It basically means it's controlled by career politicians. But we'll call it public anyway, even though in doing so, it doesn't have any practical difference to the public, but that word keeps rsilvergun happy because it offers the illusion of him being a partial owner, and thus, the illusion of him having a say over how it's run.

Altman would certainly like it, because partial government ownership means it's either protected from competitors, or guaranteed a bailout if it turns out that AI (or just his company in general) isn't actually profitable, or both.

Not quite. Socialism literally refers to a government owned means of production. Fire, police, and military "production" aren't on a free market, so yeah, technically those can be considered "socialist" but one thing you're missing about these is they're not on any market at all. The postal service might be, but at the same time, it's not publicly owned either, rather it's a private entity given some kind of "special" status that doesn't really have any parallel. Social security, medicare, and medicaid are all welfare programs. Full stop.

It's interesting you mention the police though -- it's an interesting thought experiment for how things would work out if you could "fire" your police department and hire another one because the first didn't do their job well. Out here, if somebody breaks into your car, the police will quietly chuckle while they tell you that you shouldn't have left valuables in your car, and they don't even want to file a report. And that could be a symptom of being understaffed, but the line from progressives is still "defund the police", so there you have it.

You're confusing socialism with welfare, likely due to it falling under the umbrella of "social spending", which doesn't relate to socialism. And those countries aren't even the highest spenders on welfare programs relative to GDP. You know who the highest spender is? Austria, followed by France. But even then, that's only from tax dollars. If you look at the sum total of the US, including the private sector, it actually comes out on top.

https://www.oecd.org/en/topics...

"Social Democracy" is a very loosely defined term that basically means "capitalism + welfare"

Nobody ever paid 90% top-end in this country. That also began during the great depression and WWII, so I don't see where you're getting the idea that it was some sort of "golden age".

Though I guess it depends on your perspective. Socialists and fascists alike certainly thought this about that period. The depression was "proof" to them that capitalism had failed, and saw the rise in power of the USSR, along with the holodomore, the gulag, and many other "necessary evils" to finally show the world that there was a better way.

Those aren't even remotely socialist dude. First of all, they're not government owned means of production, second of all, they have to compete on the free market, third, credit unions are literal co-ops. You know what they all have in common, by the way? They're run just the same as any other business. The only meaningful distinction between these, or even a nonprofit, is entirely in the ownership structure. Co-ops are usually customer owned, though in practice the customer can't tell the difference. Credit union ownership stake is typically determined by the total sum of your cash deposits. Many public utilities are co-ops, such as SRP in Arizona, where ownership stake is determined by how much land you own within the SRP service area. Or you can have employee-owned co-ops like WinCo foods. If you ever go to WinCo foods, you'll see that it looks like just any other grocery store. If you read the employee reviews on glassdoor, you're going to see these have the same complaints that any other employer does, except WinCo, where employees have a unique complaint about the longest tenured employees being paid more no matter what, even if they do a bad job, as well as favoritism.

"The capitalists"? Who are they? Like Snidely Whiplash figures? The people who manage co-ops are every bit as "capitalist" as the next person.

Unlike you, I don't create disinformation.

You obviously want details, so here goes: I bought the car for $15k at auction, after fees it cost about $16k. The damage it had was almost entirely cosmetic, but insurance companies are fickle about Teslas in general because they typically don't have contracts with third party repair shops that will work on Teslas, so they'll total it out over basically nothing. As for me, I just have my cousin do it. Mine was the 10th he restored from salvage. The actual parts cost about $3,100. I paid him another $3,000 for his labor, then some $1,800 to have Tesla perform the HV inspection so it can supercharge again, and $150 or so to have a company that subscribes to Teslas toolbox software to reprogram a seatbelt sensor, which needed to be done after the torsion bar was replaced with an aftermarket version.

We did buy a few OEM parts, but all were used from eBay, like one of the headlights. A few parts were new, but they were all objectively better than the OEM versions, including the skid plate, which is powder coated aluminum as opposed to the plastic one that comes stock. Body parts, e.g. hood and fender were redone with Bondo and matching paint.

