In terms of free speech, the TikTok platform was already yanked out from under you before you ever tried to stand on it. It is easily the *most* heavily narrative-shaped social media platform ever to gain widespread adoption in the West. (Douyin and Weibo and WeChat are even worse, but nobody in America uses those platforms except to talk to family members who are located in countries with extreme levels of government censorship, where everything else is blocked.)

What we should've done, about ten years ago, is put ByteDance on the entity list and make it illegal to conduct financial transactions with them, block their access to Swift, etc. That wouldn't have had much impact on the platform's growth, but it *would* have made TikTok's main source of funding far more obvious to the casual observer, which would simplify certain aspects of this argument.

Web developers have no problem with the less-well-known browsers. We never have to do anything to support them, *they* support the relevant standards and everything just works. It's consistently whatever browser has the most market share that is a perpetual thorn in our collective sides (or to a lesser extent the browsers in the #2 and #3 slots), and that's been true ever since the #1 browser was Netscape Navigator. The people who make the leading browser never think they need to do things in the standard way, because everyone will bend over backwards to make websites work with their browser *anyway* and unfortunately most of the time they're right.

I used to test in half a dozen browsers. I stopped bothering, because I never found any problems with the lesser ones. Ever.

Yeah.

Windows should probably also have a VM system that isn't total pants. I'm sure Microsoft will get right on that and have a fix ready any day now.

> Why would I want to sacrifice performance by restricting how much memory my browser is using?

Your question presupposes a couple of things:

1. You are actually using Edge as your web browser. For a lot of people this is not the case.

2. Your computer actually has the necessary amount of physical RAM. On a lot of low-end systems (especially cheap laptops) this is not the case.

There are people out there who were scammed into trying to run Windows Ten on a system with 16GB of RAM. (I've even seen one system that had Windows Ten and only 8GB of physical RAM. I was appalled.) Used-computer sellers have been refurbishing/renewing secondhand computers that are appropriate for running Windows Seven, and of course they've been putting Ten on them instead, and a lot of budget-minded people are buying them like that. This results in a LOT of page swapping. Like, really a lot, even by nineties standards. Under these circumstances, a simple action like trying to access the Start menu, can easily lead to a 10-minute wait while virtual memory is shuffled around. It doesn't help that the virtual memory system in Windows Phone/Eight/Ten/Eleven is even more pants than the one in NT/XP/Vista/Seven. But when even the OS itself won't fit in physical RAM and then you're trying to run memory-hungry things like Edge, while simultanously there are endless system updates downloading and data indexing and whatnot forever happening in the background, a better VM system would only help so much; there's going to be a lot of swapping regardless. The only way to make performance any worse than that, would be to put the swap file in the cloud.

Eleven has somewhat more realistic specs for what your computer should have in order to run it, and it refuses to install if the system is too low-end. As near as I can tell, Eleven doesn't actually need more RAM than Ten needs; but it *knows* that it needs it, and so it is more realistic about telling people their systems don't have enough system resources and can't upgrade to the new version. If Ten had been similarly realistic about this, a lot more people would still be using Seven, or else they'd have spent more on their computers and got ones that could handle Ten better.

They're afraid of becoming irrelevant, and it makes them do stupid irrational things.

The best example is Eight. Nobody was using Windows Phone, and they were afraid that (with smartphones gaining popularity) if everyone kept not using it, Microsoft would become irrelevant, so they used their majority market share on the desktop to force everyone to use their phone OS, by porting over some stuff and turning it into the next version of MS Windows. This was a terrible idea (Eight was so much worse than Seven you can't even really compare them), and as far as I know, it also hasn't resulted in anyone buying a smartphone with a Microsoft OS on it, so as a strategy, it completely failed to mitigate in any way the risk that inspired it. But that didn't stop them from doing it. Actions inspired by fear don't have to be rational.

Web browsers are a similar situation. Everybody uses web browsers, so if everybody doesn't use *Microsoft's* web browser, they feel like they're in danger of becoming irrelevant. So they think they have to stop that from happening, at all costs, and it makes them do stupid counterproductive stuff that annoys and alienates users.

