They say they used a paid actor. Of course, even if that’s true, it’s not particularly hard to find someone with a similar pitch, accent, and timbre, and then finish fixing it to make sure it’s as confidently soothing as the NPR voice you wanted to steal in the first place. I suppose in one sense it’s not utterly different from hiring a soundalike, but now the soundalike is damn near perfect (the clips in the article are VERY similar and feel more like the difference in recording equipment than anything else) and doesn’t need to actually be available to perform for new impressions. Yet another example of “withstand motion for summary judgment, string it out, lobby against future guiderails” as the totality of Silicon Valley’s legal philosophy.

I think what they’re saying is that the dissent says out loud the part that the majority would prefer to keep quiet. It’s a clear consequence of the “clever jackass 7th-grader” mindset that comes from the Originalist school of jurisprudence.

You can’t run a modern nation-state or withstand a bad actor in power if you insist that it must all be done exactly as set out in 4,500 words by a bunch of 18th-century provincial lawyers writing by committee, and that anything not expressly forbidden is allowed because… “oh well.” SCOTUS abdicating its role as a backstop of liberty and good sense to instead be a bunch of pedants is a piss-poor reason to send your country to hell, yet here we are.

They’re about to find out what we actually were getting in return.

This is one of the huge under-analyzed aspects of all this. The US “over” invested in defense and foreign aid, and got virtually all the soft power benefits of a hegemonic power, and by simply setting an upper limit on the worst abuses of imperial overlords, it generally had its allies saying “Thank You” for the privilege, with no particular signs that the bloc was weakening.

If the US is not an accessible market or a reliable guarantor of security, or if (for fuck’s sake) it’s threatening the territorial integrity of its own allies and trading partners, then it’s just China with less cheap shit to sell. Hell, even China doesn’t do the last one (offer not valid in Taiwan).

Maybe it can repost racist MAGA slop, creep on the granddaughters of ex-girlfriends, and put private messages into the public feed, just like your dad!

This is almost exactly what happened in the US a hundred-plus years ago. The fallout vastly improved medical education overall, but also ossified the field into a modern fortress of protectionism that hurts the public by ignoring the supply part of supply and demand, but also hurts the clever (and typically already privileged in most ways) young people who manage to get med school, by saddling them with huge amounts of debt and grinding them into powder for the first decade of their career. I also subscribe to the theory that the hypercompetitive selection process results in too many doctors who are not well-rounded or particularly good at processing information outside their fields, but are told over and over again that they’re too smart to have any blind spots. If you have the right credential and especially if you’ve made enough money with it, society does the Dunning-Krugering for you.

This is pretty much what I said to my wife while scritching my dogs. First it’ll just be expanded to missing kids and olds, because of course everyone wants to reunite families, but eventually it’ll be something that “law enforcement” can request for whatever the hell they want, because after all they’re the good guys keeping us safe!

But, and hear me out here, it’s also wicked cool.

Ours is more stick-shaped though, and really only good for candle wicks. If we smoked, you might be able to get a cigarette into the arc. It’d probably also work well if your grill’s or gas stove’s spark igniter was broken.

Interesting. These say they’re from Mexico. It would be pretty underwhelming if there’s a blander variety.

But the tart ones are the good ones.

Raspberry for me, though I’m not sure if it’s fully artificial or “just” ultra-processed. It’s also partly because I like that flavor but I’m mildly allergic and about 25% of the time I eat it, my lip swells a bit, so I try to minimize how often I have it.

I was using a 2012 “vintage” minitower PC that originally came with Win7 as a crappy little plex/local FTP/Minecraft server, and I had been wanting to try MacOS after not seeing it for a while, so I got a Mac Mini with an M2 in it, and while I’ve hardly stressed it, it seems really nice. It’s small and completely silent, and if I did want to use it more, Apple has certainly tried to keep their walled garden pretty and well-organized.

Naaah, fill it up with weird saber-tooth deer meat. We already know that shit’s irresistible to Wookiees.

Both things could be true.

7-11 theoretically already has it for their app; you scan with your phone and pay with Apple or Google Pay. The only thing is that you’re supposed to sort of wave the completed transaction at the cashier as you go, but the only reason you’d really need to use portable self-checkout is if the cashier is busy, and when they’re busy they don’t want you breaking in line or to stop what they’re doing to see that you’re showing them a plausibly legitimate checkout screen.

In a completely, utterly, definitely unrelated story, I got accused of shoplifting by a 7-11 cashier the other day.

