From Al Jazeera:

Governor Cox told a news conference on Friday: “On the evening of September 11, a family member of Tyler Robinson contacted a family friend, who then informed the Washington County Sheriff’s Office that Robinson had either confessed to or implied that he had committed the incident.

“This information was relayed to the Utah County Sheriff’s Office and investigators at Utah Valley University and conveyed to the FBI.”

and

Governor Cox said cryptic messages were engraved on shell casings recovered with the rifle, which he read out phonetically. Their meaning is not immediately clear.

One spent shell case read: “Notices, bulges OWO what’s this?”

Cox said three unfired shell cases read: “Hey fascist! Catch! Up arrow symbol, right arrow symbol, and three down arrow symbols”, “Oh Bella Ciao, Bella Ciao, Ciao, Ciao, Ciao” and “If you read this, you are gay, LMAO”.

So he’s online a lot. There’s the wikipedia article on the history of Bella Ciao.

the goal for me is co-operation

I asked a sincere question and you reply with snark. I don’t know why you commented when you weren’t willing to advance the discussion. You failed at your goal.

I don’t care for individual greatness and competition

That’s sweet, but it has nothing to do with the topic. It also doesn’t help you any when you need to punch a Nazi. I was talking about the government paying civilians to work for the common good (irrigation, bridges, etc.) and a population with a high standard of living. For whatever internal reason, it seems you decided to thrust imperialism into the definition of “great” – or redefine the word to mean something outside its definition, like “nice”.

Know what’s great? Great White Sharks are great. They aren’t the whitest or largest, but they are the biggest of the commonly seen ass-kicking sharks. Know what’s not great? The Little Blue Heron – but it is much bluer than the Great Blue Heron.

Well then the Roman Empire could never have been Great, nor the Greek, Persian, Ottoman, Chinese and various dynasties therein. Cleopatra wasn’t Egyptian. She and her lineage of rulers were greek conquerors subjugating the locals, if you want to look at it that way. You are denying all of South America the right to ever claim greatness.

I think I made it clear in my post that we all know there’s a history full of problems, so you seem to be trying to redefine terms without making any argument about the current case. Per the OED there are 85 definitions for “great”. Why skip the intended usage (powerful/eminent) for an informal meaning (good)?

The U.S. used to be known for high literacy, excellent schools k-college, high standard of living, countless innovations in sciences from health care to airplanes, and a presumption that you could improve your position in society rather than being confined to a class. All that sort of stuff combined is what I think of when the idea of U.S. greatness comes up.

I think I covered that with my introductory sentence. The post-war boom had to be from more than isolation or we’d expect Mexico and Canada to be rivaling the U.S. for (now falling) dominance.

descriptive summarization?

Read the title. Thought this was going to be about people spraying Roundup on their lawns. How dare you trick me into reading an interesting piece on perverse market forces?!

What happens when there’s a risk a crop could fail? “It puts pressure on me to consider cheating, because I’m not so profitable that I can afford to lose even one.”

I didn’t realize the growers operated on such thin margins.

For each batch tested, the lab issues a certificate of analysis (CoA) with contaminant testing results and details about the product’s chemical composition. Products that fail may be remediated — moldy cannabis might be treated with ultraviolet light to kill the microbes, for example — or destroyed.

The fatal flaw in this system is that cannabis labs are paid by the producers, which creates a financial incentive for labs to falsify results

That’s the same issue we have with bonds getting triple-A ratings.

But following the rules often means losing a client, he said. “They’re just going to go to another lab who will do exactly what they want, even if they charge double the price.”

So, as in with bonds ratings, honest and scrupulous labs will go broke, leaving us with labs that give reassuring results for high THC potency or low pesticide contamination.

For example, surveys have found that 25 percent to 37 percent of Parkinson’s patients use cannabis to reduce symptoms such as tremor, stiffness, and pain. But research suggests that organophosphate pesticides, which are common contaminants in cannabis, may be linked to the onset or faster progression of Parkinson’s disease.

Well why aren’t their stricter rules?

Recently, state legislators killed a proposal to expand the list of pesticides that labs must test for from 13 to 60.

Dammit. I blame the stupid rhetoric on how ‘regulation stifles industry!’ for letting such bozos govern. We could have a government that didn’t allow businesses to poison their customers, but nooooo, the U.S. thinks poison is fine if it gets us fewer laws and less government. I want to hear people saying, “Regulations are written in blood. They exist because people were injured and killed without them.”

