Nope, conspiracies don't ever happen.

The 9/11 hijackers did not plan their actions in advance. Just by sheer coincidence, 19 people just happened to be taking those four plane flights. And by coincidence (no coordination) they all got the same spontaneous idea at the same time, an idea they had never spoken about before: let's hijack the plane and crash it.

Crazy people babble on about "evidence" like people taking flight lessons, sharing vehicles, etc. but we know those things cannot possibly be true, because conspiracies are not real.

If you have a hypothesis of x and then find lots of supporting evidence for x and it becomes the prevailing explanation, that creates a theory of x, but there's one exception: when x is a conspiracy. Conspiracies are a special case, because they don't really happen.

Regardless of whatever budget Congress sets, the majority party has already been clear that they have no intent to enforce it. If the president uses the NASA money for something else, or even just puts it into his own personal pocket, we can be confident that he won't be impeached, and if impeached, he won't be convicted.

The only thing that matters is the total budget. The president is free to spend that total however he wishes. This isn't the law as written, but it's the law defacto. If voters have a problem with that (do they?) they can choose a different party to be the majority.

So when Lindsey starts reading from her AmEx-approved script, callers are infuriated by what they perceive to be another machine.

If she's accurately executing the programmers' script, I'd say she is a machine. Somebody port Doom to her!

This is a fuckin' awesome idea, but there's an easy improvement over the red rectangle and block symbol. Seriously, dude, you gotta use the sign images from They Live (1988). You know you want to.

If people don't have a government-granted monopoly on their features, they'll have no incentive to have any features at all.

We never needed "AI" or LLMs to think we're nothing more than machines.

You're not using AI or non-technical recruiters to screen the resumes, but many companies are: it is quite hard even for qualified people to get through the filters and get their resume in front of someone qualified to evaluate it. So in the end applicants at every level of skill spam their resume everywhere, while doing whatever they can to get them through the filters (which includes stuffing them with keywords). The only ones who avoid that slog are those with connections to directly get an offer, but not everyone who is a good developer is also good at networking.

That does not tell us that the quality of developers has decreased, just that the bad ones are sending out a higher proportion of applications, which they could be spamming to every job opportunity on the horizon.

Last I heard, Apple sales haven't plummeted and thrown them into bankruptcy, so it sounds like they learned the lesson just fine: it's fine to show people ads. People might complain a little bit, but they won't stop buying. Cost is $0 and ad revenue is presumably more than $0.

If someone is stuck with your proprietary software and you aren't showing them ads, then you're leaving money on the table. What're they gonna do, fork it out?

Yeah, I'm hung up on that too. You can come up with some outrageously huge numbers for mass and angular velocity, but once I multiply them by zero distance... I'm missing something.

the outer edge of the mass exceeding the speed of light

That intuitively makes sense, but I thought part of the black hole cheat is that it doesn't have an edge. I thought they were literally singularities, with a circumference of zero. Apparently not the case?

How a thing with a circumference of zero could meaningfully "rotate" is beyond me, but I thought this (and many other suspected properties of rotating black holes) was supposed to be beyond my ignorant layman understanding!

Asking someone to relocate across the country, and not offering severance if they refuse, is basically firing people without severance.

This may be fine legally as severance is only something that companies offer voluntarily, subject to a severance policy that they write themselves, so I'm sure they have a loophole in it for that. But I've never heard of any other US big tech employer doing that: this just reinforces the impression that Amazon is the worst employer among its big tech peers for tech workers.

An adversary can coerce a proprietary software producer to compromise the code. That's what we're going to see here.

An adversary cannot time-travel to when a protocol was invented, and compromise the protocol. (Though I guess the NSA can come kind of close to that, by "helping" as it's being developed, w/out the time-travel part.) That's what we're not going to see here.

Ergo, proprietary apps will remain unable to provide secure messaging, but secure messaging will remain available to people who want it.

AFAIK Peacemaker S02 comes out in August. Of this year!!

Whatsapp chats are end-to-end encrypted, which your texts are not. Also texts do not work internationally reliably or for free.

The alternative to Whatsapp is Signal (or other end-to-end encrypted, crossplatform chat app), not SMS/RCS.

Outside the US it has also become the standard communication tool. Send a kid to school? there is a whatsapp group for the class parents, and another one for your carpool. In the US enough people use iphones for Apple's messaging app to have critical mass, but that's not the case almost anywhere else in the world.

Einstein's "spooky action at a distance" ("spukhafte Fernwirkung") is *not* entanglement. It is the collapse of the wave function. This is a widely held mis-conception, but Einstein's first use of the term was in a thought experiment that did not involve two entangled particles but only a single particle hitting a detector. He objected to the idea that when the particle hits the detector in a specific spot, the wave function everywhere else instantly collapses to zero, unbounded by the speed of light limit.