Oh wait, they said genocide-*supporting*. So the stances they claimed it's a hotbed of are "right, right, middle, hard right", and then they said it's far left. Baffling.

(As a side note, far-left supporters of Russia, aka internet commies who still think of Russia as the USSR, are some of the dumbest people on Earth)

Racism is a classic right wing associated political position (far right: immigrants, minorities, deviants, and the far left cause all our problems; far left: rich people and the far right cause all our problems). Anti-muslim racism in particular is associated strongly with the right (including, one can mention, there are 4 US representatives who are Muslims - all Democrats). On China the divide isn't as stark but is still pretty strong, with the right usually more hawkish and the left more dovish. On Russia, it used to be strongly hawkish on the right, dovish on the left, but these days you have both the far left and far right liking Russia and the centre hating it.

Genocide, I can only assume they're talking about Israel. Parties used to both be pretty pro-Israel, but these days Republicans are nearly evenly split, while Democrats are increasingly strongly against Israel (but there's still a very large minority of Israel-supporting Democrats). While opposition to Israel is now majority in the US, on the specific question of "Has Israel committed genocide", it's still a minority view, but growing, with about 3 in 10 Americans (and 5 in 10 Democrats) saying yes (interesting to note, 3 in 10 Jewish Americans also said "yes"). It's a policy viewpoint that's in the process of segregating in the US by party but which didn't use to be that way, and still has a long way to go to reach a fully partisan split.

In short, their statement describing Fark as left-wing but then saying it's a hotbed of "left, right, middle, hard right" made no sense.

My ISP offers failover wireless Internet service for my cable internet at a reasonable cost. I haven't adopted this yet, but I think it's pretty admirable that they do it, and it solves more than just the power loss problem.

There is a future where essentially everyone has large battery capacity at their residences and commercial facilities, and it will probably become mandatory. Sodium Ion battery tech is coming online in a big way, and it directly addresses the numerous issues that hinder endemic battery deployment today, including safety, reliability and (ultimately) cost. At that point, the obvious thing is: everyone gets batteries and the power system relies on their existence throughout the grid to solve its storage and reliability problems in a mundane and low cost manner.

Just the opposite. The court ruled that Claude had the rights to train using books that they bought. The standard now is buying used/surplus books and mass scanning them.

From a nominal flat-panel perspective, yes (gets as high as 6,5x in some parts of the desert southwest). But this isn't a flat panel, it's curved, so your 0-degree-angle values get depressed and your tangential-light numbers get boosted. 5 mi/h and 40mi/day are quite reasonable for the desert southwest.

Obviously you won't get that in, say, Reykjavík ;)

I am all for "open source models", as you call them, but would like to point out, that posting the weights is very much comparable to posting a binary, and it's definitely not comparable to posting sources. These "open weights" tell you nothing about how the model will respond to "certain questions" until you ask them. Such a model can still do useful work, if you can run it for yourself in private, but I personally would not offer it as a service to anyone else. YMMV, especially with models created out of reach for your jurisdiction.

I do agree that for whatever use a simple left-right axis is (obviously politics is vastly multidimensional) "left vs. right" is a circle, not a horseshoe. You look at people like Greenwald, Assange, etc and it's easy to see how people loop around the back end.

Basically toward the centre you tend to have the attitude of "the fundamental system is not wrong, but we need to fix X and Y" (just with disagreements over what is right, what is wrong, and what the fixes are). Whereas the more polarized you get to the left and right, the more convinced you are that everything is wrong and it doesn't just need fixes, it needs to be torn down and rebuilt in some new glorious utopian form. So as you approach the backside, you have some unifying attitudes of hating the country and global systems, more prone to supporting demagogues, anti-democratic tendencies, militarism, demonization of the centre (usually under the mistaken belief that the centre actually supports them, whereas actual centrist views are represented only by oppressive minority), etc. The enemies of your country get treated as heroes (for example, the like of both the far-left and far-right of Russia), even when they not only want to see your country destroyed, but are actually ideologically quite different from you. Also, misogyny often starts to creep in through the backdoor of militarism and demogoguery.

Certain sides may be more prone to certain aspects - for example, the right, with its love of guns, is usually an easier slide into militancy, whereas the left, coming from having been in the opposition during the Cold War, usually has an easier route into hating the country, for example. But there gets to be enough unifying aspects on the backend between the far-left and the far-right that some people can swing all the way around.

It sounds like you said it is simultaneously far left and far right?

This is so weird. I haven't visited the site the early Afghan War, maybe early Iraq War era, but I remember it being rather US-jingoistic, pretty right wing? And the site tilt was pretty heavily "white American male" not a famously left-wing demographic.

Meh, I knew of Fark back when all that was at the site was a single photo of a squirrel with large genitals.

I used to play on the mud Three Kingdoms in the mid '90s, and Drew was a Wizard (admin) there (named "Cletus"). When Fark became a link aggregator, I used to visit for the Photoshop contests (then ended up drifting off to Worth1000 when that became a thing). I'm not surprised that he ended up launching a porn site, because, well, Drew, but they launched a TV service that ended up getting gobbled up by Adult Swim? Weird.

Crazy to see all of the stuff that's happened with the site since I left; it entirely dropped off my radar.

Because China's business model is "do what the westerners do at half price". If they have to raise their prices to Anthropic/ChatAI levels, their whole unique selling point goes up in dust, and people suddenly start asking questions about the political posture of China.

Their low price may also be viable only due to Chinese subsidies, and they may be unwilling to spend infinite amounts of money on subsidies.

They did not hack Anthropic's secret software for training their models. Their model weights didn't leak either, but their Claude Code CLI thing did leak.

Free speech includes lying.

What, exactly, is unpredictable about a sedentary human falling asleep? People do that while driving.

These robo-car companies imagine attentive humans, amazed and alert at all times, enjoying the thrill of this wonderful service, eager to swipe away with their payment devices.