paimapi

one could say that that's what it means to be resilient and emotionally mature, to not desperately seek approval from only external sources, and to be content with expressing yourself however you'd like to :)

it's not that load-bearing isn't doing the, well, load-bearing semantic work but it's both the lack of variability and lack of nuance hat makes it sound cheap. word choice is powerful - and in the same way, it can be nuanced

for eg. consider the synonyms for 'load-bearing'. if you want construction motifs: keystone, linchpin, cornerstone, foundational, structural. if you want earthy: bedrock, root. if you want ten-dollar words: axiomatic, sine qua non. if you just want to-the-point: vital, key, tenet, crucial

each of those words contain nuance. vital is used a lot in medicine (vital signs) so health, the heart, etc are evoked. pair it with specific usage like "this point is vital, the argument would die without it" and it rings different than "this point is load-bearing, the argument would be refuted without it"

you'd need to exist as a purely logical, probabilistic semantic parsing machine with no innate feeling or cultural attunement to prefer the lack of color and nuance. language as fully utilitarian with no artfulness is dreadful - if all I had to read all day was a self-important tech manual, I too would be frustrated and want for better craft in output prose

while true, this is reliant on company leadership (and their boards/shareholders) to allow for it. there's too much invested in commercial real estate at the moment that every publicly traded company with significant stake from some large investor(s) will be forcing RTO/hybrid. the calculus of 'slightly unhappy workers' vs 'complete collapse for X% of my portfolio' is not a difficult solve

which isn't to say that this is right or just. it's simply the state of things given the way we've decided to arrange our society

in the few books I've read about technological breakthroughs, the vast majority come from academia. I'm thinking about Eckert's adoption of IBM's ticker tape for commands rather than just rote data [0], all the inventions that came out of the NDRC [1] (for better or worse), the ENIAC, FORTRAN, how reliant solid state devices were on understanding quantum theory [2], and so many other examples. Paul E. Ceruzzi's "Computing: A Concise History" goes over much of this (including making note of the US military's heavy usage of LLMs for the Iraq War pre-empted the consumer push for LLMs)

most of the things that private enterprise contributes is cost reduction and manufacturing capacity (important in their own right for ubiquity) but having extremely well-funded R&D and universities still seem like the primary driver for truly evolutionary and revolutionary breakthroughs rather than useful but not necessary optimizations

IP law very much aims to protect the latter so that breakthroughs can be capitalized on but aren't a necessary motivator for researchers to continue frontier work

(0)https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_SSEC (1)https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Defense_Research_Comm... (2)https://www.allaboutcircuits.com/textbook/semiconductors/chp...

2-3 hours at 20kW daily (assuming commute, etc) vs 20ish hours always on tasks really is close to equivalent

which is to say that the last thing our planet needs is another universalized technology that outputs as much total emissions as cars

in an ideal world, we'd keep LLMs/CNNs/etc specialized and academic until we are hitting diminishing returns on optimizing fundamental microprocessor tech like GAA. but the pursuit of market dominance and mass adoption is our current operating philosophy, and so we have things like this top graph: https://hai.stanford.edu/news/inside-the-ai-index-12-takeawa...

>Grok 4's estimated training emissions reached 72,816 tons of CO2 equivalent, or roughly the same amount of greenhouse gas emissions created from driving 17,000 cars for one year

> https://restroomarchive.com/r/2026-08-31-tri-cities-airport-...

incredible work. I can only imagine what it was like standing here getting the images, the smell of the must wafting from the corners that haven't been cleaned in a decade, the microbial colonies thriving off pipe condensation above with entire universes of births and deaths and rebirths

1000/10, every bathroom is an entire story

I am a little wary how many of the newer apps on F-Droid seem fully vibe-coded. there's only so many 'brain training' games and 'fully offline notes' that one really needs

I wish there was a 'ranking' feature that periodically (maybe daily?) pulled down star/contributor numbers so you could at least look at projects that are more likely to receive continuing support and have basic hygiene like Dependabot alerts

that said, migrating off so many of the Google-native or phone manufacturer apps has been such a liberatory feeling. I do some community organizing in my free-time and am a huge FOSS evangelist in those spaces. there's so many similar values, namely anti-surveillance, and but for resistance to change and preference for hyperpalatable UX, it's such a natural fit

sure, that's a great principle but is it applicable here? Ariely is noted having sent an email asking Epstein about 'that redhead' (along with hundreds of others and his work rehabbing the image of someone with a known pedophilia sex trafficking indictment)

if you assess the original claim against the facts, is it as ludicrously out-of-step as someone claiming that Trump found A Modest Proposal persuasive?

