Exactly. The leadership and a chunk of the imported foot soldiers. That gives the admin time to regroup and let the city cool off. Meanwhile, Bovino and his coterie will use the same tactics elsewhere. If the early rumors of him going to North Carolina are correct, then the courts may be more deferential; this can then be used as evidence if/when they return to use the same tactics again because they were “fine over there” (where there are judges more friendly to their position), and that can be used as evidence in the inevitable case.

Plus, he’s from southern CA. I doubt he’s had a real winter ever in his life and is afraid of it.

I think there are two possible reasons for this:

1. Winter is coming and these good ol’ southern boys can’t take a little bit of snow and ice from our own General Winter.
2. They’re escaping before their brand of brutality is ruled completely unconstitutional, and they have to face the possibility of facing real consequences or openly defying the court.

Personally, I think it’s mostly 2 with a little of 1. As lawless as the administration is, they really like to have a fig leaf of legitimacy by not openly defying the court, just flouting rulings and orders at the margins where they can pretend they’re still abiding by what the courts say. I don’t think the administration is quite ready to go full mask off just yet.

…That’s perjury on top of acting in contempt of court. Is there some reason why he hasn’t already been put in shackles for that?

On a separate note, Bovino is so stupid. He has no clue that he’s being set up to be the fall guy. He’s racking up all the points to get all of the excesses of this evil operation in Chicago pinned squarely on him. He’s giving the ghouls at the top plausible deniability should accountability ever come.

That’s a very fair point.

Bottom line is that I’m skeptical of this guy, but this is my take on his whole deal.

He reminds me of a lot of young, infantry people I’ve met in my time: young and full of stupid decisions. I genuinely believe that he got a Totenkopf without realizing what it was. That sounds like something an idiot, young infantryman would do. However, I don’t for a second believe that he didn’t know what it was until recently. That’s a bald faced lie for someone who claims to be a student of history. My read of it is that he realized what he had on himself and he was too ashamed to actually do something about it and instead tried to just keep it a secret. That is, he tried to keep it a secret until he was outed for it. If this is the case, he should have just come clean about it when it came out and just said this, but he didn’t.

As for everything else, I’ll extend him some grace on some (except one) post. Being a trolly edgelord is whatever. Infantry, especially at the time, was very sheltered from the military sexual assault issues, and war is really hard on someone. It can send you to really dark places, especially if that’s all you’ve known. So, apologizing for saying stupid, offensive things and demonstrating change is fine. The one thing I am having a hard time reconciling is the “black people don’t tip” post. He’s actually defending that, which…is a choice. If he disavowed it saying that it’s something he observed but is obviously untrue, then fine, but he didn’t.

I don’t think he’s a closet racist or a closet nazi. I think he might just be kind of dumb. If he’s elected, at least he won’t furrow his brow and vote with Trump on everything.

That’s a great overview of it. I think you’re right; as soon as Trump dies (and I do think it requires his death, not just leaving office), MAGA will fall on each other like wolves. This is why I’m not concerned about “who comes after Trump” because in choosing, MAGA will splinter and self-destruct. I’m actually concerned about actually getting there. If Trump dies (naturally is best), and the country isn’t completely destroyed, we’ll have a hell of a cleanup project, but I think it could be fixed in a generation or two.

The fact that MAGA potential heirs are starting their succession fight tells me that they know and are privately acknowledging that he’s not healthy and are trying to get a headstart in kneecapping the opposition.

I’m cautiously optimistic after these polls and hoping that they learned their lesson after caving the last time. I think the potential for bad polling spooked them the last time, but with this, they might find their spines and get some concessions from the Republicans. At this point, we really need some sort of victory.

But I always leave room to be disappointed.

But there is something the courts can do that doesn’t involve punishment: simply order the administration to re-hire the IGs with back pay and scrub the termination from the record. That’s the actual legal remedy in this situation.

Same. At this point, I’m only buying stuff that’s local to my community from small businesses. I don’t want to help American mega-corps, and I don’t want to contribute to any tariffs going to fund the government.

I worry that poor execution or bad decision making is what will sink the progressive movement. People assume that Johnson’s poor performance is due to inherent issues with democratic socialism, when in fact it he’s just not good at his job.

Exactly! It’s why I’m not concerned with Mamdani based on what I’ve seen. He seems fairly level-headed, and he has a bit more governing experience than Johnson had.

Not all progressives have the right disposition and skills to do great things - and if progressive voters can’t or won’t distinguish between policy and performance, then the movement is likely to fizzle out.

We need to have the ability to self-criticize and be pragmatic. There’s room for pragmatism without compromising core beliefs.

Absolutely! Some of it is definitely racism, and it is at the root of some criticism. His issue is that he seems to attribute virtually everything that’s negative or even questioning to racism. Honestly, I get why he’s defensive because of that, but that doesn’t make it any less of an overreaction.

Questioning investing in the south and west sides (to be clear, a good thing) is probably rooted in racism. Questioning why another pastor is being nominated to some position is probably not. He treats both the same.

