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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: October 21st, 2023

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  • I imagine there will be limits set, through precedent.

    For example, if a customer is chatting with an AI bot regarding a refund for a pair of $89 sneakers, and the bot tells the customer to report to the nearest office to collect 1 million dollars, I can see the courts ruling the plaintiff is not owed $1 million dollars.

    Although, if the plaintiff ended up flying a few States over to try and collect, maybe travel costs and lost wages? Who knows.

    If a company marketing fee for service legal advice, their might be a higher standard. Say a client was given objectively bad legal advice, the kind that attorneys get sanctioned or reprimanded for, and subsequently acts upon that advice. I think it’s likely the courts would take a different approach and determine the company has a good bit of liability for damages.

    Those are both just hypothetical generic companies and scenarios I made up to highlight how I can see the question of liability being determined by the courts. Unless some superceding laws and regulations enacted.

    Or fuck it, maybe all AI companies have to do is put an arbitration clause in their T&C’s, and then contract out to an AI arbitration firm. And wouldn’t you know it, the arbitration AI model was only trained on cases hand picked by Federalist Society interns.


  • This is good news, relatively speaking.

    SMR technology is one of the most promising pieces of technological development in the nuclear power space.

    Standardized factory production and completely sealed, so refueling is only at the factory, never on-site. Their also, small, but scalable depending on the needs of each site.

    I’m not sure of the design this company is using, but I’m assuming they’re leveraging a fail safe reactor, as in, it requires properly running systems to generate fission, but if those systems fail, the fission process stops. There are no secondary systems that have to kick in, it’s a simple as either it’s running properly, or it can’t run it all.

    As opposed to systems like Chernobyl, or 3 Mile Island, that required separate active safety systems to guard against catastrophic failures. But if those failed, they’re backups failed, etc., well, meltdown.


  • North Korean troops are in Ukraine to gain valuable experience in modern combat, and bring it back to the DPRK. As well as to serve as technical advisors and in theater support personnel for North Korean systems being deployed by Russia.

    They aren’t there as a reserve source of cannon fodder, or secondary invasion force. Some have already died, and more will, but they’re not there and enough numbers to seriously weaken their domestic security concerns, and that’s not their purpose.


  • Shitty technicals are a dime a dozen, but this clearly had money, time, and skilled labor, all invested into it.

    The gun turret looks decently welded to the body, possibly even the frame.

    Replaced the glass on the back windows with metal for extra blast fragment and ricochet shielding. Possibly even additional steel plating for direct small arms fire protection, given how low the suspension is sitting.

    Did one of the workers steal the suspension upgrade for himself? Is it designed only to be mobile long enough for it to get into position and lock itself down once the axle snaps?

    Or did they blow the entire budget before realizing how fucked they were?







  • Thanks, and you’re welcome. Glad it was useful.

    Trump is a symptom, not the cause. And while he most likely accelerated aspects of the decline, no, he didn’t trigger it.

    But neither did those wars, they’re just what happens during an empire’s death, pointless wars, death, and violence. An angry dying man’s lashing out if you will.

    Again, symptoms, yes, but not the cause.

    I’ve already written a long enough comment for one day, but there’s plenty of academic writings on the subject if you’re interested.


  • Not that I’m going to disagree about the waning power of a dying empire, but India has historically charted its own course in regards to its international relations and dealings i.e. the Non-Aligned Movement of the Cold War.

    It knows that it’s a critical partner of the US Security State in regards to China, as well as being a significant regional power of its own. So it can buck US power a bit more openly and flagrantly when it comes to securing their own national interests.

    It’s also on average, a poorer country, relative to its size and influence. These trade deals are largely predicated upon India taking advantage of Russia’s weakened position as a global energy exporter, and getting cut rate deals on Russian oil imports.

    I believe India is also a huge importer of Russian grain and fertilizer, which I imagine they’re also getting good deals on as well, given the current global dynamics.

    You’ll never catch me defending Modi, but you also won’t catch me moralizing about developing, or underdeveloped, countries prioritizing their own energy and food supplies, over external concerns.

    And I haven’t even touched on the practical national security ties India has with Russia as one of its larger military industrial partners. Even as India is now, or planning on, moving away from Russian arms, they still rely on Russian industry for help maintaining their existing kit. That’s just how arms exports works, it’s why the global arms trade is so heavily linked to alliances. As an importer of a complex weapon systems, you have to trust that the source country isn’t going to cut you off during a conflict, and can be relied upon to fulfill their production and service/support contracts. So for India to sever ties, or even openly embarrass Putin, could significantly weaken their national defense posture and preparedness.

    Ironically, the war in Ukraine has shown Russia to be an unreliable partner because they have to redirect orders to their own front lines. This has been one of the important contributing factors for India to start moving away from Russian arms. But in the meantime, they still have a lot of Russian kit in active service.

    And I say all this as an avid supporter of Ukraine, and someone who has long advocated for significantly larger, more advanced, and consistent, weapons transfers, and loosening restrictions on their use.

    I included that last bit, because a lot of people tend to view acknowledging the fact that a lot of developing and poorer countries still rely on Russia for critical exports, and that shouldn’t be moralized, as somehow implying an implicit personal support of Russia or the invasion.








  • It’s all relative. My cheap Chinese spyware SmartLife devices are free to report the hours I turn my lights on back to China as they please, but they sit on a segmented VLAN with per client isolation.

    If they ever EOL’d them, I’ve got more than my money’s worth, and yes, some of them can be flashed, but I’d probably just buy another well established cheap Chinese competitor.

    But I agree, the above is not the use case and situation for every IoT device out there, and there are plenty of devices that I would never consider an internet/SaaS dependent version of e.g. medium to large home appliances.