I like the positive note about Maryland towards the end , but it shouldn’t be so hard to get decent information.

I read that as including human interaction as part of the pain point. They already offer bounties, so they’re doing some money management as it is, but the human element becomes very different when you want up-front money from EVERYONE. When an actual human’s report is rejected, that human will resent getting ‘robbed’. It is much easier to get people to goof around for free than to charge THEM to do work for YOU. You might offer a refund on the charge later, but you’ll lose a ton of testers as soon as they have to pay.

That said, the blog’s link to sample AI slop bugs immediately showed how much time humans are being forced to waste on bad reports. I’d burn out fast if I had to examine and reply about all those bogus reports.

These attacks do not have to be reliable to be successful. They only need to work often enough to be cost-effective, and the cost of LLM text generation is cheap and falling. Their sophistication will rise. Link-spam will be augmented by personal posts, images, video, and more subtle, influencer-style recommendations—“Oh my god, you guys, this new electro plug is incredible.” Networks of bots will positively interact with one another, throwing up chaff for moderators. I would not at all be surprised for LLM spambots to contest moderation decisions via email.

I don’t know how to run a community forum in this future. I do not have the time or emotional energy to screen out regular attacks by Large Language Models, with the knowledge that making the wrong decision costs a real human being their connection to a niche community.

Ouch. I’d never want to tell someone ‘Denied. I think you’re a bot.’ – but I really hate the number of bots already out there. I was fine with the occasional bots that would provide a wiki-link and even the ones who would reply to movie quotes with their own quotes. Those were obvious and you could easily opt to ignore/hide their accounts. As the article states, the particular bot here was also easy to spot once they got in the door, but the initial contact could easily have been human and we can expect bots to continuously seem human as AI improves.

Bots are already driving policy decisions in government by promoting/demoting particular posts and writing their own comments that can redirect conversations. They make it look like there is broad consensus for the views they’re paid to promote, and at least some people will take that as a sign that the view is a valid option (ad populum).

Sometimes it feels like the internet is a crowd of bots all shouting at one another and stifling the humans trying to get a word in. The tricky part is that I WANT actual unpaid humans to tell me what they actually: like/hate/do/avoid. I WANT to hear actual stories from real humans. I don’t want to find out the ‘Am I the A-hole?’ story getting everyone so worked up was an ‘AI-hole’ experiment in manipulating emotions.

I wish I could offer some means to successfully determine human vs. generated content, but the only solutions I’ve come up with require revealing real-world identities to sites, and that feels as awful as having bots. Otherwise, I imagine that identifying bots will be an ever escalating war akin to Search Engine Optimization wars.

Deep in the entrails of the framework, the databases have been glitching: incorrectly issuing penalties and wrongly moving recipients into the Kafkaesque “penalty zone”. The bug was falsely cancelling welfare benefits to thousands of recipients across many years.

That’s a really critical bug. QA is supposed to catch this sort of thing. Development is supposed to fix it, and fast. When the client is a government, it should have the foresight to put in the contract that it will withhold payments until such critical bugs are fixed. If you don’t do that, why would the vendor bother with QA and bug fixes?

And all of that is aside the fact that the whole thing results in busy work, hoop-jumping, and wasting time for both the people administrating it and those trying to get benefits. Sheesh.

Well, don’t leave us hanging! Which bags lasted 10 years? Where do we get them? I’m having a hard time because the only really good bags I have require a minimum purchase of 50 (these: https://enviro-tote.com/product/medium-grocery-tote-bag/).

Yes. The story here is straight from Associated Press, but I looked around and found a few more details in a Telegraph article:

But he woman’s doctor told police that the defendant had tested positive with a rapid test before telling him that she “certainly won’t let herself be locked up” after the result.

Instead she left her apartment and talked to people without a mask, ignoring her mandatory quarantine and positive test.

Note they say MANDATORY quarantine. At the end of the article they explain that Austria’s far right party, Freedom Party, is hyper-anti-vax, expected to win upcoming elections:

Its manifesto has promised a pardon for anyone convicted of breaching coronavirus rules and to repay any fines imposed during the pandemic.

The manifesto says coronavirus regulations were encroachments on fundamental rights “accompanied by unprecedented indoctrination and brainwashing.”

