Cowboy Who?

Dozens have been arrested after clashes with officers in America's second city, with National Guard members now deployed.

Dozens of arrests have been made after three days of protests, with the National Guard now patrolling the city.

Thousands living under Taliban rule worry for their futures after Afghanistan was included in a US travel-ban list.

WASHINGTON—Telling reporters that the move would do much to combat low U.S. fertility rates, President Donald Trump issued an executive order Friday reversing vasectomies nationwide. “We’re requiring all men to head to their doctors and have them undo these terrible, terrible procedures,” the president said in an address from the Oval Office in which he clarified that men over the age of 18 would be given 60 days to have their reproductive ducts reconnected or face imprisonment. “Go to your urologist, get them to make a small cut—just a little cut on the scrotum—and put all that stuff back together. There will be some pain, but we want our men blowing full, beautiful loads to make the country’s future bright. America’s vas deferens will be the envy of the world.” Trump added that this executive action would overturn the “awful Biden orders” that forced all men to get vasectomies in the first place.

The post Trump Issues Executive Order Reversing All Vasectomies appeared first on The Onion.

Statistically speaking, home is the place where you are most likely to die—so how’s this one feel to you?

Reference #28106

The post Picture Yourself Dying Here appeared first on The Onion.

The post Gingham Style appeared first on The Onion.

Dearest Beloved,

I received your missive of Thursday last with the greatest of gratitude, as I and my brave compatriots have five hours now awaited the orders to approach a moderately busy intersection in the shopping district of a mid-sized American city to confront a force of as many as eleven or twelve of the enemy, all cleverly disguised as “dishwashers,” “nannies,” and “landscapers.”

We are a rather ragtag bunch to be tasked with confronting such a formidable force, armed only with hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of tactical gear from late 2023 and weaponry that has been in service for a year before that.

I tell you with no small shame that we beseech the Lord daily to protect our high-capacity automatic rifles, rubber bullets, smoke bombs, tanks, helmets, Kevlar vests and night-vision goggles from the ravages of the possible but not very likely small stone or block of wood that could be hurled our way by a weeping child or hysterical mother as we pry their loved ones from their dastardly hands.

The skater dudes, grandmothers, and dog walkers forever taunt us, my love.

In the few remaining moments before we are forced to decamp from the tenuous safety and subpar food of the local Marriott to brave rush-hour traffic on our way to our mission, I want to share with you that I have the highest of confidence in my brethren (well, except for Clint Stackhouse—the guy NEVER puts down his phone; for real, my bro needs to go to rehab for TikTok.) Our force is made up of those hardy enough to endure such a privation of a campaign as we now must face—against an enemy as wily as they are unarmed.

They are, to a man (and woman and child and disabled veteran), unashamed to clothe themselves in the garments of workaday citizens. Many feign genuine labor as we approach, wielding serving trays, paint brushes, or ladders—some going so far as to dirty themselves with what might seem to an eye that has not benefited from a six-week Patriotic Abduction training course at a strip-mall karate studio to be actual food stains, paint chips, and other honestly earned detritus of a busy day’s work.

But have no fear for me, my darling devoted. I enter the coming fray safe in the knowledge that your sweet love awaits my return by Wednesday at the latest, depending on traffic, and that, even should I suffer the worst and return to you with visible bruising along the three inches of my wrist not protected by materials meant to absorb the force of a grenade, I shall find comfort in your Lululemon-ed embrace.

Until that moment, I remain yours in everlasting Morgan Wallen fandom,
Jared

Experts say Wednesday’s action to eliminate the long-standing policy could be a “collusive lawsuit,” where the state and feds worked the courts to get a desired outcome.

New comic!
Today's News:

This comic is based on something my friend Mike said. It is about learning a valuable lesson.

#Mia #RoninWarriors

I'm going in here horsey, so you stay here and don't move. #CowboyWho

This week on Lost Terminal: Amelie introduces a friend, Lyosha and Maddie investigate, and Seth plans a performance.
Lost Terminal will return next week!

