While the lyrics of this year’s song, “New Day Will Rise,” don’t make reference to any events in particular, Galia Press-Barnathan, a professor of international relations at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, says the message is nevertheless clear.

“You can’t ban a personal story from a competition,” she told NBC News in a Zoom interview earlier this month. “So you really get two for one,” she said, with a talented singer performing what sounds like “an old French chanson” paired with a story that makes clear the song is actually about “both a personal trauma and a national trauma, and how you sort of come out of this.”

Yeah, you told us not to make it political, but we figured we’d flagrantly worm our way around the intent of it anyways. Gross.

Except it’s Bob from Reboot instead of Jack Black.

Reposting top level to address “false flag” claims:

• https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/unitedhealth-group-lawsuit-ceo-investors-mangione-b2747303.html
• https://rosenlegal.com/
• https://www.courthousenews.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/unitedhealthcare-shareholders-class-action.pdf

While there’s certainly nothing conclusive there, I’m not really sure I see the point? When the murder first happened, there were already all sorts of talking points about UHC having twice the national average of denials while pocketing billions in wealth and using AI.

When you ask me who is angrier and has more legal capacity to take this kind of action, I’m gonna go with the shareholders. The American people should be the angrier party, but it’s a lot more abstract for them. Shareholders lost MILLIONS. Because, as the filing says, they didn’t make appropriate adjustments to reflect the reality of that situation.

Biggest point of contention here is the language used and it’s ugly, but it’s direct. People can make false flag claims without evidence until the cows come home, but I don’t smell it here.

Reposted this to social media and got that pushback from my conservative friend almost immediately, it’s somewhat of a talking point.

• https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/unitedhealth-group-lawsuit-ceo-investors-mangione-b2747303.html
• https://rosenlegal.com/
• https://www.courthousenews.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/unitedhealthcare-shareholders-class-action.pdf

While there’s certainly nothing conclusive there, I’m not really sure I see the point? When the murder first happened, there were already all sorts of talking points about UHC having twice the national average of denials while pocketing billions in wealth and using AI.

When you ask me who is angrier and has more legal capacity to take this kind of action, I’m gonna go with the shareholders. The American people should be the angrier party, but it’s a lot more abstract for them. Shareholders lost MILLIONS. Because, as the filing says, they didn’t make appropriate adjustments to reflect the reality of that situation.

Biggest point of contention here is the language used and it’s ugly, but it’s direct. People can make false flag claims without evidence until the cows come home, but I don’t smell it here.

Yes, thank you, I think this is exactly what I’ve been feeling but unable to articulate properly.

I do feel there’s a great loss of knowledge in IT, but I’m also aware that I’m motivated by my own opinions and fear of job stability here. There are absolutely times when the cloud makes sense, and those arguments about capex v. opex nail it. I’d love to blame it entirely on greedy execs, but that upfront cost is hard to swallow for a new business, whether you’re planning on super/hyper scaling or not. Cohosting in a datacenter is a great option, but even then, most people simply won’t be willing to invest the time, as you put it.

I’ve had the luck of working for stable institutions like banks and biotech in the past where they built out their infrastructure for security and reliability properly and it was wonderful. I’ve also had the misfortune of working for hyperscaling startups with zero trust architecture built in Azure. It was a nightmare and I hated every day of it.

Like most things, the path forward is going to require a delicate balance, but there’s absolutely no fucking trusting Microsoft. When Europe says, “Hey, we’re getting nervous about your influence here” the response isn’t:

“In a time of geopolitical volatility, we are committed to providing digital stability. That is why today Microsoft is announcing five digital commitments to Europe. These start with an expansion of our cloud and AI infrastructure in Europe, aimed at enabling every country to fully use these technologies to strengthen their economic competitiveness. And they include a promise to uphold Europe’s digital resilience regardless of geopolitical and trade volatility.”

I mean, of course that’s what they’d say, but still. Fuck 'em.

Y’all, I gotta admit I’m really starting to feel old. I still do not fully believe that cloud hosting is the answer for everyone. For businesses of certain sizes, I think running your own stuff and maintaining that IT knowledge within your org is invaluable, but I’m just an IT gremlin who can’t properly articulate his thoughts.

Anyone more knowledgeable care to weigh in?

Second paragraph?

Tesla is just the latest to see the symbol of bearishness, which occurs when a company’s 50-day moving average crosses and drops below the 200-day average.

As an example,

https://assets.finbold.com/uploads/2024/06/What-is-a-death-cross--1024x631.jpg

“It trivialises what we’re facing,” says epidemiologist Michael Osterholm.

Oh, OK. So it’s worse than “zombie deer disease”. Cool. Cool, cool, cool.

I cannot upvote this enough. “Just migrate to X, it’s every bit as good!” when end users know it’s not is a disingenuous argument and even if they don’t have the technical know-how to explain exactly why they feel this way, they’ll feel the deception. It only reinforces a growing distrust in tech.

The argument has to be made honestly. It’s not quite as good, but almost. Those few things you’ll miss will require an adjustment, but the overall value (a lot of times just literally, it costs less!) will become evident.

I know we’re all Linux nerds here and enthused to get people onboard, but the battle right now we’re facing is one of trust and security and must be grounded in those notions because while great strides have been made in convenience and accessibility, big corps will always be able to bankroll themselves over those points.

