tal

According to the above Wikipedia article, I don't believe it should be possible to see it with the rods at 60 Hz.

That sounds like another lawsuit.

I think that that's due to stiffness. I don't see how it'd be possible for the arm to be entering the glove on the right.

White House counterterror czar Sebastian Gorka said today that Americans who are not on board with the Trump administration’s immigration policy are “on the side of terrorists."

“It's really quite that simple,” Gorka said in a little-noticed interview with Newsmax. “We have people who love America, like the president, like his cabinet, like the directors of his agencies, who want to protect Americans. And then there is the other side, that is on the side of the cartel members, on the side of the illegal aliens, on the side of the terrorists.”

Amusingly, it sounds kind of like there are some questions about Gorka's own immigration status. Under Afroyim v. Rusk, the government cannot strip an American citizen's citizenship:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afroyim_v._Rusk

Holding

Congress has no power under the Constitution to revoke a person's U.S. citizenship unless he voluntarily relinquishes it.

However, this is predicated upon the citizenship being having been validly-granted in the first place. If the citizenship is later discovered to have been granted dependent upon false representations being made to naturalization, the government can strip it as never having been validly granted in the first place.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sebastian_Gorka

Gorka was born in the United Kingdom to Hungarian parents, lived in Hungary from 1992 to 2008, and in 2012 became a naturalized American citizen.

https://consortiumnews.com/2024/11/26/john-kiriakou-sebastian-gorka-is-back/

As it turned out, Gorka was, apparently, a sworn member of Hungary’s neo-Nazi Vitezi Rend, or “Order of Heroes,” a group that the State Department says was “under the direction of the Nazi Government of Germany during World War II” and which continues to be neo-Nazi in its orientation.

Gorka only became an American citizen in 2012, and membership should have disqualified him not only from citizenship, but even from entering the United States in the first place.

https://www.durbin.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/senators-call-for-investigation-of-sebastian-gorka-after-reports-surface-of-ties-to-neo-nazi-group

Failure to disclose membership in Hungarian anti-Semitic organization could invalidate Dr. Gorka’s U.S. immigration status

WASHINGTON—U.S. Senators Dick Durbin (D-IL), Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), and Ben Cardin (D-MD) today called on the Departments of Homeland Security and Justice to investigate whether senior White House counterterrorism advisor Dr. Sebastian Gorka falsified his U.S. naturalization application by failing to disclose his membership in a Hungarian neo-Nazi organization.

According to the Forward, leaders of the Historical Vitézi Rend have identified Dr. Gorka as a member of the organization who took a “lifelong oath of loyalty.”

“We note that this Administration has expressed a special interest in ensuring that those with extremist views do not exploit our immigration laws,” the senators wrote. “We are deeply concerned by reports that Dr. Gorka concealed the material fact of his membership in the Vitézi Rend, a far-right anti-Semitic Hungarian organization, when he applied for U.S. citizenship.”

I mean, a camera is an easy thing to block, as long as you're aware of it, understand the implications, and have the desire to block it. Just obstruct the lens. Roll of black electrical tape, put a strip over it, done. Now, most people out there may not actually do so...

Only becomes an issue if other services that you actually want are tied to the camera, or if the TV refuses to operate without a usable picture of the viewer or something.

LG TVs will soon leverage an AI model built for showing advertisements that more closely align with viewers' personal beliefs and emotions. The company plans to incorporate a partner company’s AI tech into its TV software in order to interpret psychological factors impacting a viewer, such as personal interests, personality traits, and lifestyle choices. The aim is to show LG webOS users ads that will emotionally impact them.

“As viewers engage with content, ZenVision's understanding of a consumer grows deeper, and our... segmentation continually evolves to optimize predictions,” the ZenVision website says.

Going beyond ads, if you start training AIs on human preference based on mass-harvested emotional data, I imagine that you can optimize output quite considerably. Like, say I have facial recognition being converted to emotional response data, maybe something like smartwatch pulse data, some other stuff, and I go train an AI to try to produce a given emotional output in a viewer. I bet that they can do a pretty good job of that. Like, maybe how to piss people off at a target in political campaigns, build an AI that has a potent ability to emotionally-manipulate and flirt with humans, or ensure that interest doesn't waver in television content by determining at what points people have less interest.

‘within three weeks’

If so, it seems pretty unlikely to me that the people negotiating can be doing much in terms of modifying things from the pre-tariff situation, and Trump is likely to do what he did with NAFTA->USMCA

change very little, and then spend time giving the impression to supporters that he's drastically modified the trade environment (Fox News: "Trump has solved our trade problems that Biden permitted to happen with the best trade deal ever"). I mean, trying to complete any kind of meaningful free trade agreement tends to take far longer than that.

https://www.piie.com/blogs/trade-and-investment-policy-watch/how-long-does-it-take-conclude-trade-agreement-us

Table 1 Duration of US free trade agreement negotiations (in months)

US FTA partner	From launch date to signing	From launch date to implementation
Jordan	4	18
Dominican Republic	6	37
Bahrain	7	30
Oman	10	45
Korea	13	69
Australia	14	22
Israel	15	29
Morocco	16	35
Costa Rica	18	71
El Salvador	18	37
Guatemala	18	40
Honduras	18	38
Mexico	18	31
Nicaragua	18	38
Canada	20	32
Peru	23	56
Singapore	29	37
Chile	30	36
Colombia	31	96
Panama	38	102
Average	18	45

On top of the fact that this would be off-the-charts short for a meaningful FTA in any case, neither of the two "shortening" conditions that were found exist here; it is not a US election year, and while the UK is nominally a monarchy, the monarch holds no power and Parliament is, no doubt, going to be involved in any substantial change in trading relationship.

