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If the attendee's description is true and the video is not missing context, then that doesn't appear to be what happened. Interpreting her description and the video, during the public comment period for an unrelated topic, she went through the usual process for giving a public comment, started her completely off-topic written statement, then was arrested during it a few seconds after two attempts by the council to interrupt her, during which she was flipping off the council.

If she was within her allotted time for a comment that was completely off-topic but otherwise complied with the public comment process, and her flipping off the council was, as she claims, only after it was clear that she was going to be interrupted by the police, then that does seem different than actually interrupting the discussion or refusing to leave.

>the US rules are that you can use digital protocols but you must publish the specs so anyone can, in principle, decode the signal.

This restriction does not appear to actually be enforced, eg, if I recall correctly the VARA HF/FM modes do not have published specs anywhere near sufficient to decode them, to the point where there are projects trying to reverse engineer them.

I try to do something like this with my publications, and encourage others to. My goal is to have the pipeline from raw data to complete figures and manuscript in a repository, with cached data for computationally expensive analysis and for stochastic simulation results, and the option for the user to just use those or run the full pipeline, with or without the same random seeds. I just make clear that the code was run-once code and is going to be messy compared to code refined over time and diverse uses. I generally use Zenodo to a GitHub repo, however, in case GitHub decides to do something bad in the future. Making sure things run far in the future can also be a challenge. Sure, you can use a container: will the base of that container be available in 30 years?

And with that said, for experimental work, this approach does not make things fully reproducible; it only makes the analysis reproducible. There are always factors that influence experiments: research is by definition at the edge of our understanding, and reality has countless variables, including ones no one has thought of, known about or thought important.

When I had a Fairphone 4, regulars on the community forum repeatedly reminded everyone that repairability was not a primary goal of Fairphone, ethical consumerism was, and any longevity and repairability was secondary or coincidental.

Yes, that goes against most of Fairphone's own advertising, but it was consistent with my experience of the phone and discussions on the forum: security updates frequently so far out of date that some software could not be run, flimsy components inconsistent with advertising (yes, the battery was nominally swappable, but the snaps on the back would break easily, and support would claim that it was not intended to be removed regularly), parts that were frequently out of stock, and of course, whole new phone designs every generation rather than Framework-like component upgrades.

It seems like they may have improved since then, but those problems, along with the atrocious security (FP4 used AOSP's public test signing keys, with publicly-available private keys, for its firmware) and sketchiness around specs, standards and openness (especially for the camera), generally turned me off the company.

The entire paper is almost certainly Claude-generated, given the clear Claude-speak throughout. It seems like they didn’t even try to have Claude write a polished paper: it reads like Claude writing up a lengthy report, down to the needless sectioning with idiosyncratic title language. There appears to be no disclosure, and the author contribution section appears to falsely claim that a particular author wrote the text.

I know arXiv has taken some measures to combat spam like this, but it seems like they’ll need to do more. There’s just very little barrier now to creating giant slop papers like this and then dumping them anywhere that won’t reject them. It is an insult to everyone’s time, and I can’t imagine they expect people to actually read this. If the expectation is that everyone will use an LLM to interpret it, then maybe they should have at least had a few more rounds of tightening and polishing the paper, even via LLM, to save the redundant token use.

It's just such a bizarre choice that one might hope there would be another interpretation. Why measure a percentage change on sales tax, which varies heavily from location to location, and is not what the associated fees are based on, rather than simple choice of total cost?

The only way I can interpret the percentage is that they are stating the increased cost as a percentage of sales tax rather than a percentage of the sale, such that "26% higher sales tax" in a state changing 10% sales tax would mean paying 2.4% more in total. That choice seems misleading, but does make the percentage make sense.

That’s also very common in the UK, and shows up elsewhere in Europe sometimes. In the UK, they are legally but not practically or socially discretionary. There are some tax advantages for the restaurant and in the ideal case for staff.

>In a world where things such as GLM-5.3, DeepSeek-V4-Pro-0813, and Kimi-K3 exists, this is a bit laughable.

This is not just for security, too. Using Fable for anything that could be remotely construed as being connect to chemistry or biology was impossible until a few weeks ago. Now it is slightly better, but still fails on many completely innocuous projects.

So as other models advance, Anthropic's sole frontier offering to entire academic fields remains an Opus that seems to get worse in capability each release. They're starting to become a joke in my field: at a conference a few weeks ago, one presenter laughed when I asked about his use of Fable and pointed out that it would downgrade if the letters 'd', 'n', and 'a' were anywhere near each other, which is not that far from my experience.

They comment years after immediately closing the bug as wontfix, vaguely talk about users for expressing interest in features while not being willing to open a PR, when people in the thread had actually been asking, over a long period of time, whether they would accept a PR or were just opposed to the feature outright, and say they would welcome community contributions even though they think the feature is unnecessary. Then they immediately lock the issue and delete at least one comment.

I certainly interpreted the response as meaning that anyone actually trying to implement the feature would find the PR an exercise in frustration. It may be there were some cultural confusions about context and implication, but considering that they locked the issue, people weren't exactly encouraged to ask for clarification. And the developers have a sketchy enough reputation already from other incidents.

I think the point is that there is a distinction between calls that are intrusive spam or arguably scams but not already illegal, and calls where the content of the call is itself unambiguously illegal.

Bans on unsolicited calls, or do-not-call lists, can be effective for the former, as it moves the behavior from being legal to being illegal, while for the latter, they are already breaking laws, often in a more severe way, and technical measures or enforcement are more important.

A phone company trying to trick someone into paying more per month for something they don't need is likely to be worried about being fined if caught calling a number on a do-not-call list. A scammer pretending to be the tax office and demanding payment of supposedly unpaid taxes is going to be in trouble if caught regardless of rules about what numbers can be called.