I mean, the stock is almost certainly overvalued, so at *some* point its price will experience a "market correction". But when you take up a short position, the inevitability of that ultimate outcome won't save you.

When you're short, you need the price to stay level or drop, and you need that to happen *right now* not some time later after you go bankrupt. If the price correction happens somewhat later than you expected, you lose, and the amount you lose depends on the unpredictable amount by which that stock price goes up in the short term. Fundamentally, you're handing the market the right to demand *any* amount of additional money from you (limited only by bankruptcy law), to cover the short if your timing is bad. You don't even have to be wrong about the company being overvalued. If you take up the short position too soon, and the price goes up for a while longer before crashing, it sucks to be you.

Short positions are dangerous.

> Shorts have the potential to lose a lot of money if the stock goes up.

Not just a lot, but an *unpredictable* amount. It isn't just that you can lose money if things don't go your way. That's always true with investments, especially ones that are famous for having a lot of price-motion, like stocks. But a short position is special because the amount you can lose is unbounded, and this makes it risky to hold *even* as part of a diverse portfolio. If you invest 5% of your portfolio in a normal stock, and it tanks, you can lose up to 5% of your portfolio. But if you put 5% of your investment portfolio into a short position, and the stock increases to e.g. 200 times its former value, you could lose 1000% of your investment portfolio, which is probably significantly more than your entire net worth. The 200x increase isn't especially likely, but the possibility of something like that happening is always there with a short position.

The Trump stock is more unlikely than most to have a very very large increase, because the company doesn't do any significant R&D and is already valued at a relatively high level. But it's probably *more* likely than the average stock to have a more moderate increase that would make a short position, not completely ruinous, but decidedly uncomfortable. All it would take would be for a couple more of Trump's political enemies to file yet more lawsuits against him (which does *not* seem unlikely), and his popularity would probably go up again (like it has done the last half dozen times that happened), and the stock price would probably increase as a result. So honestly, I think shorting the Trump stock is probably a somewhat more manageable risk (as part of a diverse portfolio) than a typical short position (but that's not a high bar) but also less likely to pay off. It's not an investment strategy I would particularly recommend.

I expect people are going "This is overvalued; if its bubble pops while I have it shorted, I make money." And that's true, as far as it goes, but that doesn't mean it's a good idea.

Honestly, right now the research currently being done is all incremental tweaking focused on getting things like ChatGPT and its ilk to be slightly less embarrassingly bad at doing the limited range of things they do. None of that research has *any* chance of leading to human-like intelligence, in a year, a decade, a century, or a millennium. It's like expecting to make a breakthrough in space travel by engineering a slightly more aerodynamic bicycle. The more aerodynamic bicycle may be valuable, but it isn't *ever* going to fly through space under its own power at a significant fraction of light speed, sorry, that's just not what it's going to do. Such an advance wouldn't come from that approach. If it comes at all, it will come from someone trying something new that hasn't already had millions of man-hours poured into it.

By 1998, hard drives were either IDE or SCSI, and most new computers also had (usually ATAPI) CD-ROM drives.

Admittedly, floppy disks were also still in widespread use; but it wasn't for lack of hard drives. It was for lack of USB 2.0 and the (flash-EEPROM-based) mass storage devices that it enabled.

How do you know it's not an American spoofing a European spoofing an American?

I will admit that I have occasionally been mildly annoyed that I couldn't use actual Greek characters when discussing things like etymology and math on here. But given how bad the Spam problem is already, do I want all discussions to get buried under a huge pile of hanzi and emoji and whatnot? No, I do not. I've seen what that did to Usenet, and I am not keen on it.

Slashdot walks a fine line. It has never attempted to gate itself behind geolocation checks, for example. But the site has consistently refused to make any changes specifically to accommodate foreigners. It's an American site, that is open to the public, so others *can* choose to participate, if they want to, but they're choosing to participate (or not, as the case may be) in an American site.

