Nate Vack

… I am guessing “if you are in Tehran, it’s open season on you!! hope you like being dead!!! lol”

And anyhow: The idea that Hegseth is enough of a monster to blow up an elementary school but not enough of a monster to blow up TWO elementary school seems unlikely. It’s not like we couldn’t have found more schools

Blowing up kids carelessly in a war you rushed for no reason is plenty bad

Yep! But if we’re going to have an asshole in charge, we may as well have one who is also deeply stupid and incompetent

*hunger games cannon*

. +
* + . * .
. KRISTI NOEM .
+ * . + *
. * + .

The people who die of thirst would not be the shitty rich people

Apple would also sell a crapton of the Mini with an A-series processor and a couple hundred dollars off

Well, now that the dow is below 50,000 dollars can we prosecute the child molesters please

I think this is a place where Congress should step in and define what sorts of clauses are allowable in contracts -- particularly "retail-level" clickthrough contracts. Some kind of "here are general expectations for hosts and clients, and what requires actual negotiation"

This is like a landlord saying "you can't have overnight guests" in your lease. And yes, I know there are lease clauses like that. I think those clauses should not be permitted.

Don't want to sell your software to the US gov? Sure. Free country, tell them to pound sand. Want to make sure they don't damage your platform with use? Fine.

But "you can't be evil with this, we define what evil means?" Fuck right off.

I can't say I _like_ the idea of our admin using AI tools to surveil me, or literally anything else they might do. But also: Software companies using "you didn't buy this, you licensed it, so our contract says how you can use it" is horseshit

Ford doesn't get to say that about trucks

What I am even more worried about is the possibility that Trump will get frustrated with our inability to destroy some bunker and say “why do we have these tactical nukes if we can‘t use them”

Which, to be fair: Yes why DO we leave these things sitting around waiting for a time like this

On one hand: The US has shown the world that even your staunchest, most stable ally can transform into an erratic bully, so yeah maybe everyone should get nukes!

On the other hand: Anyone else can also transform into erratic bullies so maybe let’s not proliferate so much please

Ooooo nice! Running the stats in a sandbox is a particularly nice idea.

I actually wonder how hard it would be to do that for something like R Studio in general…

or even just to look at your data without screwing around with ggplot

which is great and I love it but sometimes it’s overkill

Turns out: computers and web browsers got really fast

Slightly apropos of this: In honor of Drew Fox's birthday, this weekend I (finally!) resurrected scatterize as a browser-only setup, in the hope that it may live as HTML and javascript. It probably still has a few rough edges, but give it a try!

njvack.github.io/scatterize/

Senate G.O.P. Faces Pressure to Force ‘Talking Filibuster’ for Voter I.D. Bill

i say let them do it. if i were a senate democrat i would relish the opportunity to let the country know that republicans don't think you should vote if you are a married woman www.nytimes.com/2026/02/21/u...

I know it’s a meme but the winter olympics are brutal as hell

i was all “why was mr banks so hung up about tuppence” so i looked it up and damn that was like $18000 in todays money

regency england was wild, kids wanting to spend car money on kites and bird ladies

To be clear: I think the SAVE Act is a bad solution to a problem that doesn't exist. It is terrible legislation.

But, you know what? The majority party wants it. They think it'll make things better. Maybe let them do what they think is best.

Unpopular opinion: Dems should let the SAVE Act come up for a vote in the Senate.

Republicans want to make everyone get a copy of their birth certificate or passport and re-register to vote? Really? How do you think that's going to work out in November?

A couple years ago they really did a lot more weird stuff, it was easier to say ”llms are not useful” than it is now

Yeah the "it's just a stochastic parrot" thing was a good critique a couple years ago and now... well, it is extremely effective at least at writing code.

There are lots of valid criticisms of modern models but "lol they don't understand stuff" is not a compelling one.

No way! I always thought "toxin" meant "anything that is toxic"

TIL

It is really remarkable to me how much computers have, in fact, learned to write code

The hallucinated APIs are basically gone. There are still some questionable design choices and a tendency to repeat code but overall... phew.

I'm using it to help learn Swift and damn

Should you ever need to run a glucose curve (we're doing one for the cat) and the worksheet you got is dumb, you could use this:

docs.google.com/spreadsheets...

I have had friends with MS and lupus and I would pay a substantial out-of-pocket sum to get an effective EBV vaccine for my kids

If it's true that Moderna stopped the development of effective mRNA vaccines because of the FDA's anti-vax stance, somewhere like China has a golden opportunity to develop those vaccines and then cash in on a vaccine tourism industry

EBV infection is also likely a very important cause of lupus, which is also very bad to have