@aihorde@lemmy.dbzer0.com draw for me a spider’s web with a red light that attracts male fireflies to come have a good time at the web bordello

making bean burgers

Oh no! Just buy them! My better half is vegetarian, which means I started mostly cook meat-free because it is easier than making two meals, but now I’m just in the habit of not eating much meat. Our bean-burger experiments were never worth effort. We use fake-beef veggie crumbles for casserole-type recipes and big frozen packs of Beyond Burgers (Impossible is also good) if we want an actual burger. For chicken, we’ll buy some unbreaded seitan/TVP substitutes, like these examples.

I have the same problem with egg substitutes, so we’re still eating eggs – but from happy-seeming chickens we can visit. The hard part for me is cheese. I’m waiting for lab-grown cheese, but for now I can’t match the flavors of actual cheese.

Given that Israel has nuclear weapons, they wouldn’t be ‘sitting ducks’, but I don’t want to see a nuclear war starting in the Middle East. I doubt it would stay contained to the area. I fear that Russia would back Iran and counter – or at least threaten to – with Russian nuclear weapons, which would get the U.S. or our allies back into the mess but escalated to the whole world at risk instead of just a small contested sliver.

I would love to see a workable path to a two-state solution. Experts have spent their lives working towards that goal and it still hasn’t happened. I totally blame the government of Israel for not figuring out a peace with Palestinian residents back in the 1970s, but here we are. Bibbi makes everything worse and his public falls for his ‘strong man’ shtick just like Americans fall for Trump’s version. Sitting in the U.S., the best election choice I can make for the sake of Palestinians is to vote Harris. Beyond the election, there is room for letters, protests, and boycotts, but the problem is mostly with Israel’s government rather than with anyone in the United States.

In terms of who to vote for in the U.S. presidential election, 3rd parties are spoilers. The U.S. voter is wasting their vote if they stay home or vote 3rd party.

Politicians are notoriously evasive, and this particular interview sounded more straight forward than most. Okay, most the honest ones, anyway. I mean: it’s easy to say “Read my lips. No new taxes” or “Free IVF” if you’ve no legitimate plan to fund the government, but if you’re not going to make stuff up for the sound bite, you almost have to be evasive. Robust and well considered plans are made by experts and a politician trying to promote a good plan has to boil it down to a couple nebulous basics. Doing anything else means you either bore the audience OR skip a contingency or other minutia such that your critics call you a liar.

Remember when Obama said you’d get to keep your doctor? He was trying to summarize explaining that Affordable Care would not mandate what doctor you could use, but what he didn’t say was that Insurance Companies would continue to be able choose what doctors they covered, so Obama’s critics said he LIED about keeping your doctor. It was NOT a lie. It was just Insurance companies doing what they always did.

Harris said she would support Israel but the war had to end. If Israeli/Palestinian strife has gone unsolved for 50 years through all sorts of Presidents, I don’t expect any U.S. election to change what goes on over there. The U.S. could theoretically stop aiding Israel as it commits genocide, but the realistic outcome of that would be neighboring countries committing genocide on Israelis, and since that’s the basic reason the country was invented… maybe that’s not the best outcome either. It has been a mess for decades, and I’m not blaming Regan, Carter, Trump, Putin, or Tony Blair for any of the mess with Gaza.

Harris said she would not ban fracking but her values have not changed. I suspect this is because she’s come to see no one banned horses when car came along, and no one need ban fracking if there’s a better alternative. What she did not specify was the carrots and sticks she might employ to get us to which alternatives. That’s fine with me because the tech is changing and the outcome is more important than the method.

Harris said she would enforce laws regarding immigration AND she wanted the tabled border bill on her desk so she can sign it. There’s a bunch she could have said there, too, but my point is that again, she wasn’t particularly evasive.

I, too, think Biden did a great job as President – especially given the constant pushback he got from Congress and the corrupted Court. It frustrated me that the public didn’t notice or care, but I could see from the polls and negative press that there was no way Biden was going to get re-elected, so I was living in despair for our future until he dropped out. With Biden out of the race, the public is paying attention to the race again, becoming aware of the crazy Trump/2025 “agenda nobody asked for”, and (if we’re to believe the polls) becoming more interested in voting for a new face. Yay!

Have hope! But also, if you can volunteer to talk to potential voters, do that too.

If your schedule is too tight to volunteer, or if it is physically/emotionally too much, consider at least talking about her in a positive way.

If that is too much, maybe at least, at least mention that you’re hearing lots more support and enthusiasm than even when Biden won, so you are going to be very suspicious of claims that Dems ‘steal’ elections. Yes, Trump is still supported in the boonies, but more and more suburbs and cities are increasingly wanting Harris – you know, the places with most the people.