And how does the AARP, or NRA, or anyone end up endorsing a candidate? They get a nice bite out of the campaign budget, and come to the realization that candidate x is indeed the best choice. Money spent, votes gained.

If voters decided elections, Sanders would have been president.

But you are missing my point. Who wins does not even matter. Every candidate who will be allowed to get anywhere works for the same donors, and will be delivering essentially the same policy. Your choices are candidates x, y, and z, all with the same policy, differing only in spiel, and possibly, in the pecking order of their donors.

The difference in your candidate choices:

How much do you support the genocide? A) A lot B) Very much indeed

Who should be go to war against? A) Russia B) China C) Iran

How big of a tax cut do you want for rich people? A) $4T B) $5T

Jobs? A) See previous

Actual health care? A) No B) Fuck no!

Social security, education, salaries, vacations? A) What are you, communist?

Who would you like us to pretend we care about? A) White people B) Minorities

Yeah, good luck with that.

Party primaries are in the $1B range now. This money comes from the same donors, not the voters, not the party, and in exactly the same way as presidentials. Sell the voters and the country out to the donors, get financing, create messaging, advertise, get votes. The same goes for all elections big or small. It's turtles all the way down.

Principles, yeah there you are just repeating what I said.

Nope, voters are secondary. Before you ever get to vote, the candidates on the ballot have been voted for with their wallets by campaign contributors, who do not contribute if there is no clear ROI for them. No contributors means no advertising means no votes. So the primary concern of any politician is to make and keep promises to the donors, and only then to figure out how to woo the voters.

Now the thing is, the interests of the donors and of the voters are often in conflict, so you usually can not keep both of the promises you made. If you break your promises to the donors, your career will be over, you will never have a campaign budget again. If however you break your promises to the voters, well as we have seen again and again, they will vote for you anyway. The more work you do for the donors, the bigger your pay. However little work you do for the voters, you can still win them over again with campaign ads.

The donor work is easy, all you have to do is pass the laws that were written by and handed to you by the donors. But even if someone wanted to do something for the voters, the thing is, voter problems are complicated, and there's pretty much no one with a chance of getting elected who has any idea what to do about any of them. You only have to listen to the average critter talk about things, there's zero understanding of how the world works, zero understanding of the problems the voters face, and zero original thought about anything, all you hear is the same old party approved mass media soundbites that you have heard for decades, the same you will probably recite as answers to the same questions yourself if you don't pay attention. So who would want to get their hands dirty with any of that? Better to just ignore the voter problems, and maintain them so they can be used to get them to vote for you next time too.

In any case, where democracy is these days, the same contributors finance almost everyone and anyone across the party lines. They do not care who wins, they know that after the financing, whoever gets to the office will be working for them, not for the voters. Trump donors are the same as Biden donors are the same as Hillary donors are the same as Obama donors are the same as GWB donors and so on. Whoever wins, the donors laugh all the way to the bank.

But when there arrives a politician who looks like he will actually work for the voters and change things, the whole system will rise up against them. In the UK there was Corbyn, who got smeared with constant baseless antisemitism accusations until everyone believed them. In the US there was Sanders who got ignored by the media while polling way ahead of Hillary, and then was betrayed by his own party in favour of her, and again, in favour of Joe.

Sometimes we also have weird flashes like AOC or Mamdani, who maybe did start out with principles, but once they got established, ended up being exactly the same spineless slime as everyone else.

For tl;dr take a look at this study from Cambridge https://doi.org/10.1017/S15375... voter preference has no correlation with policy outcomes in the US. But money does.

In Soviet America, the industry and market winners pick the government!

If you think terrorists are bad, let me introduce you to Kgb, Gestapo, Stasi, why not Cointelpro. The list goes on... Once a government feels they are losing popularity and legitimacy, and might end up losing power, this is where the surveillance state is invented. Because if you are not competent enough to fix the country's problems, or if you just don't care about them, if you are in power against the will of the people, or if you just cannot take jokes and criticism, what remains for you is to get rid of those who would think different, talk different, and act different. Find them, keep track of them, beat them up, lock them up, and if there's too many of them, put them in a hole in the ground. Always the same playbook. The end result is that all the terrorists in the world can not accomplish in their lifetime what the secret police does on a lazy tuesday morning.

A surveillance state is too big a price to pay for catching a few bad apples here and there. As history has proven again and again, the purpose of the surveillance state is the good apples.

Producing smaller memory footprint binaries is not the use case. The use case would be the reason why you need them in the first place. I can conjure up a theoretical embedded x86_64 system that is severely memory limited, but I'm not sure such a thing exists in the wild. And even then the use case would have to require not only the smaller memory footprint, which you can achieve with good ol' regular 32-bit x86 binaries, but also that you need the extended x86_64 instruction set, which makes the whole ordeal incredibly niche.

You didn't notice Debian disabling it because you were never using it. You would need your binaries to be compiled for x32 to use it, and that would bring back the good ol' 4GB virtual address space limit of 32-bit times for those binaries. Getting rid of that limit was basically the whole reason of going 64-bit, and nobody wants to go back. I don't think there's any distro out there that ever had any x32 binaries.

It would be interested to know if anyone actually uses it, and what's the use case.

What could possibly go wrong?

Somewhere, sometime, someone said "troubleshoot", and the US heard "shoot the messenger", and never looked back. Well how's that working out by now...