So, being from Chicago, Johnson’s problems are mostly personal and of his own making. Like the article highlights, his staffing and approach has been pretty abysmal. He has a tendency to appoint unqualified pastors to positions (which, to be fair, is classic Chicago graft and not unheard of in the city with other mayors), and he doesn’t handle criticism well (that is, everything is “because he’s a black man” even if the criticism is justified). Plus, antagonizing the very popular governor from the same party is just a stupid thing to do. Some decisions are taken haphazardly (like trying to house migrants on toxic land). Others are just insanely stupid given the history of Chicago and basic financial literacy, like trying to take out a high interest loan to satisfy the Chicago Teachers’ Union or paying over $1M per unit of affordable housing.

The closest thing to an indictment of progressive policies is how Johnson wants to balance our budget, i.e. through taxes, even though Chicago is one of the most highly taxed places in the country already. He seems constitutionally incapable of reviewing for waste in the budget, of which there is plenty thanks to graft built up over decades. In this case, we don’t really need more of a tax in the city; we need the money that’s already being sent to be used more effectively. Decades of financial mismanagement and straight up corruption (which are, to be clear, not Johnson’s fault) led to where we are now. Even that, though, is not really because he’s progressive.

In all, Johnson’s problems are not because of overarching progressive policies; it’s because he personally makes poor decisions and doesn’t really have a grasp on how to effectively govern. While I haven’t looked too far into Mamdani, if he can simply make sound management decisions and not alienate those who should be allies, he’ll have a better time.

Yeah, I’ve found AI generated code to be hit or miss. It’s been fine to good for boilerplate stuff that I’m too lazy to do myself, but is super easy CS 101 type stuff. Anything that’s more specialized requires the LLM to be hand-held in the best case. More often than not, though, I just take the wheel and code the thing myself.

By the way, I think it’s cool that you use Old English characters in your writing. In school I used to do the same in my notes to write faster and smaller.

I think it also has to do with how closely someone is looking. AI images look amazing at a glance, but a deeper inspection shows the weird unnatural flaws. I figured that some percentage of older people just glance at the image and take the immediate reaction.

I agree, but this does sound cool for a one off–like Picard s3. Ultimately, though, I want new adventures with new characters exploring the vastness of the universe.

I really like Open-Meteo. It’s worked really well for my weather-related projects.

Isn’t it an international human rights violation to make somebody stateless?

Yes.

100% agreed. It should not be used as a replacement but rather as an augmentation to get the real benefits.

I study AI, and have developed plenty of software. LLMs are great for using unfamiliar libraries (with the docs open to validate), getting outlines of projects, and bouncing ideas for strategies. They aren’t detail oriented enough to write full applications or complicated scripts. In general, I like to think of an LLM as a junior developer to my senior developer. I will give it small, atomized tasks, and I’ll give its output a once over to check it with an eye to the details of implementation. It’s nice to get the boilerplate out of the way quickly.

Don’t get me wrong, LLMs are a huge advancement and unbelievably awesome for what they are. I think that they are one of the most important AI breakthroughs in the past five to ten years. But the AI hype train is misusing them, not understanding their capabilities and limitations, and casting their own wishes and desires onto a pile of linear algebra. Too often a tool (which is one of many) is being conflated with the one and only solution–a silver bullet–and it’s not.

This leads to my biggest fear for the AI field of Computer Science: reality won’t live up to the hype. When this inevitably happens, companies, CEOs, and normal people will sour on the entire field (which is already happening to some extent among workers). Even good uses of LLMs and other AI/ML use cases will be stopped and real academic research drying up.

Just from a quick look at https://fediverse.observer/, it looks like the Fediverse is mostly steady at 1-1.25 million monthly users (give or take) over the past two years with a slight decreasing trend. I think there are some reasons for this that are not entirely in our control.

There seems to be a global sentiment of disconnecting from social media and the internet in general. So, I wouldn’t be surprised if ever platform is seeing a decaying user base. Anecdotally, among the people I see in real life, there is a general sense of exhaustion with online spaces. Whether it’s from corporate-own, enshittified platforms to even places on the Fediverse, the people with whom I interact tend to find the entire thing hollow. They’ve trimmed down to one or two platforms (if that). In fact, I’ve even started to get that way. In the past, if someone were wrong and arguing against a point I made, I’d engage, especially if it’s in something that I have expertise. Now, why bother? There’s no use arguing; people have little interest in admitting fault or engaging in good faith (again anecdotally). That said, I’ll concede that the Fediverse is a bit better on that front, but not by much.

Then there’s the alternative nature of the Fediverse. It’s been rehashed over and over about how “difficult” it is to get on and use. It’s not actually that hard, but the barrier to entry is an extra step. That small extra step frightens people away from even joining. The only time that barrier gets broken is when a “legacy” social media platform does something anti-user. Then there is a refugee wave that comes in and goes out leading to a modest durable increase in users. Recently, there just hasn’t been a major controversy on a major platform that leads people here.

Now, my final thought on this is to ask: Is a small and steady-ish population (despite modest decay) actually bad? In my view, I don’t think it is. Being smaller and with a smallish barrier to entry means that we exclude a sizable number of the low-effort population. So, there’s less (no zero) slop here. Plus, discussions, when had in good faith, can be much deeper and less filled with stupid low-effort jokes. Overall, I’m not too concerned with the number of people on the Fediverse. Growth isn’t necessarily the best thing. Even so, with the way most mainstream platforms are going, it’s inevitable that they will do something stupid that drives more people to the Fediverse at least for a time.

TL;DR: The monthly population is mostly steady with a modest decay. Most social media is likely seeing similar trends. I don’t think the smaller userbase is that bad of a thing.