I looked into his worldview a bit when the San Francisco lecture happened, and it is deeply, deeply fucked up.

There is a certain allure because it’s based on a well-known philosophal thread of “mimetic theory” (filtered through a then-contemporary Nazi apologist, and Silicon Valley hubris) and for all it’s “Anti-Christ” talk, it doesn’t even 100% require a supernatural belief system, just the commitment to one as an outward-facing and socially enforceable ideology. What makes it so fucked up and dangerous is the almost Foundation-like orthopraxy that it demands.

The gist, IIRC, is that humans want and need something stable to copy from to know what they want, and that modernish (like in the last 300 years) interpretations of major religions, but particularly Christianity, have landed on a perfect balance of giving people boundaries, aspirations, and just enough freedom to keep society going. Therefore, the only way to avoid falling back onto outmoded and dangerous practices like mass scape-goating is to get huge blocks of people invested in that worldview. Ideally it would be the whole world in one ideology, but their nod to reality is to concede that three or four could survive in tension if they’re geographically insulated.

So moving onto the Antichrist, anyone or (importantly for the Thiel version specifically) anything that poses an existential threat to this orderly control of society risks chaos and a descent into destruction and with a Christian context can therefore be comfortably called the/an “Antichrist.” If Palantir watching literally everyone and everything means the enforcement of “western” values on western populations, then opposing that is dangerous to humanity and therefore a threat. Fighting that threat is a crusade, and even justifies the interim use of tactics that will ultimately be rendered moot by the imposition of a religio-philosophical order, such as mass scaepgoating and pogroms (coughjdvancecough).

Then, just as the classist cherry on top, remember that the supernatural part of this is all just to make sure that the stupids buy into the same worldview as the elites who will preserve society by controlling it and directing it towards self-sustaining power structures. So a Thiel can be gay, and a Thiel acolyte like Vance (we’ll look past Musk for now, as I think they probably view him more as a lucky and useful idiot) can marry a Hindu woman from one of the viable global powerbases (though we’re seeing cracks in that as current political realities weigh on him), and he doesn’t even really have to believe any of the specifically dominionist nonsense he preaches, as long as the MAGA rubes do. What it does give them is a handhold where they can legitimately believe that they’re doing what’s best for the world by trying to dominate it, and that is fucking terrifying.

As an aside, Thiel’s philosophical mentor would have been very nearly as horrified as most of us are by the conclusions he’s reached, and this is why you don’t let the software engineers think they’re the only ones who are smart, simply because it’s harder to do calculus than write a B+ Freshman essay. If Girard is “love each other or we all face ruin,” Thiel is “love each other, or we all face ruin, but you’re too stupid to love each other unless a brutal technostate surveillance apparatus enforces adherence to a love-based religion.”

I hadn’t actually looked up any numbers on the RAM shortage. Less than a year ago I got 2 8GB sticks of no-name PC3200 DDR4 for less than $25. I didn’t even really need it for my use-case, but it was so cheap that “why not” felt like a perfectly viable reason to upgrade to 32GB total. Six years ago I got the original two-pack of 8GB sticks for $75. Now that same amount of old-ass DDR4 would be $90-$100. Jeezus. No upgrades for me for a while.

Also sounds like an org that wants its event, which depends on visas for its players to happen at all and on visas for its fans to be a commercial success, to get special treatment from the Orange Menace.

Apart from all the deflection and Putin and Gilded-Age foreign policy policy theories, which may well be right, I think President Dingleberry also found out that Greenland is 1% larger by area than the Louisiana Purchase, which would make him the president that most embiggened America. How can you you deny MAGA if he literally made it greater (in size) than any president prior to him?

It’s also possible he has only ever looked at a Mercator and thinks Greenland is literally the size of Africa or South America.

“Language models don’t apply to us because this is not a language problem,” Nesterenko explained. “If you ask it to actually create a blueprint, it has no training data for that. It has no context for that…” Instead, Quilter built what Nesterenko describes as a “game” where the AI agent makes sequential decisions — place this component here, route this trace there — and receives feedback based on whether the resulting design satisfies electromagnetic, thermal, and manufacturing constraints… The approach mirrors DeepMind’s progression with its Go-playing systems.

This is kind of interesting and cool, and it’s not a hallucinating LLM. I’ve designed a couple of simple circuit boards, and running traces can be sort of zen, but it is tedious and would be maddening as a job, so I can only imagine what the process must be like on complex projects from scratch. Definitely some hype levels coming from the company that give me pause, but it seems like an actual useful task for a machine learning algorithm.

And both are delicious.