The Death of the Mind

The History
Before dataclasses were added to Python in version 3.7 — in June of 2018 — the
__init__ special method had an important use. If you had a class
representing a data structure — for example a 2DCoordinate, with x and y
attributes — you would want to be able to construct it as 2DCoordinate(x=1,
y=2), which would require you to add an __init__ method with x and y
parameters.
The other options available at the time all had pretty bad problems:

You could remove 2DCoordinate from your public API and instead expose a make_2d_coordinate function and make it non-importable, but then how would you document your return or parameter types?
You could document the x and y attributes and make the user assign…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://blog.glyph.im/2025/04/stop-writing-init-methods.html

On Monday, Juan Francisco Méndez was apprehended on a street in New Bedford, Massachusetts, after immigration police smashed his car window with a pick-axe and yanked him and his wife out of the vehicle.

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2025/04/17/pcoi-a17.html

COFOE, the Coalition for Free & Open Elections, is now 40 years old. COFOE is a loose coalition of some of the nation’s nationally-organized minor parties, plus other organizations that support tolerant ballot access. The founding meeting to bring such an organization into existence was held February 9, 1985, at 113 University Place, New York. Representatives of the Citizens, Communist, Humanist, Libertarian, New Alliance, Populist, and Socialist Party attended, along with Art Eisenberg of the New York Civil Liberties Union.
The March 16 meeting, also held in New York, created the Statement of Principles.
The May 11 meeting, also held in New York, chose the name “Coalition for Free & Open Elections.”
Back then, before the internet and e-mail,…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://ballot-access.org/2025/04/16/cofoe-is-now-forty-years-old/

On April 14, some overseas North Carolina voters filed their own lawsuit to save their November 2024 ballots from being invalidated. Cooley v Hirsch, e.d., 5:25cv-193. They put out that they followed all the rules when they voted last year. The rules said they didn’t need to enclose a copy of their photo ID. Yet now the State Supreme Court is ordering them all to send such copies in a short time period, or have their votes discarded.

The new case is assigned to U.S. District Court Judge Richard E. Myers, who already has the associated case filed by the State Board of Elections.

External feed Read More at the Source: https://ballot-access.org/2025/04/14/north-carolina-overseas-military-voters-file-their-own-lawsuit-to-validate-their-november-2024-ballots/

The application of political retaliation was part
of Clearview
AI’s initial sales pitch.

External feed Read More at the Source: https://stallman.org/archives/2025-jan-apr.html#12_April_2025_(Clearview’s_sales_pitch)

On April 11, the North Carolina Supreme Court issued an opinion in Griffin v North Carolina State Board of Elections, 25-181 P25-104. This is the lawsuit filed by the losing Republican nominee for State Supreme Court Justice in the November 2024 election. The State Supreme Court allowed thousands of challenged votes to be counted, but disallowed thousands of others that had been cast by overseas and military voters.
Some of the invalidated ballots were cast by overseas voters who had “inherited” their connection to North Carolina. They were born overseas, to U.S. citizen-parents who had been domiciled in North Carolina before they took up residence in other countries. Even though the law has long recognized their ability…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://ballot-access.org/2025/04/11/north-carolina-supreme-court-invalidates-thousands-of-votes-in-november-2024-election-for-state-supreme-court-justice/

The current rapid advances in generative AI are built on three things. Computing power, some clever coding, and vast amounts of training data. Lots of money can buy you more of the first two, but finding the necessary training material is increasingly hard. Anyone seeking to bolster their competitive advantage through training needs to find fresh sources. This has led to the widespread deployment of AI crawlers, which scour the Internet for more data that can be downloaded and used to train AI systems. Some of the prime targets for these AI scraping bots are Wikimedia projects, which claim to be “the largest collection of open knowledge in the world”. This has now become a serious…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.techdirt.com/2025/04/10/ai-crawlers-are-harming-wikimedia-bringing-open-source-sites-to-their-knees-and-putting-the-open-web-at-risk/