FriendOfDeSoto

That’s not necessarily a ding on politicians. Representative democracy requires a political meat grinder that few people get out of still mostly intact. Those are the candidates you get to vote on. It takes a certain kind of person to survive the meat grinder long enough to be on a ballot. There are 350 million people in the US, for instance. There are maybe a half million people seeking office from local to federal. That’s about .15 percent of the entire population. It’s a sheer numbers game that you haven’t voted for anyone you liked.

Many good people don’t want to enter the meat grinder in the first place, skewing the result further. That’s why democracy is mostly about voting for the least bad.

I fear if you tally up the environmental impact of war, which is more often than not the reason for the rising oil price, it may exceed the savings at the end consumer level.

I started getting uncontrolled erections whenever my sat nav told me where to go. Now I know that Knight Rider was to blame.

Great use of the royal “we.”

I think they want to continue to make hand over first kind of money. If the gold veneer house came out with straight up accusations that Huang was dumb because he was spied on, I’m sure there is a whole rat’s tail of procedures that need to be followed. And some of those would surely impede Nvidia’s ability to rake it in like that and it may lead to a change in company leadership as well. And Huang is a buddy. Whatever the NYT writes is just “fake news” so they can ignore that like they do all the other proven lies.

I’m also thinking somebody in the clown car is aware of how bubbly this so-called AI economy is and that the two time peace prize runner up should try and not poke a needle needlessly before the midterms.

After I wrote my earlier reply, I was also thinking the motivation could be so much simpler. The orange, one of his kids he likes, or somebody else he knows is heavily invested in Nvidia. This could just be grift and greed as well.

I have no idea if this was Huang on Huang spying, export ban evasion, or a Chinese Trojan horse. And I’m happy about all the negative headlines about so-called AI or the incumbent president.

Still, and at the risk of having to take a long shower after this, I think I have to defend the mad orange. Let’s say there was a big Lockheed Martin deal in the making with Japan or the UK, billions of dollars for weapons and what not. Let’s say their CEO was cozying up to a person allegedly affiliated with an adversary’s intelligence service. And revealing this would endanger the whole deal. I think any president, no matter what party, would try to keep this under wraps. Do something like cancel that special briefing for the CEO so you didn’t do nothing alright. And then hope for the best. If they break this story, the deal is over and LM and all the jobs there are in real trouble. If the NYT breaks this with anonymous sources, there is wiggle room. I think that’s just executive realpolitik and not another character flaw in 47. He has enough of those already.

Anyways, eff me, I’m off to the shower.

So if all these cities are their unique time zones different from each other, all you need to know is the travelling time between each city and the departure time from St Pancras. So that was maybe 12:05 London time. Arriving 2 hours later in Paris at 13:41 Paris time, another 191 minutes to Cologne where the train arrives at 14:47 local time, etc. You need to write a book with all these time conversions. Not just to book a trip on this imaginary train but also for the people operating the points along the way, many in different time zones than the stations it stops at. That train travels through Germany so it’s bound to be delayed. Was the delay caused in a time zone in between Cologne and Berlin? It’s a delay of 47 minutes but where exactly was the train when it happened? Because if I don’t know that I don’t know how to convert that local time to local Warsaw time. It’s a heck of a lot easier if, say, Paris to Warsaw are in the same time zone. As a society, we arrived at time zones for a reason.

Imagine if the whole world was on some global time schedule.

UTC.

What’s the fascination with this topic? Time zones are a major accomplishment because they allow us to schedule things further than our city limits. A train schedule leaving London and going to Paris, Cologne, Berlin, Warsaw, Kiev, Moscow, Yekaterinburg, Novosibirsk, etc. would be difficult to plan without them. Even this new time, let’s call it BST, still needs time zones. Adjacent places need to agree on a common time. So we have accomplished nothing other than people having to learn their new 7am is 16:00. Which is counterintuitive.

The only country that clearly doesn’t give a shit about time zones is PR China. And the only reason why you haven’t heard many people thousands of miles west of Beijing having to live on Beijing time complain is the fact that it’s the more sparsely populated areas, the more troubled, and the fact that criticising a decision by the communist party carries the danger of being sent to a reeducation camp even if you’re neither a Uyghur nor a Tibetan.

Abolish DST and the few half hour zones and UTC will be just fine.

Probably because they know you’ll just check on Amazon or similar. Back in the day, you had to look for a newspaper ad, get the catalogue, or visit the shop to find out. Now it’s enough to just wet whet your appetite and you’ll do the rest.

Also, pricing has gotten more complicated this millennium. Companies like charging different prices in different areas to different people to maximise their revenue.

There is this idea in international politics that the rest of the world should have a say in US elections. Because the outcome inevitably affects us all outside the US. Since we don’t have a say, we still rely on you to be the instrument of checks and balances on your government. And when it is as erratic and boneheaded as your current one, no amount of trade we do with the US should abrogate your responsibilities as the aforementioned instrument. Nor do I think we should stop encouraging protest against the dumb policy of tariffs, which is hurting your own economy as well. Or the end of Roe v Wade. Or the illegal kidnapping of a not much liked head of state. Or the illegal war in Iran. And while this is not exactly the example to follow, the French are rioting for much less these days. It started with bad conditions in schools.

Capitalism works very much with countries’ economies complementing each other. You have the IT sector, high tech military companies, and whisky. Europe has luxury brands, wine, and various niche industries. You buy our shit and we buy yours and then there is no need to produce your shit here as well and vice versa.

