Free speech includes lying.

Well, yes. For many years, presidential candidates, both Democratic and Republican, referred to the United States as "the indispensible nation". And my reaction was always, "Doesn't that mean the US is a single point of failure for civilization?"

We are currently performing an experiment which addresses this question: can the US enjoy the benefits of soft power without the cost? That's the whole point of obeying *norms*. No individual force is going to punish you if you are treacherous, mercurial, foul-mouthed, disrespectful and generally unpredictable. Everyone will punish you.

I think an inevitable cost of this experiment will be that the world will decide that the US can't be a single point of failure for global democracy any longer. In many ways, that's something that will be good for us. But it's also going to cost us in painful ways. When the world decides to move away from the dollar as the international reserve currency, you will see both inflation and higher interest rates on everything from credit cards to mortgages, to business loans that will offset the export advantages. We will need *more* business investment to shift the economy to producing low value goods again, so the transition will be rocky.

Merit should always consider strictly value.

It's a trade off: you get abundant free energy to run the server, with extreme constraints on cooling because your server is running in the most perfect Thermos bottle ever.

Others are taking the opposite tack: undersea data centers for abundant free cooling at the expense of having to get the power down to your servers.

If had to bet on which one is more practial, I'd go with undersea servers. Build them off the coast of Chile, run cables out from batery-backed solar plants in the Atacama desert.

The $5K a year just gives you a $300 per person per visit discount. So pays itself back in 15 visits or so.

Plenty of us nerds can afford this and want to see news about this.

I think it may be evidence that Amazon has a shitty corporate culture that squeezes every penny it can out its employees.

Corruption can happen anywhere, but it's more likely to happen in totalitarian cultures where people feel like the system is rigged anyway. That's why countries like Russia and China have corruption problems. But I suspect the same feelings of me vs. the system occur in a capitalist enterprise like Amazon where employees are governed by dystopian, rigid, computerized metrics.

Garbage regulations like IP create these behemoths. If you want freedom, stop regulating monopolies into existence.

Statism creates billionaires.

The restrictions are a mix of reasonable nuisance management and paranoia about who is flying drones, what they can do, and chain of custody.

Beijing proper is a city with a population density of over 21,000 / km^2 -- so you can imagine the chaos if any tech enthusiast resident could fly a drone without a permit. Except for a couple of free zones in the outer boroughs, New York City restricts drone launcing and landings within the city to flights with a permit and flight plan, because otherwise the sky would be black with drones. Many cities -- both red and blue -- have zone restrictions for drone flights, and those currently hosting World Cup matches have tightened them for the duration of the tournament.

Democracy is for retards.

Government did this. All of this. Government regulated so much that only a rare few can afford to compete.

This is late stage statism. Retard voters are to blame.

Like you.

Garbidgecollect surfaces etc...

Oh yes im pissed off that proton and cedega are in the news but im not and there dead ans burried. Looking at some of the changes made to direct3d it seems steam os requires that apps dont count activex instization and it wouldnt suprise me if it forced software nulling of buffers because thease some things that make strict directx 3d slow and by passing them gives substantial performance increases unfortunally someone put me in a cardboard coffin before i was able to roll this out when i wrote dirextx9 for vanilla wine many moons ago. So, im going to revisit direct3d with levels of strictness vs performance with some of the features being able to be rolled out across the entire activex architecrure in wine. I also wrote a text literal pdf importer and some other funky stuff along the way so you should soon be able to edit pdfs with a text editor instead of current vecror implementations the lengths someone has gone to to prevent the release of this are outstanding so hopefully its as disruptive as direcrx9 for vanilla wine was back all those years ago. If you find my corpse somewhere you know why.

Grok was constantly say it was doing something that it had ZERO ability to, and I kept calling it out and it kept apologizing and then immediately doing it again.

As a guy who spend 5 figures a year on Ai, the last thing I want is that. I know Claude and ChatGPT also do it, but Grok was doing it CONSTANTLY.