LightNews LightNews
joffre.bsky.social
@joffre.bsky.social
160 followers 320 following 880 posts
Posts Replies Media Videos
joffre.bsky.social
His stroke was four days before the May primary, so the timing was impossible there, but he had until August to remove himself from the general election ballot and get replaced by the party.

www.inquirer.com/politics/ele...

www.cbsnews.com/pittsburgh/n...
In the unlikely event Fetterman determined he could not campaign, he would have to voluntarily remove himself from the ballot to be replaced. Then it would be up to the full Democratic state committee to determine who would replace him.
November 14, 2025 at 2:31 AM
joffre.bsky.social
The leaders of this initiative are Progressive Conservatives, and they seem to have a goal to wedge the governing United Conservative Party (formed by a recent merger between the PCs and further right Wildrose) in order to cause a split, purge the separatists, and revive the old PC Party.
Poll showing that 54% of UCP supporters support Alberta separation, and only 39% support remaining in Canada. 2% of NDP voters support separation, and 98% support remaining.
October 28, 2025 at 6:34 PM
joffre.bsky.social
The DK64/Expansion Pak thing is a myth!

www.nintendolife.com/news/2019/11...
Screenshot from Nintendo Life article reading: One such story involves the N64's Expansion Pak, a little device used to double the console's RAM from 4MB to 8MB. The tale goes that a game-breaking, memory-related bug occurred in the 4MB version and forced Nintendo to ship the game bundled with the Expansion Pak. That's a costly bug, and we certainly wouldn’t have wanted to be the one to deliver the news to notoriously fiery then-President of Nintendo, Hiroshi Yamauchi back at Nintendo HQ. That story has become more-or-less accepted fact, although Stevenson believes the truth is more complicated. "This one’s a myth. The decision to use the Expansion Pak happened a long time before the game shipped, in fact we were called in by management and told that we were going to use the Expansion Pak and that we needed to do find ways to do stuff in the game that justified its use and made it a selling point. I think the bug story somehow got amalgamated into the Expansion Pak use and became urban myth." "There was a game-breaking bug right at the end of development that we were struggling with," he clarifies, "but the Expansion Pak wasn’t introduced to deal with this and wasn’t the solution to the problem. My memory is that, like all consoles, the hardware is constantly revised over its lifetime to take advantage of ongoing improvements in technology and manufacture methods to essentially make the manufacture more cost effective and eventually profitable. I think there we’re something like 3 different revisions of the internal hardware by this point and the bug was unique to only one of these versions. We did eventually find it and fix it, but very late in the day."
October 24, 2025 at 6:17 PM
joffre.bsky.social
It reminded me of this joke I saw on IG last week from Alistair Ogden, playing with (and critiquing) the idea that dietary restrictions and digestive issues are somehow woman-coded? We're exploring new frontiers in gender!
White male comedian saying: "Straight guys, we get perks. Like, we don't have dietary restrictions. A lot of women and queer folks have 'celiac', 'lactose intolerance', 'oil sensitivities'." Comedian continuing: "Cis, straight guys, we just have years, decades, of unexplained diarrhea."
October 22, 2025 at 2:49 PM
joffre.bsky.social
Bernie isn't admitting he is wrong *now*.
Tweets from John Bresnahan, @bresreports: An angry Bernie Sanders won’t drop his support for Graham Platner despite a Nazi tattoo on his chest 2/ Sanders said Platner “as a young man” went thru some really difficult experiences” in Iraq and Afghanistan. 3/ Sanders: “I personally think he is an excellent candidate and will support him, and I look forward to him becoming the next senator from Maine.” 4/ When pressed on Platner’s Nazi tattoo, Sanders lashed out at the “corrupt campaign finance system” adding “We don’t have enough candidates in this country that will take on the powers that be and fight for the working class.”
October 21, 2025 at 7:10 PM
joffre.bsky.social
Here's an example that isn't coding-related: someone I know posted this graph, and I wondered if chatGPT would be able to be able to tell what was off about it. At first it critiqued cosmetic stuff, but when I reprompted it, it basically nailed the question: both what's wrong, and the likely cause.
A graph charting "cumulative food price index" for OECD countries from 2015-2025, normalised to 100 for Q1 2025. For most countries, the 2025 price index ends up between 105 and 110. Screenshot of ChatGPT conversation. User prompt: "I mean yeah that's a nice catch but I meant with the lines themselves, the results." ChatGPT answer: "Ah, got it — you mean the results in the chart, not the labeling. Looking closely at the lines: The U.S. (blue) line looks too low compared to what we know. U.S. food price inflation since 2015 has been strong, especially post-2020. By 2024, the USDA’s CPI for food at home is up ~30% from 2015, but here the index only reaches ~107. That suggests the data may have been deflated or adjusted incorrectly. Same with Canada (red) — the increase looks muted. By 2024, Canadian food prices are more like 25–30% above 2015 levels, not just ~10%. Germany (green) rises a bit more, but still looks understated compared to Eurostat data. Meanwhile, some gray OECD countries are shooting up by 20%+ (even 25%) — which is closer to reality. So the likely issue with the lines themselves is: 👉 The author deflated or double-adjusted the price indices (probably using real terms), when these should be nominal indices. A food price index already controls for the base year (2015=100); adjusting further for overall inflation or real dollars flattens the lines artificially. That’s why your friend’s U.S. and Canadian lines look oddly flat — they shouldn’t be trailing the OECD average like that."
October 5, 2025 at 12:01 AM
joffre.bsky.social
Either like this or as a line chart would be actively good. Showing the sensitivity of your outcome to your design choices is good practice, and is pretty similar to a "here's how our RD estimates change with different bandwidth" chart in this Imbens/Kal paper

