WesternInfidels

She went to the place she wanted to go, with her guests and her security detail, and she got the food she wanted to eat. She had the chance to eat it.

Somehow even this write-up. which is not particularly sympathetic to her, is framing this as a kind of affront, a consequence, a humiliation. But she pretty much got what she came for, didn’t she? She’s facing no practical consequences at all. She lost a little face, maybe. This was a public declaration that people don’t like her, don’t like what priorities she’s chosen to serve.

Maybe we wouldn’t be in this pickle we’re in, if this kind of getting-through-to-the-isolated-elites happened more often. If we didn’t have isolated elites in the first place.

If you don’t like it, I’m sorry

…as Jesus himself so famously said, of course.

I participate in the techtakes community on awful.systems…

Jesus, that sounds awful.

Subscribed.

The commentariat at HN was anti-DEI before anyone knew what “DEI” even was.

Garry Tan, tech [Y Combinator] CEO & campaign donor, wishes death upon San Francisco politicians

I am constantly asked to explain my opinions … I am constantly harangued for proof of what I believe, and every time I hand it over there’s some sort of ham-fisted response of “it’s getting better” and “it will get even more better from here!’

For an industry so thoroughly steeped in cold, hard rationality , AI boosters are so quick to jump to flights of fancy — to speak of the mythical “AGI” and the supposed moment when everything gets cheaper and also powerful enough to be reliable or effective.

I don’t know what’s going to happen with “AI,” but I think this highlights an interesting pattern, one where the standards of evidence for critics and boosters are different. Certainly we’ve seen a similar phenomenon in cryptocurrencies and NFTs.

Is it profound, is it one of those penetrating insights that you can’t stop seeing once you’ve seen it? I’m not sure. Of course enthusiasts are biased, of course their arguments are emotional and unfair.

We could view this as “MS pushes for stupid direction that clued-in tech people are opposed to,” or we could view this as “MS gives up on native apps because everyone else of consequence already has.” I hate it but I have eyes.

If AI enhanced coding is really so great, we might expect to see a Renaissance of small, efficient native apps, even on platforms like Android. I’m not holding my breath, though.

The term “kill chain” reduces the slaughter of human beings to an engineering problem. It tacitly admits that modern militaries are murder factories. If we had caught ISIS or a drug cartel speaking and thinking this way, that would be a Fox News headline for months. What a dispiriting bit of jargon. It tells so much more than it says.

If this trend annoys you, check out A List Of Text-Only & Minimalist News Sites.

“The utility” has never had a way to prevent you from doing something dangerous with your wiring or with the electricity they send you. The best we’ve managed has been to encourage appliance manufacturers to design their products with safety in mind, through the UL program (which is voluntary). This is why the writer talked to the “vice president of engineering at UL Solutions.”

Putting a dollar figure on your schadenfreude? Do you want a block chain based “prediction market” for schadenfreude? That’s how you get a block chain based “prediction market” for schadenfreude.

The kind of thing only your grandparents would fall for

But evidently not.

Last week I helped someone navigate their bank’s tech support to regain access to an account they’d been locked out of. I believe the bank was having some technical difficulties that they weren’t admitting to (or which the support people weren’t even aware of). Many standard approaches did not work, and we kept getting escalated. The top person we talked to eventually asked for some information that didn’t conform to the usual security question / answer format (“What year what the account opened?” for a ~50 year old account that had been opened many bank mergers ago) and wound up reading us a new password over the phone.

This approach alarmed me, it seemed to violate some security rules of thumb that I thought I understood. But this is what the bank does, sometimes. Given the sort of nonsense that goes on legitimately sometimes, expecting the general public to understand which information flows to be suspicious of – expecting them to think in terms of information flows at all – may be asking too much. We’d all hope journalists would be more savvy, I guess, but “government officials?” Nope. I used to think “Oh, I wouldn’t fall for that” when I read stories like these, but now I’m less sure.

The stated reasoning sounds okay in isolation, but:

1. Why didn’t they start the blackout when the conflict began, as opposed to waiting like this?
2. Why is it just a delay, instead of a real blackout?

Your objection does nothing to address the issue you raised. Where is the line drawn between “information” and “legal advice?”

Wikipedia and the lawmakers themselves present us with static information that is not specific to us personally or to any particular situation we may find ourselves in, and which generally does not include specific recommendations. I think most people would agree that’s just information, not advice.

If an LLM can be coaxed into saying things like “you should,” advocating specific courses of action for your circumstances, is that legal advice? I think many of us would agree that would be unlicesenced legal advice.

Is the wikipedia responsible for you reading an article about a law and then taking that as legal advice?

Is the U.S. House of Representatives [or any equivalent publisher of the law] responsible for you reading the text of a law itself and then taking that as legal advice?

That’s very odd. The translations built in to Firefox run on the local device - like a phone, even a dumpy old phone - and they’re pretty okay.

never heard of Amnezia

You said that before though

GPTurfing?

That annoys me as well. They call it “astroturfing” because it’s fake grassroots. I wonder if we should call this “cyberturfing.”

I’ve only skimmed but:

provide an accessible interface at account setup

They don’t even define “account.” They have a definition of “account holder” that makes no sense.

Are all devices required to have user accounts? There was a time when home computers did not have such things.

The steady exodus from Elon Musk’s X has benefited smaller, independent alternatives such as … German-developed Mastodon