ignirtoq

Campaign promises from fascist populists are always made in a superposition of joke and serious. They only resolve to one or the other when they get in office, and most of the time as a supposed “joke” to humiliate the opposition or an exaggeration to “make a point” because on the campaign trail they say whatever they think will get them votes, not what they plan to do or even think is possible.

The most frustrating of the unkept promises are those that are logistically and practically possible, but never happen because the now-leader is a fascist and doesn’t do anything without personal gain, and they can’t figure out how to exploit the implementation for themselves. Not what’s happening in this case (there was never an actual path for peace with Russia, regardless of timeline), but has happened with other Trump promises.

Intent matters, and methods matter. But I think what the friend is missing is that the methods aren’t bad; op is using methods developed from scientific analysis of abused animals with the intent to ethically care for them. Coming back to intent, she clearly wants to help this guy who her training is identifying as having some kind of background of abuse. The methods might be a little crude in the sense that they were developed for animals and not for people (who are animals, but animals with several distinct qualities from other animals, like the ability to communicate complex ideas), and there are different, more well-adapted methods for people, but they’re only crude in comparison to those modern human-focused methods. They’re still quite effective, and I would still consider them ethical for use on humans when paired with an altruistic intent, which she seems to be conveying. As long as she still views the guy as fully a person, a peer, then I see nothing wrong here.

The criminal networks will just immediately switch to VPNs and using end-to-end encryption services hosted in another country. VPN technology for phones is already available and has been for a while. On day one this legislation will be useless for its primary (purported) purpose. No exceptions or winner-choosing necessary.

Then they’ll go after VPNs with the argument of criminals using the technology to skirt law enforcement backdoor requirements in end-to-end encryption.

I cannot imagine already being married and going through that tectonic of a shift of worldview. I had pretty much figured out I couldn’t be Christian by the time I got to college and met the woman who would become my wife. She was still very strongly Christian, and I was okay with that and didn’t push anything. I’m just a naturally curious person and read a lot of nonfiction and like to talk about what I read, and she is a naturally curious person, too, so she would enjoy the conversations. And after talking about the history of philosophy and philosophical ideas and how that intersected with religion, she had a worldview-shattering realization that the concept of the soul wasn’t handed down by God to early Christians, it was borrowed from non-Christian philosophy that was around at the time in roughly the same geographic area. It was another in a long line of philosophical diffusion of ideas that happens everywhere all the time in human history. Nothing intrinsically earth-shattering in itself to students of history, but that was her equivalent of Rhett’s evolution moment.

It was devastating to her, and it took years for her to figure out who she even was after that. I think it worked out as well as it did partly because I came from the other side and had already thought through a lot of the questions (What is morality without God? What brings value to our lives without God? Etc.) and could help anchor her and prevent nihilistic spirals while she figured herself out. I can’t imagine being married to someone still very much entrenched in the worldview I realized I had to abandon. I honestly think I would be terrified of how they would react: I came into my realization on my own, and so it came as an internal struggle, but now presenting this major change in myself and the way I want to lead my life to my partner, I represent in a way an external threat to their worldview and their way of life. In the face of that kind of threat, people can act drastically differently from the kind of person you have come to know them as through normal interactions. And however they react, it’s going to set the course for the rest of both of your lives.

I’m going to have to watch the full interview.

What’s the y-axis, and how exactly are you measuring it? Anybody can draw an exponential curve of nothing specific.

He never actually says that exact phrase in the books. It’s a cultural misquote, like “beam me up, Scotty,” that somehow caught on in popular culture but wasn’t in the original source.

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People are making fun of the waffling and the apparent indecision and are missing the point. Trump isn’t flailing and trying to figure out how to actually make things work. He’s doing exactly what he intended: he’s holding the US economy for ransom and building a power base among the billionaires.

He used the poor and ignorant to get control of the public institutions, and now he’s using that power to get control over the private institutions (for-profit companies). He’s building a carbon copy of Russia with himself in the role of Putin. He’s almost there, and it’s taken him 2 months to do it.

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.

https://shop.freetheocean.com/products/biodegradable-dental-floss-picks

We’re importing too much of our lumber from a foreign country (Canada), which is a national security risk to the lumber-consuming parts of our economy. I wish I were joking.

Antiwordle #1153 8 guesses

⬛⬛🟨⬛⬛ ⬛⬛🟨⬛🟥 ⬛⬛🟨🟨🟥 ⬛🟥⬛🟨🟥 🟨🟥⬛🟨🟥 🟥🟥⬛🟨🟥 🟥🟥🟥⬛🟥 🟥🟥🟥🟥🟥

My best yet.

Actually Kevin Smith finally got them back. That’s why he’s doing a Dogma tour and has talked about potentially doing more stuff with that IP.

The Angry Birds movie exceeded my expectations by quite a bit for being inspired by a mobile game.

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.

You’re right on all counts. The last 4 years they’ve finally perfected the propaganda bubble they started after the impeachment of Nixon, so they don’t have to hide anything anymore. They don’t have use loopholes, or hidden time bombs, or anything. They can straight up say the quiet part out loud, and put on paper exactly what they want, and their media will just bald-face lie about it to the public, and there are no consequences.

Hell, they released their whole plan (Project 2025) with nothing redacted or disguised in euphemism or anything, a full year before the election, so everyone had plenty of time to see the full, real picture, and they still won quite handily. I don’t know how we recover from this.

Why would I pronounce something with rules of English that’s not an English word? When I say the word jalapeno, I pronounce the tilde on the n even though in English it’s neither written with the tilde nor written with a letter combination that would produce that sound through standard English spelling.

In relation to English, it’s the “ng” sound in the common “-ing” ending or suffix.

Wikipedia has an entire article on it (of course): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiced_velar_nasal

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.