AbouBenAdhem

The same journalist wrote a piece last summer titled “The seeds of this political disaster were sown decades ago”. I can’t read it due to the paywall, but judging from the title, they may not have been completely complacent.

I doubt Trump will do anything that could be perceived as encouraging more whistleblowers, at least while he's in office.

Best case—a Democrat wins the next election, Trump gives up on trying to stop it, and pardons Snowden on his way out.

If it’s in a Greek or ancient Latin context I pronounce it with a hard C, but if it’s a general English context I pronounce it with a soft C.

I’m not sure what the third way would be.

Take the sentence “Police accused John Doe of inciting a lynch mob to attack the alleged rapist“. The police aren’t alleging that the victim was a rapist, they’re saying the rape allegation was part of the context of their own accusation against John Doe.

If an act is described as an accusation, it’s already implied that everything within the description is an allegation by the accusers. But if something within the description is itself labeled as “alleged”, that nested allegation becomes part of scenario the accusers are reconstructing.

All of it is being alleged—that’s what an accusation is.

But they’re not accusing her of arranging sex with boys who were allegedly wearing masks, they’re accusing her of arranging sex with boys who were actually wearing them. In the context of the act of which she’s accused, there were no allegations.

“Alleged” isn’t idempotent—every time you add it, it modifies the meaning.

prosecutors accuse her of arranging group sex with middle and high school boys as young as 13 years old while they allegedly wore Scream masks.

Can someone re-train journalists on the use of “allegedly”? The accusation is that she did these things, not that she is alleged to have done them.

Sprinkling the word around with no logical consistency just trains people to ignore it, which defeats the purpose.

As others are pointing out, there are mass protests going on—but I think there’s more to it than that.

The general message of all protests is “listen to us or else”. In the US for the last fifty years, “or else” has been understood to mean “or else you’ll lose the next election”—but it’s becoming clear that this threat has no leverage with Trump, either because he’s confident he can manipulate elections (through whatever means) or because he intends to accomplish his goals in his current term and doesn’t care what happens after that.

So protests need to find some other goal and some other message. Right now they’re looking for other weak points (e.g., Tesla dealerships), but once it’s clear they’ve got a strategy Trump is actually afraid of, the numbers will grow.

Tesla makes limos now?

Yeah, jpeg converts to lab (or something similar, I think). But the dimensions are the same: one channel for lightness, and then a number of channels one less than the total number of sampled frequencies to capture the rest of the color space.

Spectral JPEG XL utilizes a technique used with human-visible images, a math trick called a discrete cosine transform (DCT), to make these massive files smaller [...] it then applies a weighting step, dividing higher-frequency spectral coefficients by the overall brightness (the DC component), allowing less important data to be compressed more aggressively.

This all sounds like standard jpeg compression. Is it just jpeg with extra channels?

I wouldn’t be surprised if Putin put Trump up to it, so Russia could step in and portray itself as the defender of Europe.

So they’re adding phone capabilities to Tamagotchi?