Good discussion of the rationalization of a fascist play. Only one criticism:
But this investigation will become part of the pattern and practice of this administration filled with aspiring fascists.
They’re not aspiring. They’ve sent in the military to take over a city from civilian control under a completely fabricated pretext with an underlying entirely political true purpose. That’s not aspiring fascism, that is fascism.
Vibe coding anything more complicated than the most trivial example toy app creates a mountain of security vulnerabilities. Every company that fires human software developers and actually deploys applications entirely written by AI will have their systems hacked immediately. They will either close up shop, hire more software security experts than the number of developers they fired just to keep up with the garbage AI-generated code, or try to hire all of the software developers back.
Did blockchain solve it? Is blockchain actually pragmatically solving that problem better than existing alternatives? Or is the cost of adopting a blockchain payment system as the primary payment system, with all the risks inherent in it, higher than the benefits when compared to alternatives?
misused
Give me an example of a real world problem that was either unsolved before blockchain solved it, or blockchain solves it better than existing alternatives.
I’ll go ahead and save you “decentralized currency/finance between untrustworthy entities” (i.e. cryptocurrency) because it doesn’t actually (and can’t actually) solve that in the real world. Humans are too error-prone, and an immutable ledger presents too high a risk for business-ending mistakes for any business with any alternative options to adopt it for their primary revenue pathway.
“Generally, what happens to these wastes today is they go to a landfill, get dumped in a waterway, or they’re just spread on land,” said Vaulted Deep CEO Julia Reichelstein. “In all of those cases, they’re decomposing into CO2 and methane. That’s contributing to climate change.”
Waste decomposition is part of the natural carbon cycle. Burning fossil fuels isn’t. We should not be suppressing part of the natural cycle so we can supplant it with our own processes. This is Hollywood accounting applied to carbon emissions, and it’s not going to solve anything.
A balloon full of helium has more mass than a balloon without helium, but less weight
That’s not true. A balloon full of helium has more mass and more weight than a balloon without helium. Weight is dependent only on the mass of the balloon+helium and the mass of the planet (Earth).
The balloon full of helium displaces way more air than the balloon without helium since it is inflated. The volume of displaced air of the inflated balloon has more weight than the combined weight of the balloon and helium within, so it floats due to buoyancy from the atmosphere. Its weight is the same regardless of the medium it’s in, but the net forces experienced by it are not.
The thing is it’s been like that forever. Good products made by small- to medium-sized businesses have always attracted buyouts where the new owner basically converts the good reputation of the original into money through cutting corners, laying off critical workers, and other strategies that slowly (or quickly) make the product worse. Eventually the formerly good product gets bad enough there’s space in the market for an entrepreneur to introduce a new good product, and the cycle repeats.
I think what’s different now is, since this has gone on unabated for 70+ years, economic inequality means the people with good ideas for products can’t afford to become entrepreneurs anymore. The market openings are there, but the people that made everything so bad now have all the money. So the cycle is broken not by good products staying good, but by bad products having no replacements.
It’s mixed with other artificial sweeteners (I know of at least the monk fruit in my pantry) to get better weight to sweetness ratios. Most of the most popular artificial sweeteners are far stronger, sometimes hundreds of times stronger, than sugar. So they mix them with erythritol, which is less sweet than sugar, so you can replace 5g of sugar with 5g of the artificial sweetener in recipes and get the right sweetness.
The author hits on exactly what’s happening with the comparison to carcinisation: crustacean evolution converges to a crab like form because that’s the optimization for the environmental stresses.
As tiramichu said in their comment, digital platforms are converging to the same form because they’re optimizing for the same metric. But the reason they’re all optimizing that metric is because their monetization is advertising.
In the golden days of digital platforms, i.e. the 2010s, everything was venture capital funded. A quality product was the first goal, and monetization would come “eventually.” All of the platforms operated this way. Advertising was discussed as one potential monetization, but others were on the table, too, like the “freemium” model that seemed to work well for Google: provide a basic tier for free that was great in its own right, and then have premium features that power users had to pay for. No one had detailed data for what worked and what didn’t, and how well each model works for a given market, because everything was so new. There were a few one-off success stories, many wild failures from the dotcom crash, but no clear paths to reliable, successful revenue streams.
Lots of products now do operate with the freemium model, but more and more platforms had moved and are still moving to advertising ultimately because of the venture capital firms that initially funded them have strong control over them and have more long term interest in money than a good product. The data is now out there that the advertising model makes so, so much more money than a freemium model ever could in basically any market. So VCs want advertising, so everything is TikTok.
The open availability of cutting-edge models creates a multiplier effect, enabling startups, researchers, and developers to build upon sophisticated AI technology without massive capital expenditure. This has accelerated China’s AI capabilities at a pace that has shocked Western observers.
Didn’t a Google engineer put out a white paper about this around the time Facebook’s original LLM weights leaked? They compared the rate of development of corporate AI groups to the open source community and found there was no possible way the corporate model could keep up if there were even a small investment in the open development model. The open source community was solving in weeks open problems the big companies couldn’t solve in years. I guess China was paying attention.
