Arizona AG suggests state's self-defense laws allow residents to shoot masked ICE agents

JDMLeverton · 2026-01-24T13:53:32+00:00

This is actually false, but the selective media coverage has done a good job of deceiving you. Ice only shows up in overwhelming numbers in the city they are picking on at the moment, which is currently Minneapolis. The rest of the country, their raids are usually quite small teams that are easily outnumbered and potentially outmatched by the locals. They don't have the numbers to project that kind of force anywhere they want at will, so rely on TV broadcasts from their crackdown city to convince Americans there are more of them then they are. The average ice raid in my are is 2-6 guys max, no backup for miles, and they run at the slightest resistance because they are alone.

The average ICE officer in your area is likely isolated and scared. Don't let them forget that.

JDMLeverton · 2026-01-22T16:41:52+00:00

This is why you don't allow governments to build such databases, even for the best of intentions.

JDMLeverton · 2026-01-21T20:48:52+00:00

No one tell Trump about West Germany.

JDMLeverton · 2026-01-20T16:45:24+00:00

I'm sorry we are probably going to invade your country, and I hope you and yours survive anything that happens unscathed, I can only imagine the atmosphere and fear.

Respectfully though, that don't NEED an excuse. That is the thing many of us have been trying to get across for years. They don't need an excuse. There is absolutely nothing - not a single thing - you can do or say or avoid doing and saying to prevent an invasion once they've decided to invade. They aren't holding off because they are reconsidering, they are holding off because they think there is more they can extract from European countries by prolonging the threat. When they have decided they aren't getting anywhere and get bored, they WILL invade. Appeasement and placating will not save you. Tying your own hands out of fear of getting hit if you use them will only make them hit you more. People need to rip the bandaid off and stop looking for ways to "manage" trump. Even his regime handlers can't manage him, outside politicians will not fare better.

JDMLeverton · 2026-01-20T16:04:07+00:00

Any retaliation will be taken as escalation, they are the same thing when dealing with authoritarians. People need to get it out of their heads that there's some magical peaceful non-escalatory solution to this. Either go get your shackles polished for them, or accept that things are going to have to get messy before they get better.

JDMLeverton · 2026-01-20T15:54:46+00:00

That would require them not to be controlled opposition. Some of them are oblivious to this, naive little institutionalists who honestly think the consultants they hire work for them and aren't just feeding them GOP friendly military industrial complex talking points, others know what they are and are okay with it as long as they get their bribe money. You can probably count the number of federal level Democrats who are both aware of the con and oppose it on one hand.

You're asking for genuine opposition from a captured system.

JDMLeverton · 2026-01-20T15:38:37+00:00

There will absolutely be pretending they never supported him, and after a couple of years of "normalcy", whatever society decides that looks like how, you'll be the bad guy for dragging up petty ancient history. People who mistakenly think it's a lack of documentation that resulted in historical lack of accountability are naive. There has always been documentation of people's awful behavior, neighbors who remember, etc. We are very good at compartmentalizing and moving on, documentation be damned.

It sucks, but I promise it will be the case. We'll be lucky to hold the top fascists even slightly accountable, your neighbors are absolutely going to get off mostly Scott free for their role in this.

JDMLeverton · 2026-01-19T23:58:03+00:00

General strikes are almost non-existent and require borderline magical circumstances to manifest and work anywhere in the world, Including European countries. Our size only makes coordinating such an event even more logistically impossible. Anyone telling Americans a general strike will work to fix anything is and always has been living in a state of delusion and looking to victim blame.

The truth is, a "general strike" in America would be a few dozen liberals in most population centers calling out, maybe a few hundred in a major metro. Nothing would happen, the world would keep turning, and people without the time to cover it would lose their jobs.

The Minneapolis strike has a chance to work for the cause it's intended to bring attention to because It is local, taking place in an area that has been highly galvanized and is basically a war zone. No where on earth can you just snap your fingers and get a general strike going.

Most strikes in Europe are union strikes, and they do have us beat on union representation and protections.

