Y’know what? I don’t care. Maybe it’s happening, even in the dramatic worst-case way it’s portrayed here, but is that the biggest/only story in China? It feels sort of credibility-stretching that a country of 1.4 billion people and a top-two global economy is entirely cantilevered around the idea of oppressing a tiny minority in the rural corner of the country. I’m fairly certain there are at least nine people in China who can go an entire workday without contemplating how to wipe the Uighyurs off the map. Maybe as many as twelve!

The US is no longer in any sort of moral leadership position to point fingers on human rights, if not for the last few decades, then certainly in its El Salvador phase. The only reason Western media remotely give a damn here is because they’re desperate to slap an asterisk next to the growth and real economic advancement of a country that promises to outpace them imminently.

There’s a huge shift in male role models over the past few decades, and it always felt to me like the people who could never fit into the old militaristic, athletic “conqueror”-style mould saying “we’ll invent our own definition of masculinity” than a direct, fully-bought-in progression.

This will leave people behind-- the ones who can’t find new “appropriate” idols or aren’t impressed by their achievements. The Linus Torvalds version of conquering the world is hardly the Genghis Khan version.

Maybe we need to find a way to broaden the modern pantheon to figures that can resonate with a traditional audience.

What the hell is with the “Thank you for your attention to this matter?”

You’re shitposting to a global media audience, not politely asking Facilities to restock the vending machine with Snickers bars.

Are you just in full Business Guy Autocomplete mode? A Bigly Language Model?

No, there’s me AND Steve.

You might look into the Kailh Box switches. The click leaf adds a distinct tactile bump, plus the sound factor. The Box Navy is almost painfully tactile.

Try RiscOS for a glimpse of a world most of us missed.

I suspect it could be seen as a proper noun.

If Acme and FooCorp create a bridge between their private network spaces, it’s an internet (common noun) but not the Internet (proper noun, referring to the one with Goatse).

Let’s find an English teacher. And yell at them for forcing us to read the same terrible novel in both 10th and 12th grades. Maybe after that, return to this subject.

I’d say it’s a bad thing because it’s the wrong threat model as a default.

More home users are in scenarios like “I spilled a can of Diet Sprite into my laptop, can someone yank the SSD and recover my cat pictures” than “Someone stole my laptop and has physical access to state secrets that Hegseth has yet to blurt on Twitch chat”. Encryption makes the first scenario a lot harder to easily recover from, and people with explicit high security needs should opt into it or have organization-managed configs.

Does the USA make a $25 aftermarket PS2-style controller to steer it with?

It will even be covered in orange stains like when Kyle ate Cheetos before borrowing it.

There is the technical argument that PoS was more energy efficient than running data centres full of ASICs or sometimes GPUs solely to produce proof-of-work.

It’s still different flavours of Let’s Prentend We’re Finance Except Without Grownup Boring Rules, but if we can avoid burning gigawatts and puffing the cost of GPUs, there’s a case for it.

Even the Grinch didn’t go on TV to tell peoole he was stealing Christmas.

That fault is common in vintage stereo amplifiers too. A popular mod is to install a triac so that the switch becomes basically a soft-switch toggling a few hundred milliamperes, rather than the full current draw for less arcing. See https://audiokarma.org/forums/index.php?threads/is-your-unobtainium-power-switch-worth-5-and-an-hour-or-so-of-your-time.504673/ for discussion; not sure if it can be directly applied here.

Then you have the NexGen Nx586, which is arguably 386-like in having no FPU, but ended up being the ancestor of most modern x86 CPUs by decomposing complex operations into RISC-esque micro-ops.

The Global Foundries split was probably a way to get AMD out of the hyper-capital-intensive fab business. And without a tier-1 customer, Global had less reason to pursue smaller nodes.

Intel has that national-champion thing to keep it afloat. I can imagine there are defence contracts that will never go to a “TSMC Arizona Division” and they’ll pay whatever it takes to keep that going.

It’s easier just to price in the fee than having to shut down or retool a project.

The problem with attribution is the difficulty of 1000% accurate compliance.

If you grab 100 lines of code from a repository, or five paragraphs from a story, there’s probably a claim there. If you grab a single word, there’s probably not. But in the middle, there’s a paralysis of uncertainty-- is n lines similar enough to create liability? Can you remember where you saw what reliably? You end up with a bias towards “over-attribution” and it becomes difficult to pare it back. Does everything need a full Git-style commit history? Are we forever stuck keeping a credit on a project because it’s difficult to prove you’ve fully scrubbed their contributions?

Focus on how we pay artists (ideally lush grants) and forget about credit. Maybe establish a culture where it’s voluntary and acceptable-- that people feel that they’re allowed to cite their raw materials, and reuse doesn’t make the work lesser-- but don’t try to use the courts to force people to try to remember and track where they saw something when they just want to create, or it creates a hostile environment.

Hey, the broken clock’s right!

IP law always had a built-in scale pronlem. Without a registration-required copyright model, and probably some sort of mandatory licensing rate system, the sheer logistics of finding and arranging rights made a lot of business models inpractical. (For example, why aren’t modern bookstores just print-on-demand kiosks, or streaming services have All The Content? In large part because it would cost thousands to track down owners and negotiate terms for $1.87 in royalties multiplied by every item in the catalog.)

This was ignorable for a long time, or even a commercial advantage for firms with access to large, pre-negotiated catalogs. The AI boom created a surprise market of non-incumbents who need to get access to a lot of IP in a streamlined manner.

If we open the door for bulk IP clearance to grant the AI bubble a stro ger legal footing, it can also allow other, potentially more interesting business ideas to slip through.

It’s impressive how much of the recent deportation scheme leans on the cooperation of one tin-pot state.

There aren’t that many other places with concentration camps conveninently located and leadership ready to deal. It’s unlikely they’d build them domestically, it would take time, cost a fortune, and not achieve the explicit “we removed the evil foreigners” goal.

It would be interesting to see what happened if someone said “we’ll pay you more than what America is paying to close the door.” Would he have to just knock on every presidential palace in the hemisphere looking for a new partner? Try to scale Guantanamo 100x overnight?

The sacred rituals of Western civilization-- the election and the press-- were long ago subsumed by capital. You don’t need to formally censor when the oligarchs own the media and will skew the messaging to serve their interest. You don’t need to have a single party state when the Overton window has been dragged so far right that no electoral outcome can actually oust billionaire rule.

At least, in that context, we can ask who censorship serves? Is it about social cohesion and stability, or preserving the privilege of a handful of people?

The risk they don’t seem to imagine is that their ownership and precious property rights are still conditional.

If you impoverish everyone so much that they no longer have a stake in preserving absolute property rights, it becomes a lot easier to sell “nationalise their assets” and “hang them from a petrol station canopy.”

You might be able to find a few bodyguards you can bribe to protect a compound, but you’re not going to be able to guard everything once society no longer sees value in recognizing your claims to ownership.

Even the “robber barons” of the past-- the Carnegies and Rockefellers-- at least knew that public gestures and restraint would help push that day back, but does Musk or Bezos have that level of understanfing?