That’s a result of decades of a transatlantic relationship that worked in everybody’s favour. We invest in your economy and get security guarantees in return. It’s in a way an extended payoff of the Marshall plan. Your tech sector would be much worse if Europe had built up parallel infrastructures. Which nobody thought necessary because we were all friends. And especially arms deals are often decades in the making. So this “you buy our slop and guns so stop telling us to protest our idiotic government” doesn’t sound quite right to my ears. I think that’s too easy an out.

Rest assured though that Europe will be spending less of its money in the US. The loss of trust as a result of 45/47 is nearly instant. Rebuilding it will take more than a couple of saner administrations. Meanwhile, the US’s purchasing power is shrinking too. Europeans buy military equipment in South Korea and Canada looks to the EU for closer ties. And we haven’t even talked about the bubble yet.

It’s surprising really that you aren’t protesting more.

I don’t have much experience with Collabora but what I have wasn’t great. I’m very much in favour of governments ditching MS for something like Libre Office. But I also know that the formatting errors can be a pain in the røv especially if you have 20 year old Excel sheets full of important information spiked with macros that civil servants who have long since retired made ages ago. It’s minefields within minefields.

So I think many things can be true at the same time. Denmark would like to rely less on American software and services. It was in the interest of the government to communicate that loudly at a time when the mad orange hand was reaching for Greenland (and may do so again because what’s in a treaty?). The Collabora trial could have been an earnest effort that failed for many reasons I don’t have trouble imagining. Or it was a show piece, a signal to the Danish voters as well as American companies. Your contacts may not be as certain any more. It may have led to some increased MS lobbying bts. And this doesn’t mean this is the end of the effort. Just this one, at this point in time.

The big problem is this: success stories of governments switching to something open source are rare. You don’t win elections when people are fed up with long processing times in government services. They’d have to be sufficiently pissed off with the mad orange to tolerate that out of spite. And with the urgency of the Greenland crisis having subsided, the level of pissedoffness will have also declined.

Get off my Farmville lawn!

Here. Have some sugar.

Muse has been downloaded 9 million times in the U.S. and Canada since its launch on September 8, market intelligence company AppMagic, told Rest of World.

I don’t even want to know where they got this figure. Downloads are not the same as users. I would imagine a third is tech influencers and journalists who played with it for a hot minute, produced their piece on it, and uninstalled. The figure is immediately less impressive, isn’t it.

The question of “Western” values over local ones in developing countries is valid. While I would assume the models will be able to learn, I also think the users there will quickly realise that this stuff doesn’t work and stop using it. A similar thing will happen in areas of sketchy internet coverage. People will just not use this crap. And that the vegetable stall on the street market is going to implement an inventory system and publish an agent-friendly website so they can be part of this magnificent technology sounds very unlikely to me. Payment systems, okay. If you can do that on a phone connection. But this much complication? In the PRC in a big city maybe, Burkina Faso maybe not so much.

The agent apocalypse won’t be as bad, I don’t think. There will be plenty of stories of how the Meta agent rather than booking a 10:30am ordered a military drone strike on the nail salon by mistake or something.

The languages are a thing. Even in developed nations like Switzerland or Belgium there are challenges that the “American Intelligence” people have probably not thought about. Brussels is good example where dual infrastructure for Flemish and French speakers exist and really 2.1 language groups live separately and together at the same time. The .1 is all the EU and NATO foreigners in the city plus the odd Belgian German speaker. Booking an appointment at a doctor that doesn’t speak your language through your clever agent isn’t helpful.

It’s precedent-ish. The first court in Munich did the hard work from scratch. The Aachen court copied and pasted their logic into their own ruling. There is a strong chance that for the time being other courts will come up with similar rulings under comparable case conditions. But Google may be waiting for a case where they are not quite as likely to lose if they appeal. Funny shit can still happen, especially if the highest federal court can be convinced to rule on a case like this. So it’s too early to tell if this precedent has more long lasting staying power.

Are we moving towards an AI jihad? A jihaid, if you will.

Hormuz doesn’t fit in the Dune: Planet Earth narrative for me. We should stop using oil for the sake of the climate yet we don’t. We don’t have to go through that strait with so much trade. We just don’t want to take the detour and price increases. The Dune universe depends on the spice for navigation and I think there isn’t another source. We are still so dependent on oil out of habit and/or stupidity. The mullahs really aren’t the freemen. They are more of a side arm of the Harkonen clan that was provoked by the thoughtless action of the emperor’s real estate developer triggering their typical c@![ish behaviour.

Why aren’t they automatically looking for business links between Slovenian domain vendors and the First Family? Melania is Slovenian after all and it would be such a misstep if not even her extended family got to profit from this one.

I wonder if the more modern mobile network protocols require slightly more power than the 2-3G of old. It’s probably a rounding error; it would run forever™ minus an hour or so.

I wouldn’t lay blame here mostly at Google’s feet. They AI-err on the side of caution. I don’t know if Google finds itself as defendants in a court room right now where the influence of an LLM lead to killing or suicide. This sort of caution is the result of various user psychoses that we have learned exist in the world. Teenagers or other easily susceptible folks thinking they are Jesus, talking to god or aliens, etc. I would go so far as to say well done in a better safe than sorry kind of way in this case.

What we learn here is that the model doing search and the algorithm operate seemingly independently. And that the so-called AI results aren’t great. Water is wet, more at eleven.

Google had good search results from the late 90s to about the early 2010s. Nothing else about that company was not weird at any time. With glassholes jumping out of airplanes or them buying up almost the entire online ad market and then abusing their market position. What they are doing with Android has me this close to switching to an iPhone. And YouTube comes with its own Pandora’s box of challenges. They famously edited the “don’t be evil” stuff out of their mission statement. There are bigger Google fish to fry than this “AI summary.”

It would probably be a miracle if you hadn’t re-farted some molecules.