Fascists are always selfish. The claims about caring about the nation or anything else are always a front. They are the marketing, not the product. The product is always self-enrichment, which is exactly the goal of the Trump regime. They are archetypal fascists.
It’s not disingenuous. There’s multiple definitions of “offline” being used here, and just because some people aren’t using yours doesn’t mean they’re ignorant or arguing in bad faith.
Your definition of “offline” is encompassing just the executable code. So under that definition, sure, it’s offline. But I wouldn’t call an application “offline” if it requires an internet connection for any core feature of the application. And I call saving my document a core feature of a word processor. Since I wouldn’t call it “offline” I’m not sure what I would call it, but something closer to “local” or “native” to distinguish it from a cloud based application with a browser or other frontend.
I think you’ve already answered your own question. Trump’s first presidency was very different from his second. And the key difference is his advisors. No one knew how to deal with Trump in his first presidency, and the overarching pattern above the chaos was his close advisors constantly working against him to protect the system.
In the break between his terms, he found people who would follow any of his directives, no matter how stupid or damaging. Or I should say, they found him. Trump is now being manipulated himself by a group of “loyalists” who stand to gain from the exact chaos Trump was thwarted from doing the first time around. These people know enough about how the systems work to be actually dangerous. And now that his advisors are philosophically aligned with him, he’s actually doing what he says he’s going to do. I would argue the 4 years of a Trump reprieve may have been the worst of all possibilities, because it gave Trump and his new in-group time to find each other and prepare.
But most people weren’t paying attention. Many saw Trump in 2024 just like they saw him in 2016; the counterweight, spoiler, outsider set to upset Washington and get real changes happening. They thought Democrats weren’t helping them enough, and so wanted to upset the apple cart and get someone different in the high seat. They weren’t paying close enough attention to see that this time was actually radically different to all elections before, and I saw many, many people dismissing the warnings as “oh everyone claims their opponents are fascists, or are going to destroy the country.”
So it’s a combination of people not paying attention, as usual, and Trump actually changing how he’s doing things this time in the worst way possible.
Think of bad sleep or insufficient sleep like an injury. In ideal conditions your body heals it at a certain rate. You can make it take longer, or you can even make the injury worse, by not taking care of it, but you can’t make it heal faster. And at some point, if you’re consistently not taking care of it, you’ll make part of your injury permanent.
Similarly with sleep, it’s not a bank balance, it’s damage to your body and brain that you need to repair. And you can only repair the damage with good sleep. You have to get good sleep until you feel better, and then you’ll know you have recovered.
And if you consistently get bad sleep for too long (a week or more), your brain and body will be permanently changed. Like a permanent injury, you’ll never fully recover some of the damage. It’s hard to overemphasize how important good sleep is to your short- and long-term health.
That’s not what a vomitorium was for. I understand the sentiment, but let’s not perpetuate a misunderstanding of Roman architecture/history.
I’m not the person you’re replying to, but I think their point is that the bars don’t scale linearly. The red bar (2014 price) for the McChicken is supposed to represent $1 and the yellow bar (2024 price) ~$3, but the yellow bar is not 3 times the length of the red bar. This means the relative differences between the bar lengths doesn’t match the percent increase number printed above then. This is most egregious comparing relative differences between the McChicken and the Quarter Pounder with Cheese meal: why does a 122% increase look so much worse than the 199% increase?
I suspect the cause of problem is that the small bars were stretched a bit to fit printing the dollar value within then, but if it throws off the visual accuracy of the bars, what’s the point of using bars at all?
They didn’t put in the biggest bid. They put in a bid that was a smaller amount of cash bundled with a waiver from the Sandyhook families that were to get a damages payout that they forgo their damages claim.
The third party evaluating the bids decided this was a better deal for Infowars’ creditors, as that meant more of the bankruptcy money would be going to them, so that’s why it was chosen.
Wormholes modeled with mainstream physics are incredibly unstable, to the point that they collapse before even a single particle is able to traverse them. Proposals for ways to stabilize a wormhole rely on models that have not yet been confirmed by experiment. So any answer you get is going to be little more than conjecture, and I don’t think you can get the scientific rigor it sounds like you’re looking for.
Been the only one in my family for years using Linux, but over the last few months struggles with Windows have basically resulted in all but one computer in the house being migrated to Linux.
Put it on my 10-year-old son’s desktop because Windows parental controls have been made overly complicated and require Internet connectivity and multiple Microsoft accounts to manage. Switched to Linux Mint, installed the apt sources for the parental control programs, made myself an account with permissions and one for him without permissions to change the parental controls, and done. With Steam he can play all of the games in his library.
Only my wife is still using Windows, but with ads embedded in the OS ramping up, and features she liked getting replaced with worse ones, she’s getting increasingly frustrated with Microsoft.
I’m American, not British, but every single item mentioned that public perception is wrong about sounds like it skews toward what would be rightwing propaganda here. If the British right is anything like the American right, then appealing to the politicians misrepresenting the numbers to do a better job stating the facts is a fool’s errand. The misinformation is on purpose.