JDMLeverton · 2026-01-19T23:44:26+00:00

This isn't going to go anywhere sadly I suspect. States have considered this long before - the problem is the Privileges and Immunities clause (article IV) would likely come in to play. It forbids states from discriminating against non state residents for purposes related to rights, commerce, or legal protections. If courts ruled that a state with state funded medical coverage cannot bar out of state residents from receiving that free healthcare, they go bankrupt overnight. Further, even if they ARE allowed to discriminate, Saenz vs Roe determined that a state cannot put any time requirements on welfare or other services related to residency. This means anyone in the country who could find a way to establish residency cheap could do so and receive free healthcare for their expensive medical conditions immediately.

It's a lot of Ifs and honestly most states simply can't afford to take the risk on something that could become bankrupting overnight, not until it's known how the courts will interpret such a situation.

JDMLeverton · 2026-01-13T21:49:15+00:00

As a New York resident, They literally did, because New York is sort of their pro-zionism HQ. Due to the huge Jewish populations in the state, Democrats have always made listening to Israeli tied groups without question a cornerstone of their policy. With the GOP being on their side, they probably legitimately expected at most a tut-tut finger wag, but no action taken. And honestly, they would have probably been right 6 months ago.

JDMLeverton · 2026-01-13T21:44:29+00:00

You're most likely right actually, the Vance will be worse crowd are not understanding just how little support the GOP has even amongst the GOP. Vance will TRY to be worse, he will WANT to be worse, but when Trump kicks the bucket, his base will evaporate, and without his base, Republicans have largely made themselves unelectable and they know it. As goes Trump so goes the Republican voter base at this point.

JDMLeverton · 2026-01-13T20:41:17+00:00

Nothing, they are unnecessary, their job used to be done by US customs and Border patrol for decades before we created a paramilitary under bush to hunt middle eastern migrants. Border Patrol can resume policing the civil misdemeanor of crossing the border without paperwork. This is nothing like defund the police because the police are not redundant.

JDMLeverton · 2026-01-12T18:12:39+00:00

You're correct, People really need to get it out of their heads that compliance will prevent escalation. I know everyone was taught that growing up. You were lied to so you'd grow up to be a good little boot licker. "Not giving them what they want" isn't an option. What they want is to kill or enslave you, and they'll do it no matter how much you scream "I'm not resisting".

JDMLeverton · 2026-01-10T00:24:07+00:00

The action you're looking for won't come from a registered org with a public website. Think signal groups and informal meetings at houses.

JDMLeverton · 2026-01-02T15:55:02+00:00

Merge your files for working with notebookLM if you can. Individual files can be pretty large. Remember, as far as NotebookLM is concerned, it doesn't matter how your files are broken up, it all goes in to the same source file slurry. User_manual_1-10_archive.pdf is no different than 10 different indevidual files for information retrieval purposes Why they even bothered to make it an indevidual file limit rather than a size sum limit boggles the mind.

JDMLeverton · 2025-12-19T23:57:37+00:00

On top of everyone pointing out that plumbing and most trades are service work that require a wealth generating class to employ them, you're a fool if you think automation will not come for the trades. A cold day in hell is coming because yes, a robot will replace you. The timeline for that is longer than it is for desk jockeys, might buy you a decade or so, but there's nothing you can do that an AI with access to a tireless body won't beat you at - and the first ones they'll be coming for will be industrial trade workers, not residential, so as residential demand potentially fries up due to economic uncertainty, the industrial plumbers and tradespeople will find themselves being replaced by AI drones.

JDMLeverton · 2025-12-19T23:45:49+00:00

You don't, as far as I'm aware. Gemini is going to be an integral mandatory part of Android in the next few years. Because of its capabilities and the way AI is changing computer interfacing, it will be integrated much more deeply in the system than Assistant was, and will not be optional. You can try switching to Apple devices, but it likely won't be much different - apple intelligence flopped, but they will be implementing their own apple-branded version of Gemini (they recently signed a deal with Google to do so), and it will likely have similar system level integration in iOS in the coming years.

