What odds do you give that the reflecting pool will be fixed before he leaves office?

Meta/Multiverse was a propaganda tool, not an important technology. Timeline:

1) Facebook stopped making new things, pursuing enshittification as the primary strategy.
2) Facebook pissed off Democrats with Cambridge Analytics, and pissed off Republicans with censorship.
3) Doesn't matter how much of that was true, both parties were pissed off and threatening regulation/antitrust at Facebook in a bipartisan way.
4) Facebook promised COOL NEW TECHNOLOGY and name change. They also scaled up political donations in a bipartisan way.
5) The threats largely went away.
6) The COOL NEW TECHNOLOGY went away.

My favorite thing to do in an empty parking lot is to separate hydrogen from oxygen then rejoin it very quickly.

If that's not the absolute worst idea in the world, it's certainly in the running.

I admit I did not know about the Getty connection.

He might get away with it if he smiles more (it worked for Trump). I haven't seen him flash a non-sarcastic smile since COVID. Some mysterious sadness has infected the man.

The core of the problem is all these politicians are obsessively looking for someone to hate. It doesn't matter if it's based on race, or trans, or gingerness, or whatever. They choose someone to effectively bully, and a good 30% of the country goes along with it as the latest target. (Some go along with it because they like to hate on others, and some go along because they don't want to be bullied).

If we can stop doing that, the oligarchy will effectively lose their power.

They had the LLM steer the car using a kind of programming language, with function calls that look like this:

They translated those functions into input for some aftermarket car controlling hardware, which looks kind of cool but I didn't know was a thing.

I couldn't figure out from their report how they returned data back to the LLM, but apparently they pasted images and telemetry into the chat window every so often, or something like that.

There are some products where it's not as big a deal - apples, for instance. A New Zealand apple can still taste great when it arrives in New York or London. But yeah, the market may insist we need to buy berries year-round, but like you I largely stick to seasonal produce as much as possible. And, if not, greenhouse grown products sourced from our region are typically better than the alternatives (like here in Washington state - we are fortunate to have British Columbia's greenhouse growers close by, selling to our stores).

They do pick them early (not just oranges, pretty much most fruit and vegetables).

Funny story - way back, trains used to use interior gas lights (coal gas I think). Produce sellers were used to picking their products unripe, loading it into trains, and having it arrive at the destination perfectly ripe. Well, when trains switched to electric lights, suddenly all this unripe produce started arriving at the markets! They eventually figured out that ethylene gas, leaking from gas pipes, was serving to accelerate the ripening of the produce.

I read an article (in the Atlantic, I think) a few months ago that talked about the Florida citrus industry. IIRC it sounds like, in addition to the huge problems caused by that disease, the Florida growers have also made a habit of shooting themselves in the foot with stupid short-sighted choices.

Nah, America has become a reality TV nation.

We have zero chance of getting a competent president, for the same reason that the most skillful competitors never won Survivor.

Newsom comes across as bitter, though. He's a nepo candidate, never having won a particularly competitive race. He needs a little positivity. A positive slogan like, "Hope and Prosperity" or "High Time for Change" or "Change for High Time" or something.

That made me laugh.

I get all my best benchmarks by piping everything to /dev/null!

They recently purged the designer of their stealth aircraft after realizing the stealth part doesn't work. https://www.visiontimes.com/20...

Maybe they want to ensure those weapons designers don't leave before their deception is realized.

In China communism started with education programs for poor people. Once they got some power, they got rid of the landlords who were actually very abusive. So for many people, communism was a step forward. It was better than monarchy (or a system of warlords, which was the alternative at the time).

Communism: a step up from monarchy, a step down from democracy.