Do Americans go onto French discussion boards and complain that all the conversations are in French, that everything is discussed from a French perspective, and so on, and ask for that to be changed? (I almost asserted that we don't, but then I remembered that there are over 300 million of us, and I don't frequent French discussion fora, so who knows, maybe it does actually happen and I'm simply unaware of it. There are, after all, idiots in every country.)

He was obviously using the word "munitions" as shorthand for "munitions-bearing missiles and ordnance and whatnot". Technically he didn't actually *say* all that, but it's implied.

It could potentially also be directly useful if it can be made affordable at any kind of reasonable scale. Methanol is much easier to store than electricity, and entirely straightforward to use as a fuel. It's already somewhat commonly used as fuel for a few things (mostly recreational stuff, rather than anything industrial, but still, the fact that we're already using it this way means we already have significant experience doing so; methanol as fuel is a known quantity, and that's a useful property for it to have).

Slashdot is and always has been totally unapologetically an American site, by design. It is not *intended* for Europeans, or Asians, or cetera.

This is also why it's still ASCII-only, decades after widespread adoption of utf-8 elsewhere. Diacritical marks aren't needed in English, and comments in other languages would be considered spam here.

Europeans who don't like this aspect of Slashdot, are always free to go find another site.

Eh. Apple is definitely guilty of engaging in competition-suppressing behavior. But Microsoft is even *more* guilty of it, and Amazon's hands aren't entirely clean in this regard either, and in general these companies are large enough to take care of themselves. (Also, Windows Phone is so terrible, nobody would ever use it voluntarily even if it were free. This is part of the background story behind why Windows 8 was so bad.) Holding these companies up as victims is ridiculous. It's like arguing that Tesla is unfairly locking Ford and Toyota out of the electric vehicle market.

As for HTC, they've been in the cellphone business longer than Apple has, so the line about preventing new companies from entering the market doesn't hold water there.

The real concern is that these companies' anti-competitive behavior effectively suppresses *smaller* companies and prevents them from gaining a toehold in the market. For example, one might argue that Apple's app store policies are unfair to small software companies who want to distribute a cellphone app that competes with one of Apple's own apps, or one of their partners' apps.

> EVs as rentals might start to make sense after the charging infrastructure in
> this country has been built out further and most people are familiar with EVs.

Those things would help, but there are additional issues as well. The power
grid needs to be able to back up the charging infrastructure, which will likely
continue to be a problem in some areas (e.g., on the west coast) for the
forseeable future. Also, as you'd expect for any new technology, the price of
EVs, and of _parts_ for them, also still needs to come down some more. It's
been on its way down for a while already, but it still has some more falling to
do. Although, that may happen by the time the charging infrastructure and
power grid are ready. Range also still needs to improve a bit more, although
it's already *much* better than it used to be; ongoing improvements to battery
technology are really helping here. (Range is already more than adequate
for the types of renters who are flying to a city and then renting a car to drive
around that city, which is a fair number of them. But it's not *all* of them,
and maintaining a secondary fleet of gas-powered vehicles to serve other
customers creates unwanted logistical problems, greatly increasing the
expense of shuffling vehicles around. It's bad enough you've already got
renters who either specifically do or else specifically don't want a large
vehicle like an SUV. Compounding that with "I specifically need a vehicle
that can make the drive from Seattle to Chicago" is a business problem.)
The publicity issues related to exploding EV batteries also aren't helping.
(In practice, none of the vehicles Hertz was using had that problem. The
vehicles that do have that problem, aren't sold in North America, because
over here folks who can't afford something better than that, consistently
buy secondhand vehicles. But the internet has gazillions of videos of the
phenomenon, and many consumers don't understand all the nuances.)
Finally, a large part of the *point* in moving to EVs is significantly less
impactful than you've been told and will remain that way until more
of the grid power production infrastructure can be moved to renewable
sources, which is going to take *longer* than you've been told, because
apart from hydropower (which is only available in select geographical
areas), most renewable energy sources can't be quickly turned on and
off when needed to match supply to demand, and so switching over the
last 30% or so of production, is going to require very large amounts of
energy storage on the grid, which is very expensive. This is being
worked on, quite actively, but it's not going to happen overnight.