📓 Free transcript: https://www.patreon.com/posts/130844638
🎵 Today's SIGNAL is: https://namtao.bandcamp.com/album/lost-terminal-190
🦣 Mastodon https://namtao.com/@lostterminal
📝 Tumblr https://lostterminalpod.tumblr.com
🎙️ Recorded using a RODE NT-1 v5 USB in 32-bit float, edited with REAPER on Linux

CREDITS

• Credits narrated by Lucy Stringer
• ❤️Thank you so much to everyone who supports me, but especially my Patreon Producers:
• Ada Phillips
• Kit
• Wynand Marais
• Jade Felicity Bilkey
• Stephen McCandless
• Mike Schneider

Ant Simulator: https://evolvecode.io/turmites/index.html
Source code: https://github.com/MaxRobinsonTheGreat/turmites
This is a video about Langton's ants, turmites, and turing machines. On and on and on it goes, will it halt? Nobody knows.

~ LINKS ~
Pezzza's Ant Sim: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hTHpEF_jcu4
Discord (see langtons-ants channel) https://discord.com/invite/GZWd2qySce
Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/emergentgarden
Ko-fi: https://ko-fi.com/emergentgarden
Twitter: https://twitter.com/max_romana
Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/emergentgarden.bsky.social

~Timestamps~
(0:00) Langton's Ants
(3:32) Turmites
(7:26) Emergent Patterns
(10:13) Busy Beavers
(11:56) Evolving Ants?

__
/ : \
/ :.....\...........

The DistroWatch news feed is brought to you by TUXEDO COMPUTERS. This week in DistroWatch Weekly:
Review: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10.0
News: Murena partners with phone markers, Redox developer ports X11 and GTK, GNOME testing its own distro on real hardware, Linux Mint tests fingerprint authentication
Questions and answers: Seeking a distribution for long-term use
Released last week: Oracle Linux 9.6,....

Jones, who served in the Biden administration, defeated Rolando Pablos, a former Texas secretary of state, in a high-profile, bitterly partisan contest.

The protests in Texas followed days of unrest in Los Angeles, where President Donald Trump sent National Guard troops in response to demonstrations.

In brief: The Pacific looks to get a series of lower-end tropical systems, while the Atlantic remains dusty and quiet for the time being. We also examine Canadian wildfires today.

Pacific buzzing — with limits

It’s busy times in the Pacific over the next week, as there are three areas earmarked by the National Hurricane Center today for possible development.

None of these systems appear to be a threat to the Mexico coast at this time. Nor do any of them look to get especially strong. The 20 percent area has a wee bit of support to perhaps get a little stronger, particularly via the ICON model. But I would classify that risk as “low to very low” at this time. The next two names in the Pacific are Barbara and Cosme.

Quiet Atlantic will continue

The Atlantic remains out of play for now. We continue to see GFS model runs showing Gulf activity, but more likely than not it’s just whiffing on what may end up in the Pacific later next week.

At present, just dusty.

There’s one batch of dust impacting Florida and much of the Gulf Coast this weekend. A second batch of dust is thick out in the eastern Atlantic. That will thin out some as it comes west, but it may reach the Caribbean next week and the Gulf late next week. Although we don’t usually look far out in the Atlantic for development in June (Beryl last year being a glaring exception), at the least, conditions look poor for any development over the next 7 to 10 days.

Maybe around the 18th through the 20th we’ll get to monitor something sloppy in the Caribbean or near the Yucatan or coast of Mexico. AI modeling hints that this could be the case, but it’s not showing anything notable or troublesome at this time.

Canadian blazes adding to the haze

In a very glaring example of what happens in one place directly impacts another, for the third straight summer, Canadian wildfire smoke is a feature not a bug.

Canada is a mess right now, with numerous wildfires burning in the Prairie provinces and portions of western Ontario and northeast British Columbia.

Conditions in Canada are exacerbated by long-term drought, below normal snow, and long-term fires. Some of the fires in Canada are actually relics of fires started in 2023! They basically burn or smolder as “zombie” fires in the winter season and then flare up again as summer arrives. Canadian winters have had their harsh periods, as they normally do. But punches of cold in short bursts can’t make up for the overwhelming warmth we’ve seen at times in the winter months recently in Canada. The winters of 2023-24 and 2024-25 have averaged warmer than normal in western Canada.

Canadian wildfires themselves aren’t abnormal, and neither are warm winters. But the frequency and intensity of wildfire and warmer winters tends to be increasing as the climate changes. You have to be careful about saying that this is “the new normal,” but you can safely assume there will be more years and scenarios like this coming in the future.

