Really good article. Thank you for posting it.

I can see how it isn’t clear to non-USians, but each state has its own house, senate, and “supreme” or highest court that it elects representatives for at the state level, as well as the federal equivalents you are familiar with.

For example, Warnock and Ossoff, as you rightly pointed out, are federal senators elected statewide in Georgia, to represent Georgia at the federal level in DC. But there are also Georgia state senators who represent various areas of the state in Atlanta at the Georgia State Assembly.

EVERY state has this duplication of representatives for the judicial and legislative branches, and even the executive (governor = state president, if you like) though the names for the state equivalents can vary from the federal.

The way to spot the difference is that the reps will have either US or state in front of their titles, US being federal, and sometimes you have to look closely for it, but it’s always there. Also, there are zero state elected “commissioners” at the federal level, which is another clue: when you hear “commissioner” it’s either state level or a leader specific to a govt agency at any level.

Edited to add: The commissioners mentioned in the article are not state senators, they are representatives on the state’s Public Service Commission, which controls public utilities in the state of Georgia.

A commissioner in Georgia can also be county government, which is another level of possible duplication under the state level (the variation is even wider when you get down to county and city level).

To flip these seats is actually really significant, because local power structures are real, and can be much harder to ever change than even their more visible counterparts at the state and federal level.

If you’re not actively curating your own choice of reading material and are relying on unknown others to make those choices for you, then you absolutely deserve everything you are “forced” to read.

But even that is far too generous: nobody held a gun to your head loaded with the article you clearly did not read, lol.

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I’ve been using Duckduckgo with uBlock for years, so I had no real problems with anything like the hell of Google “sponsored content” until Duckduckgo started putting up their own AI search assistant. Since then I’ve gone from start.duckduckgo.com to noai.duckduckgo.com because I got tired of turning their search assist off and couldn’t reliably block it with uBlock because they kept changing it. (I delete all cookies after every browser session and do not maintain individual app accounts, so their AI settings options were never gonna work for me.)

Because of the way my brain works, I literally don’t even want to see what AI says until I’ve done my own looking. Yet I never failed to turn it off, because I just can’t rely on it.

Usually when I’m looking for something I’m in a hurry, so it’s less trouble for me to just pick my own sources, preferably older than 2023 if possible, and read a bit myself than to spend time getting blithely lied to, or even just suspect hallucination/omission to the point that I think I need to verify it before I can rely on it.

It’s not an exaggeration to say that for me, it is literally faster to skim three or four completely different primary sources than it is to try to verify the assertions in a single search assist paragraph: one is just light reading, the other is point by point comparison of the AI offering against multiple independent sources. So I read.

I’ve never regretted summarizing a topic myself, but I’ve definitely gotten some rotten eggs from AI, both in blatant non-truths AND in holes of omission you could drive a truck through. I won’t make that mistake again. So for me, AI summaries are well worth staying wary of for now.

I can’t judge you for that, I feel like you probably got the very best Copilot has to offer, lol

With 68% of consumers reporting using AI to support their decision making, voice is making this easier. [1]

Does anybody actually believe that 68% of consumers use or even want Copilot? But they included a source for this very generous assertion at the bottom of the page:

[1] Based on Microsoft-commissioned online study of U.S. consumers ages 13 years of age or older conducted by Edelman DXI and Assembly, 1,000 participants, July 2025.

Oh yeah, that’s compelling: US consumers, 13 years old and older. An entire thousand of them!

So the only question I have left is which junior high principal Microsoft “compensated” for this survey, and what happened to the 320 summer school attendees who said fuck you, no anyway.

I followed this tutorial on YT after a failed Win11/Linux dual boot that crashed Win11 completely and only booted into Linux, and it worked perfectly.

Essentially, this guy’s strategy is to create a second EFI partition for the new Linux install, remove the boot flag from the original Windows EFI long enough to go through the Linux install, then put the boot flag back where it was and update GRUB accordingly, allowing GRUB to find and note any other operating systems on the disk. After that both Windows and Linux stay in their own walled spaces and Windows never gets to overwrite the Linux EFI, which is the source of all the misery.

There’s more to the detail, of course, but that’s the gist of it. I have dual-booted Linux with this method solely on single partitioned disks, and never on different disks, so I couldn’t tell you whether a separate disk is a guarantee of anything or not, but after I started deliberately creating separate EFI partitions for dual-boot situations I’ve never had a problem.

