Google’s delusional fantasy has always been you want to buy a guitar, you go on Google, their ad algorithm shows you a perfectly targeted ad for the guitar you want, and you love and trust Google so you click the ad and buy it. They think LLMs will make that actually work, they want to give you a Grima Wormtongue that can simper and manipulate until you do love and trust it, and once you’re a rotting husk it whispers the ad algorithm into your ear so you think it was your idea.

You can treat Costa Gavras movies like a series: Z, State of Siege, Missing

They put a plug in the bottom that melts if the salt gets too hot and it drains out into a tank that stops the reaction with no moving parts or anyone controlling it. After it cools down they can remelt it and put it back in.

https://www.boston.com/news/local-news/2025/02/10/boston-man-found-not-guilty-of-being-a-chinese-agent/ that’s the first “Chinese spy” in that Hill article

During COVID China let people do government paperwork in an app instead of the embassy, and let local businesses sign up to help old or poor people with the app. The FBI decided to call that “police stations” and went after guys who owned a restaurant and set up an iPad for people to use and scared the shit out of them. They hadn’t done anything yet, but if the FBI scared them enough to lie or delete the app, now there’s a process crime and they’re fucked. There was nothing actually happening, like all the teenage autistic terrorists the FBI makes up and pretends to catch. Same with the other countries the panic spread to:

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4nv0p6047go

https://www.ctvnews.ca/montreal/article/chinese-police-stations-montreal-groups-demand-answers-apology-after-police-investigation/

People are saying puritans or religion, but the US was even more religious and puritain 150 years ago, when nudity in public bathhouses was common. What changed was the US got rich enough to buy millions of tiny single person bathtubs and make installing more of them than you need an investment asset that you sell to pay for retirement.

Japan has onsens and it also has people sleeping in a bush on the street. Both of those disgust Americans because you look poor. Even if you’re a sleepy business man in a suit it’s offensive that you’re not embarrassed that somebody might think you’re poor for a second. American onsens were for the poor, then for the very poor, then they were effectively illegal because we hate the idea that somebody too poor to buy a personal bathtub is allowed to live.

They say “artificial sun” because that’s what it is though, there’s no fusion reactions here they’re just microwaving hydrogen to millions of degrees to study the kind of thing that would happen IF somebody runs a fusion reactor for 22 minutes.

That’s only because they’re designed with passivation to vent tanks and disconnect batteries to remove sources of explosion when they start to die. If that fails the tanks eventually pop from thermal cycling or the solar panels overcharge the battery until it blows up like a Russian satellite did earlier this year.

From a liberal perspective what’s the difference between MLs having “critical support” for the Soviets or China and anarchists celebrating historical anarchists like Makhno and the CNT-FAI who burned churches and killed kulaks too? If anarchists are online supporting US foreign policy then liberals can assume you’re just a liberal and any claimed anarchism is just larping, but if anybody throws a brick through a Starbucks window that’s tankie authoritarianism stealing rights and freedoms from the Starbucks shareholders.

Tankie was coined by trotskyists to insult a slightly different kind of Leninist. Then anarchists picked it up and started calling trotskyists tankies. Now liberals call anarchists tankies. It’s the circle of life, in a few years if you say tankie people will assume you’re talking about Kamala Harris.

I think you’re thinking of Xiaomi, Louis Rossman did a video assuming they were doing Apple-style serialization but all it was doing was blocking installation of self-driving if the headlights weren’t standard. It wasn’t DRMing brake pads or preventing buying headlights from a junkyard, there was a functional reason.

If you don’t get the historical or political reason why something is the way it is then it seems “natural” by default. China never had a several millennia empire unless you think Europe is also a several millennia empire. The modern concept of Han is the same thing you’re doing when you say “fucking Saxons”. The Saxons didn’t do anything, the imperial system and opposition to it is racialized. From the 1600s-1900s Han wasn’t the dominant group in China, the Qing dynasty had a Manchu identity, and they executed people for expressing Han culture. Opposition to oppression and corruption and European imperial influence was racialized as Han nationalism.

CCP politics straddles an anti-colonial idea of Chinese identity where the diaspora of people shipped around European empires to build railroads or farm plantations are still Chinese, and then also a geographic identity that all those millennia of different systems whether Mongol or Manchu or Han or split up into 100 different states are all equally Chinese.

burned wood in the upper atmosphere also catalyzes ozone depletion That’s why it was bad putting CFCs up there in the first place, almost everything catalyzes these reactions

EX30 is a rebadged Zeekr X which has a normal separate speedometer cluster in front of the driver, Volvo deleted that and put everything on the center screen like a Tesla.

The Space Shuttle was also a private company. United Space Alliance LLC owned the Space Shuttles, United Launch Alliance LLC owns the military rockets, Deep Space Transport LLC owns the SLS rocket.

“Privatized” space just means instead of the government hiring Boeing or Lockheed to design a rocket according to their requirements, picking contractors to build it, and creating an LLC owned by all the contractors to pay them, Jeff Bezos hires ex-Boeing and Lockheed employees to build a rocket to his requirements, and then sues the government until they agree to pay him to launch it.

DRM plugin and all the built-in cloud stuff is proprietary on the server side

They aren’t exporting them below cost, that’s why they want to export. Inside China every company tried to start an EV division because they heard Apple was doing it and assumed it must be a good idea. Now the market is topped out and the biggest companies are trying to price the smaller ones out of business (which still isn’t below manufacturing cost because China regulates that and is nervous about having tons of cars from bankrupt companies on the road). They export with a huge profit margin to make up for the domestic price war.

The opposite of woke is random shit boomers happened to grow up with. If your politics are based on some principle you can justify, then if you lose you try again later. If your politics are based on a random collection of historical accidents you can’t justify, and you don’t even like most of them except for a couple, but you think the only way to keep the couple you do like is to defend all of them, then losing is the end. You have to fight to the death, and once you do lose you can’t cope by doing better next time, all you have is revenge.

Sometimes liberals also want to defend historical accidents that they think fit their idea of liberalism, and then they adopt the same kind of aggressive deterrence strategy, like pro-Israel liberals with college protests or the English with trans people.

Internet is full of text and video about humanoid bipedal things performing tasks. There’s a lot of investment money gambling that LLMs + human-shaped robots can make an electric slave that an unskilled overseer can vaguely yell at and the robot can figure out what they meant and how to do it like a human can.

They weren’t just being cheap, they wanted to take human-written ads, auto-generate a million variations to send to individual people, then feed the ones that got clicks back in to train an AI clickbait generator. It also means the variations would be functionally watermarked so if anybody posted part of their text on Reddit or something the BBC could track who they sent that variation to.

You don’t usually call the audio engineer a musician though. The fact that you “want a string section” is the important part. Art is communication, if you fuck with the AI until it communicates what you want, that can be art, as long as you’re not trying to pass off that the fake brushstrokes contain any meaning. If you learn all the right prompt words to make it “good” and then Photoshop it to fix all the telltale AI glitches but the only idea being communicated comes from 6 random people on Deviantart smashed together, that’s not art.