Hard Pass

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/47017054

Cartoon for Dutch newspaper Trouw. Art by Tjeerd Royaards

source mastodon - https://newsie.social/@royaards/116594142035336090

cross-posted from: https://piefed.world/c/shit/p/1132003/how-the-next-episode-button-looks-at-me-when-it-s-3-am-and-i-have-to-work-tomorrow

After being excommunicated from the GOP, Geoff Duncan is trying for a comeback on the Democratic ticket

In the Georgia governor’s race, Geoff Duncan’s candidacy tests American politics as much as it tests his political appeal.

The former Republican lieutenant governor of Georgia is a current Democratic candidate for governor, with former Biden official and Atlanta ex-mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms currently holding the lead in Tuesday’s Democratic primary. A Republican is still favored to win, with billionaire Rick Jason up against the secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, and the lieutenant governor, Burt Jones.

Though his candidacy might not prove successful on 19 May, in offering himself to the public, Duncan is asking Democratic voters to consider what the off-ramp for Republican leaders should look like in the waning days of the Trump era. Can it be as simple as switching parties and rearranging one’s political values?

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.today/post/53164571

Cross post from https://www.reddit.com/r/TrueAnon/comments/1tg6wbr/scoop_philly_revokes_gun_permits_for_black/

The ATF has slowly been redefining who can own a gun and the government is starting to pull the rug. They've also proposed requiring you to put your birth assigned sex on the paperwork, so if you are trans and have ids matching your gender you'll be required to lie on the form to buy your guns.

The fact that they're taking these steps prove to me that they think armed leftists and minorities are genuinely the only thing that can stop them now. I sense the US entering the cool zone

Cross posted from https://sh.itjust.works/post/60361701

But I had an onion ring once.

Google is encouraging its database developers to lean "heavily" on AI coding tools as it ramps up contributions to open source projects such as PostgreSQL.

Earlier this year, Google announced a raft of new contributions to PostgreSQL, the open source database that has become a popular RDBMS for developers building new applications in the cloud.

cross-posted from: https://piefed.world/c/shit/p/1131937/pov-you-are-about-to-pull-your-car-in-a-middle-of-a-usy-road-picking-up-a-friend-instead

cross-posted from: https://piefed.world/c/tech/p/1131961/former-microsoft-vp-says-microsoft-missed-the-ai-wave-like-the-internet-and-mobile-as-co

Context

He was replying to a tweet with the text:

In the past 6 weeks we have seen a rather strong shift for both Xbox and Windows implementing requested features after years of ignoring them.

This is great but…what changed for both of this massive orgs to suddenly start listening?

Let's see...

1. You make Bing your biggest bet with AI. Not a single percentage point of user share goes up from that investment
2. You bet on Copilot with AI. Not even 3% of paying users use it, even when the distribution is massive, and it's pre-deployed right in their faces
3. Then you hire the wrong people and assign them to jobs they are obviously not qualified to do. It gets worse.
4. Your OEMs invest on NPUs to then find out that nobody cares because not a single valuable use case was built for those in Windows/Office.
5. Your GitHub, which should be thriving in the age of AI, drops below 90% SLA
6. Your COGS go up significantly
7. Your shares drop significantly
8. The only thing you can brag about looks like an utilities company, not a software company
9. Shareholders start asking the hard questions

There's a point where you start getting fun phone calls and an increasing number of voices start asking you to maybe listen to customers.

I say that as a very positive thing (I know I don't sound like that, I'm grumpy by nature, can't help it). This is actually positive: If you don't push for change, change pushes you.

Hit Factory Reset might be what Microsoft actually needed, since Hit Refresh wasn't enough. Even if it comes with a ton of disruptions.

Source: Mat Velloso on X/Twitter.

Mat Velloso who was most recently the Vice President of Product for the Developer Platform at Meta’s Superintelligence Labs. He also led AI developer products at Google DeepMind (including the Gemini API and Google AI Studio). But before his stints at Google and Meta, Velloso spent over 12 years at Microsoft, where he served as a Partner Director managing AI innovation in Windows and, interestingly, spent four years as the Technical Advisor to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella.

Related news: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/5/18/israeli-forces-intercept-gaza-bound-aid-flotilla

cross-posted from: https://piefed.world/c/shit/p/1131888/the-owner-of-my-airbnb-has-a-dog-named-kevin-his-human-sounding-name-terrified-me-at-fir

::: spoiler Photo SVG code

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Too spicy?

I have a debilitating fear of needles and had to have my partner do it for me but I did it!

Unrelated picture of Ripley using his only brain cell

Here's a behind the scenes

From the creator:

The models powering generative AI platforms have been trained on the work of countless artists, generally without consent or compensation. This questionable provenance aside; it is arguable the most successful use cases for these systems are misinformation, manipulation, defamation, theft, and fraud. There is also an environmental impact to expending massive amounts of computational power on something of such dubious value. As these ethical, economic, social, and ecological issues are fundamental to the technology – I will always reject their use in my work.