I consider a free country to be one where the people govern. The absence of regulation is not a step towards freedom. But the removal of authority of a more representative government of the people is a step away from freedom.

This should be about state's rights. The modern interpretation of the commerce clause has gutted the Constitution. And instead of everyone living in a state were they have some potential representation of their regional demographic, we have a nation where only the ones that can afford to support 9 figure campaign budgets get a voice.

The hope of those that pull the strings of our government is that young men saddled with debt will fight our wars.

I had a 186 in my palm top. But building a fully IBM PC compatible with a 186 was impossible as the integrated hardware was different. You could run modified versions of MS-DOS on it and get the vast majority of programs working, just not 100% of them.

There are moving parts in all the cameras, you know, for being abot to focus.

There's throwing away working code, and there is hording old bits even though nobody is even testing them before making changes. Don't be a hoarder. And feel free to hand any important 486 code to any other GPL kernel project. Or switch to NetBSD for your 486 needs.

What is even better than being able to brag to your friends is to be able to complain to your friends and family. So this is the gift that keeps on giving.

To be fair, when Clinton and Yeltsin were running things, we thought the Cold War was finally over. We could focus on a new decade of globalization (a more palatable name for imperialism).

We had 20-30 to readdress the errors of the past adminstations but recall two things:
1. The media did not bring it up to the American people again
2. The legislature and political parties in the US did not make an issue of it.

Perhaps we pulled the wool over our own eyes. But it is useless to blame on leader or another for doing something we could have undone or improved over these decades.

Someone has to be on board to get shit done. It is how America has worked long before we were even our own country.

Until we can 3d print metal, glass, and silicon in situ. Then you just print it instead of assembling it, and possible within reach of an ambitious middle schooler when the printer technology is off-the-shelf. (So maybe when I'm 80)

Authoritarianism is available in many flavors throughout the world.

The best flavor is whichever one is most compatible with a nation's culture. And by compatible, I mean keeps them pacified. Here in the good old USA, we tend to go for an approach where the majority of people are certain they live in a free country and that nobody is trying to take everything away from them. (except for those rotten immigrants)

I think we can agree that Anthropic intentionally hides things, even if an LLM may not have been trained to hide things.

I understand the broad strokes even if I couldn't build a car or AI myself.

My understanding of how toilet paper is made is even less clear, so I avoid it entirely.

The Privacy Act of 1974 technically restricts what personally identifable information (PII) a federal agency can collect and retain. I would be OK extending this to state and local agencies. That would potentially give us a way to go after state laws that require age verfication in devices and operating systems. But it seems that there is no political will to pump the brakes on the surveillance state.

SS Officer #2: Er, Hans?
        SS Officer #1: Have courage, my friend.
        SS Officer #2: Yeah. Er, Hans, I've just noticed something...
        SS Officer #1: [Looking through binoculars] These communists are all cowards.
        SS Officer #2: Have you looked at our caps recently?
        SS Officer #1: Our caps?
        SS Officer #2: The badges on our caps, have you looked at them?
        SS Officer #1: What? No. A bit.
        SS Officer #2: They've got skulls on them. Have you noticed that our caps have actually got little pictures of skulls on them?
        SS Officer #1: Uh, I don't...
        SS Officer #2: Hans... are we the baddies?