> The messages revealed that his friendship with Epstein lasted for nine years, including well after Epstein was initially charged with soliciting sex from a minor.[52] Ariely also suggested that Epstein use learnings from his research to help rehabilitate his public image

what's clownish is defending anybody who would associate with a billionaire pedophile sex trafficker

anybody in the files who helped him rehab his image should rightly be consigned to the dustbin of history

> It revealed that Ariely had a longstanding relationship with Epstein, including having visited him at his New York home on several occasions.[45] One of the documents is an image of an email from Ariely to Epstein, in which he requests the name and email of a "redhead" that Epstein had previously introduced to him

I mean, I've always consigned 100% of NYT self help slop to the bin of books for people who aren't smart but desperately want to seem like they but this is just a little much now, Dan

I'm very comfortable with not being liked by people :)

tale as old as time. cis gay white men joining the Log Cabin and advocating against trans rights as soon as they taste power is another example

it reminds me of playground socialization. the cool kids bully you for a long time and so you socialize with the outcasts. one day you get invited into the cool crowd, minimally welcomed with some reservations, and suddenly you're bullying the outcasts you used to associate with even harder than the cool kids ever did because you think it'll help elevate your status with your new in-group

it's really a gross, childish thing but so so common to people who come into power after having it withheld for so long, at least in some Western societies

fully agreed with this. it's the same stigma that I see get applied to SSRIs - that you become 'dependent' on medication, it's not 'natural', etc

in reality, if the side effects are minimal and you function better on it, it's a sip of water and a pill a day and that's largely it for health outcomes. most drug interventions are generally extremely well-studied with very large sample sizes. there's a reason why clinical research is considered gold-standard - the regulatory requirements to even get a drug to market is monumental and some of the most rigorously audited and vetted processes in the world

the ironic thing is that most of the big pharma detractors are also ingesting dozens of supplements, the vast majority of which have little to no good empirical evidence backing them (and very small effect sizes to boot) along with even less regulatory oversight for issues like contamination, formulation, or if it even contains the active ingredient. which isn't to say that 'big pharma' doesn't often pursue avenues for profitability reasons instead of the public good but that's not the typical critique that an anti-empiricist brings most times

that's an uncited claim framed as a guess, not confirmation or even a more educated guess by people performing actual ethnographies and larger demographic analysis. pair it against both the fact that these bombs are easy to make (plastic bottle + explosive) and the stronger kinship ties of families and villages, it's not impossible to imagine groups pooling money to purchase fertilizer on the gray market

you'd have to imagine that higher earners would easily be able to navigate out to deeper waters with better boats whereas lower income would stay in shallower waters which is noted as largely where this is happening

blunt comment but not technically wrong - it's likely poverty and subsistence living that's driving adoption of this 'technique' and much of that originates from a combination of the colonial carve up of Indonesia [0] in combination with the weak and easily exploited position of the country within globalized economic markets [1]

[0] https://law.wm.edu/academics/intellectuallife/researchcenter...

>Centuries of Dutch control produced an ethnic and economic caste system familiar to many colonized peoples. Compared to some imperial powers, Dutch policy was less focused on “Dutchifying” the indigenous population, with most attention paid to resource extraction and maritime strategic advantage.

[1] https://archive.org/details/ahmad-nashih-luthfi-muhammad-fau...

