But that would have ended with Russia not being owned by Russians.

The only thing "Russian" about the people that own Russia now is the country on their passports, which they probably don't use anyway because of the sanctions etc. from Ukraine and that many have citizenship in whichever country they have moved to. They sure as hell don't give a damn about the country, it's people, or anything else "Russia", besides their ability to keep extracting money and influence from it.

Of course, you could say that about a lot of the people that essentially own the rest of the world too.

Doubly so in this case, albeit of a slightly different nature. I keep coming across IP addresses that are managed by Cloud Innovations all the time, and almost always leased out to some sketchy ISP that is either heavily compromised by botnets, or an out and out "bullet proof" hosting provider. The latter are particularly interesting as they are presumably raking in the cash because they both covering Lu's rental fees and maintaining a business relationship because they keep cycling to new subnets as the previous ones get blocked. That implies they are not defaulting on the rental fees, and Lu is either oblivious to what that continual changing of ranges for the same customer implies or is fully aware of, and therefore supporting, this kind of activity.

10m IPs, huh. /checks blocklist. Yeah, I've got just over a third of that blocked & flagged as "Cloud Innovations" at the moment, most of which are in /16 and larger IPv4 allocations. About 7m to go, I guess... Thank $deity for IPSets...

Yup. It's pretty hard to do the right thing when the oil cartel that has invaded Alberta keeps threatening to shit itself and is actively trying to engineer a separatist movement entirely for its own benefit. Here's hoping Carney eventually finds a way to disembowel them.

The last game Sweeney did the artwork for was ZZT. As much as I love playing around with AI art generation for fun, he's really not an expert on this.

National budgets simply do not, and cannot, work that way. Taxes go into a central pot, and then get assigned out according to the priorities of the state as interpreted by the government that currently controls the national purse strings, ideally without having to borrow any additional money although that seldom happens and is deeply unpopular when it does (see "Austerity" - governments typicallydo not live within their means, yet usually expect their publics to do just that). For the whole system to work, they have to both tax things that are easy to collect the tax on, and over tax those things to make up for the costs of things where it is not easy to tax. If you want any taxes spent to be proportionate to what they are raised from, then the outcome will be a LOT of essential services that are currently supported by the public purse seeing drastic cuts, forcing more people to go private or join a *long* waiting list, and requiring suplemental per-use fees.

For most people, sure the odometer will be fine, but some of us live in rural communities and have vehicles that are used a significant amount of time off public roads, but still need to be taxed for their on-road usage - think tractors or road-legal quad bikes, for a couple of very obvious examples. A simple "per mile driven" based on the odometer is not the perfectly fair "one size fits all" solution that it might at first seem to be if those kinds of vehicles go electric at some point, so I think a little more nuance may be required before this scheme sees the light of day. Privacy concerns aside, many of those issues could easily be addressed via GPS-based tracking of just public road usage, and could also enable more nuanced billing to try deter drivers from using busy roads at peak times, effectively turning any road that is applied to into a toll road.

It should also be noted that this is on top of existing vehicle tax, which is paid as an annual fee in the UK. People with large SUVs and commercial vehicles will still be paying more to drive those vehicles per year, but whether the plan is to shift more of that tax to the per-mile rax rates based on criteria such as the likely amount of road surface wear they will create, e.g. different per mile rates for larger vehicles, isn't yet clear, either. Overall, it's probably the fairest system for users of different types of vehicle classes and power trains to pay their share of the public highway costs, but the devil is always in the details and at this point there are scant few of those available to see where the issues people ought to be concerned about might lie.

They clearly do NOT think it is safe. From TFS, emphasis mine:

"It is important to differentiate between the highly toxic PFAS such as PFOA and PFOS for which the EPA has set drinking water standards, versus less toxic PFAS in pesticides that help maintain food security," notes Doug Van Hoewyk, a toxicologist at Maine's Department of Agriculture, Conservation and Forestry.

Less toxic is still toxic. So, they *know* it's bad for you (and probably the environment/local ecology too), just not as bad, and yet they still expect you to be grateful for their efforts and quite literally lap it up. Good luck getting that shit on the shelves of places like the EU that have reasonable food standards, regardless of any tariffs or TACOs.

Given most people think "dams, reservoirs, and turbines" when they hear the word "hydro", it's also worth pointing out that the UK has a lot of untapped tidal potential as well; the Severn estruary in particular is one of the largest tidal bores in the world, twice a day, and its energy potential will only increase as sealevels rise. Combine that with some suitable storage system, and you'll have another clean (once set up) and predictable supply capacity to offset some more of the current carbon-based baseload.

It's true that many people have self-serving reasons for hating LLMs.

About 1 million Americans have lost their job this year, with AI being a cited by employers.

I am certainly going to try getting ChatGPT to read and understand legal contracts before going to speak to a lawyer. The more I know, the better questions I can ask. I use a privately staged LLM to posed medical questions. Better than running the gauntlet of Canada's broken medical system. Yes I read articles from NIH. LLMs aren't a replacement for expertise. But these are concrete examples where LLMs threaten jobs while making ordinary people's lives better.

Job losses are a real concern, and people are right to be worried/concerned, even if economic change is good in the long run.

I'm more concerned by the cruddy quality. Ask it questions about the existence of God, and ChatGPT will say it has no opinion, and is NOT agnostic. Mmm, sure thing. Something is true/not true/cannot be talked about, if powerful people will get angry over what ChatGPT will say about it. Apparently there's as many people employed to "manage the message" as there are building the underlying useful technology. I find this pathetic.

The technology is amazing. It is a game changer. It'll be exploited by scammers. It has huge problems. It'll take time for society to adjust.

"We need money for roads and schools" is sometimes about paying for generous entitlements to previous employees.

Use Linux and MacOS, and iOS heavily. Gotta say that Linux is essentially hassle free. Very very few random changes to KDE system panels. Some minor stability issues with updating KDE. That's about all.

Mac has gone down hill a long way from the high UI standards of the 1980s. Using the control panel has devolved into a linear search. Stuff seems randomly organized probably due to Conway's Law. The worst feature is that you cannot uninstall itunes. The very existence of noTunes (so you don't accidentally boot itunes by hitting the wrong button) is a telling indictment on Silicon Valley's corporate culture.

I've had some great baking recipes from LLMs. Fun asking it why you'd do things. Eg., "why would you chill the batter of a cake?" Of course, I never expected it to give me 100% accurate information, and know enough about baking to parse the information that it's giving me.

Planned economies would likewise happily replace people with machines, if they could. The set of modern planned economies is very short: North Korea.

State capitalism -- where the state controls the decisions, but the profit motive remains, includes: China, Laos, Cuba, Turkmenistan, Eritrea... there's not a single country there that give a flying fsck about human rights.

So... Did you work on Microsoft Excel, the Intel Pentium, or both?

You jest, but it truly is terrible. Take this bit (if true): "(According to the report, more than 60 percent of students who took the previous version of the course couldn't divide a fraction by two." My immediate reaction to that was "WTF!?" You just need to double the denominator and simplify if possible and it's all integers no matter what, but, even if you don't simplify, 2/6 and 1/3 both answer the question "what is half of 2/3?".

That's not just a failure in maths skills, it's a failure in basic comprehension and ability to conceptualise a problem, which is far more wide-ranging and impactful than just being bad at math.