Tadpole9181

The head of the DoJ, being questioned about the president of the United States' involvement in (one of) the highest profile child sex trafficking ring in US history and it's subsequent cover up using the FBI itself, yelling about the economy and that nobody cares about child sex trafficking... Is not exactly a normal "political gaffe".

I would, in fact, say it's a huge deal that anyone remotely aware of what's happening in politics should know about. It was headlined and broadcast on most major networks.

Nor do I see anybody upset that it was misinterpreted or that someone didn't know. Just people who didn't know about it name-calling anyone who did. So not sure how their little joke "provoked" a flamewar, vs people being sensitive and lashing out that they aren't in on the joke immediately.

Never heard that one, but my off the cuff thought was "sounds like something a so-far-lucky gambling addict would say".

It looks like 70% of all satellites deployed in 2025 were starlink. Seems they make up over half (~65%) of all satellites currently in orbit.

So GitHub and Windows and IDEs need to be open source because they can output FOSS code? That's obviously rediculous.

If an AI outputs copyrighted code, that is a copyright violation. And if it does and a human uses it, then you are welcome to sue the human or LLM provider for that. But you don't get to sue people for perceived "latent" thought crimes.

Sure, that would be astoundingly amazing.

But the second sentence there is unwarranted. Someone can lament their hopes and dreams dying while still caring about the realistic needs of the world around them.

There's also the tiny detail that we are technologically incapable at the moment.

Sorry, I'd love to hear exactly how a mars habitat with a half dozen people or a space station are "hedges against terrestrial existential risks"? Those are both "unfriendly" environments that lack the resources required to sustain themselves for any appreciable amount of time. And certainly don't have the number of people required to repopulate.

You know those people would rely on endless, constant resupply missions for the rest of their lives with no hope of ever being returned home, right?

How important is this to you? Are you willing to personally act as executioner and press the button than sends these people to their deaths, knowing we could just stop being able to send food and replacement equipment in a few years?

We can't even keep our society stable and our people taken care and our home world clean. You think we are even close to terraforming or creating a society on Mars? Other than as some token of nerd approval, what does this extremely expensive and dangerous mission accomplish?

...what in the world...

We have a war in Iran that was not approved by legislature. Run by a Fox news host with no experience who has committed multiple war crimes on camera now. A war we are not exactly winning (now raising the enlistment age and losing million dollar aircraft to thousand dollar drones), having an enormous and lasting impact on the global economy - making us look downright stupid. And position us to be unable to defend allies in the region, sure, but perhaps even other critical regions like Taiwan.

We kidnapped a foreign leader and are talking about an invasion of Cuba - who we are committing human rights violations against by preventing them from having electricity.

We have tariffs across all our prior allies. Multiple trade deals have been ruined. America's reputation is permanently damage. Well, more than that, Trump has threatened to invade Canada and Greenland. And apparently our (former) allies took it so seriously they had begun to develop new strategies and elevate their military preparedness and make security talks with their allies.

And our "corporate stability" benefit is quickly falling apart as agencies and courts are rapidly being replaced with sycophants whose most important decree is "bribe or otherwise adorn dear leader with praise". Bills attempting to bring back manufacturing are dead. Infrastructure bills are dead. We're back to the rot.

ICE is acting as a Gestapo, who show no badges and wear masks and plain clothes. They have killed multiple people and faced zero repercussions and has been expanded to airport security where they have already assaulted citizens. And that's before we get into the concentration camps.

The president attempted a coup on our government in 2020, where he directed his supporters to storm the capital and stop the ratification of an election he lost - and faced absolutely no punishment. He is now nominating judges who are refusing to state in their Senate hearings that he lost the election. We have also passed a bill called SAVE that effectively makes creates a secret poll tax for married women, whose both cost and expediency are gated by a department directly controlled by the executive. That's if we even have a fair one, of course: Trump has floated numerous times cancelling the election in times of war or deploying armed ICE agents to key polling locations. He has made it very clear they cannot lose midterms.

And that executive is vaporized. Trust in public careers has been killed by DOGE, alongside the careers and decades of knowledge and progress destroyed by them simply hammering apart institutions . The department of education is dead. The fed, one of the last and most important hold outs, is losing independence and will soon by led by a yes man who will blindly slash rates for Trump to enrish himself - at any cost for the economy.

The SCOTUS, of which an entire third were placed by Trump - who is eyeing yet a fourth - have given Trump enormous wins, most famously the ruling that he is essentially immune from all laws and can do anything he wants. And they're looking like they may erode the state right to self-managed elections and/or ban mail-in votes. A ruling that essentially destroyed our ability to punish Trump for his colluding with a foreign nation to rig our democratic system with the help of the technofeudal corporations.

Which, funny enough, brings us full circle to the war in Iran. Where his actions now allow him to stop all support for Ukraine and drop sanctions on Russia without people noticing all too much. Yet again, benefiting the crooks a significant portion of the intelligence community believe - including our own - compromise the now president.

I cannot fathom how you can sit there and say that the system is "working". Has the frog seriously been sufficiently boiled? It was this easy? It's been one single year!

Which is why we generally don't use highly volatile fuels in vehicles, like I just said?

And, no, batteries can have outbursts but they're nowhere near as catastrophic as compressed, explosive gases or an antimatter bomb.

Surely you understand there's a difference?

Liquid gasoline does not spontaneously explode like an action movie. You can put a match in the fuel tank and (presuming infinite oxygen availability) it'd just start a small fire. Heck, may even just give a little puff and then put out the match.

