I’ve never had to wait long in New Orleans or DC except for odd circumstances but those places essentially have predetermined elections.

• During the pandemic in New Orleans, they made the Smoothie King Center the main early voting location. That took a couple of hours but in normal years, I vote at a fire department and it just takes a few minutes.

• In 2008 in DC, I lived near the White House and my polling place was an historic AME church that was a spot on the Underground Railroad. Every global news channel with staff in DC — so all of them — was trying to interview people. So, I’m not sure that was the voting system’s fault so much as global media asking everyone for a sound bite. (I got interviewed by Japan’s NHK but I didn’t make the cut. If I want to get on Japanese TV, I guess I’ll have to go on a game show.)

But I’ve never lived in a competitive state or district. DC doesn’t have real representation in Congress and Louisiana’s 2nd district is drawn for Voting Rights Act compliance reasons so it’s also not typically competitive. (Louisiana also elects state/local officials in non-presidential years so it’s rarely got much on the ballot besides President and maybe an amendment or two. This year, we voted on whether offshore wind farms would participate in the coastal wetlands restoration program like offshore oil rigs.)

China should be ashamed. America would never steal rocket technology from fascists.

They couldn’t get Zoltar to de-age him like in Big? Why use A.I. to do something we could already do in 1988 for 25¢?

I would rather cook because I like the taste much, much more. Almost all frozen stuff is just flavorless to me so I end up having to doctor it up anyway. It’s easier for me to just start from scratch unless it’s something that’s a giant pain.

I also worked as a cook when I was young so the effort/time is probably a bit less for me since I can do the food prep stuff quickly and without much mental effort. When I chop vegetables, my brain basically does it on autopilot.

I’d like to think it’s because they’re taking a stand but they have to be even more sick of seeing weird American incels talk about US elections than we are in the U.S. Not to mention vote scolds who assume the entire internet is American.

“I don’t care about the election.”

“Vote! It’s important!”

“Motherfucker, I live in Antwerp! Shut up! Just shut up!”

4 more gigstons of CO₂ in the atmosphere linked to more anxiety in people who might actually see 2100.

My ancestors came from the sea.

Why is generative AI even needed for audio transcription? We’ve had decent voice recognition tools for years even on cheap consumer grade stuff.

I imagine this is less about making money off developers as it is about making misinformation research cost prohibitive.

Oh, for fuck’s sake. Can we have a decent password manager that isn’t tied to a browser or company? I pay for Bitwarden. I’m not being cheap. But open source is more secure. We can look at the code ourselves if there’s a concern.

And that’s on top of all the Brazil users who fled to BlueSky when he refused to comply with a court order (and pay a fine) so they blocked Twitter for a few days. I’m not sure how many went back after he paid the fine but BlueSky was fairly popular in Brazil even during the closed beta so I’m sure a ton stuck around.

I wasn’t saying Bell Labs wasn’t innovative. The “they” in that sentence was referring to average, non-tech consumers like my grandma. The monopoly AT&T had over the Bell System funded all that research and consumers paid higher rates and had worse service because it was a monopoly.

I’m not anti-research. I’m anti-monopoly.

They said they have no plans to deprecate v2 and if they ever do, will provide 12 months notice before doing so. So, I think there will be time to prepare for that switch.

According to caniuse.com, it works now in the Nightly builds and can be enabled in other builds via the media.wmf.hevc.enabled pref in about:config.

I use Firefox Dev Edition and I think it’s enabled there. But either way, you can enable it on stable.

You can always keep Chromium installed for the odd site that doesn’t work in Firefox (my daily driver). I do web development and test in every browser and I almost never encounter sites or features that don’t work in FF. The only one I can recall is something in the Azure Portal, probably because Microsoft wants you using Edge.

Typically, Safari is the laggard and any developer worth their salt would make sure their site works on iPad and iPhone. When a new web standard is released, usually Chromium supports it first but even then, not always. And web developers usually don’t use features that aren’t implemented across the board yet. I know I go to caniuse.com before I use something fresh out the oven.

I read that they temporarily (and apparently accidentally) removed the uBlock Origin Lite extension but they’re not getting rid of Manifest v2 that allows normal uBlock Origin to work.

The developer released the lite version on Firefox because it might be better for Android Firefox users. I guess there was some confusion.

Ditka vs. a Hurricane? Who would win?

Hold on! Hold on! Hold on! The name of the hurricane is Hurricane Ditka.

Scam attempts. This may be better elsewhere but in the U.S., every phone call I get is either a scam attempt or my mom (who is old enough that I worry about her getting elder scammed like when my grandma paid a stupid amount for silver coins).

I’ve never gotten scammed (except small stuff like carnival games or whatever) but if I were president I’d make ending scams — even false advertising ones — my top priority. You’ll be able to pick up a call from and unknown number after my first 100 days: that’s my promise to the people of America.

And, yet, in that time, consumers paid more for telecommunication services and basically the main innovations they got were touchtone phones replacing rotary ones and higher bills. Bell Labs being a success story doesn’t mean Ma Bell shouldn’t have been broken up.

If consumers are paying extra to a monopoly anyway, just fund university labs and non-university research agencies (which we do). We have dozens of equivalents to Bell Labs. There’s no reason to rely on monopolists for innovation.

The open source project is fine. It’s in no way perfect but it powers a shocking percentage of the world’s web sites. It’s showing its age, is bloated, and has constant security issues but if you know how to use it, it gets the job done.

Lately, the CEO of Wordpress.com — who also heads the Wordpress.org foundation for the open source project — went after a popular hosting service claiming they were basically making billions and contributing nothing to the open source project. But from the outside, he went about it in a very aggressive and seemingly irrational way.