A huge swath of Republican voters are not voting for Trump. They are voting against “Democrats”. Propaganda in the US has turned politics into a team sport, and you always root for your team, even if your team is having a rough season.

It’s cute how you think things will be alive.

I keep an eye on these types of treatments. Type 1 diabetes being autoimmune and all.

So far, I’m putting it in the bucket with all the other “cure is just 5 years away” things we hear about.

It’s promising, and neat it’s worked in these cases, but I remain skeptical. Twice over as it appears to be research from China, who doesn’t have the best track record for robust scientific integrity. We’ll see how repeatable this stuff is soon enough.

The tricky part about T1 is… We don’t know why the immune system is malfunctioning, only that it is. Without that vital piece of research, everything that presents as a cure is temporary at best.

Dr. Faustman out of Mass General has been conducting some trials into phase two or three using the BCG vaccine to treat / cure the immune response.

There’s a problem there, though. The propaganda was basically various versions of “The government (when run by Democrats) is bad, don’t trust the government.”

If they put up a notice saying, “This domain was seized, here’s the real facts!” the target of the propaganda isn’t going to buy it for a hot minute.

If they put up replacement content that doesn’t mention the government seizure, tha target of the propaganda is already primed to shout, “Fake news!” at anything that disputes their existing worldview.

It’s best to just let those domains return like a 504 Internal Server Error and die a quiet death.

A “Library of Congress” for published web content maybe. Some sort of standard that allows / requires websites that publish content on oublic-facing sites to also share a permanent copy with an archive, without having the archive have to scrape it.

Sort of like how book publishers send a copy to the LoC.

I am literally in the middle of swapping DynamoDB for a RDBMS.

The idea that you can abstract away such fundamentally different data stores is silly. While I hate doing it now, reworking the code to use relational models properly makes for a better product later.

My principle dev asked if we could figure out how to invoke Lambda functions from within postgres trigger functions.

I was like, “Probably. But it’s like putting a diving board at the top of the Empire State building… doable, but a bad plan all around.”

I think a bigger effect is familiarity.

Bingo. It’s not about making you buy something right now, it’s about brand recognition and such.

To wit, if you listen to podcasts, do a little thought experiment. Name a VPN company.

Was it “Nord VPN”? Ads work.

That is a LOT harder done than said. Apple might have the resources, but they don’t have the time or focus to become an actual bank.

They’ll just go to some other bank, willing to take on the shittier client risk. Probably Citi or the GE/Synchrony bank. Capital One if they smile real nice and bring flowers.

This is why I have a hybrid and not an EV.

Obviously that was Obama.

Every now and then I seem to develop some sort of sympathy for her. It’s painfully obvious she’s a trophy wife, and she didn’t sign up for any of this political bullshit. It’s equally obvious she’s just in it for what she thought was the money. She signed up to sit around, fuck an old man for a few years until he died, and life a posh life sleeping with the bodyguard or doorman to keep herself entertained until he did.

His foray into politics, and I think, winning the Presidency is probably her worst case scenario. I take her “I don’t really care…” sweater at face value – she doesn’t care. She didn’t want it, she doesn’t care about it, and she kind of just wants to go back to being a pretty face whose name you can’t quite remember.

Then I remember she not only enabled her husband, but actively supported him during his Presidency. Fuck that bitch. She made her choice, even if it’s for silly reasons.

A very small part. Like all the sugar you’d need for the day part.

You can, in Windows, boot into a no network safe mode and set various registry and group policies to stop Windows updates.

If you’re particularly frisky, there are alternatives to the WSUS, Windows Server Update Service you could deploy on your local network.

It’s a lot of work, though.

I have to believe it’s mostly hype. The man was at the helm when OpenAI suddenly “changed the world” with “AI” (note the quotes) but that seems to be almost entirely a case of luck.

Like, generative AI models aren’t really brand new. OpenAI just made them really accessible and easy to use for other applications, which is where Altman comes in. He had an ounce of foresight to see the tech was “the future” and a whole lot of luck executing on his plan to bring it to market.

As a figurehead and leader, that does count for a lot, but not the table-flipping freak outs we see happening.

There was one years ago I had where all you needed was to type course.pass(true) into the console.

A witchfinder in 1674 wrote that lemons are icky so Alito cast the deciding vote to eliminate it.

Auto manufacturers are all in board with direct sales to customers

States have passed laws prohibiting (or making it difficult) direct sales at the lobbying of auto dealership groups.

This will be very limited, and expect to see more laws that stop it appear soon.

It’s a twofold scam.

One, because the person is buying new, it’s driving up sales to a bunch of “confirmed” addresses, which is an important metric for Amazon sales.

Two, the “random” destination is a second customer’s address, and the friend is being an unwitting proxy in a drop shipping scheme.