>The short cut to development that the New Order took was highly depending on foreign loans. Consequently, development models were very much shaped by the foreign institutions that became the source of finance for Indonesia. At the end of the 1980s for instance, the World Bank forced for the project for the construction of Kedung Ombo Dam [...] The construction of the Dam had caused thousands of people and tens of villages to be evicted and involuntarily resettled. The Dam became the symbol of prestige for the New Order. When the New Order regime collapsed, the dam was abandoned and gradually left to dry.

yet another case of an editor writing a clickbait headline for a much more nuanced article about a very specific and interesting topic

it both makes sense and seems very obvious that the CIA utilized an artistic movement as both a tool of internal domestic propaganda (excluding Soviet art which was incredible for its time due to actually being publicly funded) and to push soft power overseas by dangling inclusion in supposedly prestigious cultural institutions (ie mostly playthings of the rich, populated with the owned art of the rich with the blessing of the government which increased the cultural prestige and thus later sale value of the art)

a more honest title might be 'Is the way we perceive modern art influenced by Cold War American propaganda'? but I suppose that wouldn't have Gen Z and Alpha clicking through and learning how culturally bankrupt things are in the West, and how pervasive and invisibilized so much of our domestic propaganda is

another example of this might be the way nonviolence as a protest strategy just happened to be greatly encouraged by the rich and CIA-connected [0] [1]

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dmL7Ph4Us8o&lc

[1] https://openlibrary.org/books/OL17563812M/How_nonviolence_pr...

a single RCT of 40 people is about middle-of-the-range when it comes the hierarchy of evidence and is at best a 'that's neat, I'll wait a few years for there to be more studies' if you don't want to do any more thinking about it, a 'I need to see it in context of other studies' if you want a lot of work, or a 'I sure hope there's a meta/review' if you don't have the time but still want to remain skeptical

that said, there is a GRADE-assessed systematic review and meta on mint (PMC11587584) and this linked study's results are 7x the pooled effect size (SBP -8.5mmHg vs -1.2mmHg) of the other RCTs. the review also concludes that more high quality RCTs are needed before anything approaching clinical significance

the wildly disproportionate effect size indicates to me that this is one going to be one of those outlier studies that future reviewers will either likely omit or clearly state that it is an outlier result and if they're super duper honest they'll provide the new pooled results with and without this outlier study

definitely not Switzerland now - https://tuta.com/blog/switzerland-surveillance-plan

Iceland still has the best data protection laws in the world, afaik

we had one chance to elect that technocrat who could have set us on the path that the PRC is on now. instead, we decided it was more important to feel like we could have a beer with the President and so ended up invading Iraq and Afghanistan instead

you say that like American lobbyists and Congress people are at-all technically minded and not just hyperbolic princes seeking influence at any cost

>Big deadly pandemics (black plague level) are usually bacteria.

that's not really true, is it? I'm thinking small pox and influenza are big ones with well-studied pandemics that had fairly high mortality rates

this is more of a curiosity and not pushback but are there mechanistic reasons why viral mutations are subjected to tradeoffs in terms of lethality vs infectiousness? is it that the more lethal it is, the earlier it is that people become symptomatic (and thus are far more likely to isolate and/or be immobile)?

we're far closer to one side of that spectrum than the other. consider the retroactively legalized mass wiretapping, room 641A, NIST compromises, PRISM, 14 Eyes, the other Snowden revelations, etc

then consider this paired with the implementation of mass data sharing between the alphabet agencies, surveillance data sharing from private companies like Amazon Ring, Flock, Clearview, etc. and NSPM-7 ordering agencies to create JTTFs to target organizations like BLM

then consider the unmitigated use of force by federal law enforcement agencies like ICE

I think if this were 1995 your point might be fair but those days are unfortunately long gone

I think the exploits of the Inquisitors across the millenia especially post-Cathars when torture and mass slaughter were recommended tools for religious indoctrination might be a bit a counter-factual to this (but religious history is not my most strongly studied area)

from NIST [0] to AT&T [1], the NSA has always had a backdoor into huge swathes of data created or transmitted through whatever means along with having Congress laws passed to retroactively make all of this collection legal [2]

it really makes you wish that the lesson the Ruby Ridge far-right took away was simple anti-authoritarianism and not the antisocial tendencies of racial separatism and a Judeo-Christian theocracy

[0] https://cs.stanford.edu/people/eroberts/cs181/projects/ethic... [1] https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/the-whistleblower-who-unc... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSA_warrantless_surveillance_(...

their competitors are Clearview and Motorola, neither of which are what you would call unimpeachable from a corporate ethics standpoint [0] [1] [2] [3] [4]

companies will only do better if their clientele wants it. if the police don't want accountability processes then that's just tech debt for a future roadmap some other team will handle

[0] https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/society-equity/clearv...

