WesternInfidels

OK, yes, “Schrödinger’s Blockade” is better.

We’re changing the name to “Schrödinger’s Strait”

It exists in a state of superposition until an oil tanker explodes

This is going to wind up granting AI agents a piecemeal, half-assed, legal-fiction version of “personhood,” like corporations have. The AIs will wind up with freedoms like: They can spend all the money they want, that’s “free speech.”

And the fleshy unfortunates among us still won’t have a right to a living wage, to medical care, etc.

…federal immigration officials attempted to use the tariff statute to unmask the president’s critics before, during the first Trump administration, and were reprimanded for doing so by the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of the Inspector General in a 2017 report.

In its summons, ICE indicated the basis for its request was a provision of the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930 . John Doe informed the court that they had nothing to do with the kind of activities at issue in the near-century-old statute, which governs boat show sales, wild animal imports, forfeited wines and spirits, and cross-border trade in other goods.

Anyone… anyone?

An unnamed source told the Post it was like “hearing a voice in a stadium, except the stadium is a thousand square miles of desert.”

What the hell is this analogy? “It’s like [thing], except if [thing] were totally different.” This is like a bad movie script.

To find a heartbeat, a quantum Ghost Murmur tool would have to contend not just with Earth’s magnetic field and magnetic noise from natural and human-made electric currents but also with “the heartbeats of the sheep and dogs and jackrabbits—whatever else is running around out there,” says Chad Orzel, a professor of physics…

I’m glad someone brought this up, it was the first thing that came to my mind.

I have a Uni Kuru Toga mechanical pencil that I bought perhaps 20 years ago. For about $7. And it still works great.

Somehow, it’s still $7? How?

Sumatra PDF Reader is no-frills and distraction free. Even on my ancient PC, it’s fast as heck. I have rather rudely installed it on other people’s PCs, because their slow all-singing all-dancing PDF readers drove me up the wall.

RawTherapee converts “RAW” files from digital cameras to friendlier image formats, and pretty often RawTherapee’s edit is all I need. It’s feature packed, it can do film simulations, image de-noising, tone-mapping, and now it has the ability to do some local adjustments, too. I have several “RAW” converters, including a commercial one, but I keep coming back to RawTherapee as the mainstay, the most productive for me.

I’ve got foobar2000 set up as a pretty plain-looking, non-distracting music player. It’s got great library features, it has a wildly customizable interface, it’s got a plugin architecture to extend its abilities in many ways. It has stayed on my PC for years because of its quiet competence, always serving without demanding my time or attention.

I used to keep my password file and other confidential stuff inside a TrueCrypt virtual volume. Now I use the successor, VeraCrypt. Both have always worked flawlessly; in fact, TrueCrypt is way smaller and I’m not aware of any security issues with it, it’s just not actively developed anymore.

These are actually blog posts that list such things:

A List Of Text-Only & Minimalist News Sites (Updated 2026)

No Logins Required: Alternative Interfaces To YouTube, Twitter, Reddit, Instagram

If “Vydia” can get access to this mechanism, it can’t be that hard, can it?

Given the current media, copyright, and business environment, why haven’t we seen this kind of reverse-piracy pursued as a deliberate business model? Buy some IP rights cheap from YouTube “content creators” who have given up, use your AI-powered robot to find vaguely similar stuff from creators who are still working, and copyright-claim it all?

It’s pretty evident there would be no downside.

Maybe small YouTubers should get together and create such a business, just to force the system to change. Make copyright claims against Paramount, CBS, etc. Make them barely plausible. Make thousands of them, from behind a rotating cast of shell companies. Make AI-powered, trust-the-claimant style copyright claims unworkable. Hey, it’s just the free market regulating itself.

No one becomes a billionaire by accident. People who have an insatiable urge to dominate are hugely over-represented in the Epstein class, through their own efforts.

internet bluetooth wife

My new punk band name

I had a visit with a PA who pantomimed the use of an inhaler she didn’t actually have on hand. The note-taking robot decided that was a “demonstration” with a billing code, and that it should be billed as $800.

You’d never really get those ducks in a row, but it would be entertaining to watch you try.

Patents are a (relatively speaking) newfangled trick to turn ideas into legal “capital.” In the same way that a corporation “is” a person.

The backbone of capitalism? I’m not following that.

I’m probably an idiot. Tell me I’m all wrong about this.

The danger is that quantum computers could factor large products well enough to reverse public keys, finding the associated private keys. Which would indeed be very bad. But this isn’t quite a magic key that opens everything.

Public key crypto is used to set up a secure network connection, but it’s not used to encrypt the data that flows on that connection. Quantum snooping would require an eavesdropper to intercept every bit on a connection, from initiation onward. And decrypting it would probably not be a real-time affair.

Public key crypto is also not used to protect your typical encrypted zip file or file system volume. Your Bitlocker and Veracrypt secrets aren’t about to fall to quantum spies.

I’m bothered that so many popular articles about this issue draw no distinction between the classes of cryptography that are vulnerable and those that are not.

Seems like an appropriate companion piece:

The 49MB Web Page

I went to the New York Times to glimpse at four headlines and was greeted with 422 network requests and 49 megabytes of data. It took two minutes before the page settled. And then you wonder why every sane tech person has an adblocker installed on systems of all their loved ones.

I guess I must have seen that here in the Fedi.

This is a great story to illuminate the large number of problems that could be addressed by decent public transit, better options for walking and biking, etc.

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