Make piracy the better alternative in every way and people will pirate.

Make a legal transaction the better alternative in every way (ok, except money) and people will use that.

It really is so simple, even an executive should be able to understand it.

While that might be an interesting technical challenge, one has to wonder why. Just because something is "culture" doesn't mean it should be copied. Slavery was part of human culture for countless millenia. To the point where we haven't even gotten around to updating our "holy books" that all treat it as something perfectly normal. That's how normal slavery used to be.

(for the braindead: No, I'm not comparing Taarof to slavery. I'm just making a point with an extreme example.)

The thing is something called unintended consequences. So in order to teach an LLM Taarof you have to teach it to lie, to say things that don't mean what the words mean. And to hear something different from what the user says. Our current level of AI already has enough problems as it is. Do we really want to teach it to lie and to misread? Just because some people made that part of their culture?

Instead of treating LLMs like humans, how about just treating them as the machines they are? I'm pretty sure the Persians don't expect their light switches to haggle over whether to turn on the light or not, right? I stand corrected if light switches in Iran only turn on after toggling them at least three times, but I don't think so. In other words: This cultural expectation only extends to humans. Maybe just let the people complaining know that AIs are not actually human?

If you read the article carefully, they are talking about lenses THINNER than a hair. I see several of the posts here thinking the width/radius of the lenses is this small, a reasonable mistake given the way this was written. Having a radius that small would severely reduce their light gathering ability, requiring very bright light or very dim images or very long exposure times.

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Abandoned hotel rooms? How is anything abandoned in NYC in 2025?

Just bc rent is high in NYC does not mean they have no buildings being kept empty.
There must be, since the news indicates the seized network was scattered across 5 sites. In short; they were hidden within rooms in 5 different abandoned buildings - not just one.

If not, why and under what authority was it dismantled?

Police can seize equipment in order to investigate possible crime, so long as they have probable cause to suspect the gear might be evidence, then they can take it in.

Also, the location being Abandoned hotel rooms, and the unauthorized nature of the presence of many racks' worth of gear being installed there by the owners of the property is probably plenty probable cause.

Was the installation used to commit a crime?
It sounds like they are still investigating. The article does not mention any crime as being alleged, Only that the network they seized in theory would be capable of causing disruption if the operators had wanted it too.

Nazism isn't an internet insult. It was an actual, real thing that happened in this world, with an actual, real ideology, and the core of this ideology was racial-based social Darwinism.

That TLAs cannot actually break the TOR system itself?

Probably not true. Presumably the third-letter-agencies can break TOR, but I would guess the criminal spies they're trying to recruit from the Russian government or whatever to betray and sell their own countries' secrets aren't just hopping on Tor from a device identifiable to them without additional safeguards.

It's likely for example that possibly the US or UK can track down Tor users much more quickly, and the Russians can't get physical access to the nodes to subvert the crypto as easily.

BTW, re: the Congo in particular: the most common traditional type of fishing is basket fishing with woven funnels suspended in the rapids. You sure as hell better know how to swim if you want to do that.

Famous angler Jeremy Wade referred to the local Congo fishermen as nearly suicidal, just diving into the rapids to get nets unstuck and the like.

SIGH.

There were 10 people chosen and people with dark skin in the USA make up about 1 out of 8 Americans.

1 in 8 is 12,5%.

African-American without mixed race in 2024 is estimated at 46,3M, or 14,2%
With mixed race, that rises to 51,6M, or 15,8% of the population.
Some hispanics have dark skin, some light. In 2023 there were 62,5%, representing 19% of the population (though there's a small overlap with black - doesn't affect the numbers much).
In 2023, Asians were 25,8M people, or 7,7% of the population. This is again a diverse group with mixed skin tones (for example, the Indian subcontinent)
In 2023, there were 1,6M people (0,49%) of pacific island ancestry and 3,3M native Americans - again, mixed skin tones.
People of Mediterranean European ancestry often have so-called "olive" complexions.

With a strict definition of dark skin, you're probably talking like 1 in 6 or so (~16,7%). With a looser definition, you could be talking upwards of 40% or more of the population.

The chances of the 10 people to be a perfect representation of the racial demographics of the USA is quite small.

