Federal authorities have charged three current or former Louisiana police chiefs with taking bribes in exchange for filing false police reports that would allow noncitizens to seek a visa that lets certain crime victims stay in the U.S.

Those charged are Oakdale Police Chief Chad Doyle, Forest Hill Police Chief Glynn Dixon, former Glenmora Police Chief Tebo Onishea,

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oakdale,_Louisiana

Population: 6,692

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forest_Hill,_Louisiana

Population: 605

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glenmora,_Louisiana

Population: 1,087

Hmm. If all you need to get a pathway to citizenship is to find a dinky place in the middle of nowhere with a not-entirely-honest police chief, I’d be kind of surprised if it’s just Lousiana.

The guy exploiting it also probably would have had a better shot at this if he’d actually staged the crimes.

It looks like they already have parks there with a trail system. Maybe some of it could be connected with dedicated trails that don’t just run on the side of the road.

It looks like near Cottonwood Heights, there’s the Jordan River Parkway Trail, which appears to be paved, and looks like it north-south spans Salt Lake City.

looks more

I-215 passes along Cottonwood Heights. It looks like it has a sound barrier along at least part of it, with an undeveloped area on both sides to help keep noise away from houses. If one put an east-west bike trail along that, you could use that to get from Cottonwood Heights to Jordan River Parkway Trail.

Looking at the photographs, I’m not all that impressed by the building it replaced that people are complaining about not having the elements from preserved. It’s got some Art Deco elements, but we’re not talking the Chrysler Building here.

EDIT: Here’s a image of one of the two bas-relief sculptures, a much closer shot than the photograph in the article:

Hansen believes it is important that people have a truly anonymous payment option available to them.

It’s at least going to be better than a credit card, say, because not every hop in a chain of transactions is going to be visible. And there’s always coins, though there are some physical bulk issues there.

https://www.ecb.europa.eu/euro/coins/html/index.en.html

The euro coin series comprises eight different denominations: 1, 2, 5, 10, 20 and 50 cent, €1 and €2.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coins_of_the_United_States_dollar

Coins of the United States dollar – aside from those of the earlier Continental currency – were first minted in 1792. New coins have been produced annually and they comprise a significant aspect of the United States currency system. Circulating coins exist in denominations of 1¢ (i.e. 1 cent or $0.01), 5¢, 10¢, 25¢, 50¢, and $1.00.

Coins don’t have serial numbers.

considers

They do have defects from wear. I imagine that you could photograph each at high resolution when they pass through cash processors, generate some sort of fuzzy-hashed fingerprint, and then use that to track coin movement. But I doubt that this is being done, and certainly it’d be harder than tracking banknote serial numbers in a world of ATMs.

The real question is whether the author doesn’t understand what he’s writing about, or whether he does and is trying to take advantage of users who don’t for clicks.

That’s because I was previously running with a pair of Bluetooth earbuds, EPOS’s GTW 270.

I have a hard time imagining running with earbuds without using sport earbuds, the kind that have a loop that hooks over your ear to secure the earbuds in place.

That seems like a good recipe to lose one of the buds as well.

It would be prudent for companies selling wireless earbuds to make replacement cases more accessible. For example, Bose sells replacement charging cases for several of its earbuds, including its 2022 QuietComfort Earbuds II.

I mean, losing parts for out-of-production electronic devices is a more-general issue than something specific to Bluetooth earbuds.

https://www.amazon.com/EPOS-Wireless-Earbuds-Android-Compatible/dp/B08QVYC3QP

In this case, it looks like stock is still available for the case+earbuds. You can get a new pair of earbuds and a case for $75. Do that and now you have spare earbuds for if you lose one of those or they go bad, which is another route that could have rendered them unusable.

EDIT: If I lost a pair of Bluetooth earbuds, I don’t think I’d get that bent out of shape. Traditional 1/4" or 1/8" jack headphones are pretty mature technology. You could use a decades-old pair and it’d be pretty decent compared to current headphones. Bluetooth earbuds have been changing pretty quickly. New audio codecs, Bluetooth standards, and ANC has become popular and gotten increasingly good (and it looks like the pair in question can’t do ANC). An older pair of Bluetooth earbuds is kinda meh compared to current ones.

Easter Monday

France may not be very religious any more, but it looks like they do still have a lot of religious holidays:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_holidays_in_France

Good Friday, Easter Monday, Ascension Day, Whit Monday, Assumption Day, All Saint’s Day, Christmas Day, Saint Stephen’s Day.

The researchers’ proof-of-concept exploit was able to tamper with deep neural network models used in machine learning for things like autonomous driving, healthcare applications, and medical imaging for analyzing MRI scans. GPUHammer flips a single bit in the exponent of a model weight—for example in y, where a floating point is represented as x times 2y. The single bit flip can increase the exponent value by 16. The result is an altering of the model weight by a whopping 216, degrading model accuracy from 80 percent to 0.1 percent, said Gururaj Saileshwar, an assistant professor at the University of Toronto and co-author of an academic paper demonstrating the attack.

