Technically true but irrelevant.

A majority of Americans do not give a shit about Danemark and would not lift their pinky to help one of their staunchest allies. That is true.

MAGA is a (large) minority. That is also true.

This is all enabled by a very sizeable chunk of Americans being literally mentally unable to conceptualize people outside their village as living, breathing, fully conscious people deserving of love and safety. They are colloquially known as “non-voters”.

Compared to which alternative?

We know exactly what they are doing already. Watching the trains go by to Dachau saying “better them than me”. Watching their sons and daughters go to war saying “well I’m not really political”.

Feckless cowards. They bear full responsibility for the current situation yet you can’t count on them to do anything they aren’t made to do.

So half your country won’t be moaning and denouncing and overall being sad next time and assassination attempt is made against Trump, right?

… Right anakin?

Yeah, right.

Netanyahu did not show up at the border unannounced saying “let me through or else”. He got permission ahead of time. Had he not gotten permission, he would have had to find another country who did or gone around. Especially for Greece and Italy which don’t really stand in his way, the Mediterranean is right there!

Even assuming that Netanyahu calls the bluff and flies through, there are a lot of options ahead of all-out war. For instance sending jets to “intercept” his plane and escort him out saying “he refused to follow orders to land and we did not deem it worth it to escalate the situation”. It’s not like his airliner is armed or anything. But it would send a very different diplomatic message.

For France in particular, this is far from the first time he flies over its territory unimpeded. This is not a matter of military concerns, this is pro-Israel Macron taking a stance to show support for his ally. He’s not been very outspoken on Gaza because the domestic political situation is very delicate and anything he says can only weaken his support further, but his personal stance is hardly a secret and the military interceptors are under his full control.

I know it’s not the biggest deal out of all the awful shit going on, but man this pisses me off. The journalistic institution, top-to-bottom, is utterly failing to accurately report on anything that is going on, seemingly out of fear of sounding “overly alarmist”. Time and time again the would-be alarmist statement turns out to be true, and yet they do not learn.

Every so-called journalist and news institution is directly responsible for the fall of democracy because they abdicated their duty to inform the public of what is actually going on. You can literally open any history book covering 1930s Germany to get factual material on why this is bad. Not doing so is a journalistic and moral failure of the highest order and I’m tired of pretending this is what “journalistic integrity” looks like.

Few Celtic roots*

For instance char comes from the Celtic carros.

Furthermore French has a strong Frankish influence, hence the name of the language and its relative distance from Italian Spanish or Portuguese which are more directly descended from Latin. But also many other influences. French has a surprising amount of Arabic vocabulary for example, and not just from recent immigration/colonisation.

Either way if you ignore regional languages you’re not doing linguistics. And the author could not even get it right for national languages, if we even accept that arbitrarily picking one makes any sense.

This map is a masterclass in what not to do and it almost feels like intentional engagement farming.

… and? What is the Kremlin going to do, declare war?

Military officers are legitimate targets. Either Ukrainian Special Ops performed yet another successful mission within Moscow, or Russia unlawfully merced one of its own generals. Either way it’s a bad look for Russia.

One thing people who don’t build products tend to imagine is that PMs are constantly doing market research, data analysis, focus groups, etc.

That may be true at some companies, but IME they can be clueless beyond belief because their real job is to be salespeople. They sell dreams to executives. Whether those will actually sell is a much lower concern.

See also: AI being shoved down everyone’s throats.

Same, and I’m not well-versed into the neurology of it all but I think it’s something way worse than the symptoms of ADHD.

Five seconds is well within my attention span. I forget everything the minute I open a door or open a new tab, but this ain’t that. I can watch something in silence, my brain distracts itself, that’s kind of the whole problem. This though? This is about promising an impending dopamine hit to a restless junkie who was about to scroll down for a quicker hit.

No, scratch that. This is about the video editor constructing a strawman of that restless junkie, pandering to that, followed by a (proto-)fascist algorithm eeking out every last bit of video retention from its users for maximum profit. Even if 95 % of users don’t actually need the countdown to keep watching, and the 5 % remaining really should not be using that app for their mental well-being, the algorithm will mercilessly incentivize creators to put in the countdown.

Since legislating algorithmic attention-hoarding doesn’t sem likely to hit the political docket anytime soon, the only winning move is not to play.

My guess is the same thing as “critics say [x]”. The journalist has an obvious opinion but isn’t allowed by their head of redaction to put it in, so to maintain the illusion of NeutTraLITy™©® they find a strawman to hold that opinion for them.

