Allow me to posit the following: we could very well be minding our own business but still strongly influence the rest of the world. For example, if a company wishes to do business in America -- the world's largest and most lucrative commercial market -- they must comply with US laws. This is no different than any other country. You may not like it, but that's how commercial business works, and it'd be no different if someone like North Korea had the market everyone wanted. You'd just be complaining about a different country.

Don't like it? Don't do business in the US and you're free to do whatever you want. You'll be excluding yourself from probably 70% of the available market, but you're free to make that choice.

Don't forget, your argument can be turned around quite easily: you could mind your own business and stop trying to tell the US how to do business according to your wants/needs. Funny how that works.

You're blissfully unaware of how national sovereignty works.

Good luck getting the US to accommodate an Interpol extradition request for 4chan and its personnel. There's no reason the US would agree to it since 4chan has violated no US law. So long as 4chan operates in the US exclusively and violates no US laws, they are effectively beyond the reach of the UK government. They could presumably nab some 4chan executive if they ever visited the UK, but all one has to do to avoid that is just not visit the UK.

This is how international legal disputes have been handled since the dawn of international legal disputes. Don't trust me, look it up, I'm sure chatgpt can fill you in.

It's about time they admitted to something that was obvious to almost everyone: nuclear power is the only effective path to carbon-free base load power generation. Wind and solar make good intermittent sources, but base load has to be utterly reliable regardless of whether the wind is blowing or the sun is shining. That's nuclear.

Getting rid of the nukes was a knee-jerk reaction, not a smart technological decision. The pivot to depending on oil and gas from a potential hostile neighbor just added to the madness.

He financed, produced, starred in, and distributed the film completely independent from the "Hollywood System". For God's sake, how much less "sucked in" can a person be and still have the means to do it at all???

Give the man some credit.

I presume you're referring to the 2008 Chinese Milk Scandal? I'll point out this was something perpetrated by the Chinese industry, not American. It was knowingly covered up with the complicity of the Chinese government to prevent it from embarrassing the ongoing Olympics. Only when the scandal became impossible to cover up did the CCP take any action.

As of December 2025, San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie and former Mayor London Breed have both expressed praise for China and the relationship between San Francisco and Chinese cities.

Hamming distance is the term you're looking for.

I was going to post a very similar comment: these people are not coders but they are project managers, and they are "employing" AI as their coding employees.

The thing is - there's "nobody" to take credit for the work, so the manager gets credit for something they didn't do. So it's definitely a skill and is work, but it isn't "coding" at all.

It's an interesting world - the AI is an extremely inexpensive employee and has enough skill to displace increasingly higher-skill tiers of actual software engineering and programming.

If I was running these hackathons, I would disallow AI or I would allow people to hire "code-as-a-service" people. Those seem functionally equivalent activities, just with AI being vastly easier to manage the logistics and you don't have to pay employment taxes or benefits to the AI.

It's no wonder there is so much tension about the many uses of AI - instead of hiring people to do work, it's another instance of paying to use a machine to do work at a price point lower than paying people.

The important distinction though is if this was a "preventable" failure that is due to something the engineering community already knows but was just omitted or done carelessly, or if the failure was indeed due to some new physics or unique application.

But just saying "hey we learned that this didn't work" is only useful if you learned a new thing that didn't work - if instead you had a structural failure because you didn't employ known best practices... that's wasteful.

I don't think we know enough at this point to know which case of learning this is. Hopefully it is truly new learning and not just "oh whoops we forgot to inspect those welds."

The unfortunate aspect of that philosophy is that our society now confuses "don't censor political speech I don't like" with "don't censor falsehoods which are tied to politically-charged topics."

We should absolutely encourage discussions about things we may not agree on - but we should also not give audience to things which are demonstrably incorrect.

How much of this, I wonder, is that Qualcomm has patents on things integral to the physics? So that inherently anyone else trying to make a modem has to use alternate means to make it work, which are basically poisoned by the standard so of course they won't work as well?

It can't really be that hard to make a radio from a physics standpoint, but I bet it can be difficult to work around patents. Especially if it's a "dumb" patent like "put a filter here" which should have invalidated the patent due to "anyone skilled in the art" of radio devices... but because of it competitors can't put a filter in that exact spot, so have to figure out some other place to put it which of course doesn't work as well because it isn't where you'd want it...or "we set this frequency so it can only be done using a component with this material's band gap, and we have the patent on this material" or something like that.

You're not missing something. Much like Disney's "Snow White" was called a "success" despite bombing both at the box office and on streaming, the corporate media stooges will blithely state the complete opposite in an attempt to hide abject failure. Ubisoft is no different.

AC fans waited years to get a game with samurai's based in feudal Japan. What they got is a "samurai" game with no actual Japanese samurai protagonist. Ubisoft's reason for this is painfully obvious to everyone. This is why Japanese consumers have largely rejected it and has a lot to do with why sales have tanked overall.

There's a saying for this that ends with "go broke." It's slipping my mind at the moment, but I'm sure it'll come to me eventually.

If more companies would not only put a monetary bounty on these crooks but also specify "dead or alive," perhaps it would start to put a dent in their activities. They're already operating from countries that either look the other way or actively assist them in their activities. Putting a death mark on them ups the stakes considerably and allows the use of...ahem...alternate actors...ahem...that can operate beyond the law to get actual results.

I always laugh / cry when people say something about "stop indoctrination!" because what they really mean is "we don't want that kind of indoctrination, we want this kind!"

What we really need as a society is critical thinking skills, the ability to draw conclusions from evidence instead of reporting only supporting evidence for a preconceived conclusion and suppressing other evidence. We need to have people that can determine if the evidence is complete and conclusive, not just matching what people want emotionally.