With a bit of googling, you can verify these pricing details, including the reason insurance companies total them out over relativity minor damage. See also rich rebuilds, among numerous others on YouTube who do exactly what I did all the time.

The only part you might have a hard time reconciling is it's likely that Teslas have gone up in price at salvage auctions since I got mine in March.

As for the free charging, all I can tell you is that for those of us who have had jobs that don't suck with employers who don't suck, perks like this are pretty common. Shit, it's cheap compared to the free health insurance I already get from them.

Prompt:

Hey ChatGPT, who is being reasonable in this argument?

---
Rei: " ... We think of bees as mindless drones (literally, we took the very word!), but they're all individuals each acting on their own.... "

Synonymous Homonym: "Drones are specifically the male bees. Most bees are not drones."

Rei: "That's not what I said. I said that the word "drone", as in a mindless unthinking being, is derived from drones, as in male bees. I did not say "all bees are drone bees"."

Synonymous Homonym: "What you actually said:

We think of bees as mindless drones (literally, we took the very word!)

Suggesting that the word "drone" means "mindless bee.""

Response:

Rei is being more reasonable here.

The key issue is whether Rei's original sentence implied that all bees are drones or that "drone" as a metaphor comes from bees.

Rei wrote:

"We think of bees as mindless drones (literally, we took the very word!)"

The parenthetical "literally, we took the very word!" naturally reads as:

The figurative word drone (meaning a repetitive, unthinking worker) comes from the bee term drone.
Therefore, our cultural association of bees with "dronelike" behavior is reflected in language.

That is a claim about etymology, not about bee taxonomy.

Synonymous Homonym's first correction:

"Drones are specifically the male bees. Most bees are not drones."

is technically true, but it doesn't actually address what Rei was saying. Rei wasn't claiming that all bees are male drones.

Then Synonymous Homonym shifts to:

"Suggesting that the word 'drone' means 'mindless bee.'"

This doesn't accurately paraphrase Rei either. Rei never said the word means "mindless bee." The sentence only suggests that the metaphorical sense of "drone" is derived from the bee term.

If I were judging the exchange, I'd say:

Synonymous Homonym's factual statement is correct: drones are male bees.
But it's responding to a claim Rei didn't make, making it a misreading.
Rei's clarification directly matches the ordinary reading of the original sentence.

So the stronger interpretation is that Synonymous Homonym misunderstood the original remark, and Rei's correction is justified.

Or to put it more simply: you're attacking a straw man (a claim I never made) because you cannot defend your actual scientifically inaccurate comments about bees having half-hour memories.

You are confusing "forgetting" with "disruption".

I am not.

Your entire argument was that bees have short-term memories. The example you cited demonstrates precisely the opposite - that bee memory is if anything too durable>/i>, such that bees will refuse won't even bother searching for their hive if it has been moved, that they always go back to the spot where they remember it being last.

However, what you are choosing to ignore is that, once a bee has been accepted into a different hive, it becomes part of that hive

That's like claiming that if you move to a different city, you've "forgotten" where you used to live.

When a bee, due to a navigation error or its previous hive being gone, enters a different hive (drifting), it absorbs the pheromones of the new hive. It is now chemically marked as belonging to that hive. Chemicals are communication to bees, just as much as vocal commands are to you. Bees do not learn all of the other bees in their hive, they don't have some sort of rolodex. If you smell like hive A, you're allowed into hive A. If you smell like hive B, you're allowed into hive B. Bees don't particularly "care" which hive they're in; they have their own individual motives and drives, which simply involve being in "a" hive. Once they're marked as belonging to hive B, they can no longer enter hive A (at least not safely).

Note in the above what has nothing to do with any of this? Memory. It's just about smell. Memory is about where the hive can be found after foraging (which is also about memory) - and it remains, even after drifting (they'll continue to return to the same spot - again, even if the new hive is moved). Smell is about which hive you can enter. Or for a summary version:

1) A bee leaves the hive to go foraging

2) It remembers where the best spot to visit is (usually from having gone there before, but occasionally from having seen a waggle dance) and what flowers (shapes, smells, sizes, etc) will be yielding best there at what times of day, and what areas to NOT go to, where there may be threats. This information persists for days, weeks, or even the bee's entire life. It can target an area to an accuracy of a couple hundred meters, and then begins a search.

