nwatson

It's too late, these actions have shown how truly fragile and arbitrary USA policy is, and extreme anti-current-rules-based-order views are rampant in USA politics. Policy will be volatile and no multinationals or governments will want to deal with the chaos.

When the bully gets too ambitious the large number of bullied gang together for revenge, or at least effective countermeasures. The world will route around USA, find they can manage ok without it. The USA will be iced out, lose its reserve currency status, nobody will buy its military technology, making the USA unable to recoup large outlays for ambitious military projects, and the USA will lose its military dominance.

Also, the future of warfare and terrorism is autonomous networks of drones. Mexico and Canada won't be disposed to care what passes through their borders with the USA, and like Zelensky said ... we had the oceans and friendly neighbors, but that won't help us anymore.

EDIT: minor corrections

I also do not like that the first (and wrong) form is seen by many as equivalent to the second form.

I think GP is saying the Irish speak and write a more beautiful or clever English, the language adopted from their conquerors, than in the USA, or perhaps even England.

The time and expense to set up a manufacturing line for anything nontrivial is large. And Trump's policy volatility makes the risk completely not worth it.

I use Apple-Silicon MacBook Pro and Mac Mini for software development. I hardly ever use Apple software for business/personal/productivity. Jetbrains IDE tools, Docker, Homebrew work great. I install Chrome browser and use Google services, AWS and GCP consoles, etc. via the browser. YouTube for video, Google Music app.

As for all Apple software, I might use Preview or Numbers (spreadsheets) on occasion, and I'm forced to use Finder, which I hate. And Terminal works well. I avoid Safari.

Apple "PC" hardware is solid. I use third party apps though, little Apple software, there are better alternatives. I've used Android since the HTC Dream (I think it was the first Android phone in the USA) and have stuck with Android since, with few problems.

Edit: I thought the Apple Vision Pro would be interesting (I couldn't justify the expense) but I saw the value supposedly would be greatest for those fully bought into the integrated Apple app ecosystem and iCloud. I'm not the target user.

Speaking of religion and Europe ... while not in Latin America I spent a few years growing up here and there in Arizona, my parents being ministers in a pentecostal church. All the pentecostal and charismatic churches were in thrall of the Hal Lindsey book "Late Great Planet Earth" [0] and other prophetic books trying to map nations/geographies from the Book of Revelation / Apocalypse to the then-day international power structure. "Sister Drew", our local in-congregation prophecy expert, would relay the latest findings. From what I remember, the idea was that Russia and Europe were to fight it out, Europe being the seat of the Antichrist's power, and somehow the Vatican was embroiled in it too.

Europe was supposed to be the "late stage" of human civilization, from Daniel's Old Testament dream of the human-form statue. The head of gold was the pinnacle of civilization, Babylon. The silver chest and arms were Persia. The belly and thighs were the Greek Empire. The legs of iron were the Roman Empire, resurrected as the fractious European Common Market (now European Union) in the feet of "iron mixed with clay".

The USA was variously portrayed as the Great Wh*re of Babylon, or else had some heroic role of some kind in these End Times.

At some point, all nations would stop fighting each other and join together to turn on Israel. Israel would be doomed but for God's intervention. From Daniel's dream, a pebble would form from nothing, grow to be a mighty boulder, and smash the feet of iron and clay (Europe, and by proxy godless humanity) and the rest of human civilization in form of the statue would crumble. The mighty boulder being ... Jesus. Israel would be mostly destroyed but a rescued "remnant", faithful Christians would be raptured / taken to heaven, the World would End ... and eventually all humanity would be judged for eternal salvation or punishment.

Wacky, fringe stuff ... EXCEPT THAT THESE BELIEFS ARE SO RELEVANT TO OUR PRESENT POLITICAL SITUATION IN THE USA. Check out the book "The Violent Take It by Force: The Christian Movement That Is Threatening Our Democracy" by Matthew D Taylor [1]. In this book and various podcasts Taylor describes the origins, religious and political philosophy, and current political power of the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR). No NAR church / congregation will claim the moniker today, but it remains a perfect description of the structure, leadership, and influence of this movement. The Bebbington Quadrilaterial splits "evangelicals" in the USA (and internationally) into four groups based on measures along two axes ... the "denominational vs non-denominational", and "charistmatic vs non-charistmatic". I grew up in in the denominational charismatic square, where churches believe in and expect the miraculous, but also belong to a centralized denomination with standards and accountability. The NAR congregations fit in the non-denominational charistmatic square, have a very authoritarian leadership structure with "apostles and prophets" at the top of each organization, and with a forest of MLM trees of such organizations, with no accountability at all for the "apostles" (c.f. the Mike Bickle scandal, and so many others, where people got away with abuse for years). In any case, in 2015 Trump's "spiritual advisor" Paula White (in early 2025 now is head of the White House Faith Council) gathered many apostles in this NAR movement around Trump, to throw their weight behind his candidacy and make him an acceptable candidate for their brand of evangelicals, and to pull in low-information evangelicals of other stripes behind his candidacy. And hence ... a conversation today between Trump and Zelensky, and many other knock-on effects.

Note that the NAR proposes to take over the world through their Seven Mountains Mandate, to "Bring Heaven to Earth", and usher in the End of Time. Of course, Trump does not believe any of this, but the evangelical power base is extremely loyal to him.

[0] https://www.amazon.com/Late-Great-Planet-Earth/dp/031027771X

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Violent-Take-Force-Christian-Threaten...

