Eric King

@virtualking.bsky.social

324 Followers 1910 Following

Husband 👫, dad 👨, humanist, atheist, veteran, autodidact 📕, software developer, video gamer, desert dweller 🌵. formerly of twitter @mr_eking

Image showing the vote tally for the motion removing all City DEI programs: Kwasman - Yes McAllen - No Whitehead - No Borowsky - Yes Littlefield - Yes Graham - Yes Dubauskas - Yes
Image showing the vote tally for a work-study: Kwasman - No McAllen - No Whitehead - Yes Borowsky - No Littlefield - No Graham - No Dubauskas - No
Excerpt from the Atlantic article "Trump and Musk Are Destroying the Basics of a Healthy Democracy": No one likes bureaucracies, even if they must acknowledge that modern states cannot function without them. But Trump’s contempt for government employees is not driven by some sort of noble, reformist instinct: He distrusts public service because he does not understand it. The president has a solipsistic and binary view of the world in which everything revolves around him, and other people either support him or oppose him. He is unable to comprehend the principle of an apolitical service that must obey the Constitution and the law over the wishes of Donald J. Trump. In Trump’s world, service—including military service—is for suckers and losers. Only saps forgo personal benefit and miss out on a chunky payday in order to be part of something bigger than themselves. The president and his MAGA allies, accordingly, have portrayed diligent government employees as schemers who are part of some nefarious ideological project. In a titanic act of projection, Trump has convinced millions of Americans that their fellow citizens are scammers just out for themselves.
A portion of an upcoming City Council Meeting agenda. It reads: Merit-Based Employment and Discontinuation of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Programs Request: Adopt Ordinance No. 4662 to: 1. Ensure city employees are hired, evaluated, and promoted based on merit, protecting City of Scottsdale employees from unlawful and anti-meritocratic forms of discrimination, and ensuring that residents and taxpayers are served by the most qualified city employees. 2. Discontinue the use of city funds for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) systemic programming, to include the Office of DEI, DEI programming and trainings, and other initiatives that could arguably violate A.R.S. § 41-1494. Training and prevention of unlawful discrimination remains encouraged and shall continue. 3. Direct the City Manager, or designee, to reassign the Diversity Program Director and ADA/Title VI Compliance Coordinator to an appropriate department and position; reflect these changes in the city’s organizational chart; and make the necessary budget transfers and amendments necessary to carry out the intent of this Ordinance. Note: This item was added to the February 11, 2025 City Council Meeting agenda at the request of four or more members of the City Council. Return to In-Person Office Work Request: Adopt Resolution No. 13353 directing Charter Officers and the Presiding City Judge to consider all positions working remotely and develop a plan to return employees to work in a timely manner, at their discretion. Note: This item was added to the February 11, 2025 City Council Meeting agenda at the request of four or more members of the City Council.
Image showing that I was BlueSky user #3,984,443
A photo of a relaxed grey striped cat, laying on the arm of the couch, and staring at me because it's time to be fed.
Screenshot of a portion of the article, highlighting: "OpenAI has found that it can use the large version of Strawberry to generate higher-quality training data to feed into its LLMs. This training data generated from AI is known as “synthetic” data. With this synthetic data, it reduces the company’s need to use text and images from the internet to train its AI models."
A portion of a browser window showing the URL to Google Cloud's "State of DevOps" resource, with the content of the page reading "Service Unavailable" in large text