Nobody is that "stupid" in those departments.

The question should be what was the quid pro quo?

We can imagine what the PLA got out of it but what favor did Microsoft get?

And how high up the chain did it go? Who specifically approved the arrangement?

At least Microsoft probably has Windows 11 "backups" of the hard drives of anyone who might think of bringing charges.

Not sure if that strategy can be called stupid. Lots of other words apply.

"One Nation Under Blackmail" is a popular phrase.

Five years ago when I bought a car in America the manual was roughly $1000 cheaper than the automatic.

That is believable. A sole developer at a law firm will have random tasks (like, "find out what is in this dbDOS PRO database we found during discovery"). As such, a lot of your time is spent figuring out how to do things that will only have to be done once. Traditionally, you would have spent time in search engines or StackOverflow trying to figure it out. Now AI is acting as a type of advanced search engine for you.

So your work is like the ideal use case for AI.

That's not really true. Science is a tool for testing hypotheses. It doesn't really care where the hypothesis comes from. In this case, the hypothesis is that the human brain can be perfectly simulated by a Turing Machine, which is a reasonable hypothesis.

If they just accepted that as true, it would be unscientific. But if they actually test their hypothesis, it's not unscientific.

At the time when he said that, the number was closer to 90% than to half.

Now it's easier to target, and easier to figure out which advertising is wasted.

A random generator will eventually create the works of Shakespeare.

A current LLM will never create the works of Shakespeare.

wtf I had never heard of Zizians, they claim to be rationalists but seem completely insane.

Yeah, so if this is the cover story what other heat signatures might they be looking for?

It's not immediately obvious to me but something we should understand.

Detecting Zizians would help prevent these forest fires but it would be quite hard for a satellite to do that.

"only 60% of Americans know how to drive a manual transmission (according to a survey from auto parts retailer AmericanMuscle)"

1) that seems like 60% of the readers of American Muscle
2) 'know how to' is covering a lot of ground here. "Knows how to start a stick, and how to probably get it moving from level ground with 25% of killing it" maybe. Can confidently and reliably drive with a stick, knowing basic techniques? 25% or less, certainly.

Having a stick shift is 100% the simplest security system you can have on a car in the US in 2026. Your car might still get broken into, but they'll abandon it quickly.

NASA already has this. No need to wait 10 days.

Welp, I can assure you that when I question authority, I am not doing it to gain my own power. I am anarchist to the core.

Yeah that's true.

You are vastly underestimating the power of the US military. An occupation would be easier than Iraq OR Afghanistan, because there won't be outside funding for an insurgency, and because the vast majority of Iranians already hate their government.

Bush was worse.

I was wondering that, too. Linus is vulnerable to intimidation, we saw it when he was forced to accept a code of conduct.

Theo, on the other hand, is not beholden to anybody. If only there were more people like the Rat.

Except when he's so bad that he has to apologize and sit in time out.

Linus is a smart guy, that's why he can explain his reasoning and we are smart enough that we can understand it. No need to blindly believe him because he is Linus (a logical fallacy btw).