[1] https://www.edpb.europa.eu/news/dutch-supervisory-authority-...

[2] https://www.aclu.org/cases/aclu-v-clearview-ai

[3] https://www.business-humanrights.org/en/latest-news/motorola...

[4] https://classactionu.org/our-news/motorola-solutions-faces-p...

I came from an email marketing company where this was not the case. celebrity accounts were accessible to everyone down to the level of first-line support which eventually resulted in someone getting fired because they were able to add a self-promo into a large account's public communique. it took years before basic access controls were implemented and even then that was only because we were acquired and our parent company was very unhappy with our current state

which isn't to say that Flock isn't at fault - they very much are and they made it simple for cops to stalk people at will and with very little visibility until recently. pair it with a very nominal reason to investigate, say, community organizing and it becomes (or, really, has already become) a way to stifle dissent [0]

[0] https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/inte...

I think this has much to do with the history of policing in the US which originated in the South as re-enslavement patrols and in the North as strikebreakers [0]. these institutions were built to be oppressive towards a population that was heterogeneous. this is unlike the ethnic homogeneity in Europe

with the recent waves of immigration into EU states, you're now also seeing some of the same tactics in use by those 'better' policing institutions (eg France's prison population [1]) plus the rise of reactionary, far-right political parties [2]

my guess is that these are just the natural outcomes from us organizing ourselves as nation states ruled by ethnic and economic elites. carve up borders along sociocultural lines like shared language, religion, and phenotypes and you will always have a ruling majority (at least in the beginning). any changes to that status quo means someone has to relinquish power and some people will do everything, even deliberately antisocial, societally harmful things to preserve that hold [3]

until we move past this kind of organization, I don't see any other possible outcome. given the mass migrations that will occur due to climate change, I expect we'll reach a breaking point within a century and the only path forward that isn't regressive will need to be revolutionary rather than evolutionary

[0] https://sandratrappen.com/2018/11/18/private-police-forces-t...

[1] https://www.antoniocasella.eu/nume/France_prison_MUSLIM_2008...

[2] https://www.dw.com/en/far-right-populists-eu-germany-afd/a-7...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_strategy

news like this is only coming out because Flock very recently rolled out a system that tracks usage and flags possible abuses: https://www.wsbtv.com/news/trending/flock-updates-safeguards...

the problem is that usage of this system with enforcement is not law. Police Departments opt-in and are the ones responsible for whether or not individuals are charged, fired, or simply disciplined, and they also choose whether or not to disclose this to the public. and the other problem is that it's not just Flock - other companies are stepping in like Axon and Motorola and are essentially eating the cake that is Flock's recent public infamy [0]

and law enforcement skirting of accountability is essentially a legalized thing now under legal mechanisms like qualified immunity. not to mention the boy's club that are police unions - my FIL is a former sergeant and has many stories of how he was blackballed by his union because he wouldn't cover for bad cops to the extent that they were pursuing taking away his pension and insurance coverage until just a few years ago

[0] https://www.atlasofsurveillance.org/search?location=&technol...

it's a rhetorical heuristic that a writer should know to use when directing a reader to a declarative that they want them to pay attention to, usually because it's a non-obvious or roundabout insight

when utilized by AI, it's a probabilistic output and it's variable whether or not that rhetorical trick is useful. it also pushes a non-skeptical reader to focus too much on the following text or even to believe that they, themselves, derived some insight. this is effectively a kind of persuasive sophistry which is not helpful - adding rules around it prevents people from deluding themselves with AI