In the short-term, the risk for wildfire growth or new wildfire starts is high and expected to remain quite high over the next 7 to 10 days. And so it goes.

LOS ANGELES – As National Guard troops took to the streets ready to open fire on U.S. citizens in the name of “Making America Great Again”, President Trump reminded all Americans that he only stands against starting wars on foreign soil. “During my decade of non-stop campaigning,” bellowed Trump at a camera in the Oval […]

The post Trump reminds Americans he only promised not to start foreign wars appeared first on The Beaverton.

On the right, you’ll see the Alamo root cellar and on the right, the Alamo rumpus room.

Can I borrow your face? Thaaanks.

Thomas Ptacek:

LLMs can write a large fraction of all the tedious code you’ll ever need to write. And most code on most projects is tedious. LLMs drastically reduce the number of things you’ll ever need to Google. They look things up themselves. Most importantly, they don’t get tired; they’re immune to inertia.

Think of anything you wanted to build but didn’t. You tried to home in on some first steps. If you’d been in the limerent phase of a new programming language, you’d have started writing. But you weren’t, so you put it off, for a day, a year, or your whole career.

I can feel my blood pressure rising thinking of all the bookkeeping and Googling and dependency drama of a new project. An LLM can be instructed to just figure all that shit out. Often, it will drop you precisely at that golden moment where shit almost works, and development means tweaking code and immediately seeing things work better. That dopamine hit is why I code.

Ptacek says he mostly writes in Go and Python, and his essay doesn’t even mention Swift. But the whole essay is worth keeping in mind ahead of WWDC. There is no aspect of the AI revolution where Apple, right now today, is further behind than agentic LLM programming. (Swift Assist, announced and even demoed last year at WWDC, would have been a first step in this direction, but it never shipped, even in beta.)

Kyle Hughes, in a brief thread on Mastodon last week:

At work I’m developing a new iOS app on a small team alongside a small Android team doing the same. We are getting lapped to an unfathomable degree because of how productive they are with Kotlin, Compose, and Cursor. They are able to support all the way back to Android 10 (2019) with the latest features; we are targeting iOS 16 (2022) and have to make huge sacrifices (e.g Observable, parameter packs in generics on types). Swift 6 makes a mockery of LLMs. It is almost untenable.

This wasn’t the case in the 2010s. The quality and speed of implementation of every iOS app I have ever worked on, in teams of every size, absolutely cooked Android. [...] There has never been a worse time in the history of computers to launch, and require, fundamental and sweeping changes to languages and frameworks.

The problem isn’t necessarily inherent to the design of the Swift language, but that throughout Swift’s evolution Apple has introduced sweeping changes with each major new version. (Secondarily, that compared to other languages, a lower percentage of Swift code that’s written is open source, and thus available to LLMs for use in training corpuses.) Swift was introduced at WWDC 2014 (that one again) and last year Apple introduced Swift 6. That’s a lot of major version changes for a programming language in one decade. There were pros and cons to Apple’s approach over the last decade. But now there’s a new, and major con: because Swift 6 only debuted last year, there’s no great corpus of Swift 6 code for LLMs to have trained on, and so they’re just not as good — from what I gather, not nearly as good — at generating Swift 6 code as they are at generating code in other languages, and for other programming frameworks like React.

The new features in Swift 6 are for the better, but, in a group chat, my friend Daniel Jalkut described them to me as, “I think Swift 6 changed very little, but the little it changed has huge sweeping implications. Akin to the switch from MRR to ARC.” That’s a reference to the change in Objective-C memory management from manual retain/release (MRR) to automatic reference counting (ARC) back in 2011. Once ARC came out, no one wanted to be writing new code using manual retain/release (which was both tedious and a common source of memory-leak bugs). But if LLMs had been around in 2011/2012, they’d only have been able to generate MRR Objective-C code because that’s what all the existing code they’d been trained on used.

I’m quite certain everyone at Apple who ought to be concerned about this is concerned about it. The question is, do they have solutions ready to be announced next week? This whole area — language, frameworks, and tooling in the LLM era — is top of mind for me heading into WWDC next week.

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) wants to enforce a 10-year moratorium on AI regulation by making states ineligible for broadband funding if they try to impose any limits on development of artificial intelligence.

