The thing is , Switzerland was always stuffed to the gills with germans, french and italians. I've never met a more multilingual people than the swiss.

Its always the same kicking post too, "It must be the immigrants". I had someone ranting to me the other day about how she didnt feel safe anymore and crime was thru the roof blah blah no go zones, No matter what statistics I showed her that in fact crime had consistently been dropping over 20 years and the days while certain parts of town in the 1970s and 1980s you where taking your life into your own hands entering, in 2026 those areas are mostly gentrified luxury appartments, and so on, she just wouldnt believe any of it, and its all "The immigrants are making crime!" (despite the fact that consistently immigrants are significantly lower in representation in crime stats than locally born folks).

Some people just refuse to think it over. In the end I really had to just disengage from the conversation because any data that disproves her paranoia she just takes it as evidence that people are lying using maths or something. I honestly don't how do you get someones brain unstuck from a rut like that? At a certain point, its just exasperating their crazy to even try.

Yes, I'm sure humanity's 21st century understanding of physics, despite things like the crisis in cosmology, dark matter, US military footage, etc, is fully accurate and is the absolute limit of reality's capabilities.

Its not a matter of thechnology, its a matter of physics. Assuming that humanity survive its currently self destructive trajectory and we are still around in a million years, the laws of physics will not magically change. The speed of light will still be a hard limit, both for us, and for anybody else in the universe.

The crisis in cosmology and dark matter have no bearing on this. Both the actual composition of dark matter , nor the correct value for the cosmological constant are completely independent variables to the speed of light. The resolution of these issues will not change the fact that the speed of light places hard limitations on the impossibility of casual visitation from distant stars.

Eh. Despite initial fears in 1990s about reproduction on the internet devaluing originals, copyright law and enforcement largely settled on the idea that that people posting images etc on forums and social media was largely harmless particularly if credit was given, but people using them commercially required payment. and that was an arangement that largely suited artists fine and largely ran as much on principle as legality until the AI bro's turned up and started just stealing art to transform into slop undercutting that whole agreement.

If it was a real currency, it losing value would generally be considered a positive. It means the sale of a good would earn more of the stuff. But this is where the bullshit hits the road. Its not a currency, nobody is using it to facilitate economic trade. Its just a shitty ponzi token. And the favor of the market has moved on from Dunning Krugerands to AI slop.

I wouldnt underestimate the complexity of an MMO. They are genuinely some of the most complicated software assemblages ever created, and usually involve teams of hundreds of people working for upwards of a decade just to get a beta out the door.

Creating a cloned server is a hell of an achievement.

Eh. I think he's a miserable c*** but oh well.

It'd be fun to be that rich, but it seems to do a number on peoples head to be that divorced from the grinding reality of regular folks.

If an invading army has been running genocidal ethnic cleansing on your own soil, then I'd argue that the gloves are off.

Imagine if , say, mexico invaded the united states (Hear me out, its a hypothetical). Would you be offended if the US responded with strikes on mexico? No you would not.

How is this different? Evil can not be tolerated. Ukraine has every right in the world to do whatever it takes, to defend her citizens, including retaliatory strikes.

Maybe? But it seems like its just more in line with the "californian landmarks" naming scheme , which they adopted after running out of big cats to name OSX releases after.

Am I a bad person for somewhat enjoying the way crypto bros and AI bros seem to prey on each other. A fool and their money, and all of that.

It just seems like the worst people are all out to steal from each other. Fine, just leave my boomer parents out of it.

The chinese have picked up on something that Tesla missed: That consumers dont want to be standing out in a weird spaceship, but do want the cool shit. The other day I saw one of those BYD pick up trucks. It looks like something one of the farmers we have as clients would drive. Its basically a hybrid F150. If the cybertruck was THAT, Tesla would have had a winner. Instead they tried to build an ugly moon rover that nobody wanted and slapped the word "Cyber" on it. I'm sure it impressed the wall street wonks, but it alienated the people who want electric AND want a big honking pickup truck, AND can flip back to gas if the power runs low.

The template to succeeding with EVs is there. We just need to get over our cultural cringe about buying from asia. And if we cant do that, maybe at least figure out why the chinese are succeeding where western EV brands fail.

Let's not forget ObjC and the sheer amount of stress and madness it caused.

Objective C was what C++ would have looked like if it had a sane design instead of being 10 incompatible languages stapled together. The syntax was wonky, but it was an absolute delight of a language.

Hold on, I might be wrong about that. I remember hearing a news story about that several decades ago, but can't confirm it now.

Good stuff with the self correction. I wish people did this more often when they catch themselves out with a confabulation (which everyone does from time to time. Memory is an imperfect mechanism).

You can actually plot improvement as measured by benchmark vs power consumption to train, and you see the power consumption curve upwards while the benchmarks seem to be asympote trending towards a specific limit. I've got a theory on it too. An LLMs basic fitness criteria is "Output text as close as possible to the training data". Well one thing that is NOT in the training data is text generated by anything smarter than a human. Because we've never seen an entity thats smarter than us. So the whole thing seems to be converging on a limit thats essentially 'one extremely well read human", and it has no data to tell it what something smarter than a human would look like.

All training further does is push that curve closer to the limit line, but it can never go above it. Theres a reason a lot of AI researchers are pretty adamant that the transformer LLM is probably not the final form of AI that can do the whole AGI superintelligence thing.

Some of these things I suspect are old Steve Jobs dogmas. Jobs also hated two button mice. Thankfully you could always turn on the context right click, but even to this day the right-click seems to be something you have to turn on in settings (Not that I've set up a fresh mac in aeons. Jobs hated the ergonomics of touchscreens on laptops.

While I get the reverence for Jobs inside apple. Maybe its time they moved on from him. Well except for the customer service thing. Customer service from apple was *excellent* under Jobs. When the iphone sdk first came out, I wrote an angry email to sjobs @ apple dot com about the waiting time for approvals and how a client was threatening to sue me for delaying the project launch. That night at like 2am I got a phone call from his personal assistant telling me that jobs had flipped his lid and was on a rampage wanting to know why my app had been sitting in a queue for 2 months. Gotta respect that commitment to customer service. Crazy bastard actually read his emails. Even I dont do that lol