Authoritarianism is available in many flavors throughout the world.

The best flavor is whichever one is most compatible with a nation's culture. And by compatible, I mean keeps them pacified. Here in the good old USA, we tend to go for an approach where the majority of people are certain they live in a free country and that nobody is trying to take everything away from them. (except for those rotten immigrants)

I think we can agree that Anthropic intentionally hides things, even if an LLM may not have been trained to hide things.

I understand the broad strokes even if I couldn't build a car or AI myself.

My understanding of how toilet paper is made is even less clear, so I avoid it entirely.

Yes, a fair voicing of "opinions" on labor conditions between one human and one globe-spanning immortal megacorporation. Very fair.

Only true for goods and services where there is perfectly inelastic demand, which kind of doesn't exist. Even demand for fuel is somewhat elastic. Health care has about the least elastic demand. Junk from Amazon has highly elastic demand.

This would certainly happen to a large degree, otherwise Amazon could price themselves out of competitiveness fairly easily.

If you make your money by owning rather than by working, that's true. Higher wages reduce business owners' income, at least in the short term. So next time someone has that opinion, find out what they do for a living. They'll probably say they "run" something.

The Privacy Act of 1974 technically restricts what personally identifable information (PII) a federal agency can collect and retain. I would be OK extending this to state and local agencies. That would potentially give us a way to go after state laws that require age verfication in devices and operating systems. But it seems that there is no political will to pump the brakes on the surveillance state.

SS Officer #2: Er, Hans?
        SS Officer #1: Have courage, my friend.
        SS Officer #2: Yeah. Er, Hans, I've just noticed something...
        SS Officer #1: [Looking through binoculars] These communists are all cowards.
        SS Officer #2: Have you looked at our caps recently?
        SS Officer #1: Our caps?
        SS Officer #2: The badges on our caps, have you looked at them?
        SS Officer #1: What? No. A bit.
        SS Officer #2: They've got skulls on them. Have you noticed that our caps have actually got little pictures of skulls on them?
        SS Officer #1: Uh, I don't...
        SS Officer #2: Hans... are we the baddies?

Well I only do busy work now, so Outlook Web is good enough for scheduling meetings.

President Jimmy Carter under estimated the support the Ayatollah could muster, burned his own political capital in supporting the Shah, miscalculated the importance of the clerics to Iranian culture (especially in rural and the lower class), and ultimately unprepared for the Iranian Revolution, Absolutely bungled it, and the result was he lost backing of his own party, and haunted the remainder of his presidency.

It's like 2026 is 1978 all over again. And we have people in charge that are incapable of learning from their own mistakes, let alone the mistakes of their predecessors. The end results that I believe are likely is that we're going to botch this one, either through President Trump's direct orders or m ore likely one of the crony appointees is going to make a bad call that is going to cost us dearly. At the extreme end of what is possible is well-funded supporters of Iran could back Yemeni Houthis to carry out attacks on American civilians in order to create discord in the US and weaken political support for Trump and the GOP. And it's not like it would even take much, as support has long been waning Trump and the GOP controlled Congress.

Tariffs, high gas prices, and substantial threat to public safety. This is what voting with a cult costs you. Economic recovery is going to take a decade or more starting in 2029. The 30's are going to be the DIRTY THIRTIES. Zoomers are going to be pissed at all of us when they figured out just how badly we let the Boomers and GenX fuck them over.

Your personal wealth is less than 0.0009% of the entire worlds wealth. Your wealth suddenly skyrockets to 6% of the entire worlds wealth. Oh wait, it didn't skyrocket... it lazily flopped to 6% of the world's wealth?

I am curious how they identify kids that are using VPNs to non-hostile countries to then do what they want on the Internet. Are they blocking all VPNs? Are they decrypting all traffic leaving Australia? I can't imagine that the law is anything other than the most minor annoyance to minors.

Or are you folks keeping your kids uneducated and ignorant over there like they are in the USA?

That would add the requirement for the central repository as infrastructure which is probably not worth it bandwidth/storage-wise when so many gaming PCs are likely to be online at any time, but the possibility of a malware vector (or some kind of sabotage, maybe people would try to DoS a game by sharing corrupted compiled shaders as a form of protest) is worth considering with or without it.

BOINC protects against errors or sabotage in their distributed computing system by having 2 random different users both run the same task and ensuring that the results from both match before accepting the result. This requires centralized infrastructure, but a duplicated work verification system like this could work. Imagine the centralized system acts as a trusted private torrent tracker, only verifying a shader and making it publicly accessible once multiple uploads match. That would make uploading invalid shaders almost impossible since a group would need to conspire to do it with exclusive earliest-possible access to the game/driver/hardware combo.

Those aren't reasons for everyone to be compiling on their own. In a BitTorrent-like system nobody would be "keeping" shaders they aren't using, just sharing shaders they've compiled because they're using them. If nobody's ever done it before for the hardware/driver combination then you fall back to compilation and then share your results so others can benefit and the same work doesn't have to be done again.

Plus most users are probably on one of the latest driver versions so there would be far more hardware than driver variation.

Just like how WaPo eventually went from an assurance that nothing would change to blocking an endorsement of Kamala Harris to no longer publishing any opinions that were insufficiently pro-"free market" for Bezos' taste:

https://www.ms.now/opinion/msn...