ColdStream

Terrance McKenna once said that the worst US President is the current one regardless of the time. That is because they always seem to just accept what has come before and just stack more things on top.

Biden didn't remove the Trump Tarrifs on China for instance. But this goes across party lines and back for decades. Neither side is interested in tearing down the surveillance state stuff is a good example.

I said it in another comment, not only did they negotiate that, the resulting negotiation held very little of substance for the US. It was very light on specifics and all for show.

It has been said that when the tariffs started that the Japanese delegates went to Washington to negotiate. The delegates asked them "Since you are trying to negotiate, what do you want of Japan?"

All they got back was "Well, what can you offer?"

Turns out they had started the tariff war with absolute no idea on what demands they wanted to make. Japan used that to their advantage because without any specifics, they were free to write the terms.

Personally there are two sides to this that conflict.

Firstly, yes Europe and its allies are rapidly becoming more capable and are now funding said capabilities.

Secondly, it sadness me to see people cheering on the growth of the war/defense sector.

Tao Te Ching - Chapter 46

When the Way governs the world,

The proud stallions drag dung carriages.

When the Way is lost to the world,

War horses are bred outside the city.

There is a reason the US is worried about things like Pix is Brazil. Viable alternatives are coming online that cuts them out of the set of power.

I mean look at the Japanese deals, it has some of the most wishy-washy loose language I have seen in a serious political document for a very long time.

We indent to do this, they propose that, there is aspirations of this. They caved but only in the most symbolic fashion possible. I see a lot of diplomacy at hand.

"Speak softly and carry a big stick; you will go far." - Theodore Roosevelt,

There is a Japanese proverb "A thousand years of good reputation is ruined in a single hour."

Trump has burnt up the single most valuable asset any country or person can have. Trust.

I was very impressed at the pace at which Canadians got behind the move away from US goods. Turns out threatening to annex a country and NOT having those making the threats get punished/thrown out does that. It shows a significant enough part of the US would support the move. That portion might only be 10-30% (who knows exactly) but it is enough that it cannot be ignored and it will keep coming back.

There are still more fundamental materials markets that will take years/decades to move away from but that is already happening.

Long term it is a very tough position for the US. They need to run a trade deficit to keep the power of the US dollar, if that goes so does a lot of their world power.

More broadly however, the question that I think everyone should ponder on is, "If the US falls as the world super power, do you think the alternative will be better?"

A huge part of the US's spending is on the military and that is used to stabilize global trade, that is so that the USD is still THE major currency. But recent moves looks like they are trying to keep that while also kicking out the struts that hold up the entire system. It is very illogical, maybe there is a bigger plan but somehow I don't think there is.

Credit to France, Charles de Gaulle was the first to realize that the US should be blindly trusted. Macron is also a firm believer in this as well as he is well versed in Gaulle's ideas.

As for the rest of the world, yes the silence in regard to helping the US is deafening. You can see the diplomatic frustration of politicians when they have to talk about Trump and the admins actions. They cannot dismiss them but they really don't want to support them either.

Exactly, the move away from the US is both fast and slow. Fast on the things that could be swapped for an alternative straight away/short term. Slow in that there are something that will take decades to move away from and are actively being worked on but quietly.

This is the problem of the 2nd Trump admin, the first time was considered a fluke incident and didn't pan out so bad as there was a lot of longer term folks keeping things sort of in check. The 2nd time, it was apparent that there is a significant enough faction of the US population that will ensure this kind of power structure keeps coming back. Trump is but the first of many to operate like he does. There will be more like him.

I must warn some people, who knows which side of politics that will come from. Don't think 'your side' is above it, this kind of rhetoric and rot and creep in a lot quicker than one would think.

Blue zones was a funny thing. It seemed odd that there was places where longevity was so pronounced. A particular genetic advantage that was localized or as it was pushed some generally lifestyle advice that sounded reasonable made it travel a lot further than it would have otherwise. It wasn't bad advice, it was just wildly over sold.

So when Newman's work came out and it turned out the be almost entirely pension fraud, it suddenly made a lot of sense of why it was so localized and pronounced.

Newman seems to hit on all these points wonderfully in this interview.

I guess now that they have the cash from OpenAI for training data, now they can try to cash in on their side too. Play both side of the game.

I would be more concerned if Reddit hadn't become an absolute shell of what it once was. It is now a waste land of bots pitching the same generic witty remarks back and forth at each other.

While it is still showing strong numbers, the place just feels done nowadays. It has finally succumbed to the same rot that Facebook has.

I think it is like most software, especially in the OS space. The technology doesn't have to be the best, it just needs to get lucky enough to become a standard and build a moat with that.

And by the mid 80's the moats were already very deep.

Amiga couldn't over come the PC. IBM couldn't over come the moat of Windows with OS2. Intel couldn't overcome x86 with the i432 or Itanium. Luck and market forces from said luck played a huge part in determining who won.

Everyday when I come to work it is a case of "How will something Microsoft break today?". It is different everyday, it is always something very silly and petty and small. I am so tired of this crap happening non stop. They are a trillion dollar company and they turn out amateurish crap nowadays.

A few weeks back I was trying to recover an Xbox account using their website. I have never seen a more convoluted, sluggish running interface and web response time than what they have clobbered together. I suspect they must just keep layering software stack on top of stacks rather than keeping everything lean.

Once I got the account recovered, firing up the Xbox is a gamble in if it will work. Either is just hangs as it tries to ping back to MS servers or it just hangs when booting stuff for... reasons. Again, they have had decades to get this right...

