activescott's Notes

A plugin driven framework to build WYSIWYG Markdown editor.

The Brennan Center for Justice at NYU Law is an independent, nonpartisan law and policy organization that works to reform, revitalize, and defend our country’s systems of democracy and justice.

We have solutions for democracy’s most pressing problems.

Voting & Elections

Americans still face many barriers to voting. Meanwhile, elections require secure systems and independent administration of the casting and counting of ballots. The Brennan Center fights for voting rights, and we advocate for plans that will safeguard the election system — and the officials who work in it — from attacks and political interference.

Money in Politics

Americans are fed up with the role of big money in political campaigns. The Brennan Center’s solution: small donor public financing to put power back in the hands of individuals.

CloudServer (formerly S3 Server) is an open-source object storage project to enable on-premises S3-based application development and data deployment choice.

Spreadsheets, forms, dashboards, python-formulas, calendars, access rules, collaboration, automations. OPEN SOURCE.

Shortly before the 1956 presidential election, President Dwight D. Eisenhower used a recess appointment to place Brennan on the Supreme Court. Brennan won Senate confirmation the following year.

Due to his ability to shape a wide variety of opinions and bargain for votes in many cases, he was considered to be among the Court's most influential members. Associate Justice Antonin Scalia, who served alongside Brennan between 1986 and 1990, called Brennan "probably the most influential Justice of the [20th] century."[4][5]

Brennan strongly believed in the Bill of Rights, arguing early on in his career that it should be applied to the states in addition to the federal government.[41] He often took positions in favor of individual rights against the state, favoring criminal defendants, minorities, the poor, and other underrepresented groups.

Furthermore, he generally shied away from the absolutist liberal positions of Justices Hugo Black and William O. Douglas, being very amenable to compromise in order to win a majority of Justices.[42]

he believed that the deliberate taking of human life by the state, as a punishment, was inherently cruel and unusual.

In Glass, the Court chose not to hear a case that challenged the constitutionality of the use of the electric chair as a form of execution. Brennan wrote:[47]

Th[e] evidence suggests that death by electrical current is extremely violent and inflicts pain and indignities far beyond the "mere extinguishment of life". Witnesses routinely report that, when the switch is thrown, the condemned prisoner "cringes," "leaps," and "fights the straps with amazing strength." "The hands turn red, then white, and the cords of the neck stand out like steel bands." The prisoner's limbs, fingers, toes, and face are severely contorted. The force of the electrical current is so powerful that the prisoner's eyeballs sometimes pop out and "rest on [his] cheeks." The prisoner often defecates, urinates, and vomits blood and drool.

Brennan concluded by stating that electrocution is "nothing less than the contemporary technological equivalent of burning people at the stake."

Brennan wrote the majority opinion in Roth v. United States which set new standards for obscenity laws, allowing some prosecutions, but drastically loosening the laws overall.[48] He later reversed his position in dissent in Miller v. California arguing that obscenity laws were unconstitutional.

He is regarded as one of the most liberal justices in the history of the court.[54]

Mamdani has said New York City’s legal department is discussing the possibility of arresting Netanyahu when the prime minister is in the city to attend the United Nations General Assembly.

“I believe that Prime Minister Netanyahu belongs in The Hague,” Mamdani told The New York Times’ “The Interview” podcast.

“He’s a war criminal who has been charged by the International Criminal Court. And what you will find is that is an opinion that is held by many purely because of what his actions have wrought over these last many years,” the mayor said.

Trump, in a Truth Social post on Monday, said, “Benjamin Netanyahu will not be arrested, in any way, shape, or form, while in the United States of America.”

The ICC issued an arrest warrant for Netanyahu on Nov. 21, 2024, alleging he is “responsible for the war crimes of starvation as a method of warfare and of intentionally directing an attack against the civilian population” in Gaza, as well as “crimes against humanity of murder, persecution, and other inhumane acts from at least 8 October 2023 until at least 20 May 2024.”

AIFoss covers open-source AI tools for people who want to run AI without handing data to a third-party API. If a tool requires a cloud account to use, it's not in scope here.

Why this site exists

Open-source AI moves faster than any publication can track, and most coverage is either a GitHub README written by the maintainer or a 10-minute YouTube install video. We do something different: structured comparisons, documented test configurations, and honest assessments of what each tool is actually good at versus what it claims.

