i've experienced the same with huge agile team trees to catastrophic results. it's not really inherent to the methodology but to the real goals you mentioned: burn money to increase valuation to eventually sell off. any methodology will succumb to that. if anything agile actually allows for more confusion, discordination, obfuscation and most of all plausible deniability (i can almost hear some true believer shouting "then you're not doing agile right!" which ... just describes the majority of companies doing agile, welcome to reality!).

land of the free!

our apologies, sir. would you prefer a slashvertisement instead?

i can see where he comes from but he's jumping into the tar pit here, flat. i would have appreciated a thoughtful exploration of what "consciousness" really is, how we perceive it and what it means (and that faith-like clinging to magic specialness), but (from what i'm able to read) he's mostly babbling nonsense about how impressed he is with "claudia".

i have little doubt that "artificial" conscience can (and probably will) be generally accepted as a thing eventually, it's a matter of complexity, but this is cringey.

by applying equivocation, category error and/or false equivalence, optionally adding a dash of strawman or whatabout.

making a tpm a requirement to ensure not running malicious code and then completely disregarding elemental security considerations in a component that is designed to run untrusted code ... you might not appreciate the irony or even the comicality, but do you really still don't see the contradiction? then read on ...

the whole point of the tpm in this use case is to securely store and use that key!

you just added another hilariously failed attempt at excusing something for which there is no excuse:
- but, but, ... efficiency! (ms)
- but, but, ... no one should be able to peek at my rams! (ms)
- but, but, ... if i also leave the key around, the passwords being in plaintext doesn't really matter anyway! (you)

i think you don't get the irony. this is the company that campaigned furiously for the necessity of tpm for consumer devices ...

you couldn't make this shit up, brought to you by "closed proprietary sofware".

then again, decrypting an entire password list and leaving it around in memory for no reason is totally unacceptable practice. it's flabbergasting. you access sensible information only when needed and dispose of it after use, and even zeroing the memory should be par for the course. this is basic hygiene in any context.

both the pretext of "efficiency" and completely disregarding "defense in depth" are just laughable, even moreso if the information is as sensible as passwords no less, and agument "incompetency" to "pathetic clown level incompetency".

i would. curious, why wouldn't you?

but, but ... think of the actors!!!
btw i don't think ai is fundamentaly different from any previous disruptive technology in this regard. heavy interest groups fight until they have repositioned, some don't know better and fight to the bitter end. they have money enough to buy politicians or even judges and bombard "public opinion" 24/7 but their expiration is certain nonetheless.

i have to disagree with this too. good and genuine acting and storytelling is still appreciated by some people, and always will. heck, some people still goes to actual "theaters" today! there will be downsizing, but the best and more determined still have a place, and will have going forward (and theater might even thrive). "culture" and "cultural industry" are very different things, and this is all about cold dead money.

besides the own industry's endogamic fixation and fuss with the yearly oscars charade, does anybody here still give a crap about it?

glitter! we need glitter containers!

yes and no. israel's and us' agendas conflict but also overlap. don't buy the whole "the tail wags the dog" and "netanyahu is the root of all evil" narrative, that's just another distraction. both netanyahu and trump are tools in the hands of the western financial cartel and this actually extends to us and israel themselves, and everything inside and inbetween. if they're tools that means that once used they can be expended, rebuilt or repurposed and the loss is already factored in. for the greater good, money has no homeland.

that's a date floated around in speeches and memos. yes, it seems way to soon, and it's probably wishful thinking.

let's connect a few dots:

venezuela / cut cooperation and crude imports from china
gulf/iran / cut china from gulf oil (about 50% of their crude imports)
indonesia / control malacca straight (another vital trade route for china)
azerbaijan/zangezur corridor / deny belt and road

and suddenly the ongoing lng projects in alaska become profitable, who would have thunk.

the whole thing is about isolating china, cutting their oil supply and disrupting their trade routes, and at the same time propping up us power and economy via energy dependency.

cutting germany from russian energy (ukraine, nord-stream) also makes germany dependent on us lng.
the war in ukraine was about crippling russia and then using it in turn to contain china, which has failed
which is why it is necessary now to militarily prop up germany to go to war against russia. projected 2030

it's complicated. in theory us would benefit from huge energy exports (paid in dollars, which offsets trade imbalance, debt servicing) and relative increase in power by creating disruption and dependency abroad in general. this will ofc create huge problems (inflation/depression) domestically too, but ofc elites wouldn't care less, and if need be they got ... well, tools like ice to manage it. this is how capitalism becomes fascism.

plans aren't quite working as expected. the eu is fucked for the foreseeable future, indeed. russia has proven to be way more resilient than expected, iran just threw the whole chessboard around, russia-china-iran has become a quite solid and motivated coalition (out of sheer necessity). china has immense oil reserves (they have been seeing this coming a while ago) and has leapfrogged in clean energy (and in tech and military) much more than expected and can get by without us/eu markets.

i just don't see that cults have to be necessarily exploitative, so i would go with "not all religions are cults that abuse or exploit", and i'm maybe spliting hairs but i'm not sure that this is the exclusive meaning (although it is often implied), there are many groups we call "cults" in casual speech that aren't, some groups are called cults because their beliefs are extreme, but that doesn't necessarily imply abuse or exploitation. which is why i said "all religions embody some form of mind control".

again mind control need not be pejorative, and need not be enforced, but conform a minimal set of values and/or beliefs that are simply expected to be shared, wether enshrined in tradition, preached, written in a manifesto or just tacitly assumed, this communion is a way of molding minds to conform to the group, and will have an effect on individual minds and behaviors. which is essentially mind control, positive or negative is another issue. then again if none of those are spiritual in nature then we wouldn't be really talking about a religious group either. aaaaand, i know for sure you wouldn't call that a cult.

sorry if i'm being pedantic, i guess my point is that this whole classification (religion, cult, sect) is pretty fuzzy and subjective.