The House previously approved a budget bill that contained a fairly straightforward provision to ban state AI regulation for 10 years. Cruz, chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, yesterday released budget reconciliation text that takes a different approach to preventing states from regulating AI.

Cruz's approach may be an attempt to get around the Senate's Byrd Rule, which limits the inclusion of "extraneous matter" in budget reconciliation legislation. He wants to make it impossible for states to receive money from the $42 billion Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) program if they try to regulate AI. Cruz released a summary that says his bill "forbids states collecting BEAD money from strangling AI deployment with EU-style regulation."

Read full article

Comments

This week, Republicans in Congress and the executive branch stepped up their efforts to roll back clean vehicle legislation and regulations. Antipathy toward environmental protections was a hallmark of the first Trump administration, but in his second term, the president and his congressional allies are redoubling their efforts to allow cars to pollute more and limit the adoption of electric vehicles.

Congressional republicans have been working on a budget bill that would radically transform many aspects of American life. Among the environmental protections being stripped away in the "One Big Beautiful Bill Act" (yes, that's what it's called) is a repeal of the US Environmental Protection Agency's rules on "greenhouse gas and multi-pollutant emissions standards."

These regulations are meant to limit the amount of carbon dioxide emitted by the US vehicle fleet, a major driver of climate change, as well as the noxious pollutants containing sulfur and nitrogen compounds that have more immediate and deleterious effects on human health. And if the budget bill is sent to Trump to sign, the existing Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) rules, implemented in 2022, and the future rules meant to take effect next year will be no more.

Read full article

Comments

Google wasn't around for the advent of the World Wide Web, but it successfully remade the web on its own terms. Today, any website that wants to be findable has to play by Google's rules, and after years of search dominance, the company has lost a major antitrust case that could reshape both it and the web.

The closing arguments in the case just wrapped up last week, and Google could be facing serious consequences when the ruling comes down in August. Losing Chrome would certainly change things for Google, but the Department of Justice is pursuing other remedies that could have even more lasting impacts. During his testimony, Google CEO Sundar Pichai seemed genuinely alarmed at the prospect of being forced to license Google's search index and algorithm, the so-called data remedies in the case. He claimed this would be no better than a spinoff of Google Search. The company's statements have sometimes derisively referred to this process as "white labeling" Google Search.

But does a white label Google Search sound so bad? Google has built an unrivaled index of the web, but the way it shows results has become increasingly frustrating. A handful of smaller players in search have tried to offer alternatives to Google's search tools. They all have different approaches to retrieving information for you, but they agree that spinning off Google Search could change the web again. Whether or not those changes are positive depends on who you ask.

Read full article

Comments

A remarkable schoolyard brawl erupted online Thursday between President Donald Trump and his former "First Buddy" Elon Musk during which the pair traded insults and barbs. The war of words reached a crescendo during the afternoon when Trump threatened Musk's federal contracts.

"The easiest way to save money in our Budget, Billions and Billions of Dollars, is to terminate Elon's Governmental Subsidies and Contracts. I was always surprised that Biden didn't do it!" Trump wrote on his social media network, Truth Social, at 2:37 pm ET.

Anyone with a reasonable grasp of reality understood that the "bromance" between the president of the United States and the most wealthy person in the world was going to blow up at some point, but even so, the online brouhaha that has played out Thursday is spectacular—at one point Musk suggested that Trump was in the Epstein files, for goodness' sake.

Read full article

Comments

The most telling detail in the Kilmar Abrego Garcia saga isn’t what the DOJ is claiming — it’s what a federal prosecutor refused to do. Ben Schrader, a 15-year veteran of the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Nashville and chief of the criminal division, abruptly resigned rather than put his name on the indictment the Trump administration cobbled together to justify their illegal deportation of a man courts had barred the US from sending to El Salvador.

That should tell you everything about the quality of this “case.” But let’s walk through exactly how the DOJ manufactured criminal charges to cover up their own constitutional violation.

After months of claiming it was “impossible” to bring Abrego Garcia back from El Salvador — where they illegally shipped him, despite a court order, due to an “administrative error” — they have now brought him back.

For months they resisted doing so, as everyone realized it would mean admitting the Trump administration’s aggressive immigration program made mistakes. So the administration pivoted: they fired the DOJ lawyer who had initially admitted that it was a mistake to deport him, and began claiming that Abrego Garcia was obviously a terrible criminal, a “leader” of the MS-13 gang, and a “human trafficker.” The US government then began searching high and low for literally anything they could use to try to justify those claims about him, so they could falsely pretend that they were correct in shipping him out of the country.