scholar.harvard.edu/files/imbens...
Fig. 3 in Optimal Bandwidth Choice for the Regression Discontinuity Estimator by Imbens/Kalyanaraman. x axis is different bandwidth widths for a regression discontinuity regression, from 0 to 0.5. y axis is the coefficient for the outcome effect for each of those different bandwidths. Outcomes are plotted as a solid line chart, with dotted lines showing the confidence interval.
September 26, 2025 at 10:33 PM
joffre.bsky.social
Image of a homophobic slug looking unimpressed, with a banner of white text on red background reading "LIVE SLUG REACTION"
September 26, 2025 at 9:09 PM
joffre.bsky.social
Red Army Choir rendition of Bella Ciao, eh?
Screenshot from church website showing bio for the dog, Bella. Top left shows music player, Bella Ciao performed by the Red Army Choir. Left shows image of Bella, a white husky. Banner has "Bella" repeating in a wave, with the tile of the page being "Ciao!"
September 23, 2025 at 12:47 AM
joffre.bsky.social
Unlikely to be him - someone named Tyler Robinson owned the house listed on the FEC form from 2019-2021, when our Tyler Robinson would have been 16-18.
FEC form showing Trump donation by Tyler Robinson at 83 N Lee Ln, St George, UT. Homes.com screenshot showing 83 N Lee Ln was owned by Tyler and Makayla Robinson from Jul 2019-Jan 2021.
September 12, 2025 at 4:49 PM
joffre.bsky.social
Gallup had him in the 60s and 70s for most of the year, brief dip into the 50s when the economy fell off a cliff and Congress passed TARP. news.gallup.com/poll/116500/...
September 3, 2025 at 11:15 PM
joffre.bsky.social
You suggested "the Jordanian model where they've hybridized policing and tribal blood feuds" for discussion, and then a few posts later you said that you had presented "best practices from peers that get better value for money”.
September 1, 2025 at 1:53 PM
joffre.bsky.social
Turns out it's not exactly "data". The registration is real, but they're only *modelling* race, they don't know it.

You can actually guess race pretty accurately from name+location, but once you start slicing and dicing the results on the basis of your predictions...
Tweet screenshot from the source of the table saying: "voter registration data is just going to have “modeled” ethnicity since it isn’t tracked. it’s generally not great but i will play around with it"
August 12, 2025 at 7:45 PM
joffre.bsky.social
Yeah, it'S this Capital One branch.
August 11, 2025 at 11:26 PM
joffre.bsky.social
Not just that, she also took a detour into saying that the future would see ethically-sourced cocaine, but not coffee or chocolate (or bananas).
Also real talk, there's a better chance of ecologically responsible, labor-respecting synthetic cocaine being produced in labs than for coffee beans or chocolate. Sorry, nerds. The future *might* have ethical gram bags but it *definitely* won't have ethical lattes
August 10, 2025 at 11:34 PM
joffre.bsky.social
www.euronews.com/my-europe/20...
UK ninja sword ban begins as 1,000 bladed weapons surrendered in national amnesty From 1 August, it is now illegal to own, sell or import ninja swords in England and Wales, with possession in public carrying up to four years in prison. More than 1,000 weapons have been surrendered under a UK government amnesty aimed at tackling the country's worsening knife crime crisis as a ban on ninja swords comes into force, the Home Office said on Friday.
August 2, 2025 at 11:29 PM
joffre.bsky.social
Looks like this is a favour the government did to doctors, not a prohibition.