Beau of the Fifth Column (Youtube channel for Justin King) would always emphasize (before he relinquished it all for his wife "Belle of the Ranch" to take over) that international relations are usually well-orchestrated, even between enemies, with speeches and releases using heavily coded language, to minimize the possibilities of conflict. Friends and enemies both would telegraph to some degree their intentions, their protestations, their agreements, and shifting policies ... very very carefully.

Trump, Vance, Musk ... have upended this all with their amateur hour antics. They are not serious people. They think they can rewrite the rules but they've bought us at least a decade of hurt and isolation on the international stage, and likely worse economic prospects for a while. Nobody will trust us, even if saner leadership comes round in a few years.

With Trump's fragile ego, there's a chance he will designate all humanitarian charitable organizations, and military-aid organizations, to whom USA citizens might want to donate, that have any ties to or otherwise benefit Ukraine, as terrorist organizations. I will be evaluating these ... if you have plans to assist, it may be better to do so sooner rather than later.

Ukraine is sending troops over 26 or so years old now. They will need to dip into their prime-aged young population eventually, the 18-to-26-year-olds. That will be a hard moral choice they apparently want to avoid, but perhaps necessary.

China takes Siberia. Soon. And maybe Taiwan.

Ukraine knows the future of warfare and will prosper if they survive this. They will be the ones with the technology and experience in future warfare, and the USA is throwing away a chance to partner with Ukraine and guarantee such a victory.

In 20, 15, or 7 years from now when terrorists are sending drones into medium-sized cities in Alabama to kill indiscriminately, it would have been better for the USA to have been on Ukraine's side.

EDIT: better grammar, maybe

I would believe ... plan to buy the ETF, find the number of shares of Tesla integrated into your ETF purchase, and then buy the ETF and short-sell that number of shares of Tesla "simultaneously". Keep checking the composition of the ETF and rebalance your Tesla short, or perhaps also the ETF.

Without fractional shares it might be difficult to get an exact counterbalance, and there will be inconvenient short vs long term capital gains tracking for rebalancing events.

Edit: spelling

For those close to the current executive, killing DoEd ultimately is a cultural quest, not a fiscal one.

Edit: and so are a lot of their other efforts

They'll also be prime targets for drones.

Someone I know at a mixed-signal company many of whose chips go to 5G deployments said their revenue really slowed down last year due to 5G deployment uptake decreasing significantly.

Musk's operations likely are using illegal means and are an overextension of power, while legislative and judicial branches, as well as internal executive branch watchdogs, have abdicated their roles in oversight and control. This is effectively an overthrow.

I don't see much of that in North Carolina.

Ore por nós, nesta hora da nossa estupidez. Na verdade, foram muitas outras horas de estupidez, mas o sofrer começa agora.

I'm in WS myself now, going on 12 years.

To be built in Greensboro, NC / North Carolina ... https://boomsupersonic.com/superfactory

Taiwan would strike Three Gorges Dam and kill millions. CCP should focus on Siberia.

The gyroscopic effect contributes little to maintaining a balanced bike ride, contrary to the article claim. An idealized massless wheel/tire wouldn't diminish ridability.

Steering dynamics (steering to counteract bike lean) and trail effect (bike are built to automatically counteract lean), along with rider input (steering, leaning body), are more important components.

That focus-farther-than-the-page works (for most people) as long as the distance between the (center of each of the) two images on the page is smaller than your interpupillary distance. In this case the left eye will see the left image, the right eye the right image, in the overlaid resolved image.

For most people, having the images resolve in front of the plane of the page such that in resolved overlaid image the right eye sees the left image, and the left eye sees the right image, will work ... and it can work even if the images are farther apart than the interpupillary distance.

Interesting seeing the death of blockchain-based AWS QLDB mentioned.

I worked at a company for a while that used QLDB as the primary system of record. The idea is great but the problem is that due to performance and other QLDB limitations all data had to be mirrored to an RDBMS via a streaming/queuing system, and there always were programmatic errors in interpreting data arriving for import into the RDBMS ... text field too long for RDBMS field; wrong data type or overflowing integer; invalid text encoding; ... Etc. These errors had to be noticed, debugged, fixed, and data had to be re-streamed. In the meantime official transactions were missing from the RDBMS side, which was used for reporting, driving the UI, deriving monetary obligations, etc. it was not worth the trouble. (I was lucky to not be involved in that design or implementation.)

Then just use a database for unit testing as well.

The LLMs have been fed the critique and analysis and discussion of all manner of biblical passages. The LLMs usually give great interpretations and even contrast different theological takes on such passages.

I imagine Bible passages, at least the more widely quoted and discussed ones, appear many, many times in the various available translations, in inspirational, devotional, scholarly articles, in sermon transcripts, etc. This surely reinforces almost word-for-word recall. SEO garage is a bit different each time, so common SEO-reinforced themes might be recalled in LLM output, but not word for word.

ChatGPT chat interface has impressed me when going beyond the scope presented on TFA, eg, when asking about predestination, biblical passages for and against, theologians' and scholars' takes on the debate, and exploring the details in subsequent follow-ups. The LLMs have been fed the Bible and all manner of discussions of Bible-related matters. Like the grandparent comment suggests, the LLMs are much more impressive at interpreting biblical passages and presenting the varieties of opinions about them, or finding passages related to specific topics and presenting opinions.

... and you can push CPU-intensive stuff off to a thread-executor to avoid blocking the async run-loop