This video is specifically for Zorin but I’ve used the same strategy successfully on other distros. He has also done specific dual-boot walkthrough videos for a number of other dual-boot installs and troubleshooting as well, so check the channel if you want to find other distros. I did not see Bazzite specifically, but I saw plenty of Fedora. (No affiliation with this channel, I’ve just used a number of his videos and appreciate the specific care and accuracy he gives his tutorials.) Hope this helps.

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Exactly. And for all of this “the exact lesson from apartheid” we’re all supposed to have taken to heart about the uselessness of non-violent protest, remind me again because it’s been some thirty years since I last heard about it . . . where is apartheid now?

I love when these fifth columnists show up to shit on any individual effort toward change, no matter how tiny, and to shower any “I can” idea with contempt, because it tells me who they are, and confirms that my own infinitesimal contribution, in combination with millions of other like contributions, is anything but useless.

Clearly it does matter what we think, very much.

This AI response is weak.

I’ve been off Reddit totally since 2023, so part of my understanding may be out of date, but before that I was on for many years and watched how powermods became powermods.

Thus this situation is very unusual. Reddit never did anything about the powermod situation before, but now, suddenly, it’s a big deal. For years (over a decade, at least) users have been screaming about the worst abuses on the site being from powermods, and time after time Reddit bent over backwards to not only avoid doing anything about it, but seemed to grasp every opportunity to enhance the problem any way they could, shutting down complaints rather than the power trippin’ bastards that were regularly creating the problems.

Note that powermods very frequently mod the largest subs, which is how they became powermods to start with: modding a sub that got big and then being invited to help mod new subs that then also grew in popularity.

For myself, I don’t think anyone would give two shits if “powermods” only had an aggregate total of 500 users each, but very frequently they have millions, even tens of millions. Looking at the largest subs on the site and the powermods on those subs, and how many of those powemods are crossovers on equally dominant subs, you see the same core group of powermods across all the top sites, give or take a few individually here and there.

Strangely, this is the group Reddit is now disbanding.

Another thing to consider is how many powermods went on to become admins over the years. At least a handful: I don’t know the exact number anymore but it’s non-zero. Powermods who are admins are especially useful to Reddit, because they ensure that the c-suite has direct control over some of the largest subs without ever appearing to do so.

All this is to say that the powermod situation has been mutually beneficial to Reddit admin for ages, which is why they never changed it or even really acknowledged it.

But now, for the first time since 2005, Reddit powermods are suddenly a problem. So what’s changed? Cui bono?

My guess is that Reddit admin is about to a) yank the entire site to the hard right by removing pretty much all effective human moderation and thus preventing powermods from being able to stand in their way across the largest subs (some of which we’ve already seen and the article addresses), and/or b) introduce some other vile change or policy that is certain to piss off EVERYONE, including every non-bot mod on the site, to the point that admin expects a general revolt even among the powermods and need to dilute the individual power of mods in advance.

One very hypothetical change that could do the trick is Reddit forcing mods, including powermods, to quietly engage in collecting evidence of and reporting users and content that admin would like to sell to the current US admin, for example: intel which Reddit is well situated to provide and for which the current administration has already been calling in the wake of a certain recent death. What if Reddit decides to go all in with the present political trajectory, looking for political power as well as the payout they’re usually in it for, and in so doing force mods to comply or lose their subs? It’s not like Reddit hasn’t already done it for less.

Again, these are just my own musings. But whatever the reason, Reddit admin calling it quits with the powermods suggests something much larger than just another light rehabbing of Reddit power structures.

After I didn’t see the mentioned content I looked around Zdnet, and I think you might have meant to link this article instead:

https://www.zdnet.com/article/rebooting-your-phone-daily-is-your-best-defense-against-zero-click-attacks-heres-why/

Bad click, it happens. Good article, though. Thanks!

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The only thing I really want to know about Google’s Protected Audience “alternative information dimension” container is how I can stuff it full of noisy bullshit, removed around with it, poison it as thoroughly as I can, and then cheerfully send it away back to Google as a trojan horse as often as possible – all while maintaining the appearance of operating organically within the parameters of normal function as expected by the Google mothership, so they will gladly hoover up my toxic shit and not stop me from seeing what I want to see outside the interference of their New and Improved intrusive hellscape of data collection and ad serving.

And all this preferably as an automated function via uBlock Origin. Thanks!

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