www.tfmg.org.uk/news/no-long...
New guidance from the Passport Office: “In the past it was ok to use your Doctor/GP to countersign your application. Due to high demand and complaints received from medical professionals you are now not able to use your registered doctor as a counter signatory (however if you have a friend or colleague who is a doctor this is still permitted).”
July 30, 2025 at 6:49 PM
joffre.bsky.social
Streaming did perform a miracle in getting people to spend money on music again after piracy absolutely killed the recording industry, and a comparable or larger share of those revenues are actually going to rights-holders rather than middlemen.

www.riaa.com/u-s-sales-da...
Chart of US recorded music revenues from the RIAA, adjusted for inflation, broken down by format. Revenues peak in 1999 north of 25 billion, almost all in CD sales. They precipitously decline as CD sales disappear and reach a bottom of 9 billion in 2014. Starting in 2015, streaming starts picking up steam, and revenues rebound to 17 billion in 2021, where they remain in 2022, 2023, and 2024.
July 15, 2025 at 9:44 PM
joffre.bsky.social
La Presse in Montréal does something like that. They created an iPad app back in 2013, and it worked so well for them they switched away from paper entirely in 2016.

They licensed the tech to the Toronto Star, but it flopped and was abandoned there after two years.
Front page of La Presse+, showing four stories in a grid. Opinion column from La Presse+, showing a large hero image and the text in a column taking up 1/3 of the screen at the left. Screenshot from La Presse+ showing various stories in three columns taking up 1/4, 1/2, and 1/4 of the page. The columns can scroll independently.
July 10, 2025 at 6:10 PM
joffre.bsky.social
Just look at the MTA's budget! 4.8B in farebox revenue in 2025.

If you think it costs more to collect fares than the amount collected, you have to think that 2/3 of payroll goes to fare collection and only 1/3 goes to operations. The math can't add up otherwise.

www.mta.info/document/101...
July 9, 2025 at 3:04 PM
joffre.bsky.social
Jeffries was actually neutral-to-positive about Mamdani on the Sunday show he did, but people are focusing on the one gently-phrased bit of criticism - the sentences about "globalize the intifada" in the third screenshot.