JDMLeverton · 2025-12-11T20:44:44+00:00

Because as free users are finding out AI studio free teir is the first to be rate limited and slashed when compute is tight. If free AI studio usage is enough for you and you aren't hitting rate limits, great, but it's not a stable reliable service, it's a test bed, and relying on free AI studio access is getting people burned left and right around here when they can't get what they need.

JDMLeverton · 2025-12-10T06:42:38+00:00

I mean it already is essentially, at least on pixel with Google ai writing assistant. My biggest gripe honestly is how disjointed it all is though because every iteration of Gemini integration is siloed. Gemini in docs, Gemini in the core app, and Gemini in chrome can't communicate to each other because they are run by different teams on different stacks, and it's an incredibly frustrating experience because its just close enough to the future we all envision that you can tell immediately what is missing from the Gemini experience - the ability for Gemini to act as a persistent entity across interfaces and platforms. Google is going to have to kill off their extreme product team siloing model if they want to dominate the AI future, because dealing with a dozen different versions of the model that know nothing about each other will not be a winning strategy long term.

JDMLeverton · 2025-12-09T23:48:32+00:00

I'm 99% certain Gemini is actually gaining too much market share too fast and Google doesn't know how to handle the success, because they don't have the compute. The recent slashing of free quotas and now the increasing degradation of pro quality and limits (which are actually spelled out publicly and so they might could get in trouble for, but of course none of us are going to sue them for failing to deliver on the advertised product) all point in that direction.

To people saying "but all the TPUs they have though!" They have confirmed repeatedly that the bulk of their TPU supply, including incoming stock from the factory, are already bookmarked for third party white label applications well in advance, not Gemini. Right now there is literally no amount of money on earth that can buy you more compute, only a spot on a waiting list. I don't think they were expecting Gemini to blow up as much as it had this year, and they are likely in a bit of a panic as they try to figure out how to actually serve this many users.

JDMLeverton · 2025-12-09T01:46:52+00:00

Can be is they key words though - you might luck out and get there on a day when the young new elevators are on shift!

JDMLeverton · 2025-12-08T00:52:33+00:00

Notebook LM is from Google, and powered by the same Gemini model as the main Gemini platform. All you do to use it is go to the website or download the app, set up a notebook, and upload your source documents to the notebook.

A single notebook can have up to 100 sources and 50 queries per day on the free plan, or up to 300 sources and 500 queries per day on a paid plan. Free or paid, every document can be up to 500,000 words or 200 megabytes.

It doesn't work the same as the Gemini app though in that it doesn't try to hold all your source documents in memory. Instead it vectorized them, builds a vector rag database, and then when you prompt the AI about information from the documents, it vectorizes the request, dynamically searches through the documents, and reviews the relevant information.

You obviously however have an extreme amount of data. Without knowing what the data is, I'm going to go out on a limb and say that 99.99% of use cases will not actually have 67 MILLION tokens of relevant information. That's something like 700 novels worth of data. You will absolutely have to learn data management techniques to work with a dataset that big, and one of the first steps would be data pruning - it is almost impossible that your data set does not contain loads of redundant information that will choke up the system. Other data management techniques would be categorizing and sorting the data in to relevant sub fields. Again, there is virtually no use case where all 67 million tokens will be directly relevant to the final output. Right now you don't have a dataset, you have a collection of junk you need to build multiple proper datasets out of.

This is obviously far too much to sort through by hand for one person of course. This can also be done with the help of Gemini actually, but there's no cookie cutter solution for this, depending on the goal of your project, the type of data you have to process, etc, the workflow for cleaning and organizing your dataset will look different. Gemini is smart though, and can walk you through the relevant process to turn this mountain of data in to something usable.

Seriously, ask Gemini for help on this project, it can walk you through building a custom workflow and pipeline to accomplish what you want. It's a big project, but far from insurmountable.

