> On a related topic, why did nobody call out the outrageous things that were happening on Epstein's island? Because the whole point was to build up a war chest of blackmail material for future leverage.

That's speculation but it's not really backed by what happened. Epstein and Maxwell do not appear to have ever blackmailed anyone, which is why the former is dead and the latter is in prison. It's not exactly hard to see a situation where both are spirited out of the country to a friendly jurisdiction when the noise becomes too loud, yet neither were able to force their connections to get them out.

My honest theory is that Epstein primarily wanted to be rich and so provided dopamine hits to his clients by providing two non-investment related "perks" of being around him: a positive one of putting billionaires in contact with charities, and a negative one that appealed to the basest instincts of the kinds of sociopaths that seem to be disproportionately represented among the rich. Epstein knew that dopamine hits, rather than competence, was the best way to get clients to stick with him and his business. Not exactly an unusual pattern, especially today.

What on Earth gives you that idea? I'm a diver, the damned thing could be upside down and it'd be still interesting. On its side is arguably optimal.

One possible trigger was in a short seller report published back in May of this year.

https://daringfireball.net/lin...

The other possibility is someone in the food chain wanted to do some blackmail and in trying to get ahead of that, Nvidia had to out themselves.

The other possibility is that someone already was getting ready to put together a shareholder lawsuit, or an expose and was asking inconvenient questions of some of the parties that were effectively facilitating his infidelities. In order to not be seen as complicit, they had to throw him under the bus.

I imagine we'll find out sooner or later what the chain of circumstances were.

What utter bollocks. This is the type of industry that AI has no role in whatsoever. Why the fuck would you put something designed to emulate a "human" in instead of a conventional, easy to understand, algorithm that just juggles prices and flight times?

You slop-gobblers are so obsessed with your complement-toy that you've forgotten traditional processing is not merely more efficient and faster, but actually more accurate, when you have a straightforward logical query to make.

Well, he was accused of unauthorized access to a computer system, but the owners of the computer system involved made it emphatically clear they didn't want charges pressed. So technically you're correct, which is the best type of correct, but the nuance is that, no, the law he supposedly broke was too much for this specific case.

The other thing he was accused of was copyright infringement, but that's not illegal unless you intend to profit from it (simplification), it's normally merely a civil, not criminal, matter. And the entire point he was making was that the files shouldn't have been protected by copyright in the first place.

Swartz almost certainly had more issues than criminal charges that would inevitably have been dropped, or gone to court and been dismissed as soon as the "victim" refused to testify or testified in Swartz's favor. So while there's been a pile-on for the prosecutor in this case, I'm reluctant to join it beyond thinking she should have listened to MIT/JSTOR. People who are accused of crimes, even crimes they know are under uncontroversial laws and for which they're dead to rights, don't generally kill themselves. Rather, given his background, I suspect depression caused by you-know-what is far more likely.

macOS's Unix-like userland (ie the command line tools that weren't written for macOS, tools like "ls" and "rm") are mostly from FreeBSD (at one point I think there were some GNU tools mixed in, but I have a vague memory they started to remove those in earnest). None of the rest - the kernel, the GUI, the file systems, device drivers, the equivalent of init/systemd, et all are from BSD derived code, they're mostly proprietary Apple/NEXT.

And this is a massive concern when it comes to LLMs. To date, there's no evidence that the output of LLMs really is "public domain", the courts are divided on it, and the sloptivists aren't going to be able to assure us LLM code is free of copyright risk until literally the UN intervenes and convenes an international AI copyrights treaty that declares it public domain. Until then different countries may legislate, but as long as any significant jurisdictions tag LLM output as belonging to the people whose works fed the LLM, incorporating LLM code into a program you intend to distribute is risky to say the least.

Not that that's going to stop anyone for now, because the machine tells me what a good boy I am and how my ideas are so good so it must be good yes it is yes it is yes I am a good boy!

Truly inspiring words. Let's not worry then about nukes either. Wildfires? Let's not put them out. Let the world burn! It's going to change anyway so why not?

Well yeah, our search results are shit these days because Google is, from what I can tell, intentionally enshittifying it to push people towards Gemini.

And what does AI have to do with Amazon package delivery? Anything at all?

Or are you ignorant of what the complaints are about "data centers". Nobody's opposing classic data centers here. They're opposing AI buildings. And they should. And you should too.

But you don't.