Here are the actual odds of selecting no dark-skinned people at different population percentages being "dark skinned", by one's definition of "dark":

15%: 1 in 4
20%: 1 in 8
25%: 1 in 17
30%: 1 in 34
35%: 1 in 73
40%: 1 in 165

Then consider that NASA astronauts are required to pass a swimming test

It is not a test of swimming prowess, just of an ability to not drown. You have to be able to do three lengths of a 25-meter pool without stopping, three lengths of the pool in a flight suit and tennis shoes, and tread water for 10 minutes while wearing a flight suit. This is not some massively imposing task. You don't have to be Michael Phelps to become an astronaut.

and as a general rule those with African ancestry tend to have less stamina in swimming than those with lighter skin

Yes, white athletes tend to have an advantage in swimming. A 1,5% advantage. While a 1,5% advantage may be of good relevance at the highest level of a sport, it's hardly meaningful in a "can you tread water with a flight suit on" test.

Think of the different races as just really big families

That is not how genetics work, and is instead the pseudoscience that drove fascist movements, and in particular, Nazism.

There is far more genetic diversity within a given "race" than between them. Certain genetic traits tend to have strong correlates - for example dark skin and sickle cell anemia - but that's not because races are some sort of genetic isolates, but rather for very practical reasons (dark skin is an adaptation to not die of skin cancer in the tropics, and sickle cell disease is a consequence of a genetic adaptation to not die of malaria which also happens to be found in such climates). But the vast majority of genes don't have such strong correlates.

The concept of "race" as a distinct biological category is not supported by modern genetics.

If we are to ignore skin color and just put one big family up against another big family on swimming ability then just due to random mutations, perhaps some Darwinian selection way back in the family tree, one family will swim better than the other

The main "racial difference" in swimming ability in the US is "inherited", that is, parents who don't know how to swim tend to not teach their kids how to swim. As a result, white children are 56% more likely to receive swimming lessons than black children. One can expect that to directly correspond to an advantage in adulthood. But again, the ability to tread water is not out there knocking 90% of astronaut candidates out of the race - especially given that astronaut candidates tend to be athletic and motivated to learn new skills.

People with light skin tend to have ancestors that had to go fishing for their protein

Utter tripe. Fish consumption has no correlation with skin colour. How much fish do you think your average herder or plains horseman ate? And fish is massively important in much of Africa - in coastal areas (Gabon, Ghana, Sierra Leone in particular note), along the Congo (it's literally the world's largest river, people have been fishing it since time immemorial), Lake Victoria, Lake Chad, the Niger Delta, etc etc. What sort of racist stereotype world are you living in where black people don't fish?

Having a large candidate pool relative to the number chosen makes it easier to show bias and still get high-quality candidaes, not harder.

I dont know, I would like to have a an HTML page back as an option

Microsoft just needs to add option of "pinning a Window to the background". To make the Window become fullscreen with no title bar, and prevent focus or interaction with the Window while it is pinned -- with your Desktop Icons and UI simply stacked on top of the Window, so your background could be any Window.

if you want HTML, then you could pin a shortcut to open a dedicated chromeless full-screen browser app.

This would be better than having a Video file or a HTML file as background - the background can be any application.

there are lots of those, often with their own "store." I find batteries like that a lot.

But this was explicitly a Walmart listing, by Walmart, rather than a 3d party listing.

That's what you think.. but AI makes coding so easy in management's eye that they can create temporary seasonal coding positions for the winter each year - bring on a bunch of Desk Clerks. Add AI usage and basic coding to the job skills equirements, and stick them in the coding positions.

H1-B, you're only going to need a reasonably low number of people in the team to setup a remote office for the entire team

This is why we should make sure Offshore work performed for a US company by contract employees has to be legally classed as US source income - offshored services, and establish a tariff rate per hour on that higher than the H1B visa costs.

Import Duty on transferring the work performed in a foreign office into a US company.

The more they modernize in China, the more expensive their labor will get

The country China is the global leader in industrial automation worldwide; Robotics and AI are among those areas they have an advantage. The cost of human labor may be getting more and more expensive, but they need less and less of it.

Furthermore in all likelihood the price of labor in the US HAS to decrease in order to compete. Therefore the rate of wages in the US may decrease due to them.