abcnews.go.com/Politics/wee...
Let’s start with the big news, Leader Jeffries, out of your hometown. Mamdani won a big victory. Have you endorsed him yet? REP. HAKEEM JEFFRIES (D-NY), HOUSE MINORITY LEADER: I have not. We had a conversation on Wednesday morning where I congratulated him on the campaign that he ran, a campaign that clearly was relentlessly focused on the high cost of living in New York City and the economy. He out-worked, he out-communicated, and he out-organized the opposition. And that’s clearly why he was successful. KARL: So, what’s holding you back from endorsing him right now? JEFFRIES: Well, we don’t really know each other well. Our districts don’t overlap. I have never had a substantive conversation with him. And so, that’s the next step in terms of this process, to be able to sit down, which we agreed to do, in central Brooklyn, discuss his vision for moving the city forward and addressing the issues that are important to the communities that I represent. A very diverse district that I represent in Brooklyn, including many African Americans, many Jewish Americans, many Caribbean Americans who are dealing with a lot of challenges in the city and want to make sure that the next mayor of the city of New York, whoever that may be, is prepared to tackle them. KARL: Mamdani calls himself a Democratic socialist. He proposed, obviously, big tax increases, free mass transit, free bus fares, government-run grocery stores. Is this the kind of progressive socialism it is -- we’re going to see as the future of the Democratic Party or is this unique to New York City? JEFFRIES: I think that one of the things we've been clear about from the very beginning as House Democrats is that we need to relentlessly focus on addressing the high cost of living in the United States of America. This country is far to expensive for working class Americans, for middle class Americans, for all those who aspire to be part of the middle class. Imagine a country where every single, hard-working American taxpayer can afford to live the good life, work hard, play by the rules, have a good paying job, good health care, be able to afford a home, educate your children, go on vacation every now and then, and one day retire with grace and dignity. The good life. The American dream. That is not accessible to everyone. And so, I think it will continue to be important for all of us on the Democratic side to address relentlessly the issue of the lack of affordability in this country. Donald Trump promised to lower costs on day one. Costs haven’t gone down. They’re going up. In fact, the guy is crashing the economy in real time and posing these reckless Trump tariffs that are going to increase costs by thousands of dollars a year. And he may even drive us toward a recession. KARL: You mentioned the diversity of your district, including a lot of Jewish constituents. Mamdani has made comments that some have said veer towards anti-Semitism. His initial statement after October 7th, he criticized the Israeli government but didn’t criticize Hamas. He defended the use of the word globalize -- or the phrase “globalize intifada”. And he even said that the Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu should be arrested -- or he would if he were mayor, he would arrest Netanyahu if he visited New York City. Do these things concern you? JEFFRIES: Globalizing the intifada by way of example is not an acceptable phrasing. He’s going to have to clarify his position on that as he moves forward. With respect to the Jewish communities that I represent, I think our nominee is going to have to convince folks that he is prepared to aggressively address the rise in anti-Semitism in the city of New York, which has been an unacceptable development. And any mayor, whether you’re a Democratic mayor, a Republican mayor, an independent mayor, has got to commit to the safety and well-being of all of the people of the city of New York. And when there are moments of crisis and a rise in anti-Jewish hate, that’s a threshold, of course, that needs to be crossed. With respect to the African American and Caribbean American communities that I represent, it's going to be important for our nominee to articulate the case for dramatically and decisively addressing the rise in gentrification and the housing displacement that threatens to continue to wipe out low- and moderate-income Black and Latino communities in New York City.
July 8, 2025 at 2:20 PM
joffre.bsky.social
They're an energy superpower, apparently. It looks like they and the Netherlands do a lot of the refining for the rest of Europe.

oec.world/en/profile/c...
Chart of Belgian exports in 2023. Largest categories are Refined Petroleum and Petroleum Gas, at 34.9B and 31.9B.
July 8, 2025 at 12:36 AM
joffre.bsky.social
One of the top posts on r/france this morning:

“Is it just me, or is there a pro-AC propaganda campaign going on right now?

[…]

You might say it’s normal because it’s been hot, but it’s not like it’s even the worst heat wave we’ve had this century, and anyway it only lasted a few days.”
C'est moi ou il y a une campagne de propagande pro-clim en ce moment ? Sans rentrer dans le "débat" de si c'est bien ou non de démocratiser la clim en France, j'ai l'impression de voir 5 posts par jour sur r/France, r/écologie, r/opinionnonpopulaire ayant grosso modo pour titre "change my mind on est trop cons d'être anticlim en France". Et même des articles du même style dans différents médias traditionnels comme Le Point. Vous me direz c'est juste qu'il a fait chaud donc normal que les gens parlent de clim, mais bon c'est pas non plus ma canicule du siècle, ça a duré quelques jours seulement, et j'ai pas l'impression d'avoir vu ça lors des précédentes canicules?
July 3, 2025 at 11:57 AM
joffre.bsky.social
Disheartening to see the leader of the Greens attack her over it, too. It would be such a disaster for the French left to go into the next election with “ACs? Psh, we’ll cool cities by planting trees”.

(Translation:
France: going through a historic heat wave
Marine Le Pen’s solution: buy ACs)
Tweet from Marine Tondelier, French Greens leader, quote-tweeting Marine Le Pen’s AC proposal and saying: La France : subit une canicule historique. Le programme écologique de Marine Le Pen : acheter des climatiseurs.
July 2, 2025 at 11:01 PM
joffre.bsky.social
Oh that’s the actual wording they put in the law adopting it (even while conceding it was a “universal” system)! That rocks, real hater energy.
LOI portant modification de l'heure légale française, pour la mettre en concordance avec le système universel des fuseaux horaires. Le Sénat et la Chambre des députés ont adopté, Le Président de la République promulgue la loi dont la teneur suit : Article unique. - L'heure légale en France et en Algérie est l'heure, temps moyen de Paris, retardée de neuf minutes vingt et une secondes. La présente loi, délibérée et adoptée par le Sénat et par la Chambre des députés, sera exécutée comme loi de l'Etat. Fait à Paris, le 9 mars 1911.
July 1, 2025 at 3:00 AM