Rowhammer attacks present a threat to memory inside the typical laptop or desktop computer in a home or office, but most Rowhammer research in recent years has focused on the threat inside cloud environments. That’s because these environments often allot the same physical CPU or GPU to multiple users. A malicious attacker can run Rowhammer code on a cloud instance that has the potential to tamper with the data a CPU or GPU is processing on behalf of a different cloud customer. Saileshwar said that Amazon Web Services and smaller providers such as Runpod and Lambda Cloud all provide A6000s instances. (He added that AWS enables a defense that prevents GPUhammer from working.)

Well, if you can afford twice the computation cost, you can run a computation twice to validate that the result is the same, and re-run if they differ. I suspect that corrupting GPU memory in a reproducible way is going to be a lot harder, so defeating that should be pretty hard. That won’t require hardware changes.

Bonus points if you work in the medical field!

You people.

While true, I would point out that the low mortgage rates that increased housing prices — low mortgage rates permit people to borrow more and tends to drive up prices — in the decade-and-a-half before 2022 was unusual for the US. Prior to about 2008, interest rates were at or higher than they are today.

Here’s a graph of the 30-year fixed-rate mortgage rate:

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MORTGAGE30US

Here’s the Case-Shiller Home Price Index. This measures same-home prices — that it, it attempts to factor out changes in types of home being built, so new homes being larger won’t drive it up.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CSUSHPISA

It’s not adjusted for inflation, though.

Here’s an inflation-adjusted graph:

https://www.longtermtrends.net/home-price-vs-inflation/

Between about 2011 and 2022, the real price of a given house rose rapidly in a low mortgage rate environment. In 2022, mortgage rates returned to something that’s more historically-normal.

I expect that to sell a house in this environment, a homeowner will probably have to cut what they’re asking.

Consumer acceptability is key, acknowledges Mr Eiden. Most people don’t want to look like cyborgs: “We need to make our products actually look like existing eyewear.”

looks dubious

I can believe that most people want something that they consider stylish. However, I’m skeptical that most people specifically want something to look like existing stuff. Clothing has shifted a lot over the years and centuries; it’s not as if every person putting something on their body said “it has to look like the stuff that’s come before”, or present-day vision equipment would look like this:

Or this:

I’m assuming that you’re guessing “female”?

https://sexualityandthecity.com/2016/11/26/when-women-wanted-sex-much-more-than-men/

In the 1600s, a man named James Mattock was expelled from the First Church of Boston. His crime? It wasn’t using lewd language or smiling on the Sabbath or anything else that we might think the Puritans had disapproved of. Rather, James Mattock had refused to have sex with his wife for two years.

Looking at other sources, the expulsion was in 1640.

IIRC, border agents do have some expanded authority within a certain distance of the border, and that might affect some of California, but not Los Angeles.

kagis

Ahhh. Apparently water borders count. Doesn’t need to be a land border.

https://apnews.com/article/immigration-enforcement-border-patrol-internal-arrests-3f37f3ad15a31f2f1b7c57def9f2c055

Agents are granted by federal law the ability to stop and question people within 100 miles (161 kilometers) of the border, including the coasts. They have heightened authority to board and search buses, trains and vessels without a warrant within the zone.

That encompasses vast swaths of the country that include about two-thirds of the U.S. population, according to the American Civil Liberties Union. Los Angeles is well within 100 miles of the Pacific Ocean.

You typically need to notify other members of a treaty of your withdrawal, and then there’s some time delay until you’re no longer bound by the terms. You can’t just secretly withdraw, or treaties wouldn’t be very meaningful.

EDIT: Yeah. The submitted article says that it happens in six months from today, and here’s the treaty text on withdrawal:

https://www.un.org/en/genocideprevention/documents/atrocity-crimes/Doc.44_convention antipersonnel mines.pdf

Article 20

Duration and withdrawal

1. This Convention shall be of unlimited duration.

2. Each State Party shall, in exercising its national sovereignty, have the right to withdraw from this Convention. It shall give notice of such withdrawal to all other States Parties, to the Depositary and to the United Nations Security Council. Such instrument of withdrawal shall include a full explanation of the reasons motivating this withdrawal.

3. Such withdrawal shall only take effect six months after the receipt of the instrument of withdrawal by the Depositary. If, however, on the expiry of that six- month period, the withdrawing State Party is engaged in an armed conflict, the withdrawal shall not take effect before the end of the armed conflict.

4. The withdrawal of a State Party from this Convention shall not in any way affect the duty of States to continue fulfilling the obligations assumed under any relevant rules of international law.

IIRC, they no longer print it, but you can probably buy used collections.

kagis

Yeah. The final print edition was 2010:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encyclopædia_Britannica

The Encyclopædia Britannica (Latin for ‘British Encyclopaedia’) is a general-knowledge English-language encyclopaedia. It has been published by Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. since 1768, although the company has changed ownership seven times. The 2010 version of the 15th edition, which spans 32 volumes[1] and 32,640 pages, was the last printed edition. Since 2016, it has been published exclusively as an online encyclopaedia at the website Britannica.com

Printed for 244 years, the Britannica was the longest-running in-print encyclopaedia in the English language. It was first published between 1768 and 1771 in Edinburgh, Scotland, in three volumes.