The best they can do was… finding a 2022 traffic stop.

In that stop, Abrego Garcia was driving a van with eight passengers from Texas to Maryland — construction workers, he said, being transported between job sites. The officers at the time found nothing worth charging. They didn’t even cite him for speeding.

Difficult to see that as evidence of anything horrible.

But desperate times call for desperate measures. And the Trump administration desperately needed something. So it appears the DOJ used that non-incident to secretly indict Abrego Garcia on two counts of “transporting” undocumented workers. That indictment was unsealed today, along with the announcement that Abrego Garcia was being brought back to the US to face those criminal charges.

Oh, so they could bring him back…

This proves that the administration has been lying, repeatedly, in claiming that they had no control over him and couldn’t bring him back.

Remember: Trump himself admitted multiple times that he could get Abrego Garcia back. Meanwhile, AG Pam Bondi was insisting in public that Abrego Garcia would never return to the United States.

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem was even more definitive: “there is no scenario where Abrego Garcia will be in the United States again.”

Kristi Noem less than a month ago: "There is no scenario where Abrego Garcia will be in the United States again."(No matter what happens, bringing him back to the US is a climbdown for the administration)

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2025-06-06T20:51:36.817Z

All proven false. Today, Bondi tried to claim this was different because they “presented El Salvador with an arrest warrant.” But that only proves the lie — there was never anything stopping them from making that request. They just chose not to, while claiming it was impossible.

El Salvador readily agreed to the request — exactly as everyone knew they would, despite Salvadoran President Bukele’s claims that it was “preposterous” to even think of returning him as he would have to “smuggle a terrorist” into the US.

Turns out all of that was theater.

We’ve seen this playbook trotted out multiple times: whenever someone is denied due process, we hear about how awful they are, how violent, how dangerous, as if that means they don’t deserve due process. But that’s garbage: everyone deserves due process, because without it, there’s simply no way to know for sure that they are all those things anyone is claiming.

The new criminal indictment

It’s now clear that the DOJ went on a fishing expedition to find anything they could possibly dig up to pin on Abrego Garcia. The evidence was so weak that, according to ABC News, the local DOJ prosecutor resigned rather than put his name on the filings:

The decision to pursue the indictment against Abrego Garcia led to the abrupt departure of Ben Schrader, a high-ranking federal prosecutor in Tennessee, sources briefed on Schrader’s decision told ABC News. Schrader’s resignation was prompted by concerns that the case was being pursued for political reasons, the sources said.

Schrader, who spent 15 years in the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Nashville and was most recently the chief of the criminal division, declined to comment when contacted by ABC News.

When experienced federal prosecutors walk away from cases because they believe they’re politically motivated, that tells you everything about the integrity of the charges.

But the DOJ pressed forward anyway, transforming a routine traffic stop into something much grander. In their detention motion, two years after police found nothing worth citing, the government now claims:

Over the past nine years, the defendant has played a significant role in an undocumented alien smuggling ring that has resulted in thousands of undocumented aliens being illegally transported into and throughout the United States, including members and associates of La Mara Salvatrucha (“MS-13”), a recently designated Foreign Terrorist Organization, as well as unaccompanied minor children

This represents a remarkable evolution in the government’s case. In 2022: not worth a speeding ticket. In 2025: international human trafficking kingpin.

At today’s press conference about this, Pam Bondi also appeared to accuse Abrego Garcia of being a “child-groomer” and a murderer. When reporters pointed out that the indictment says nothing about such things, she got angry, insisted he’s really bad, and then ended the press conference abruptly.

Everything is backwards

Here, the entire process has been backwards:

The Promise: Rigorous deportation processes targeting only dangerous criminals. Once deported, impossible to bring anyone back.

The Reality: They accidentally shipped someone with no criminal record to El Salvador against a court order barring him from being shipped there. Then, they were able to easily bring him back two and a half months later, as soon as they asked, but only after they scraped together a very weak looking indictment to try to turn him into a criminal.

That’s not protecting Americans from violent criminals. It’s turning people into criminals to justify a monumental fuckup and human rights violation.

#Kento #Rowen #RoninWarriors