FriendOfDeSoto

47, like his erstwhile buddy Epstein, deals in favor/counterfavor. The sheiks who paid for the jet scratched his back in exchange for a US favor, possibly pushing the repeat Nobel peace laureate runner up into war on Iran. And if he and his own can get rich in the process, no, wait, that’s plan A. All the rest is just theater and headline generation. I suspect the ballroom is just helping direct tax funds into construction companies that are owned by his former fixer’s neighbor’s third cousin’s dog’s groomer’s husband. The NYT will enlighten us in time.

I think the US military will be able to inspect the plane and discover any hidden bugs. You don’t really need to track the plane; it’ll be on the news. As for the White House, even if a republican wins the next election, I’d fire the entire staff and send the military counterintelligence outfit through there with a fine toothed comb. A Democrat incumbent will probably sleep somewhere else for a while, pointing to “necessary” renovation work. I don’t think that that would be paranoid.

Bah humbug that’s obvs called schadenbetrug.

Language is imprecise. That’s where the ambiguity needs tolerance. A child can be a grown person and a person growing up, depending on context. There is no orphanage for people in their 40s. The original argument seems to hinge on the word child being basically equal in meaning to human being in all contexts. Which isn’t the case all the time. And it isn’t in the context of orphans.

You need to work on your ambiguity tolerance.

They date whoever they want. Probably not you though. Thanks for rage baiting with us today.

and then fix the new mistakes it made while trying to fix the old ones and

I don’t think it’s enough just to point out that we’re doing society wrong. Unless you’re Earnest Hemingway, you need to do it in an appealing literary way, language and structure and characters and that sort of thing.

We must keep these strategies to ourselves! The bots will adapt.

The “zero occupant problem”

The fact that this has a name is such an indictment of failures in urban planning. I’m going to assume an American coined the term because a lot of other places have not fought the idea of public transport as much as the American automobile industry.

There is an argument that a connected Borg collective of self driving cars would be capable of running vehicles with smaller gaps in between them, thus reducing congestion and improving efficiency in traffic.

Yet you created a new account here just to bitch about that. What does that make you? The petulent teenager?

I don’t think you’re teaching your kids not to lie. You are teaching your kids the situations the community you’re in has decided when it’s okay to lie and when not. We package this as this sort of absolute philosophy but it’s not. It’s very flexible and hard to navigate.

You have probably lied to your kid that you’re out of snacks or that you forgot to bring your wallet to buy more snacks. Or that Santa exists. Kids will eventually pick up on these things.

I guess something’s gotta give because when it comes to finishing their prey they are playfully underwhelming.

I think you’re paranoid.

The estimates vary a bit but you can say a significant portion of the people fired in the tech sector lost their jobs for financial reasons, not AI as is often purported. The tech sector over hired a lot during the pandy and that meant they’re correcting that. And the investment into so-called AI are so big they need to save somewhere else, i.e. overhead.

I can imagine such a scenario as well because we are humans and we would do dumb shit like that.

FTL can mean different things. It could be the Trekkian warping space around you. It could be the Galactican jump to somewhere else. Or a portal. Or something else. Which tech it will be will matter. And different to most sci-fi, there could be more than one way if indeed c can be smashed.

The problem with space is that it isn’t completely empty and stuff in it moves like evil landmines. You don’t want to warp into a moon or jump inside an asteroid belt. Which means you will need this sort of highway or scenic spot system of space that is actually confirmed empty so travel along the route doesn’t blow you up or jumping doesn’t mean you accidentally end up in a black hole. In my mind, that would prohibit the use of the technology inside a star system because there are two many moving parts to consider and keep track of. So you need to take a year-long sub-LTS access ramp to reach the highway at the edge of the solar system before you can move safely faster than a flash. The same is true for the resource rich destination.

That’s why I can also imagine a scenario where having the technology might not be as impactful as we fear and thus not lead to war. The infrastructure would have to be so massive to make this work, it isn’t an immediate advantage to have it. More of a burden really, provided the economy still roughly works as it does today. And if we have the tech to reach the edge of our solar system in a shuttle bus service kind of way, we will be already enlarging our resource pool with stuff we find inside our solar system in an early Expansian kind of way. Better ROI on that than stuff from further away.

One of the funniest videos of politicians that I’ve seen recently was a casual meetup of Poland’s PM Donald Tusk and the then incoming Hungarian PM Magyar. He had just defeated Viktor Orban, Putin’s fifth column in the EU and authoritarian asshole of the year. Magyar introduces one of his ministers to Tusk. I don’t remember which ministry but her name is also Orban. Tusk is ever so briefly taken aback by the mention of that name, which Magyar realizes and quickly adds: “No relation.” They giggle at the mixup and Tusk just fires off nonchalantly something like: “Well, my name is Donald.” They laugh and move on.

Citations needed

There was a time in the early 2000s when good old Google search was so good, it got you your results in record time. One query and a couple of clicks. And then they realized they could sell more ads if your search took just a couple of queries longer. Every query was a chance to sell more ads. And the results got worse.

Personally, I don’t use a search engine that spits out so-called AI results. I manage the old-fashioned way because I’m old. But the principle to give you shittier results to get you to rephrase your search and thus multiply ad sale opportunities surely applies here as well.

I’m sorry if you had to chew on this for a month and I’m even more sorry to tell you that your reply makes no sense to me.