The *exact* same idea with the *exact* same complaints from the Left, the UCS, all the progressive crybabies...can reasonably be seen as having ended the Soviet Union by ramming it financially into its own contradictions.
Is that ACTUALLY what you guys at the Paul Robeson bookstore are all still salty about? That the guys you insisted all along were the "good guys" turned out not to be?

Anyway, the idea that defense = escalation hasn't been a thing since MAD was largely abandoned in the 1990s. Welcome to the post cold-war era, comrade.

...and it is genuinely an efficiency gain: now I can completely avoid 2 shit product families from only 1 vendor.

That's great!

it could also be price anchoring. they could know the price is BS but they are anchoring something unrealistic now to help later.

if we spend the next 2 years thinking the next xbox is going to be $1800, when it launches for $999, some people will be overjoyed at the great deal they are getting.

Or else some con man is bilking the gov out of a shitload of your tax dollars by selling a piece of junk to gullible wishful thinkers eager to get their hands on a magic bullet.

They just want visitors to have a fuller experience of local life.

"The US is escalating"?
That's a rather specious viewpoint, isn't it? Or did you intend to lie by omission?

The Soviets/Russians have had space based weapons platforms in orbit since the 1960s
The Chinese have had weapons aloft for at least 10y.
Honestly, if the US *doesn't* have functional, effective orbital weapons already up there, they're fucking incompetent.

And, if investors don't like it, they can walk away, can't they?
Isn't that how the free market works? Convince people to invest in you, great. If you're an asshole or do stupid things, they take their $ away.

Look, I get it, slashdot despises Musk for many, many things (some even have to do with actual business or technology). But this is up to investors and their choices.

SpaceX IPO $160 today $162. Not really compelling unless one believes in their mission.
Tesla 1y was $442, now is $385. Not very compelling.
 

but their concerns were ultimately proven correct, over and over.

there were significant LPEs in other OSes that were exploitable because of kernel lock bugs and race conditions.

and since the smp days, entire new classes of bug (eg info disclosure because of observable side effect bugs in cpus w parallel speculative execution) have also been invented as new processor architecture features have become common.

concurrency is still hard, 30 years later.

Take absolutely any business.

Add "instant, real support by competent Americans"

Loudly proclaim that your customer service is based on this. Make it a credible promise.

Charge x% more than your competitors.

Congratulations: you have a small, lucrative share of the market cornered. You also have a Moat that is AI resistant.

I only ever contact "customer support" when the company has fucked up and I can accurately explain how and I cannot fix their problem my self.

But Increasingly companies have simply removed any mechanism by which you can contact a human with agency. You are subjected to chatbot humiliation loops until you give up. If they give you phone number, you are on hold, or hung up on, or transferred until you give up.

Latest example: For the last 24 hours, an Azure portal blade that my team uses has been completely non-functional, with a knockout-js error in the Azure portal code.

Their own AI-troubleshooting thing says there is no problem with Azure. [they shipped the org chart, again].

Because we don't have a paid support contract to go with our paid cloud shit, there is no way for me to tell Microsoft there is a problem with the service we buy from them. The AI says there's no problem. Without a paid support contract, there's no "plan B".

(Technically, I can also write a forum post, if I agree to getting data mined and spammed forever. During the signup process, I tried changing my country to Germany, and the automatic opt-in changed to manual opt-in, but the continue button was blocked until I "opted in")

The enshittification is preposterous, and there are a class of people out there who will pay more - sometimes MUCH more - to not be humiliated by incompetence.

Those customers are out there, but where are the companies who want them?

The gutter is filled with thousands of crowns.... waiting for the next king to simply pick one up.

It's not like you can't use another model to validate the results you got with one model. That's a step you should be taking anyway. It's actually built into the system for test/dev of the agent and inference model itself. Active supervision, sandboxing and all that.

>hurting brown people

This _probalby_ wont get through your confirmation bias filter, but if you look at who trump is giving _pardons_ to, i think the leading groups are:

> jews
> blacks

I don't think white Boomers (never mind white 2A supporters) even register.... with the possible exception of releasing some J6 prisoners.

A lot of the people you dislike, because of who they dislike, and who supported Trump, are pretty upset about all of the "pandering" Trump does to criminal blacks.

So if he's supposed to be a white supremacist president, the majority of white supremacists don't seem to agree.

Most people cannot actually see things from outside of their bias filters.

(ironically enough, Stephen Miller, the main mouthpeice of Trump's "racist" immigration policies, is Jewish... again, much to the consternation of many pro-white Trump supporters)

Obviously, the majority of ammosexual 2a supporters view what ANTIFA, BLM, and anti-ICE protesters are doing as much worse than what the Trump admin is doing.

It turns out that almost nobody is against authoritarian violence per-se. Everyone just wants it done to their enemies instead of themselves.

The number of people within FedGov who have heard of DeepSeek is small. The number who could tell you why it might be better than some other model at some specific task is much smaller.

The number who could want to use deepseek for a valid reason is vanishingly small.

One thing that should be abundantly clear is that the Trump admin doesn't control everything in the executive branch. There is still significant employee resistance to Trump and anything construed as a trump edict or trump agenda.

There's no evidence the administration is afraid of smart people.

There is substantial evidence that people within the executive branch have attempted to undermine or simply ignore Trump's directives.

Banning use of Chinese AI in fedgov makes sense to me; similar to banning use of certain chinese cellphones for fedgov use. Doesn't matter if they are better. What matters is the high liklihood of foreign systems being used in espionage.

It may be that the "ban" isn't prima-facie about limiting the use of deepseek, but, announcing a policy and then firing-for-cause people who choose to violate it.

They didn't support SMP for a long time either.

OpenBSD tends to lag behind most OSes in "workstation quality of life" features, whereas they tend to be world-leading on unambiguous specs, and code correctness. (And man pages, IMO)

Their excellent security reputation is well deserved, and is downstream of their priorities... which I would describe as "skeptical of shiny new things with ambiguous semantics"

...would somehow also cause Slashdot to seethe in fury.

You guys are hilarious.

It was probably the other O'Neil, with one L. He has no sense of humour at all.

I could understand bots and mailing lists. The thing I never understood with LinkedIn was how many real people (usually recruitment agents) had apparently spent the time to read my profile and send me a personalised message, yet still thought I'd be interested in a job paying half the market rate for someone with my skills and experience.