Huang's billions are probs not going to impress the Chinese, who are investing multiples of that. The Chinese also consider developing their own (AI) semiconductors a national priority, with the US of the last 10-15 years having proven to them conclusively that Western supplies can not be relied upon. Their homegrown stuff is not as advanced as Nvidia on performance/watt yet, but it's cheap (especially compared to the multiple orders of magnitude inflated prices of Nvidia) and it works, and has built an AI industry in China that rivals the US.

So this ship sailed for Huang some time ago. I'm reading this announcement more as a "screw you guys, I'm going home" to Trump. The Orange Man has had Huang lick his boots, messed with his business with his trade wars and sanctions games, and paraded him in China now... and all for nothing, Trump has zero leverage on China, he has nothing to offer to China, and thus, nothing to offer to Huang either. All mouth and no trousers. Why would Huang hang around ...

Taiwan is where the semiconductor industry is at, and Taiwan is where Huang needs to be, too. The tech is there, the engineering is there, the manufacturing is also there, even if they branch a little to the US. The US semiconductor industry otoh is moving out of inertia by now, unable to keep up with the volume, and therefore, investment, and r&d of Taiwan. And all of that is before you take into account the US is basically in war with higher education by now, which does not bode well for any hopes of long term brain availability.

He sure could use a distraction from the Iran War, and from gas prices.

I am not arguing tech cannot improve lives, I'm arguing it doesn't happen by itself. Technology is mostly neutral, and does to us what we set out to do with it. But since technology is ran and owned not by the people, but by an elite that has interests that run counter to those of the people, getting any improvements to filter down to the population at large is either a happy accident, or takes a great effort and struggle.

Starting with the stone age, no, you're just plain projecting savage beast stereotypes into the past. What we know about the stone age is mostly egalitarian with a side of matriarchy.. Different places in different times have of course had different societies, but one thing is certain - until technology and civilization lifted us out of the constant fight for survival, nobody could afford to hold down women in a serious way. They were needed to be on the front lines of the struggle, motivated, able, and capable. And once we get into times where we have records of unspeakable things like bride price, we also get records of dowry and dower, ruining our hopes of having a black and white world. And as one of my teachers put it about ancient Greece - the man was the head of the house, controlling the land, the estate, and the slaves. The woman had no say in that. But the woman controlled the man, so whatever she wanted to happen, happened.

For an age of great inequality between the sexes, look into postwar US. Those times surely must have been technologically advanced enough to not oppress women, right? And they were, but yet, kinder, küche, kirche. Only when our lives have improved enough that we do not need women to sweat and toil with us every day can we lock them up in the house, be that figuratively or literally.

So coming to the tech. Agriculture was not made our major food source to make our lives better, the monoculture grain diet was worse than the hunter-gatherer varied diet in a major way. But the armies needed storable food, so we were forced to settle down and plow the fields. We invented gunpowder, and other than fireworks, all it ever did was make everyone's life worse. We invented TV to spread information, yet we use it exclusively for propaganda and dumbing down the populace. We invented the world wide web again to spread information and usher in a new era of the empowered individual, yet we use it for porn, surveillance, and hating our neighbour based on brainrot clickbait headlines. Nobody is even pretending AI is meant to improve anyone's life, the only hope of a business model it has is getting the headcount down at every company everywhere. Where are the fired people supposed to get jobs in a deindustrialized society, nobody knows and nobody cares, but the way the US is going about such problems, I'm seeing a jobless -> homeless -> hole in the ground pipeline not too far in the future. And no, I'm not feeling threatened in my job security by AI.

The thing with AI is, it does have potential to improve our lives, if we get rid of the idea that a job is how someone is supposed to feed and shelter themselves. But with the good will and competence our elites have, that's not happening unless the world burns first. But after the burn, we might be back in the fields again.

Social problems are solved by people, if they set out to do so. They will use whatever technology is available and applicable, but the will to solve the problems is primary. Whatever new fancy technology one might invent, if nobody cares to use it to solve a social problem, it will not happen. And as the world always has stood and still stands, what is holding us back is the will, not the technology.

Calling people names already, are we. But you are at least something on topic with communism, it pairs inherently with the Industrial Revolution, as it was invented as a result of witnessing the exploitation of the factory workers.

The quality of life of an average English person in the 19th century was child labor, cold, undernourished and overworked, if lucky enough to have a job. The luddites did not fight to keep their great jobs, they fought to have any job at all, because the alternative was to starve. The truth is, the life of a factory worker during the Industrial Revolution was much worse than a farmer's. The farmer was his own boss, built his own housing, managed their own firewood, made their own clothing, and never starved unless the crops failed not only on their farm, but everywhere else too. The factory worker was subject to the whims of the factory owner, was never secure in his income, yet dependent on it for everything he had, was in a constant losing struggle to pay his expenses, and starved not only on crop failure years, but on a regular basis because of a lack of money, and was also subject to constant outbreaks of disease like cholera, as a result of poor hygiene in a densely packed population. Everyone's life was, to put it in Hobbes' words, nasty, brutish, and short, and this was especially true of the factory worker. It took time and effort until unions, social democracy, and the threat of communism managed to get the benefits of the Industrial Revolution to start to benefit the people, like with safety nets and social security.

Pax Britannica, however, has nothing to do with any of that, but it does have to do with imperial violence, death, destruction, and pillaging all around the world. But as one would expect, there is a symmetry between the attitude of the Empire towards other peoples overseas, and towards their own people at home.