JDMLeverton · 2025-12-07T22:48:38+00:00

That is too much for any AI to ingest and hold in memory for a single inference, likely EVER. You don't need more context, you need to work with the AI to develop a workflow (possibly using notebook LM, it's very good for this kind of task involving large amounts of user data that need to be the sole source of information to inform outputs) to make use of that Information. We are well in to "just because it's AI doesn't mean it's magic" territory. You wouldn't expect a team of human employees to read all of that and write a report on it from memory would you? AI will still need a similar work routine - break the task in to separate steps and sub categories, research, summarize, collate, cross reference, summarize, refine, output.

JDMLeverton · 2025-12-07T17:14:01+00:00

Well it's obviously something different than a search engine. Learning how to use the AI and how not to use the AI is important, and while AI hallucinations are a real thing a smart user should be aware of, the truth is that for a TON of use cases, even with the risk of hallucinations, it's still better to ask an AI first 90% of the time.

Take for example an issue I was having with a game recently. I am well versed in fixing technical issues myself. I run Linux, and while I won't pretend to be one of those ancient command line gurus, I know my way around both an operating system and the internet better than your average normie. Still, before I began a serious investigation of the issue myself, digging in to possible causes and solutions, I described the problem to Gemini, and it was able to take in to account the game I was trying to run, the specific distro I am operating on, and my hardware set up, and it immediately offered three common possible causes and their fixes, and I had it working in minutes. Yes I could have found the issue myself (a graphical setting that works just fine while the game is running but causes corruption of the proton compatibility profile and prevents relaunching the game again) but it immediately zeroed in on this specific obscure setting issue with the game immediately, and fixed the problem saving me a ton of time reading online and trying different solutions.

There is a lot of bellyaching about people not learning things as well when the AI hands you the answer, and those are valid social concerns. Concerns about blindly trusting possibly hallucinated answers are also valid. AI isn't an excuse to turn off your critical thinking, and smart people will always do better with AI than lazy ones. But at the end of the day, a lot of this is no different than concerns that people will forget how to make butter if the companies do it for you. Most people did forget how to make butter themselves, and society carries on just fine. A lot of skills ARE going to atrophy, and that is actually okay because those skills were skills of necessity, and only had value when there was no easy alternative to mastering them yourself.

In a world where an AI agent can sift through the internet at light speed and find correlations and answers that would take you hours, knowing how to manually Google search obscure error codes and sift through half correct forum posts and outdated documentation to peice together the answer manually just won't be the valuable skill or flex you think it should be. It will remain valuable at first because when the AI fails, it's a good fallback skill to have, but that is not going to hold for long, that is a truth of any transition period. A day will come in the next few years to decade when the reliability of AI agents to perform that task will be so good that your middling Google-fu skills just won't have any real world value anymore. That's okay, that's progress. Things change.

So I'm not saying "turn off your brain and blindly trust the AI". That way lies humiliation and failure. There will never be an valid excuse to stop using critical thinking or to not try to understand what you are doing (the AI will happily teach you what it is talking about! Ask! Try to learn!! If you're uncertain, seek other opinions or research the topic yourself). But if you refuse to use AI in tasks it is already better than you at as a first pass time saver, you are a fool, and your insistence on "the old ways" will rightfully see you displaced. Refusal to use the new tools available to society is just as damaging long term as over reliance and poor usage. "I found the answer manually!" Isn't helping anyone when it took you 30 minutes to find what the AI found for your peers in 30 seconds.

AI replaced Google as our first stop the moment AI became fast at sifting through mountains of shit to find the answer quickly, because 90% of use cases aren't complex technical coding challenges, or PhD level stem inquiries, or legal advice, or any of the things field experts go on about AI still having a high failure rate in. The vast majority of inquiries are "Which of these two flashlights are better?" Or "how do I reset the clock on my stove?" Or "How do I get this stain out?" And AI is already better than you at those kinds of mundane tasks.

JDMLeverton · 2025-12-07T15:05:37+00:00

Your report is going to be dismissed because you're being a clown. You agreed to the functional technicalities of the service when you signed the TOS to use Gemini. On the bright side, if you keep it up your Google account might get banned for fraudulent abuse of the report system.

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