Antimatter in any sufficient fuel quantity, the moment it breaks confinement, will completely annihilate and release ALL it's energy in a single moment, setting off a chain reaction to the remaining antimatter. It's like sitting on an armed nuclear bomb, where you rely on electrified, highly sophisticated containment equipment never failing a single time for months to years... In a radiation-heavy environment known for causing sophisticated electronics to have errors.

And, yes, hydrogen cars were looked at critically because of the perception they can Hindenburg (I'm unsure if it's true or not). Which is a good example because you don't particularly see any hydrogen blimps anymore - we made them illegal because they're dangerous.

The US just gave away a billion dollars to NOT build renewable energy.

Rich folk would have a man gutted like a pig for a crisp $5 bill.

They would absolutely (have their secretary) commit legal inside trader for a few hundred thousand on every occasion they could.

That's all well and good, but let's just be entirely honest at this point: you have no rights. ICE can call you a slur and shoot you point blank in the head, with a US passport and birth certificate in your hands and they would get away with it. Then the president and 30% of the country would call you a terrorist.

And they've already caused an incident by assaulting and arresting an American citizen - of, of course, a specific ethnicity - because she could not "sufficiently" prove her citizenship status.

At an international airport.

I didn't say they wouldn't actually try / do it. Just being clear that the US does not define any legal avenue whatsoever.

The US does not have a legal avenue for cancelling elections regardless of circumstances without a constitutional amendment. It cannot happen under any conditions or circumstances.

To do so would basically be an open announcement of dictatorship and - more than we have already - the end of rule of law and a likely civil war.

> the magic rocks we can find in the woods

The hypocracy of calling them unserious moments ago.

It seems to me what you're arguing is that the government should incentivize the industry to produce solar panels domestically - as a strategic resource. Then you are both free from China and oil producing nations; and you get to create some domestic jobs in manufacturing.

> But China also owns the supply.

Well then, damn, we better get started making deals today?

Your plan to do absolutely nothing and continue losing forever with increasingly no way out seems utterly rediculous.

It did not find nothing, it found that the allegations were largely true and then shrugged and said "oh well, presidents are immune so no criminal conspiracy".

Don't get me started. For every half-decent choice, there's a multitude of insane choices. After all this time they still don't have side-by-side review.

Equally as annoying, the break from VSCode is horrible. Having to use a separate registry, not having basic settings sync, the delay behind mainline VSCode updates.

Then, it's just plain buggier than others. The agent terminal just doesn't work semi-regularly, it doesn't like listing directories in the @, the SSH plugin crashes every other time it tries to connect, undoing agent work undoes edits I made in unrelated files sometimes. Sometimes updates just regress performance hard for seemingly no reason.

I also noticed the token use is wildly less efficient than CC or Codex these days. After almost no time at all it's up to 100,000 tokens and they're charging $1 per request for Sonnet. Side-by-side, Cursor spent $17 in the same time CC spent $4. Which is bizarre to me, since they advertise how their indexing and semantic search is more token efficient?

The autocomplete model was the only reason I stayed as long as I did. I wish there was a VSCode equivalent.

I'm sorry, this is just Republican apologetics. This is about a single party. How in the world could you possibly suggest otherwise?

I'd love to hear how Biden, Obama, or Clinton got us into forever wars. Or how they threatened allies. Or how they destroyed our trade or deal-making reputation. Where are the Democrat newscasters saying we should invade Canada? The figure heads calling for internment camps?

Are we all affected? Sure. Does everybody in the world view us through the lens of our worst (people/behavior)? Of course. But it IS about a single party on every. single. issue.

If the Democrats were to regain control and we had public trials for all involved for war crimes, constitutional violations, etc, it would do a lot to fix the damage. Not pretending it would all go away, but actually holding the one party accountable would help because everyone on the planet knows who is responsible.

He's already talking about "taking Cuba".

It's impossible to be sure, but...

- Em dash

- "Not just X, it's Y"

- "It's the difference between."

- "Narrow statement. Broad statement."

I'm more and more convinced that humans were fundamentally not ready for LLMs and are not taking how existential of a threat it poses to basic communication and social normals seriously enough.

It's not even price for me - I'm happy to pay for an experience. I'm more annoyed that the theater is basically the worst place to watch a movie now.

The silver screen has a contrast ratio in the hundreds. A $300 consumer TV now looks significantly better than the blurry, muted, and muddled projector image.

Then the audio at theaters is always totally blown out and overly bassy and siblant. Fine for action, I guess, but it makes listening to dialogue exhausting.

And unless you get your favorite seat, you have to watch the movie skewed. God forbid you get a seat in the front and have to crane your neck the whole hour.

Meanwhile I can stay home, not deal with driving 20 minutes and interacting with the public, pay less, eat better food, get blitzed with friends, talk with my wife, have better visuals and audio, etc. Other than nostalgia, there's just no reason at all to go to a movie theater. It's become kind of outdated in an era of modern TVs to me.

> Also wouldn't it only work for aircraft that are flying away from the launcher?

Yes, pretty much all early guided missiles of the sort were what's called "rear-aspect".

Can't see the plume - can't make a boom.

Simply saying it in his position is explicitly a war crime already.

Until you're a professional designer and they ask you to "scale up this part" or something. Then you realize that your actual intention is having the original layer currently rendered at that size and did not actually intend to permanently modify the original so you can't go back.

Once you export it is, of course, actually downscaled.

Same idea behind masks and modifiers and the like. Most modern creation tools try to give ample opportunity for non-destructive modification to simpler, immutable primitive layers.

If only there was a link to the report on TFA, which then itself linked to multiple sources, configurations, and processes used.

I'm sorry, do you not understand what the US is these days? Who runs it? They already have. Yesterday news started leaking about a 2-5,000 unit deployment.

But friends and family of military already knew before that.