... if they hadn't let the environmentalists shut down Indian Point.

I bet the same people objecting to these bogus lawsuits -- which are really an attempt to legislate via the civil court system -- are also crying about how the US isn't opening the Strait of Hormuz.

Thanks for your questions, Freenet caches data but it isn’t meant to be a long-term storage network. It’s better to think of it as a communication system. Data persists as long as at least one node remains subscribed to it. If nobody subscribes (including the author), it will eventually disappear from the network. So yes, if only your node subscribes then the data will only exist there and won’t be available when your machine is offline. But if other nodes subscribe it will be replicated automatically and remain available even if your node goes offline.

Not from 2023, the linked video is from last month. https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

In 1790, the US population was 94.9% rural. There is no country. in the world today that rural -- Burundi, which looks like blanks spot in the world at night satellite picturs, is 88% rural.

The largest city at the time was New York, with a population of 33,000. Northern Manhattan was near-wilderness, mid-town was farms and country houses.

In 1790 the US was. country you could "police" with sheriffs and volunteer posses, largely to keep the peace. If you got robbed, you hired a private thief catcher. This works in a 95% rural country with just 3.4 million inhabitants. It would be chaos in a country 87x larger.

8GB is plenty of RAM for what most users use their laptops for, if the OS doesn't gobble it up with background tasks. Probably be a good idea to steer clear of Chrome as a browser on these things.

It's actually more like an iPhone 16 Pro runing MacOS in a laptop form factor. Apple basically rummaged through their parts box and pulled out a mobile CPU that'll deliver 50% more single core performance than what's in a high-end Chromebook with only 80% of the power draw. And Apple's got *massive* economies of scale on those parts, so they can afford to deliver a lot of bang for the buck.

The only place the Neo appears to falls short is in RAM, but this is *not* a power user machine, it's for basic office tasks and multimedia consumption. Realistically 8GB is plenty for many users.

In any case, the desktop isn't the center of most users's universe anymore; the switchboard of their life is their smartphone. This is a gateway drug to MacOS IOS integration, and eventually onto the upgrade treadmill. Users will switch seamlewssly between their iPhones and Neos all day long, with data on iCloud and iMusic etc., and when it comes time to upgrade their phone or their laptop, they won't be *stuck* exactly, but if they leave the reservation they lose a lot. But they certainly could upgrade to a *much nicer* Macbook....

It's no wonder the other laptop makers are sitting up and taking notice. Apple has set up a one way conversion ratchet for people tempted by a really nice and perfectly adequate entry level machine at an entry level price.Nobody else has the vertical integration -- chip foundries to device manufacturing, to software platform -- spanning desktop and phones that's needed to do this.

Anyone who's watched a house go up has marveled at how quickly the framing goes up, then how long it takes everything else to get done.

Framing is about 1/l4 of the build time for a house. The *labor* for framing is less than 10% of the build cost. If the machine cost *nothing*, and framed the building *instantaneously*, those are hard limits on how much faster and cheaper the house building robot could make the process: about 25% faster with about a 10% cost reduction. But the machine wouldn't work instantaneously, nor would it be free.

There already is a better way of doing this. You prefabricate the house in units, ship them to the site, then bolt the units together. The modules could be completely finished at the factory. Savings over traditional construction would be substantial -- 40%. The problem is, can you build houses people want to buy and which local building codes will allow you to live in. If you throw out expectations that a house looks like a house a child would draw with crayons, you can build a really nice. So with prefab houses you either have things that look like mobile homes; or things that look like they were designed by a scandanavian architect. Houses that *look* like mid-range, hand-built homes are a tough nut to crack.

There was a movement among architects to use pre-fabricated construction to solve the problem of housing returning GIs after WW2. It didn't catch on as the kind of democratizing mass produced housing the movement envisioned because people wanted a house that looked hand-built. But if you can get over that, it produced some really great houses. One of the more famous examples (although not completely pre-fabricated) is the Eames House. There's a company from that period that's still in business, but they pre-fabricate million dollar luxury homes, not mass produced housing.

The obstacles to prefabricated houses are regulatory, which is why it can't reach the middle of the market. Anti-mobile home rule discourage really cheap pre-fabricated houses, but high end producers can afford to jump through the regulatory hoops. For mid-range houses, the regulatory burden outweighs the economic advantage of prefabrication. This could allow a framing robot to have a niche, although as I pointed out it won't save much money on the build cost.

Back to the Future IV and Family Ties reboot when?

Your links are to Iranians in the US and Canada. Supporters of the Shah, other people who don't like the Islamic Republic, and their descendants, most likely. Not really a good sample. What about the people OF Iran, you know, the ones who voted 98% "Yes" for the Islamic Republic in 1979, and THEIR descendants? The ones who like to chant "Death to America"? Sure, a few were having second thoughts earlier in the year, but the leaders of that bunch all got killed; there's almost no one left in country to oppose the Ayatollahs.

THis is true. You also get a better understanding for AI's limitations, familiarity of where to be skeptical, and a feel for when a context is losing its mind. I like to put it this way: nobody who can't outthink an AI should be using an AI for anything important.

It wouldn't be news if you looked at their terms of service -- which you should. The ToS explicitly say they use a combination of automated systems, human review, and reports to identify and investigate violations of their usage terms, including violence, abuse, fraud, impersonation, disinformation, foreign influence campaigns , abusive sexual content, and academic dishonesty. This includes "anonymous" sessions that are saved for a minimum of 30 days. You have no expectation of privacy from the provider's compliance teams.

This is *absolutely* standard among the major online players. So why not use a local AI workstation with a couple of big-ass GPU cards in it to run the campaign? That's what they *should* have done. But the major online players like ChatGPT and Claude are much better at realistic content generation than the widely available local models you can run.

What they should have done is design and run the compaign on a local AI workstation, and used the local workstation to generate prompts they could feed into burner accounts on public services like ChatGPT and Claude. But they got lazy and ran the *whole* operation in ChatGPT, right in plain fiew of the OpenAI compliance teams the ToS they evidently didn't read would have told them were there. They even did *performance reviews* in the same account.

Remember folks, these "spooks" are just mid-level paper-pushers in an opaque communist bureacuracy. You can never discount inertia in such an environment. Because this was something new, they might even have had trouble getting the purchase of some high end GPUs approved.

I don't hate Trump. I pity him. No matter how much shit he slaps his name on, it won't fill the hole is daddy left in him. But people that damaged shouldn't be let anywhere near power.