Despite the small sample, two variables are significant in explaining the delay between launch and signing.

1. A king. Having a monarch reduces the length of negotiation by about half. Only four agreements took less than a year, and three were with Bahrain, Jordan, and Oman. A king surely has more leeway to carry out reforms he deems reasonable. (The fourth was the Dominican Republic’s negotiation to join the Central American Free Trade Agreement or CAFTA, though it benefited from joining late, which may suggest that late entrants to an already negotiated TPP could also face shorter delays.)
2. An election year. Agreements that are signed in a US presidential election year end up taking about 40 percent less time than agreements signed in other years. This makes sense: Negotiating presidents want to close agreements that they started, which will be part of their legacy. The urge to close is real: More than half of the US agreements were signed in election years and of course the TPP, if implemented, will add to that group.

In the UK's case, there was some prior discussion about a UK-USA FTA, so maybe they could bootstrap off that to reduce the negotiation time, but I have a hard time believing that even an administration-friendly, Republican-majority Congress is going to sign off on whatever the Trump administration negotiates in a major FTA without having some kind of input.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom%E2%80%93United_States_Free_Trade_Agreement

I've never really wanted to get a QLED monitor, so I haven't spent time looking at their VRR behavior; sorry. I imagine that there's material out there about it, though.

I have more problems telling Linux to not play audio through my dualsense controller

Open pavucontrol, go to the "Configuration" tab, and for that device profile, choose "Off".

You could also just select something else as default device in the "Output Devices" tab, but disabling the device will keep it entirely off the list of options, if you don't want it used.

I tend to do that with the HDMI outputs on my video cards as these days video cards can stream audio to televisions via HDMI and the like, and I never want to actually use my monitor as an audio output device; I have dedicated, discrete speakers.

I mean, he's a populist. He scores political points by blaming "the elite". That's kind of hard when you're the President, since you are the establishment, and especially when your party holds a trifecta, so he's got to find someone to show himself fighting, be it being in the news over court cases or whatever. Someone else has to be responsible for obstructing what you're doing.

During term one, he kept himself in the news by having legal fights over his "ban immigration from several majority-Muslim countries" thing.

He's got to always be visibly fighting something for that to work. If you aren't in a fight at any given moment, go push on something until you get pushback, and make sure that you stay in the news for it.

I can see flicker in some 60 Hz LED lighting in the corner of my eyes, using the rods in the irises of my eye, when I can't see it using the cones in the pupil. Stick the light in the middle of my vision, and the flicker vanishes. Drove me nuts with some inexpensive, high-power corncob LED light bulbs that didn't have an electronic ballast, just fed wall power directly to an array of LEDs.

Wikipedia says that the cones are more time-sensitive than the rods, which isn't what I'd expect if that were the case. But that's what I experience. Maybe it was the result of the thing getting a sine wave

which is what wall power would input to an LED

rather than a square wave, which is (roughly) what I'd expect a system controlling brightness of an LED using PWM to output. I don't know what else would be unusual about that situation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flicker_fusion_threshold

Different points in the visual system have very different critical flicker fusion rate (CFF) sensitivities; the overall threshold frequency for perception cannot exceed the slowest of these for a given modulation amplitude. Each cell type integrates signals differently. For example, rod photoreceptor cells, which are exquisitely sensitive and capable of single-photon detection, are very sluggish, with time constants in mammals of about 200 ms. Cones, in contrast, while having much lower intensity sensitivity, have much better time resolution than rods do. For both rod- and cone-mediated vision, the fusion frequency increases as a function of illumination intensity, until it reaches a plateau corresponding to the maximal time resolution for each type of vision. The maximal fusion frequency for rod-mediated vision reaches a plateau at about 15 hertz (Hz), whereas cones reach a plateau, observable only at very high illumination intensities, of about 60 Hz.[3][4]

Passing an open hand with fingers extended in front of the light tends to make any flicker more visible, as it makes the moving fingers "judder", as with a strobe light.

The flicker fusion threshold does not prevent indirect detection of a high frame rate, such as the phantom array effect or wagon-wheel effect, as human-visible side effects of a finite frame rate were still seen on an experimental 480 Hz display.[6]

Normally, Congress imposes tariffs, rather than the President.

Trump's authority to impose tariffs is entirely based on him making a very-questionably-legal use of an act granting him authority to act in emergency situations.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Emergency_Economic_Powers_Act

The International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), Title II of Pub. L. 95–223, 91 Stat. 1626, enacted October 28, 1977, is a United States federal law authorizing the president to regulate international commerce after declaring a national emergency in response to any unusual and extraordinary threat to the United States which has its source in whole or substantial part outside the United States.[1] The act was signed by President Jimmy Carter on December 28, 1977.[2]

I think that there is probably a pretty strong argument that LGBT policy in the UK does not rise to the level of an emergency posing an unusual or extraordinary threat to the United States.

California just filed a lawsuit arguing that Trump's use of the act is not legally justified:

https://www.gov.ca.gov/2025/04/16/governor-newsom-files-lawsuit-to-end-president-trumps-tariffs/

SACRAMENTO – Governor Gavin Newsom and California Attorney General Rob Bonta today filed a lawsuit in federal court challenging President Trump’s use of emergency powers to enact broad-sweeping tariffs that hurt states, consumers, and businesses. The lawsuit argues that President Trump lacks the authority to unilaterally impose tariffs through the International Economic Emergency Powers Act, creating immediate and irreparable harm to California, the largest economy, manufacturing, and agriculture state in the nation.

I think that Trump demanding policy on LGBT in the UK as a condition to refrain from imposing tariffs probably only strengthens California's case.