that we would be horrified to see applied anywhere else. Bringing up 8A for such a tiny fine would be giving Meta a very unique carve-out that we normally would not apply.

It may be that $5k is too much to charge criminals per act, in that each crime didn't really cause that much loss, but bringing up due process concerns seems like bullshit when the fine is already so small. NM and Meta had been trying to negotiate the cost of illegal business for years before negotiations failed and it went to trial. Meta decided to let a jury decide, and the jury's come up with a fairly tiny fraction of their assets.

If Meta thinks the price of illegal business is still too high, then they can lower the number of willful violations they commit per year, to optimize the advantage they gain from illegal actions at an affordable rate.

Geez, Zuck, just do less of it. If $40B seems like a lot, then maybe try only $10B worth of crime next time. What's the big deal? Live and learn. After this little fine you still have 98% of the company left to go on and incur the next wave of liabilities.