I guess now they don’t even need to find a tweet with 3 likes to present a convenient quote from “critics” or “the public” or “internet commenters” or “sources”, they can just ask ChatGPT to generate it for them. Either way any redaction where that kind of shit flies is not doing serious journalism.

On top of the other point.

Capitalism is uninterested in your healthcare policy. That’s your country’s failure, not capitalism’s, for once. Market pressures did not invent a gaggle of middle men siphoning the money between patients and care providers. That’s a result of government failures that ossified into a corrupt system benefiting a select few, a scheme which is not unique to capitalism and is actually reminding me of soviet bureaucracy.

The distinction is not purely academic, because correctly pointing out that you’re not fighting capitalism but corrupt bureaucracy makes reform a much easier sell, which is why healthcare reform is a transpartisan issue until donors and lobbyists get involved.

Altman secretly secured 40 % of the world’s DRAM manufacturing capacity last month. Supposedly Samsung and HK Hynix weren’t aware they were both signing up for it.

That alone would be enough to call collusion if it wasn’t an obvious play to strangle his competition by literally choking them out of hardware.

https://www.mooreslawisdead.com/post/sam-altman-s-dirty-dram-deal

With this and other projects like Hyprland I do wonder what the right thing to do is. Like, the project would probably be better served if the governance was not dickheads. But they make decent products for free. The community could fork with a better governance model and just continuously merge the work from the “problematic” people involved, but that seems like a lot of work for very little gain.

At the same time I would not want to get very involved with community development efforts led by people who do not share my core values, and I’m probably not alone, so we’re probably missing out on opportunities by keeping the status quo.

I don’t think that’s really fair. There are cranky contradictarians everywhere, but in my experience that feature has been well received even in the AI-skeptic tech circles that are well educated on the matter.

Besides, the technical “concerns” are only the tip of the iceberg. The reality is that people complaining about AI often fall back to those concerns because they can’t articulate how most AI fucking sucks to use. It’s an eldtritch version of clippy. It’s inhuman and creepy in an uncanny valley kind of way, half the time it doesn’t even fucking work right and even if it does it’s less efficient than having a competent person (usually me) do the work.

Auto translation or live transcription tools are narrowly-focused tools that just work, don’t get in the way, and don’t try to get me to talk to them like they are a person. Who cares whether it’s an LLM. What matters is that it’s a completely different vibe. It’s useful, out of my way when I don’t need it, and isn’t pretending to have a first name. That’s what I want from my computer. And I haven’t seen significant backlash to that sentiment even in very left-wing tech circles.

Honestly, PCs are not ready for local LLMs

The auto-translation LLM runs locally and works fine. Not quite as good as deepl but perfectly competent. That’s the one “AI” feature which is largely uncontroversial because it’s actually useful, unobtrusive, and privacy-enhancing.

Local LLMs (and related transformer-based models) can work, they just need a narrow focus. Unfortunately they’re not getting much love because cloud chatbots can generate a lot of incoherent bullshit really quickly and that’s a party trick that’s got all the CEOs creaming their pants at the ungrounded fantasy of being just another trillion dollars away from AGI.

Quite the contrary! They effectively sell their cards at a ~20% discount to a bunch of AI companies by “investing” in the companies for a promise to use that money to buy their cards.

It’s as dumb as it sounds and textbook unsustainable economic bubble behavior, but NVidia don’t care because more sales = more stonks = more money to “invest” = more sales = more stonks = more yachts for Jensen. So what if it makes 1929 look like a walk in the park, it’s not their problem.

On maybe the third day of my first programming job, a colleague pulled me aside and said “don’t give me ‘shoulds’ and ‘probablys’. You need to sound confident so I can know to trust what you’re saying”.

That guy was a bit of a dickhead in general but there’s a lot of truth there. To the question “what’s the expected impact of this change?”, “None.” is a good answer. “Well it should work…” is not useful feedback and a good Operations Manager will rightfully reject the change.

Of course it is better to be hesitant than falsely confident, but far too many (software) engineers hide behind indecisive language to dodge the necessary hard work of validating their hunches. If you didn’t test your shit fully, just say so. If you’re right, say it. Personal ego doesn’t belong in an engineering discussion.

I think the premium thing is a channel option. Some channels consistently have it, some don’t.

Regular YouTube 1080p is bad and feels like 720p. The encoding on videos with “Premium 1080p” is catastrophic. It’s significantly worse than decently encoded 480p. Creators will put a lot of time and effort in their lighting and camera gear, then the compression artifacting makes the video feel like watching a porn bootleg on a shady site. I guess there must be a strong financial incentive to nuke their video quality this way.