I think you’re letting what you want to be true override what you deep down know to actually be the case. But I guess I should know by now not to attempt injecting reality into an old fashioned partisan pile-on thread.

Trump’s approach is definitely corrupt and yet another of the hundred reasons he should be in jail.

But… recent years have seen other flawed democracies where unknown candidates with no previous track record in politics and no party affiliation but who just so happen to have the same name as a major party’s candidate show up. There clearly needs to be something in place to mitigate these shenanigans, but it seems more like a fix that’s needed in the ballot design, rather than the insanity that Trump’s pushing.

This really misses the point of [thing that the post wasn’t about]

FIFY

Last week, Google’s Finland country manager, Antti Järvinen, apologised for the forest clearings but claimed the company had acted “on the best understanding we had of the legislation at the time”.

That understanding being “it’s more profitable to just do it and pay the fine”

I suspect this was made with the whole “Art collection as tax avoidance scheme” thing in mind.

The first line was broadly right. But you blundered on the second, especially by phrasing it in a condescending way, because how many figures you should quote to depends on more context than just how many figures the input was quoted to.

financial misconduct

It’s always a grift. Time and time again all over the world, the far right are fuelled not from true belief in their bullshit but from the realization they can make bank by peddling hatred.

what’s to work out? just provide a phone number and city as your address, and one day someone will call you and mutter something unintelligible and you say “TELEGRAM… TELEGRAM” and then they telegram you to ask where you are and you send your location and then they show up with your grand piano on the back of their moto and ask for a mystery extra delivery fee.

yeah. I foolishly thought that if I booked the hotel a hundred metres from where I’d be working, I wouldn’t need a car. Nope.

Also something about the way the cops carry themselves make you feel less safe to see them, rather than more safe. And for a “land of the free” there seems to be so many rules and warnings absolutely everywhere just waiting to trip you up.

I’m reluctant to name individual incidents because the dynamic of forum posts suggests that some smartass will leap in to say “oh that never happens in your country?”, but I can only relate my own experiences, e.g. beggars waiting at junctions going up to my car to ask for money, or a road rage guy in a huge truck that followed me many miles back to my hotel to shout at me for turning into the lane he was trying to turn into. Yeah it can happen in other places, but to me it happened in the US.

In total I’ve been to 10 different states, spanning a period of over a year, and concluded that the US is basically everything they accuse their enemies of being.

I’ve spent time in over 30 countries, including developing and emerging countries, and the US is by far the one I felt the least safe in.

They don’t need to, OpenAI and Anthropic are running at a huge loss to keep it cheaper to use them than to buy the comparable hardware required to replace them. The only way running open source models is cheaper is if you ignore hardware costs, or if you have a very specific and unusual usage pattern (i.e. constant 100% capacity, and not a clock cycle more or less), or if you go with another cloud provider who are also running at a loss.

That doesn’t even stand up on its own terms.

Farenheit doesn’t “intuitively” tell you whether there’s going to be ice on the road or whether your pipes are liable to freeze, and also has the added pain in the ass that on a very hot day you need 3 digits to represent the number instead of 2, and doesn’t even compensate for it by removing the possibility of negative values which can still also happen.

On top of that the extra scale doesn’t give you a perceivable difference between the numbers, that is to say, I could put you in a room and ask you if it was 70F or 71F and you’d basically be guessing.

Celsius on the other hand is eminently relatable: negative number means ice/snow, single digit means heavy coat, tens means lighter coat/sleeves, twenties means nice, thirties means hot, forties means remain indoors.

You’ve hit on my bugbear with most post-apocalyptic fiction: pretty much universally humans have shown that they will tend towards co-operation when placed in situations of hardship. But most writers, game designers and preppers want you to think that when civilization collapses everyone will be like “there’s no rules any more! I can murder whoever I want and take their stuff!”

hang on a minute, there’s spaces around your em-dash! An AI didn’t write this at all, this is fake AI! I call Shenanigans!

I wonder if any of Trump’s supporters remember that his original 2016 campaign leant heavily on the idea that he was great at hiring people, and would replace the swamp with a team of the country’s best and most highly qualified people?

We should start using sliced avocados

Yes, though it goes further than that even if you ignore the politics.

Linus is undoubtedly talking about when an LLM is used in a very specific way in his imagination where it’s helping a competent programmer spot some things they might have missed, but the programmer is still diligent and professional and genuinely does take responsibility for ensuring the quality of their commits. Where the delusion comes in is grossly overestimating how many people are actually like that outside of his inner circle of world-level experts. What’s happening in all the other open-source projects is a flood of low quality garbage PRs from meat proxies.

Using established and tested security implementations instead of rolling your own has been considered good practice since forever. It’s not a bad thing.

The alt text on that strip seems especially pertinent