What you'll find here

• LLM runners — Ollama, llama.cpp, LM Studio, vLLM, Tabby: feature comparisons, performance tradeoffs, when to use each.
• Image generation — ComfyUI, Automatic1111, InvokeAI, Fooocus: workflow depth, hardware requirements, upgrade paths.
• Coding assistants — Continue.dev, Cline, Aider, Tabby: setup guides, model pairings, honest productivity assessments.
• Self-hosted stacks — Open WebUI, Flowise, n8n, Langfuse: integration guides and real-world deployment patterns.

GPU benchmarks, local LLM tutorials, ComfyUI workflows, and self-hosted AI guides for the home lab crowd. Tested on the cards you can actually buy.

The Liberty Phone exists alongside our regular Librem 5; it’s the same freedom you’ve grown to trust with Purism products, it’s the same operating system (PureOS), the same software, and the same privacy protections built in; the Liberty Phone adds a highly controlled secure supply chain.

Real convergence means bringing your desktop computer with you wherever you go. When we talk about how we have invested in convergence with PureOS we start with the desktop OS and shrink it down to your pocket.

A whole mobile operating system experience, that is yours.

A free and open-source operating system for various devices, based on the Android mobile platform.

We’re making a statement by offering The Fairphone (Gen. 6) and Fairphone 5 with /e/OS pre-installed on our webshop.

We build desirable, open source, privacy-enabled smartphone operating systems

STIHL

and development in
the region’s most populous counties (King, Pierce, and Snohomish)
has led to an expansion of impervious surfaces, which in turn
increases stormwater runoff and degrades water quality from
pollutant loading. Comprehensive restoration plans and policies
have been developed to address water quality degradation
associated with urban development and increased stormwater.
The Puget Sound Urban Tree Canopy and Stormwater Analysis
Project is designed to enhance the discussion around those plans
and policies, with information about the role tree canopy plays in
managing water quality and quantity in the Puget Sound region.

Key findings from the comparison, presented in further detail in this report include:
1. In nearly all modeled scenarios, i-Tree Hydro yielded lower runoff volumes, and therefore a lower benefit of tree canopy than WWHM.
2. Increase in tree cover over impervious surface results in decreased runoff volumes.
3. Development that includes tree retention results in reduced runoff volume compared with development without tree retention.
4. Scenarios where tree canopy is replaced with any other land cover type, including herbaceous layers or impervious area, result in
increased runoff volume.
5. Areas with higher existing tree canopy coverage experience a lower magnitude of runoff volume when tree canopy is reduced.

With expertise from urban forestry program and policy managers, supplemented by analysis from i-Tree Hydro, decision
makers can more effectively factor in the impact of a decrease in tree canopy and an increase in impervious surfaces in the planning stages
of development projects involving changes to land cover. Including tree canopy in the discussion opens the door for forward-looking
strategies, including forest retention and canopy enhancement as a complement to mitigation strategies in a particular jurisdiction

King Conservation District is a nonregulatory, special purpose district, funded by you, with a mission to promote the sustainable use of natural resources through voluntary stewardship in King County. We provide technical assistance to private residents in forest management, farm conservation planning, wildfire preparedness, and streamside and shoreline enhancement. We also work with cities and other organizations to support community gardens, urban forest canopy, and local food systems. You don’t have to go it alone, your local conservation district can help.

Google, clearly, knows what it’s getting into. This story from The Times on Wednesday reports that Google, working with Intel and Sony, is also working on a competitor to Apple TV (and thus the iTunes Store for video). The unofficial partnership Apple and Google forged a decade ago grew during a period when the two companies were focused on very different markets. Now, their sights for the coming decade are on the same markets: mobile computing devices and entertainment. Post-PC computing, if you will.

Apple faces more decisions than Google in such a war, because Apple has products that use Google services; Google doesn’t have products that use Apple services. Those rumors that Safari and/or MobileSafari might switch to Bing as the default search engine? I give more credence to them now. The problems for Apple there are that (a) Microsoft is every bit as hell-bent as Google to take on the iPhone; and (b) Bing, improved though it may be, is not as good a search engine as Google.

I can’t see Apple building its own search engine, but perhaps they really are building their own maps service — hence their purchase of PlaceBase last July.