sangnoir

500 lines of bash could have been rewritten as 50 lines of dense Perl. Pro: fewer lines of code. Con: even the author would find the Perl script inscrutable after a few weeks.

No hypothetical there - it has already happened, just not about Tiananmen square. Have you tried asking ChatGPT about David Mayer[1] or Jonathan Turley[1]? Give it a whirl and watch the all-American censorship at work.

Corporations avoiding legal trouble is the one thing in common between American, Chinese, or any other AI company, really.

1. https://www.404media.co/not-just-david-mayer-chatgpt-breaks-...

Is this a trick question about Hollywood accounting?

> He's very much constrained by MAGA and friends

A promoted president Vance will be in no way constrained or contained by MAGA if he has Thiel in his corner.

I don't think people with skin in the game are as cavalier about Vance as you are. He is after all, a heartbeat from the presidency whose incumbent will become the oldest on record - you probably don't want to be on his bad side - just in case. If he calls you, you probably want to pick up the phone and hear him out.

You may have missed my final sentence.

I'm talking about buying pieces of big tech and selling them to the public via IPO. I don't thr the public has gotten wise to anything when POTUS and FLOTUS have "meme" crypto coins.

> That moat is trivially circumvented by lighting a larger pile of money and less trivially by lighting the pile more efficently.

DeepSeek has proven that the latter is possible, which drops a couple of River crossing rocks into the moat.

> They have no desire to unseat BigTech, they want to be acquired by them.

Acquisitions are one way to make money off big tech. Breaking them up and buying parts of them for cents on the dollar are another, especially if you can issue barely veiled threats of government-backed retaliation if they refuse to come to the table with your allies/fronts. With a "loosened regulations" regime, IPOs may be even more profitable than acquisitions.

IMO, the SV mindset, VC and big tech aren't interchangeable in that way.

Sequoia Capital, the 900 lb gorilla of VCs reportedly had $102B in funds/assets in 2024. Apple just had $124B as first quarter revenue and had over $200B in cash reserves after a $30B stock buyback. I don't know the size of the funds Vance oversaw, but I bet dollars to donuts, the scale is far bigger at big tech.

Vance came from Venture Capital, not big tech. Now that they have a seat st the table, I can see VC folk cannibalizing big tech if there's enough money in it. Who can say no to a court-mandated fire sale of Chrome Inc or Android Inc? They'd ride it all the way to an IPO, before the enterprises collapse without the ad-dollars <-> eyeballs virtuous cycle.

You are going to die someday, right? How close do you have to be to deaths door for it to be morally okay for me to smother you with a pillow[1]? It was going to happen anyway, why would it matter that I did it?

1. Or carbon monoxide mask, if the distress of asphyxiation is throwing you off the from point I'm trying to make

The Jesuit order - to which Pope Francis belonged (belongs?) - has a long and notable history of contributing to science and scientific discovery. So they are not just thinkers, but doers.

Installing Lineage should help battery life. @marcan[1] dissected the new update and puts the blames an overlay in the new kernel that changed the charge voltage.

1. https://social.treehouse.systems/@marcan/113914172433692339

> Banned in the USA. Only.

The US government has the wherewithal to drag Europe along with it, like they did with Huawei's 5G equipment.

The comparison becomes meaningless when we count the milliwatt, sub-Lumen LED in an outlet wirh incandescents. "I had 8 incandescent lightbulbs, but now have 1000s of LEDs- including outlets, TV backlights, DVR status" isn't comparing like with like.

An appliance with the primary role of storage, and the ability to share files over the network are the distinguishing features for a NAS. Network support for iSCSI, SMB, NFS makes a NAS; sharing data exclusively over the media protocols (http, rtsp, etc) makes it a media server

Debian Testing might be more of your tempo if you don't like the age of packages in Stable

Spammers know of the "+" trick, which was popularized by GMail. If they have any level of sophistication at all, they'll /+.*@/@/

RifylyAI to keep up with the times.

These days, it's -ai. All those SomethingAI names won't age well, and will be dated sooner than the proprietors think

> They want Trump to negotiate a new deal on their behalf.

I am certain they'll get the deal they deserve. For every complex problem, there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong

My high school teacher taught our class a lot about biases in historical sources, when reading a source you have to critically analyze who the author and recipient were, and their motivations. That lesson still applies in the age of LLMs as a filter of knowledge, if you ask anyone to summarize a historical event, they color it with their own subjectivity - human or model.

Anyone who tells you history is unbiased is either lying, or a propagandists standing by with a pitcher of Kool-Aid.

Who's going to pay for the quarantines - the same overburdened taxpayers you were concerned about?

How much are you willing to pay for screening a very long list of diseases - both in administrative costs and traveler time wasted? Will you be quarantining citizens too, as some infections have an incubation period before they can be detected - who will pay for all of that? How many tourism dollars will be lost due to this additional friction?

Now that we have established you're willing to pay to prevent diseases spreading to the US, why do you think that screening at the border is superior to reducing the worldwide incidence, or eradicating them and never having to screen for them ever again?

> Do I need to accept everything else to get this service or can I just whitelist this line item?

It's a bundled deal, sorry. It's not just governments that avoid admin overheads - no auto insurance I know will let you pick which specific impacts to insure against a la carte, just to reduce your premiums.

Also, no 2 people will ever agree on the same government spend (to the nearest million), so I don't see the point of your exercise to personally quantify how ones tax dollars should be directed. The point of having a representative government is so that individual citizens don't need referendum on how much to pay for toilet paper at an USAF base in Japan, or disease reconnaissance in central Africa - but both things benefit US citizens (broadly speaking) and need to be done, so congress allocates the money.

How much would you pay to not get Ebola or another haemorrhagic disease, should it find it's way into your community? How much are you willing to pay to hedge against that risk by squelching outbreaks near the source?

American soft power enables a multitude of benefits to US taxpayers, but as a higher-order effect. Leaders who only apply first-order thinking will disrupt complex systems without understanding them.

In addition to your phone, you can also set up to 4 other Webauthn tokens, Yubikeys or FIDO2 devices as well as a printed recovery key. If none of those fall-backs work for you, perhaps switching to a different password manager is best.

Incidentally, Altman's comments were in response to a question a out about a hypothetical startup with $10m. So you've made the argument even more cogent.