Copyright (well, under US law, and I assume elsewhere) also doesn’t restrict actually making copies, but distributing those copies. If you want to print out a hard copy of the entire Encyclopedia Britannica website for your own use in the event of Armageddon, I imagine that there’s probably software that will let you do that.

Oh, that’s interesting. Didn’t know about that.

I don’t think that there’s a way to list instances that a PieFed instance has defederated from, unlike Lemmy; while both have a list of instances at /instances, only Lemmy indicates which ones have been defederated from. It was a helpful tool to help me guess the sort of content an instance had.

Like:

https://lemmy.world/instances (under “Blocked Instances”)

https://piefed.world/instances

EDIT: It does show the last time that the instance sent data, and I guess you could sort of guess that if a large instance that probably has activity hasn’t sent data to the PieFed instance recently — like lemmygrad.ml and hexbear.net on piefed.world — then they’re probably defederated. But it doesn’t clearly indicate that this is the case, either.

ragingHungryPanda

And poop while I was doing it.

looks skeptical

Bamboo is pretty fibrous.

I mean, the bar to go get a reference book to look something up is significantly higher than “pull my smartphone out of my pocket and tap a few things in”.

Here’s an article from 1945 on what the future of information access might look like.

https://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/unbound/flashbks/computer/bushf.htm

The Atlantic Monthly | July 1945

“As We May Think”

by Vannevar Bush

Eighty years ago, the stuff that was science fiction to the people working on the cutting edge of technology looks pretty unremarkable, even absurdly conservative, to us in 2025:

Like dry photography, microphotography still has a long way to go. The basic scheme of reducing the size of the record, and examining it by projection rather than directly, has possibilities too great to be ignored. The combination of optical projection and photographic reduction is already producing some results in microfilm for scholarly purposes, and the potentialities are highly suggestive. Today, with microfilm, reductions by a linear factor of 20 can be employed and still produce full clarity when the material is re-enlarged for examination. The limits are set by the graininess of the film, the excellence of the optical system, and the efficiency of the light sources employed. All of these are rapidly improving.

Assume a linear ratio of 100 for future use. Consider film of the same thickness as paper, although thinner film will certainly be usable. Even under these conditions there would be a total factor of 10,000 between the bulk of the ordinary record on books, and its microfilm replica. The Encyclopoedia Britannica could be reduced to the volume of a matchbox. A library of a million volumes could be compressed into one end of a desk. If the human race has produced since the invention of movable type a total record, in the form of magazines, newspapers, books, tracts, advertising blurbs, correspondence, having a volume corresponding to a billion books, the whole affair, assembled and compressed, could be lugged off in a moving van. Mere compression, of course, is not enough; one needs not only to make and store a record but also be able to consult it, and this aspect of the matter comes later. Even the modern great library is not generally consulted; it is nibbled at by a few.

Compression is important, however, when it comes to costs. The material for the microfilm Britannica would cost a nickel, and it could be mailed anywhere for a cent. What would it cost to print a million copies? To print a sheet of newspaper, in a large edition, costs a small fraction of a cent. The entire material of the Britannica in reduced microfilm form would go on a sheet eight and one-half by eleven inches. Once it is available, with the photographic reproduction methods of the future, duplicates in large quantities could probably be turned out for a cent apiece beyond the cost of materials.

If the user wishes to consult a certain book, he taps its code on the keyboard, and the title page of the book promptly appears before him, projected onto one of his viewing positions. Frequently-used codes are mnemonic, so that he seldom consults his code book; but when he does, a single tap of a key projects it for his use. Moreover, he has supplemental levers. On deflecting one of these levers to the right he runs through the book before him, each page in turn being projected at a speed which just allows a recognizing glance at each. If he deflects it further to the right, he steps through the book 10 pages at a time; still further at 100 pages at a time. Deflection to the left gives him the same control backwards.

A special button transfers him immediately to the first page of the index. Any given book of his library can thus be called up and consulted with far greater facility than if it were taken from a shelf. As he has several projection positions, he can leave one item in position while he calls up another. He can add marginal notes and comments, taking advantage of one possible type of dry photography, and it could even be arranged so that he can do this by a stylus scheme, such as is now employed in the telautograph seen in railroad waiting rooms, just as though he had the physical page before him.

https://www.bostonmagazine.com/arts-entertainment/2016/10/18/puritans-and-sex-myth/

Debunking the Myth Surrounding Puritans and Sex

The Puritans weren’t prudish. In fact, they were passionate.

From the beginning, Puritans maintained sexual intercourse was necessary for procreation, but also asserted sex was an important way for couples to bond in a loving relationship.

“They talk about the duty to desire, that you’re supposed to engage in intercourse with your married partner and that this is good,” says Bremer. “There will actually be some people in early New England who are censured by the church because they have deprived their married partner of sex for three months or more and this is seen as bad.”