This is something that began long before AI art. Look at the popularity of Thomas Kinkade - The Master of Light! Many AI generated images, when not refined down, now have that same sort of aesthetic. I have found that Googles Nano Banana generation is particularly susceptible to generating that cozy glow kind of style than many gravitate to.

It is art stripped of the humanities. Pleasant, non threatening, technically very capable and totally disposable. The Big Mac of creativity.

I am not surprised. I completely get what they were going for, it feels like a product that should just be the default. But the was two major issues with them. One technical, one social.

On the technical side, they required a full roof replacement. This made for a very costly investment with a multiple day installation period. Typical panels, cost a lot less, are just placed on top of the current roof and are done in a few hours. Solar tiles simply couldn't compete with that.

The social side, it is what could be called 'Green Bling'. They just look like a normal roof tile, you cannot virtue signal to the neighbors with that! That probably isn't a huge issue but it wouldn't be insignificant. If you have typical solar panels, you know you have them and so does everyone around you. This isn't a big thing and it is much less now that it seems like almost everyone has them, at least were I am.

Not surprised, the US is backed into a lifestyle that is hard to maintain. They are struggling to grow their productivity and thus it is easier to spend big on the credit card and just hope that folks don't move away from the petrodollar.

I said it yesterday on here, Trump was right when he said "So long as oil is bought in US dollars, the debt doesn't matter." But when that comes down, it is going to hurt. That will be any time between next Tuesday and 50 years from now.

The question I have is, do these companies keep copies of the scans after they have finished training on them? If so, then it isn't the worst outcome. Not great but at least the information is not completely destroyed forever just the original physical being of it.

Deeper thought however, eventually this will all be lost to time and I suspect that about 99% of all printed materials probably would never be read again simply due to the huge volume of it and sheer obscurity. Ernest Becker and his work 'The Denial of Death' might have some thoughts on this.

go to any second hand book store and just pick out something at random from the 1950's for instance, something about pottery or bird watching or whatever. The history of Bisbee Arizona, I don't know. Look up the author, see if they even left a trace of their work and the vast majority of the time they have already been forgotten to the great void of the universe. In the end, it all goes away. Clinging only creates pain.

I'm not saying that we should let them just do this, I am just saying that long term it is a tough battle to fight only to lose the war.

Definitely, he may have been the architect of digital jails but he did seem to care about his prisoners. Tim Cook is just a free for all but with some nice marketing.

I have been using Linux on the desktop since the late 90's. Other than increase hardware support, I have not tangentially noticed/felt almost anything you have mentioned here. When I fire up the desktop and load Firefox, I do not feel or see the sandboxing, the scheduler, the file system or the I/O. It just works.

Yes, we interact with it all the time but it isn't something that the end user would notice and that is a great thing. If you are not directly poking around with that stuff, you shouldn't notice it.

That they are so seamless should be seen as a badge of honor.

It is funny with Linux (the kernel). From the outside it looks like almost nothing ever changes. You switch the computer on, it works away in the background to bring up the desktop and have everything talk. From that perspective it feels like nothing has changed in decades.

But then you look at the change log, and almost everything you see added sounds really useful to someone working on this stuff. 35 years of work on this and there is still so much to be done even if you most people using it never directly feel it.

I think a part of happiness is just knowing that you cannot win the game of life. Even if you could process a thousand times more information, would that make you any happier? If anything, your craving for information would only increase.

It's not the processing that is the problem but the craving.

That said, ignorance is bliss but the consequences are dyer. There is a nice middle ground.

Like the whole meme of "Well actually...".

Sometimes you just need to let it go, choose peace over proving something. Occasionally I still get caught up in something but it is very rare nowadays.

It was Buddhism Monk Ajhan Brahm, before he started down that path he was going down the university path studying theoretical physics. The one thing that stood out to him was just how miserable so many of the smarter people where, and just how much they clung to their ego's and status. There was a moment when it dawned on him "I don't want to be anything like these people!".

Another great one was this by Gen Kelsang Sherab. In his final interview for his music studies they asked something like "How will you pursue this in future?", his response was "I will not, I choose to pursue happiness."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hS_swacFLNU

Credit to Steve Job's, he wasn't too interested in joining PRISM. Reasoning was never given but I would suspect it was part his anti-establishment bent, part trying to not damage the brand if it came out.

It was only once he passed than Apple went all in on it.

It was during the first term of Trump when he said something like "So long as people are buying oil in US Dollars, it doesn't matter how high the debt is."

It is reckless but he is kind of right. So long as it is the hemoglobin for a sizable bulk of global trade, it can potentially go a lot higher. But that is a path that ends in tears, any time between next Tuesday and 50 years from now.

It is things like that that make me wonder how the Internet Archive hasn't been absolutely destroyed in court a thousand times over. It has become a hot den of copyright infringement unlike anything else.

But as for the show, I this is where we see the sassy much more acid tongued Black Adder rather than the bumbling under trodden character of the original season. The first season was brilliant in its own way but it feels like a very different show because of it.

Tommy Chong is a proud Canadian today with that head line.

Exactly this! Recently I saw a project that is heavily AI assisted to port Doom to the Neo Geo. That is hardware that works in a totally opposite fashion to how Doom runs. It is a 12Mhz 68K chip with no frame buffer. And yet, they are making it work and with surprising performance.

Considering how little open Neo Geo code is probably out there to train on, that these models can build to this is very impressive.

Yeah, most people are just trying to make it day to day doing their best. We are flawed but that is what make it fun.

There is also just a matter of randomness.

Marcus Aurelius was considered one of the great emperors of Rome with a fairly level head considering his position. It seems like he would have been an idea parent, so when his son Commodus came a long as almost the total opposite. It says something about human nature, it cannot be contained at times.