Because you're easy manipulated by the chatbot. It makes you feel good! It tells you what a good boy you are and how your ideas are so good all the time. Over and over again. And... you've only ever suffered abuse your entire life. Constant being told your ideas are bad. That your code isn't good. And here it is, a dopamine inducing device that praises you for the first time in your life. And you don't want to consider the possibility it might be terrible. It might be making you dumber - but it is. It might be saying those things... because it's been programmed to, in order to prop up an unsustainable business just long enough to make everyone dependent upon it, which it is. Trillions of dollars diverted from things that might actually help people into creating RAM shortages, destroying privacy, destroying incentives to create, and creating dependencies on sociopath-run businesses in the hope that, after crypto and other scams failed, this might be the one, the tech that'll steal the economy. And you've fallen for it.

So you repeat this tired and obviously bad faith criticism of anti-data center protestors because you've been indoctrinated into a cybercult so fucking thick you don't even consider how much of an out of touch moron you appear by pretending this isn't about AI.

I don't think I'm going to get through to you, but to those reading this and being on that knifeedge of thinking "This karmawarrior guy's a bit mean" while for the first time wondering why it is that the chatbots insist on the ridiculous over the top fawning behavior, why the studies show AI is causing skill losses among its users, why so much money is being poured into tech that cannot possibly make a profit, and why the peer reviewed studies seem to say one thing about AI productivity (spoiler! in most cases, it's not having a massive impact) and programmers who are using the tech enthusiastically are saying another (10X productivity!!!?!)... think about those things some more, and draw the obvious conclusions.

I think I just threw up in my mouth... ;-)

> Which begs the question -- why are US safety laws so lax?

It's more different priorities. The US (and Canada) has safety laws (and indeed a whole policy on roads) oriented towards protecting the driver and passengers. While the rest of the world tends to consider the lives of those outside of a car to be more important.

Of course, some times those policies will mesh and vehicles can be made that match both priorities. Other times, they won't. And other times, there's no reason why a vehicle can't be built that considers both priorities to be important, but for whatever reason, the designer decides to focus on one market at the expense of the others.

The Cybertruck is probably not the only design that can't be exported to Europe for the same reasons, and there are reasons why most car manufacturers have "US" and "non-US" portfolios so different they'll slap the same name onto two entirely different vehicle designs knowing that there's no confusion because one is intended for Americans, and the other not.

No, it *was* a Nazi car. But a little lesson in history:

In the late 1930s, the Nazis took their Germany Uber Alles nonsense to its logical conclusion and started invading other countries. So there was a big war, and in the end, because fascism is essentially a con-game at a governmental level, Germany collapsed and the rest of the world took over. Hitler shot himself.

So at that point, Nazism in Germany was essentially dead, and while there may have been quite a few people in Germany who still believed this bullshit, German industry was no longer in the hands of people who promoted fascism.

Interestingly, Henry Ford, who also promoted fascism, albeit reluctantly joining the efforts to fight Germany during the war, died two years later, so it's arguable Ford remained a fascist car company slightly longer than VW did.

If a company isn't funding fascism, it's not fascist and its products are not fascist. Conversely, if a company is funding fascism/neo-Nazism, today, directly or indirectly, then it is one. That's how it works. That's why if, say, hypothetically, a company called Edison was making cars and the CEO and owner of the most shares, Leon Scent, was promoting some political part(y/ies) that blamed the world's problems on convenient and blameless minorities and promoted cruel policies towards them, it would be reasonable for everyone to boycott Edison's cars, but would no longer be an issue if Scent were to sell his holdings, and sever all of his connections with Edison. At that point, Edison would no longer be a fascist or neo-Nazi car company.

He didn't say they had gold veneer. He said they appealed to the same people who think gold veneer is tasteful.

I've seen them in RL, and I have to agree with the sibling post who says the kind of person who'd think they look cool would be the same that thinks putting gold veneer on everything makes looks elegant. They're just... gaudy with no redeeming qualities in terms of design, the kind of thing a 9 year old would draw as his concept of what a really cool car looks like. It's just weird, angular, and large. It looks as cool as a skip. Which not coincidentally its compared to on a regular basis.

The good news is between Ford and Slate, the options for something that does what the Cybertruck says, but has a utilitarian design, looks decent, and is actually affordable, are coming. Whether there's a market is another issue given the disproportionately high number of pick-up drivers who are likely swayed by culture war crap. But they're coming for those who want the advantages of EVs without having to drive a sedan.

I've seen two or three in my neighbourhood but:

1. The neighbourhood is heavily MAGA (Florida, East Coast but North of Palm Beach)
2. When you think of all the cars you see, you're going to notice the Cybertruck because of what it is, but it's not like I'm seeing them every day. There's a very good chance I've seen more than 50% of the Cybertrucks in the area, making up some relatively small percentage of the population here as a whole.

To put it another way, if the area I live in has 20-40,000 people in it, and there are ten Cybertrucks, that means there are far more trans people (0.1% of the population vs 00.025% - 00.05%) in my area than Cybertrucks. They're just not popular.