forrcaho

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.

It appears that the credulous Fox "news" watchers really did believe that there were violent immigrant gang members in massive numbers all over the country, as they've been told for decades now. Anyone who understood that's not the case wasn't surprised that "mass deportation" meant rounding up gardeners and construction workers (duh!). But Rogan and his listeners bought into the idea that only the thousands of cartel mobsters that were taking over the country under weak Democrat rule would suffer.

Those were imaginary baddies all along! Tell your listeners that, Joe!

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

Pleased to see that this is actually free, in the open source sense (it's GPL3). It took me an ungodly number of clicks to get to the project's github repo, so I've saved you that trouble.

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.

There are definitely people who cut & pasted from stack overflow in the work environment, too. The difference is that I, as the clean-up crew, could google their code and find the post it came from ... and then I could read the comments and figure out wtf they thought they were trying to do. When they paste LLM-generated code in, there's no trace of where the dumbfuckery came from.

Just thinking about it makes me glad I'm near retirement.

Having been a coder for decades before AI came on the scene, I don't understand how inexperienced programmers could possibly write a serious amount of working code with AI.

It's wrong, like, at least half the time, but as an experienced coder, I can look at the "code" it generated and know what it was trying to do, and then write it correctly. I do find AI useful when I'm not sure how to go about solving a particular code-related issue, but ... it just gives me something to think about, not an answer I can use directly.

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 ...