Like other states, California won’t financially penalize violators, but it will post the names of violators on the state Department of Justice’s website.

Sounds like the state is just giving the violators free advertising to potential donors who want to exploit the practice.

The theory you’re referring to sounds like the free energy principle (or a variation of it).

Yeah. In my case, though, a lot of my library consists of relatively expensive reference works that I use regularly and that would be prohibitive to replace if Amazon decided to play games with them.

Did they mean to say “overzealous”?

Because a “zealous” prosecutor is just one committed to doing their job.

Yeah—I finally got a physical Kindle in part to simplify the process of downloading and backing up my ebooks.

To be fair, though, their devices and apps have mutually-incompatible file formats, so if the only point of downloading a file were to put it on an offline Kindle via USB (which is the only use case they acknowledge), they’d need to know what device you’ve got so they can convert the file to an appropriate format.

I don’t know.

You can put unmanaged files (in a readable format) onto a Kindle via USB, though, so if you’d backed up the file somewhere you could presumably put it back again manually.

They compute the odds of a human ever getting hit by a PBH in the lifetime of the solar system, and it’s… considerably less than the odds of getting a stroke.

There are also Kindle books sold without DRM at the request of the author.

The article links to another article describing the effect of getting hit by a primordial black hole. At their typical assumed speed they’d pass through a planet without stopping, but the momentary distortion caused by their passage would be enough to kill a person in its path.

…and now the strategy behind the couch rumors becomes clear.

The rate at which your hairs emerge from their follicles is constant, but the rate of increase of the total length of the hairs slows down and eventually stops because the hairs naturally wear down over time.

Imagine that your hair is like pasta being extruded into water, and that it slowly dissolves over time. The more time the pasta has been in the water, the faster it dissolves—and it eventually reaches an equilibrium length where the tip is dissolving as fast as the other end is being extruded. But if you cut off the pasta at the extruder and time the new pasta coming out, you’ll measure the full extrusion speed instead of the extrusion speed minus the length-dependent dissolution rate.

The billionaire SpaceX, Tesla, and X CEO claimed the Democratic Party would naturalize enough non-citizens as voters

Naturalized non-citizens like… Elon Musk?

Newsom on Sunday instead announced that the state will partner with several industry experts, including AI pioneer Fei-Fei Li, to develop guardrails around powerful AI models.

That’s reassuring—Li is one of the best-qualified people for the role, and she isn’t in the pocket of any of the major players.

I would distinguish between authorities who engage in ”bad“ behavior that’s inherent to the institutional role they’ve assumed (in which case my negative feelings are directed more toward the institution than the individual), and authorities who exploit their institutional roles to serve themselves.

Abuse of authority.

Any other form of misbehavior might make me feel sad, or sickened, or determined to make things better; but the only time I actually feel angry at the people involved is if they sought out a position of public trust and then betrayed that trust.

Hmm… I could have sworn that the first time I followed the link it went to this page which ends after a few paragraphs with a subscription link. But the page I get now is fine.

(Edit: I see now that I got to that page from a link in your comments, and mistook that tab for the one I’d opened from the main link.)

Anyone want to chime in on the downvotes?

Maybe because the article is behind a paywall?

Zipping a file repeatedly typically doesn’t reduce the size further after the first time.

The Song That Doesn’t End—we’ll finally rescue all those people who started singing it not knowing what it was.

AKA “Why zip doesn’t compress things much any more”.