3) When done, it returns back to where it remembers that the hive should be (this memory is highly persistent, and can only be reset by an orientation flight.

4) The bee starts by using the sun and broad navigational features as with outbound flights to get to within a couple hundred to a few dozen meters (the "visual catchment area"), then gradually switches to small-scale features and searching. This is all based on memory.

5) For the final approach, the bee relies on a mix of sight (remembered), sound (generic), and smell. The latter is not a learned trait, it's "whatever you happen to smell like". While it's usually described as recognizing the smell of their sisters, that's not exactly right. The actual underlying mechanism not so much learning what something does smell like as it being unable to detect what they do smell like

The mechanism the same as how humans become unable to notice their own body odour or perfume: sensory adaptation. Because they're constantly smelling themselves, their brain learns to tune out their own smell. However, it doesn't tune out the smells of others. When they return to their own hive, the scent is something that they're adapted to tune out. But when they arrive at a different hive, they're hit with a scent that they're not adapted to, and that they can detect.

If you want to put it in human terms, the underlying mechanism is "this hive thinks you're stinky, that one doesn't smell you because you've all been around each other for so long".

If you want to call sensory adaptation "forgetting", then you're going to need to call human sensory adaptation "forgetting" as well. And again, none of this has anything to do with actual memory tasks, such as navigation and how to find the best flowers. Bee memory is exceptional with them.

Who said the word "small"?

(My personal hot take is that, both for copyright reasons ("Purpose and Character of the Use", aka for-profit, is a critical factor in determining copyright violation, such as from scraping), and general moral reciprocity argument (closed commercial models extracts profit from the commons without giving back), closed source trainers should fundamentally be required to give back to the commons in some meaningful way)

... some public ownership of compute, to offer out for grants to Open Source development, so that the commons can better keep up with the closed source providers?

I'm sorry that the genitals of people you neither know nor are dating bother you so much, dude.

Do you also spend this much time thinking about the genitals of children, like so many of your ilk?

Bluesky knows full well it's not operating a real federated service

Better tell that to Blacksky, Eurosky, etc.

The vast majority of people stay on the primary PDS, relay, etc namely because Bluesky hasn't proven itself to be some evil overlord pursuing insidious goals. If that were to ever occur, people would just migrate. Unlike with ActivityPub (Mastodon), ATProto allows for true migration. Your content isn't tied and linked to a specific server - it's more like a URL on an arbitrary domain, and you can just change the "domain" (the PDS). Everything is timestamped and cryptographically signed, so if you download a backup of your content, you can just reupload it somewhere else and it continues to remain linked into the whole ecosystem.

More to the point, primary Bluesky servers have gone down and third parties like Blacksky remained operational, very much demonstrating that the network is federated.

Also, re: this from the header:

" and by the end of October last year, it had reportedly seen a 40% drop in daily mobile active users over the past 12 months."

... is cherry picking. If you graph users, you'll see that - like most sites - new users tend to arrive in big "spikes", triggered either by events at other social media platforms, or major news cycles (such as elections). Most new users to a site are not "sticky". Some drop off in days, some in weeks, some in months, etc, but this slowly levels out, and the rest are "sticky". With Bluesky, usually half or so of new users stick around, which is an unusually high percentage. If you measure from a new-arrivals spike, of course you see a "dropoff", but you see that for any site. The question is, how is the long-term trend of users that stick around? If you cancel out the spike pattern, Bluesky has a long-term population of around 600k daily posters / 1M daily likers / 300k daily followers.

What you can say is there haven't been any big new user spikes since late 2024 / early 2025. That said, there kinda was some serious news going on in late 2024 / early 2025....

I paid $24,000 for my 2023 model y performance, and my gas costs exactly zero. As in, I charge for free at work, which isn't at all unheard of.

Wrong anatomy item that horny users want to crank up

The extra fingers will come in handy when climbing.

Imagine being like that and spending that much of your day thinking about other people's genitals.