I was riding as a passenger in my friend's Tesla (forget which model). And it apparently had a feature where it ran the high beams all the time unless the car detected a vehicle a certain distance in front of it. However, whatever that distance is/was is wayyyyyy too short. Because I kept saying: "dude, that guy on the highway a quarter mile away is totally getting blinded by you right now". And he was all "nah, the car knows best". To say nothing of opposing traffic in other lanes the car likely can't even see.

Why not though? Moderating as part of a discussion should be perfectly normal. If I think you're an idiot I should be able to mark you as one while also explaining to the world (and you) why that is the case.

Because many (most?) people use moderating just to bury posts they disagree with. Even if they're factually relevant. Which is generally what creates silos. That' encourages an environment that is the exact opposite of "discussion". More "soapboxing", less critical thought.

the real story is way more complex than that, because the legality of the permit was in question and had been under scrutiny by the courts for the entire period in question

It's really not. The vast majority of lawsuit were bourne by environmentalists challenging with laws that were effectively EPA fiat (which change with a favorable administration, or by spending additional time addressing deficiencies). None of them were insurmountable (which is why the project continued on, even in light of the lawsuits). The permit rescinding by a hostile administration, however, was insurmountable.

There's a reason that the oil companies did not bother to fight the Biden administration's decision to rescind the permit, and simply shut down the project.

The project was never shut down; it was suspended: https://www.theguardian.com/en...

And I don't understand why you think they would fight it. The President clearly wasn't going to let the permit through. His words had nothing to do with legality and everything to do with ideology ("Obama said his decision was in agreement with the State Departmentâ(TM)s assessment that the pipeline âoewould not serve the national interests of the United Statesâ): https://www.theguardian.com/en...

The construction companies correctly surmised this project was going to be shelved until they got a more favorable administration.

So it's not really the same thing. It's not even close.

I mean, it's not far off

Also, fuck off with the open borders bullshit. No one wants completely unregulated immigration. The far left in the USA and presumably everywhere else just wants lots of opportunities to move here...not let ANYONE without any sort of security checks whatsoever.

This is only recently true, after substantial political losses. There were next to no checks during the Biden period...you'd just say "asylum" and you'd get in. Then you'd live in the US for years waiting for a court case. Then if you got booted out, you'd just do it again. Wash, rinse, repeat. Dems did not care. One iota. Now that they've lost pretty brutally in the recent election on the topic, they suddenly changed their tune. Funny that.

For Aldi, which uses Instacart, I assumed it was because there is no 'fee' for pickup, but they have to pay someone to shop for you. I consider the difference a convenience fee.

That said, by not shopping in store, I end up getting only what is on my list and end up paying FAR LESS than I would if I was wandering around.

really need to have the banks and schools take loan risk then you will costs come down.

That's not the only thing that would occur. Risk assessments would then necessarily come into play and way less student loans would be offered. So average cost would decline, but less kids would be able go to college. This is the extra same mantra that gave us the shit home loans of the housing bubble, where risk was a secondary factor to making sure everyone got to live the american dream of home ownership

Nah...it got stuck in Lisp Limbo and Microsoft cut it out...

IBM stays IBM, I feared that in the long run the aquision will be the end of Redhat, it is happenning now as it seems.
IBM is a shithole employer and has been for decades!

I found GP2.5 to be great at academic-style research and writing; it was absolutely awful at writing code. So; I would tell it to plan some thing for me and write it in a way that could be used by another agent (Claude Code) to build the code to do the thing. In this way, it has been great! I haven't yet attempted it with 3.

That said, I found GP3.0's page to be hilarious:

It demonstrates PhD-level reasoning with top scores on Humanityâ(TM)s Last Exam (37.5% without the usage of any tools) and GPQA Diamond (91.9%). It also sets a new standard for frontier models in mathematics, achieving a new state-of-the-art of 23.4% on MathArena Apex.

It then proceeds to show, lower down on the page, an example of what it can do, by showing off 'Our Family Recipes". If there's anything that touts PhD-level reasoning and writing, it's a recipe book.

No; it's absolutely a terrible idea. It may be great for the businesses; but, it's absolutely fucking terrible for the consumer.

This is absolutely fucking insanity. Imagine having to carry 6 different cards and wondering which one a particular store is going to take.

imagine how many more thousands they could save by replacing 200k in toy computers with a real datacenter platform.

Eh, Republicans choose not to vote for Nikkey Haley

Yes, Republicans did. Not independents, which is the comment I was replying to. Because of the way our shitty party system works, both Republicans and Democrats effectively vote in their extreme candidates during the primaries, and the moderates and independents in the middle are forced to choose between two shitty options every year. So it oscillates back and forth. Just because "your guy" gets picked in the general election doesn't mean we like his ideas. It just means the last guy was shitty and we're hoping your guy wises up and returns to a sensible middle (or at least a more sensible spending pattern). Though that hasn't happened in several decades.

what bothers me is the vast swath of independent voters who for some inexplicable reason believe the Republican party is better for the economy even though every time they get in charge they immediately crash it and the Democrats have to try to clean up the mess.

You act as if they're choosing the Republican candidate. For the last several decades, the winners have come from protest voting (ala hating the other guy/girl). Though that doesn't stop people from assuming they have some kind of mandate and overreaching like crazy. Which then leads to the pendulum swinging in the other direction when the next party overreaches.

In the old days, we had long runs of same party control...MckKinley/Roosevelt/Taft. Harding/Coolidge/Hoover. FDR/Truman. Reagan/Bush. You'll note that pattern stopped in the early 2000s when the presidency started seesawing back and forth. People don't want any individual anymore. They don't want the other guy. And you're gonna see this again in 2028 when the Dems landslide a win. And of course the message they take away again, like fucking fools, is that the public somehow is in love with all their policies and wants them to ignore half the country and go as extreme as possible with their agenda. And then we're going to get a Republican again in 2032.

SAS has been dead for 15y; it started with R and then Python absolutely destroyed it. No one teaches SAS in universities any longer, why would they? It's terribly expensive and absolutely fucking dead.

We migrated away from SAS back in 2017 and never looked back. The only verticals still using it are heavily regulated and running long-standing legacy code that they're slowly migrating to Python.

I remember absolutely dying when they tried to renegotiate our contract UP back in 2015. I flat out told them they were dead and we were moving away from them and they told me, "good luck managing your data without us!"

Two companies and 10 years later, we're doing just fine and they are not.

You're technically both correct. They are a monopoly, as Webster's defines the word. They aren't yet a monopoly under US law.