onfocus

In a 122-page written order issued late Friday, U.S. District Court Judge Karin Immergut found banning large capacity magazines and requiring a permit to purchase a firearm are in keeping with “the nation’s history and tradition of regulating uniquely dangerous features of weapons and firearms to protect public safety.”

Progress.

Instead of responding to search queries by linking to the web pages we’ve made, Google is instead generating dodgy summaries rife with hallucina… lies (a psychic hotline, basically). Google still benefits from us publishing web pages. We no longer benefit from Google slurping up those web pages.

Cutting ties with Google is an interesting idea. I've definitely been trying to minimize my interactions with Google. I don't use Google Analytics here. I use DuckDuckGo for most of my searching. I use Firefox for browsing on a desktop and Safari on iOS. Hard to see a shift from Google happening on a big scale without some other shift in the way people discover new things online though.

…most are very easy to program by simply playing to their insecurity and desire for acknowledgement of exceptionalism, and so they push each other further and further into extreme ideas because their entire careers have been predicated on the idea that they're genius outliers who can see things others can't, and that their wealth is a reward for that imagined merit. "I must be smart, look how rich I am."

Anil on the brainworms that seem to be infecting the billionaire class. It sounds like a bizzaro normalcy bias driving extremism. Surely something would be stopping me if my views were out of bounds. But there are no bounds in our society once you have a certain amount of money.

Musk and the people backing all this are more interested in reshaping the global order than in earning fake “fiat currency.” Their real goal is to usher in “hard currency” and re-base global currencies around scarcity and physical assets. So no it really doesn’t matter much what happens to Twitter’s ad model in the meantime. It will probably do alright, and they can probably find other ways to make money, like adding in payments and weird Dogecoin schemes.

Yeah, this article by Dave Troy from last October was not only prescient but has timely reasons why Twitter and Bluesky might not be the competitors you think they are.

“National Geographic will continue to publish a monthly magazine that is dedicated to exceptional multi-platform storytelling with cultural impact. Staffing changes will not change our ability to do this work, but rather give us more flexibility to tell different stories and meet our audiences where they are across our many platforms. Any insinuation that the recent changes will negatively impact the magazine, or the quality of our storytelling, is simply incorrect,” a National Geographic spokesperson told PetaPixel.

The staff reductions will continue until flexibility (the reason people still buy paper magazines) improves.

…this completely foreseeable, undeniable risk — one that every single one of us contends with every time we gather with our old friends — is completely unremarked-upon.

The age of the federal political class is painful to think about, but so true. Another reason we need a wide variety of representation in Congress. Thanks for the added anxiety, Cory Doctorow.

Taranto showed up at Obama's residence on Thursday after former President Donald Trump posted screenshots on his Truth Social platform that featured a purported address for Obama's home in Washington. Taranto's account reposted Trump's post.

This should be the headline: Former President Incites Followers to Violence Again.

The court, Kagan concluded, “exercises authority it does not have. It violates the Constitution.”

It’s a remarkable statement. To say that the Supreme Court can violate the Constitution is to reject the idea that the court is somehow outside the constitutional system. It is to remind the public that the court is as bound by the Constitution as the other branches, which is to say that it is subject to the same “checks and balances” as the legislature and the executive.

Another Supreme Court case based on no real injury with the sole purpose of overturning policy Republicans don’t like with zero accountability. Corrupt court continues and will for the foreseeable future.