As someone who has worked in the tech industry near Seattle, I don’t know how well known it is to the wider populace or people in Europe, but open source is absolutely anathema here. It’s seen as insecure, unstable, and unreliable.

I work in IT so I’ve tangentially worked across a number of sectors supporting their stacks and it’s pervasive within the American culture. There is a major de-prioritization of in-house IT knowledge and sysadmins in favor of enterprise support contracts. When shit hits the fan, it’s less important to have a knowledgeable team and more important to have a foot to stamp down on until the issue is resolved. Often that foot has another foot that stamps down, onward and onward until someone manages to engage the MSP or cloud provider that set the service up initially with their scant documentation.

It’s a nightmare both for tech workers and from a cyber security perspective. A lot of this contains my own personal bias and perspective on the matters, but let me say, I have stared into the void and I can’t stop screaming.

I think one of my favorite examples was using simple salt to trap them within the confines of white lines that they didn’t think they could cross over. I really appreciate the imagery of using salt circles to entrap the robotic demons …

Hey, fair. I know the overall political left has always been plagued with infighting and purity testing. I’d like to at least do my part in bridging the gap between leftists and liberals by not getting in your face about not panicking over this shit if you’ll still allow me the same space to entertain my concern without calling me hysterical. Deal?

There have been growing criticisms of him coming from the left for a bit now on how some of his tendencies to diffuse situations learns more towards liberalism than leftism. This isn’t an outright attack on him or to say he’s moving rightward overall. I need to watch this video again but I think this is the one that touches on a bunch of the points, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9hCxHvogsTY

From a comment on the video, “Jon Stewart made me a liberal as a child, adulthood made me a leftist.”

If you like Jon Stewart I’m not trying to say you shouldn’t. But as someone who has continually been moving left, I do feel more distance from him than I used to is all.

After everything, I do still generally respect and like Jon Stewart, but even I found his piece this week on the Daily Show to be some real weak ass shit. I try my best to keep ahold of myself, not run away too much with assumptions or conspiratorial thinking. But you don’t have to wait for them to do 100% fascist shit to start calling them fascists.

The White House defended the firing of Fong and the other inspectors general, saying “these rogue, partisan bureaucrats … have been relieved of their duties in order to make room for qualified individuals who will uphold the rule of law and protect Democracy.”

This. This right here. They are screaming their intent at us and we don’t need to wait for them to do it to respectably call them fascists. Like to be clear I guess he can do this but the way he did it is potentially incorrect? Regardless, that’s not what I want to hear you say when you do it to a 22-year veteran of the department.

I don’t even know what to say about this mess, but yes: that’s enterprise pricing. It doesn’t need to be that way, but it can be because those are the kind of prices you can charge businesses. And really, just as a pleasant capitalistic side effect of this, is that the lower classes are completely locked off form this technology. It’s not a mystery, it’s not a conspiracy, it’s business. And I hate it.

History from someone who moved to the platform early on:

A lot of the early adopters were the queer and trans community, first to leave Twitter after Musk’s meddling and most sensitive to the changes he was making. (In this context I don’t mean sensitive as in “snowflake”, I mean sensitive as in “aware of inevitable changes and resultant catastrophe” - when someone shits in the pool you don’t wait wait for the water to turn brown). They took the gross out humor and used it as a ward to keep some of the other elements from following over. Now they defend the term as history.

I don’t particularly agree, I understand the basis for it but ugh, it’s still gross. I keep advocating for “bleats” which kind of works as “Bluesky tweet” and leans into us all being sheep; something I find cute and take no offense at because it’s a toothless insult wielded by deeply unserious people. Alternatively, I think we should’ve just straight stolen tweet since the trademark or whatever has been abandoned at this point (???). Failing that, I’ll probably resort to just calling them posts, there’s no point in fighting momentum like this and I imagine it’ll probably settle down onto something else once the platform gets over its first wave of serious growing pains … if it lives that long.

This is the book that introduced me to the Chinese Room thought experiment and is the first thing I began to think of when the recent AI trend started to make a splash.

Peter Watts is great and though it’s not related to the topic at hand, I cannot recommend Starfish enough. Dark, haunting, and psychological. (It’s apparently part of a series but I never carried on)

I was brought up on this harsh truth by my parents just like a lot of people, I assume, but I no longer believe it.

Sure, I believe we all owe it to ourselves and others to put hard work into the system, but there should be an inherent sense of fairness (or call it equality if you will, I don’t want to get bogged down in the tedium of definitions right now). If the system is unfair, we should be working to make it more fair. It’s not satisfactory to simply leave it as it is, broken, and tell everyone else to deal with it when they may not have the resources to do so.

I’m not saying you’re wrong. I say I refuse. I do not believe.

You know I’m honestly not sure. Mostly good I think?

Sidestepping the issue entirely of the act itself - strictly speaking more about the news cycle around it. I don’t know that it needed much more extensive, exhausting coverage. Just given the nature of the news currently, you gotta admit, surprising right? I’m not even trying to imply any sort of conspiracy about why it wasn’t more popular. I’m just saying, I think news cycle would’ve latched on harder if they could have, but the public gagged and said no thanks, we’re simply not interested, causing them to shift focus.

I’m still absolutely flabbergasted at how quickly we all moved on from Trump literally getting clipped in an attempt on his life.

They tried to muster some outrage and solidarity, but most of us just shrugged and went, “Damn. Oh well, maybe next time.”