You pay five million bucks to the government, presumably to be pocketed by the president. Under the legal concept of l’etat, c’est moi you have therefore substantially benefitted the United States.

Aren’t the rebels the bad guys at that point? You know, with the whole gassing thing? The rebellion against the Galactic Empire doesn’t exist, seeing how the Galactic Empire doesn’t even exist yet.

Mind you, the anime part came from some guys on the Internet combining a sped-up version of the original song with some dancing from the opening of a hentai show. (Or game? I don’t remember.)

Then it went viral and the label marketed the hell out of it.

The original song is just another piece of generic dance music: Four on the floor beat; lyrics that vaguely describe dance steps; catchy because Swedish producers can’t produce non-catchy songs.

I think major factors in people bitching about the Windows 10 EOL is that a) Windows 10 was explicitly marketed as the final version of Windows and b) Windows 11 is so unappealing that even companies are reluctant to upgrade.

Normally, that wouldn’t be a big problem. We had dud releases before. Windows Vista had few friends due to compatibility issues but was workable. Besides, 7 was launched shortly after Vista’s EOL. Likewise, Windows 8’s absurd UI choices made it deeply unpopular but it was quickly followed by 8.1, which fixed that. And Windows 10 again followed shortly after 8’s EOL (and well before 8.1’s).

Windows 11, however, combines a hard to justify spec hike with a complete absence of appealing new features. The notable new features that are there are raising concerns about data safety. In certain industries (e.g. medical, legal, and finance), Recall/Copilot Vision is seen as dangerous as it might access protected information and is not under the same control that the company has over its document stores. That increases the vector for a data breach that could lead to severe legal and reputational penalties.

Microsoft failed to satisfyingly address these concerns. And there’s not even hope of a new version of Windows releasing a few months after 10’s EOL; Windows 12 hasn’t even been announced yet.

It’s no wonder that companies are now complaining about Windows 10’s support window being too short.

In stereotypical winter you can’t add enough layers since if you do add layers so your face doesn’t hurt you get accosted by the police because going to public places in a balaclava hasn’t been legal since the late 50s.

In winter as it actually happens you need fewer layers but they need to be waterproof because winter means rain at +2 °C.

Yeah, and in the 70s they estimated they’d need about twice that to make significant progress in a reasonable timeframe. Fusion research is underfunded – especially when you look at how the USA dump money into places like the NIF, which research inertial confinement fusion.

Inertial confinement fusion is great for developing better thermonuclear weapons but an unlikely candidate for practical power generation. So from that one billion bucks a year, a significant amount is pissed away on weapons research instead of power generation candidates like tokamaks and stellarators.

I’m glad that China is funding fusion research, especially since they’re in a consortium with many Western nations. When they make progress, so do we (and vice versa).

At least the fusion guys are making actual progress and can point to being wildly underfunded – and they predicted this pace of development with respect to funding back in the late 70s.

Meanwhile, the AI guys have all the funding in the world, keep telling about how everything will change in the next few months, actually trigger layoffs with that rhetoric, and deliver very little.

Auto-writing boilerplate code doesn’t change the fact that you still have to reimplement the business logic, which is what we’re talking about. If you want to address the “reinventing the wheel” problem, LLMs would have to be able to spit out complete architectures for concrete problems.

Nobody complains about reinventing the wheel on problems like “how do I test a method”, they’re complaining about reinventing the wheel on problems like “how can I refinance loans across multiple countries in the SEPA area while being in accord with all relevant laws”.

Mind you, a lot of this reimplementation is because those 1000 other implementations that came before all haven’t had their source code released to the public. No amount of vibecoding is going to help there because those LLMs were never trained on code that was never publicly released.

A good foam pillow under my head, a bit of my blanket between my knees. Sometimes I think about getting one of those knee pillows but so far I haven’t bothered.

I won’t go back to a down-filled pillow. Those will inevitably stop supporting my head during the night.

I wouldn’t say pure rage… They were certainly high energy but not super focused on being angry. This may in part be due to Fred Durst adding major frat boy vibes.

I have no idea what they’re like these days.

Note that, as far as I can tell, the “Second Kowloon” depicted in the show is a much nicer place than the original Kowloon Walled City was.

I fully agree. LLMs create situations that our laws aren’t prepared for and we can’t reasonably get them into a compliant state on account of how the technology works. We can’t guarantee that an LLM won’t lose coherence to the point of ignoring its rules as the context grows longer. The technology inherently can’t make that kind of guarantee.

We can try to add patches like a rules-based system that scans chats and flags them for manual review if certain terms show up but whether those patches suffice will have to be seen.

Of course most of the tech industry will instead clamor for an exception because “AI” (read: LLMs and image generation) is far too important to let petty rules hold back progress. Why, if we try to enforce those rules, China will inevitably develop Star Trek-level technology within five years and life as we know it will be doomed. Doomed I say! Or something.

They are being commonly used in functions where a human performing the same task would be a mandated reporter. This is a scenario the current regulations weren’t designed for and a future iteration will have to address it. Lawsuits like this one are the first step towards that.

I saw the term “bio resonance” and immediately knew that this ostensible medical practitioner couldn’t get in touch with reality if they used a special reality-seeking pole constructed from a thousand dousing rods.

I used to work adjacent to the medical field, close enough to have to deal with a certain kind of medical practitioner a lot. For some reason, that part of medicine attracts people who believe in the supernatural so I’m familiar with bullshit from anthroposophy to quantum healing.

That shit gets real wild real fast. Bio resonance is already terrible (it’s basically the same kind of bullshit Scientology’s “E-meters” pretend to do but now as a “therapeutic” device with thirty buttons). But the worst must be quantum healing.

In quantum healing, actually seeing the patient in person is not necessary. Neither is knowing a lot about the patient. In fact, the less the practitioner knows, the better. Just give them a picture and a really vague description of the symptoms and the person (or pet; it “works” for those, too), and the practitioner will do something at some point in the future that will have some positive effect on either the person or the universe as a whole, even if it’s not obvious. Source: Trust me, bro.

And they charge real money for that shit. Real medical practitioners who went to real university and have a real degree in human medicine.

Absolutely incredible.

That’s literally how many German private houses are built: Autoclaved aerated concrete with a brick cladding. Looks nice and provides a lot of thermal insulation.

Water hardness matters a lot, too. When I visit my family and shower with their super soft water, I could use industrial degreaser and my hair would be just fine.

But when I’m at home where the water is super hard? I better use a shampoo without sodium laureth sulfate and condition regularly or my hair will become an uncombable abomination within a few days.

Of course it’s more normie. As more people from more diverse communities join, the average becomes more, well, average.

For instance, not everyone who moved over from Reddit is a communist trans furry cybersecurity expert in a chastity belt – some people even somehow manage to be none of those things.

I think there is room for them and there’s even room for them thinking the original crowd is weird. We need to maintain that “weird” is good, though, and that people can just look away if a topic makes then uncomfortable.

It works with .ml and friends – they can spend all day living their understanding of communism and everyone who doesn’t share that understanding can just block them and move on with their lives.

In this case it’s just the adjective odd, not some acronym.

What happens instead is that the established parties decide they can win the voters back if they adopt far-right policies. We get extra-shitty governance and they still lose voters. It’s a lose-lose situation but they’re committed.