Interesting site, thank you! I personally fell on the lower left in my personal score (ec=-2.88&soc=-3.49).

I agree with you, I think there is a strong migration to the upper right. Its not just the US, either. I don't know that a single factor accounts for it, but I do feel that the migration to that quadrant (and extremes in general, along various axes, that I have seen in my life time) is a worrying trend. Of course, societies have all been through cycles of this before, but it is usually painful. I appreciated Jon Grinspan's "Age of actinomy..." in this regard. The US has certainly been here before. And found its way out (at least that time). I recommend it if you are interested in the topic of political tribalism and extremes.

I was also surprised by this. You can read up about the method they use here. See also my reply upthread.

You can read about the methodology they used in detail. While I agree that "media bias ratings are not simple to do, I don;t believe they are impossible or that they need to be subjective. I am not affiliated with AllSides in any way, but I think they have a rigorous methodology.

Yup. And if you are a visual person, here is a chart showing changes in quantified media outlet bias over some years, It's a shame I was not able to find an updated one, but the picture is pretty clear.

Yes, indeed. I add another important one folks often forget: "Do you like to eat?". Agriculture runs on fertilizer and diesel fuel for the machines. Fully agree with your hope for the future, but it is a long road.

Relevant, I think: A recent blog post positing that AI worms might come soon. I suspect this could be the other side of the coin from using AI agents to find vulnerabilities.

... Godzilla!

Recent news indicates that Porsche, at least, should be worried. There seem to be multiple factors at work here, but value and drop in sales to China are among them. Status symbols change over time.

There might be hope for a future release of MacOS.

Great analysis at the highest geopolitical level. My mind also jumped to what events in Venezuela might mean for Taiwan, as I am sure China is watching carefully. One difference is that China had not extended even ambiguous security guarantees to Venezuela, while the US has a record of these for Taiwan. You might certainly be right that the US will choose not to defend Taiwan directly if China moves to invade because the risks are sky-high, but if PLA forces attack US positions pre-emptively. perhaps to try to secure a quick victory.. well, things could get very ugly quickly. Recent experience in Ukraine shows how badly things can go "off script" to a larger belligerent. Uncertainty about US actions (a hallmark of the current US president) might well be the only thing holding the PRC back right now.

Still, what you describe so well makes a lot of sense. I was not born when the iron curtain descended across Europe, but I can now better imagine what that felt like.

I think I used to have this off on my Mac, but this was a few years ago.

Beyond me why it would be a great idea to foist this on Linux users. In my experience the juice is not worth the squeeze at all. Maybe it is something that has to be implemented due to the horrible state of many mobile PC firmware (UEFI) these days.

The computers had a lot of RAM, I suspect...

Excellent post. I think it pulls the curtain back further on how these LLMs work, and what they are really doing. With so much hot air around the topic it is pretty hard to get hard info if you are a non-expert, but the hangman example really illustrates that these are modeling language without underlying understanding at all. Makes me concerned for how people are using these LLMs (like the pythia at Delphi or some other oracle). Thanks for your post!

I wonder if HSR could be placed on parts of the existing interstate highway system to save costs and time.

Thank you, these are good points! I will look at Betterbird, I had not heard of that before. Also, the tendency to make things "Microsoft version" is a terrible habit that company has- examples I can think of from the top of my head include their development of ooxml for MS Office, rather than sticking to the existing ODF. Nominally, MS states that they do things like this for added features (for the doc example), but the outcome is reduced interoperability and lock in. I think a similar dynamic exists for Outlook/Exchange. Its really too bad.