Mastodawn

NY Senate has an About webpage where it states that it uses open source software whenever possible for reasons that include reliability and security. Yet there is also the pending age verification bill which seems ultimately incongruent with the About webpage.

https://www.nysenate.gov/about#:~:text=The%20Senate%20uses%20open%2Dsource%20software%20whenever%20possible.%20In%20our%20experience%2C%20open%2Dsource%20software%20is%20reliable%2C%20secure%2C%20and%20cost%2Deffective.

https://www.nysenate.gov/legislation/bills/2025/S8102/amendment/A

GFH_oheffllc Feb 3

Staples, an office supply store, can't find me felt tip "pens" (unless I search for just a singular "pen").

GFH_oheffllc Nov 29

Sure, the article's good, but the author's participation in the subsequent comments...is a phenomenon https://forums.theregister.com/forum/all/2025/11/26/tuxedo_axes_arm_laptop/

Tuxedo Computers slams lid on Arm Linux laptop after 18 months of pain • The Register Forums

GFH_oheffllc Nov 29

I guess the unnamed person who wrote that x11 apps will work except for "rare special cases", doesn't use Autokey (which doesn't work on Wayland). https://blogs.kde.org/2025/11/26/going-all-in-on-a-wayland-future/ According to Wikipedia, "AutoKey is currently available in packaged form for users of Debian, Arch, Gentoo, and Fedora as well as for some of their derivative distributions such as Ubuntu, Mint, and Manjaro." So rare and special, huh. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AutoKey

Going all-in on a Wayland future

Well folks, it’s the beginning of a new era: after nearly three decades of KDE desktop environments running on X11, the future KDE Plasma 6.8 release will be Wayland-exclusive! Support for X11 applications will be fully entrusted to Xwayland, and the Plasma X11 session will no longer be included.

KDE Blogs

GFH_oheffllc Apr 30, 2025

Carl Malamud Apr 30, 2025

All state and federal regulations current as of March 31, 2025, formatted in XML, are now available for download. https://archive.org/download/state.regulations.bulk/2025.Q1/ We now have 5 years of quarterly releases online in case your LLM needs a snack.

state.regulations.bulk directory listing

GFH_oheffllc Mar 13, 2025

Would love to be able to highlight text on web pages while reading. Just for short term (1 hr) purposes--not for keeping a big collection (I already clip with wallabag, zettel notes, or zotero.) Don't want my highlights tracked/analyzed. If it's secure & at least semi-reliable, something like this chrome extension might work: https://alternativeto.net/software/notestash/about/ I've tested it for about 10 min in a VM. If disconnect internet, make highlights, close/open chrome, highlights persist (but not sure where saved).

GFH_oheffllc Feb 18, 2025

A recent ad in NY to take a pause from gambling made me realize I am seeing the word "pause" more. E.g., court denies request to pause..., judge extends pause..., pause in funding freeze... I checked the word "pause" in google trends (sorry, I know google is lame), and it shows an increase in searches for "pause" over the last several years.

GFH_oheffllc Feb 17, 2025

KProfsBlog Feb 17, 2025

Sid DeLong has a “The Rest of the Story” style post today on the Blog. It’s about a notorious law student denied admission to the bar because he was a jerk. Spoiler alert: his obituary tells a different story.

#law #ethics #BarAdmissions

https://lawprofessors.typepad.com/contractsprof_blog/2025/02/and-now-you-know-the-rest-of-the-story-with-sid-delong.html

GFH_oheffllc Feb 6, 2025

Came out in the summer. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ipZSqcFA0Z0

Amyl and The Sniffers - "Big Dreams" (Official Video)

YouTube

GFH_oheffllc Jan 25, 2025

although this has to do with ai, it's still an interesting article. because export controls limited access to cutting edge chips, they used "engineering tricks—custom communication schemes between chips, reducing the size of fields to save memory, and innovative use of the mix-of-models approach," https://www.wired.com/story/deepseek-china-model-ai/ it reminds me of when in college a dorm mate explained the difference between complex & simple instruction set chips (I was studying philosophy but lived on engineering campus)

How Chinese AI Startup DeepSeek Made a Model that Rivals OpenAI

When Chinese quant hedge fund founder Liang Wenfeng went into AI research, he took 10,000 Nvidia chips and assembled a team of young, ambitious talent. Two years later, DeepSeek exploded on the scene.

WIRED