forrcaho @ forrcaho @lemmy.world

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2 yr. ago

I've got to admit, I was a bit confused by this headline, because I'd heard that despite cuts to NOAA, the usual flood alerts were given and Texas officials were lying about that.

The article clarifies that a bit:

Former and current NWS employees have defended the agency’s response, as have meteorologists across the country. NWS’s Austin/San Antonio office—which covers the region— issued a flood watch on Thursday afternoon, followed by flash flood alerts that night into Friday morning.

However, the office’s warning coordination meteorologist took an early retirement offer in April as part of NOAA’s personnel and budget cuts, which were part of DOGE’s efforts to slash government “waste.” The position still hasn’t been filled, and according to the department’s website, the office currently has six additional vacancies. That vacancy may have delayed urgent communication with local officials.

It also sounds like the Trump admin isn't going to change their plans for NOAA:

Unfortunately, NOAA’s recently released 2026 budget plan would shut down multiple NOAA labs, including the decades-old National Severe Storms Laboratory, which is crucial in researching and developing storm prediction technology, including hurricane forecasts. These cuts were outlined in Project 2025, with Russell Vought—Trump’s OMB Director—writing that he wanted to gut NOAA because the agency is responsible for “climate alarmism.”

I have to agree, knowing the facts about how rapidly the climate is changing does lead to alarm.

While we don't all know he cheated, we do all know he totally would if he thought he could get away with it, and there are some troubling irregularities in the vote counts.

Thanks for the warning. I've crossed Best Buy of my list of places to shop.

Walmart heiress Christy Walton bought ONE full-page color ad in the New York Times. The rallies themselves appear to be independently organized --- you can volunteer to host one on their site --- and you can get a good idea of who's actively involved in organizing them by looking at their partners page.

Ok, this is an idea I had after reading numerous comments on this post. You're all asking how this would work ... hear me out.

California declares its own currency, the "California dollar". Wages earned in California dollars wouldn't be taxed like US Dollars.

There are some issues to work out; I think the IRS does tax your foreign assets ... some ... but I think that this scheme could work.

A bill like this was proposed in the Minnesota state house, shortly before one of the co-sponsors was arrested for soliciting sex from a minor.

I only use Windows because I have to work with a corporation's IT helpdesk staff to get on their VPN if I want to do contract work for them. They are not likely to help me get connected from Linux; they'll just find another contract dev. Once in, I do everything in Linux because my code will ultimately run in a Linux cloud container of some sort. WSL works well enough for me to do this. I'd rather have Linux on bare metal, but whatever. I'm in; I'm coding; I'm getting paid. I'll put up with a little bit of suck.

AppImage is the no-nonsense universal package format.

I once saw a headline that someone (I forgot who) said that "AI is weird". All I could think was, well yeah, he's been called "Weird Al" all of his professional life ...

That article says they're closing for Easter, which is not an uncommon thing in the US-- for example, Costco will also do that. Nothing to do with the boycott, or "looting".

My bad, the illustration was supposed to be of Virginia Basora-Gonzalez, who has been accused of trafficking fentanyl. On the one hand, it seems encouraging that they had to find someone who could more credibly be presented as criminal -- hopefully an indication that their claims about the pro-Palestinian students and Argentinians with tattoos they've disappeared were not deemed credible enough by the general public.

Still, we only have the allegation of this administration against this person, so it's quite possible she's entirely innocent. It's not like they give a fuck about actual crimes or making our country safer. They just want to be seen as badasses.

When I worked an hourly job on the night shift, we would all clock out to change the time and then clock back in.

You got a link for that? I'm not finding anything online linking Rumeysa Ozturk to anything related to drugs

Upvoting for the concise summary of what the article is about (thanks!); not for the opinion expressed (which appears to conflate Russian developers with the actions of the Russian government -- something I find problematic at best).

You had two chances to impeach the shit and you didn't.

CLI is being able to speak a language to tell your computer what to do; GUI is only being able to point and grunt.

The original marshmallow experiment is so popular to cite because it is a "just so story" -- that is, as typically explained, it presents a moral lesson that seems intuitively obvious. That's one reason the result stood for so long without attempts to reproduce it.

Such attempts have now been made, and no one can reproduce the reported clarity of the original. One interpretation of this is related to the wealth of the families involved: the original subjects were, after all, children of Stanford University students, and as such came from families of relative wealth.

There are studies which reach the conclusion you're reporting (likely popularized by this Atlantic article but it's paywalled so I can't check), but the way you present this as a "fun fact" is turning the test into a different "just so story".

The reality is that, while there are some stats gathered from the marshmallow test and followups that could be interpreted that way, the actual data gathered is too messy and inconclusive to draw any definitive conclusions.

Oh, thank the gods. I read about the "Trump Derangement Syndrome" bill and thought -- they're flooding the zone with shit, just like Steve Bannon advised, and just like when you train a puppy, we need to rub their noses in it.

As far as I can tell from the article, the definition of "smarter" was left to the respondents, and "answers as if it knows many things that I don't know" is certainly a reasonable definition -- even if you understand that, technically speaking, an LLM doesn't know anything.

As an example, I used ChatGPT just now to help me compose this post, and the answer it gave me seemed pretty "smart":

what's a good word to describe the people in a poll who answer the questions? I didn't want to use "subjects" because that could get confused with the topics covered in the poll.

"Respondents" is a good choice. It clearly refers to the people answering the questions without ambiguity.

The poll is interesting for the other stats it provides, but all the snark about these people being dumber than LLMs is just silly.

We have free public school lunches for all our kids here in Minnesota because of Governor Walz. How the fuck is that "blue republican"?