There's a huge difference:
Our governments, at least in theory, are controlled by us, the people. Ok, the 1% who make the major campaign contributions. But that's still a lot of people.
The number of SpaceX or Amazon shareholders who have enough shares to have a say in these matters is single-digits. So power is concentrated in much fewer hands.
Given dynamic battlefield, I don't think that is as easily done as you think, and the moment SpaceX makes a mistake and knocks out a Ukrainian drone on a mission, they'll be guilty for everything. There's not really a winning position for them here.
Russia isn't hiding that it targets civilian infrastructure. They still wage war the way everyone did it in 1939-1945. US and UK bombers essentially just opened the doors above German cities and let the unguided bombs fall wherever. We're not doing that anymore because most of the world learned that despite all this, they didn't exactly surrender. So it's a huge waste of resources. Russia, on the other hand, still thinks that Ukrainians will agree to becoming Russians due to a few cold and dark winters.
What possible legal use does a "mixing service" provide?
Hiding money flow from public view. It is trivial to automatically trace all transfers on the blockchain. And the same way I don't post my banking history to the Internet, I have a reasonable need to not have all of my Bitcoin transactions fully transparent to everyone in the world.
So tl;dr: The legal use is: Protect my privacy.
That doesn't mean I am doing anything illegal. I might be doing something perfectly legal but socially controversial - maybe I make campaign contributions to the communist party, or consume an unhealthy amount of furry porn. It might also be legal but I have a need to hide my finances from someone specific - maybe an abusive spouse, maybe overly controlling parent, maybe a stalker.
For the moment, Bitcoin is still a bit of a niche thing, but the more it moves into mainstream, the more people will have the interest and the capabilities to use Bitcoin to breach people's privacy when they use Bitcoins to pay for something.
It's been, what, a week, and they got 6000 jets through maintenance during a very busy holiday travel season?
That speaks to fantastic logistics. There are anonymous folks out there who did a great job and deserve a ridiculously generous Christmas Bonus.
And no, I don't want ads. I have never, ever, bought anything from an online advert in over 20 years of using the internet (Yes, I started when it was Arpanet).
I too bought memory in April to avoid tariffs. I had to run a stupid python program to generate a dataset that required 96GB of RAM for a delayed project so I figured I might as well bite the bullet. DDR4 was still a good value at that point (it's a problem that can run overnight, performance wasn't too important).
But how are the tariffs limiting the manufacturing supply capacity of RAM factories in East Asia?
Do you have a mechanism to propose?
Do you think they're making enough to meet demand but then blaming tariffs to justify jacking up prices? All of them? It would be an interesting conspiracy but is there any evidence to support that theory?
> How much is this problem is down to AI and how much to beautiful tariffs?
What mechanism are you thinking of where tariffs could limit supply of VRAM from East Asia?
Simple price increases, sure, definitely, but this is described by manufacturers as a supply & demand problem.
Do you have a different angle we should consider?
Absolutely. And QUICKLY.
Suicidal pilots would not have restarted the engines!
The "did you do that?" comment had no indication of what "that" was that has been published. It is pretty clear that multiple actors are engaged in muddying the waters.
"The truth will out" - but possibly at 40,000 feet over the North Atlantic.
How many RATs does it take to power a data center? enquiring minds want to know!
> It did happened before, but not on this scale and speed.
Check out Meltwater Pulses 1a and 1b.
Eastern Europe was screaming about how dangerous this was, but they weren't listened to.
One of the most insane things is how after Russia's surprisingly poor military performance in the Georgian war, the Merkel government was disturbed not that Russia invaded Georgia, but at the level of disarray in the Russian army, and sought a deliberate policy of improving the Russian military. They perceived Russia as a bulkwark against e.g. Islamic extremism, and as a potential strategic partner. They supported for example Rheinmetal building a modern training facility in Russia and sent trainers to work with the Russian military.
With Georgia I could understand (though adamantly disagreed) how some dismissed it as a "local conflict" because it could be spun as "Georgia attacking an innocent separatist state and Russia just keeping their alliances". But after 2014 there was no viable spin that could disguise Russia's imperial project. Yet so many kept sticking their fingers in their years going, "LA LA LA, I CAN'T HEAR YOU!" and pretending like we could keep living as we were before. It was delusional and maddening.
The EU has three times Russia's population and an order of magnitude larger of an economy. In any normal world, Russia should be terrified of angering Europe, not the other way around. But our petty differences, our shortsightedness, our adamant refusal to believe deterrence is needed, much less to pay to actually deter or even understand what that means... we set ourselves up for this.
And I say this to in no way excuse the US's behavior. The US was doing the same thing as us (distance just rendered Russia less of a US trading partner) and every single president wanted to do a "reset" of relations with Russia, which Russia repeatedly used to weaken western defenses in Europe. And it's one thing for the US to say to Europe "You need to pay more for defense" (which is unarguable), even to set realistic deadlines for getting defense spending up, but it's an entirely different thing to just come in and abandon an ally right in the middle of their deepest security crisis since World War II. It's hard to describe to Americans how betrayed most Europeans feel at America right now. The US organized and built the world order it desired (even the formation of the EU was strongly promoted by the US), and then just ripped it out from under our feet when it we're under attack.
A friend once described Europe in the past decades as having been "a kept woman" to America. And indeed, life can be comfortable as a kept woman, and both sides can benefit. America built bases all over Europe to project global power; got access to European militaries for their endeavours, got reliable European military supply chains, etc and yet remained firmly in control of NATO policy; maintained itself as the world's reserve currency; were in a position that Europe could never stop them from doing things Europeans disliked (for example, from invading Iraq); and on and on - while Europe decided that letting the US dominate was worth being able to focus on ourselves. But a kept woman has no real freedom, no real security, and your entire life can come crashing down if you cross them or they no longer want you.
Even America is beginning to realize that his connection with reality is virtual.
(Score:X, Troll)
And yet, your imaginary friend still isn't real.
They clearly didn't even use a proper image generator - that's clearly the old crappy ChatGPT-builtin image generator. It's not like it's a useful figure with a few errors - the entire thing is sheer nonsense - the more you look at it, the worse it gets. And this is Figure 1 in a *paper in Nature*. Just insane.
This problem will decrease with time (here are two infographics from Gemini 3 I made just by pasting in an entire very long thread on Bluesky and asking for infographics, with only a few minor bits of touchup). Gemini successfully condensed a really huge amount of information into infographics, and the only sorts of "errors" were things like, I didn't like the title, a character or two was slightly misshapen, etc. It's to the point that you could paste in entire papers and datasets and get actually useful graphics out, in a nearly-finished or even completely-finished state. But no matter how good the models get, you'll always *have* to look at what you generate to see if it's (A) right, and (B) actually what you wanted.
Put your best foot forward. Or just call in and say you're sick.
