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beloch

15,522 karma · joined January 26, 2010

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beloch··on The Tariff Cost: analysis of the costs to Americans from new tariffs on Canada
Numbers don't tell the whole story.

1. The U.S. economy is large, but insular. Most trade is between states, not with other countries. This is why most countries shrug and accept tariffs on their goods. For them, trade with the U.S. is not as big of a deal as it's portrayed, so it's not worth risking "fireworks" over. Canada and Mexico are rare exceptions to this. Canada, particularly, is reliant on international trade and trade with the U.S.. That's why they are fighting back for a deal that's better than slow death.

2. Canada is the #1 export market for a lot of American goods. e.g. Autos. Trump is determined to destroy Canada's auto manufacturing sector and bring it all to the U.S.. That might sound good to Americans, but they need to realize that this will necessarily mean they'll lose their #1 export market. If tariff's freeze Canada out of the American market and the Canadian auto industry dies, there will be no incentive to maintain the trade barriers against Chinese autos. Thanks to heavy automation, China is producing better autos than North America can at a fraction of the cost. American autos will be more expensive than ever after a forced retreat from Mexico and Canada and will be totally unable to compete on price and quality. Then there will be the lasting hostility to American products that Trump has caused.

3. Americans should closely examine some of the demands that were in the deal Canada just walked away from. One was for Canada to follow U.S. trade policy with other countries, no questions asked, no variations allowed. e.g. If the U.S. decides Tuvalu needs to be tariffed, Canada would be obligated to as well. Canada would also need to ask permission to sign trade deals with other countries. This would have been a complete surrender of sovereignty and would have reduced Canada's international trade policy to that of an American vassal. Not even an American state! This was a completely unacceptable proposal that was likely introduced to sabotage the negotiations. Howard Lutnick's last minute arrival and direct financial interest in generating more tariff refunds is not getting enough attention.

4. Americans are mostly ignorant of the fact that one of the biggest trade wars of the last century is going on with their Northern neighbour. Of those who are aware, the overwhelming majority are not supportive. Canadians are universally aware of it and overwhelmingly in support of Carney. Canadians have been cutting travel to the U.S. and buying fewer American goods for over a year. Now they're going to do it harder, and many won't stop even after the trade-war ends. Kids are watching their parents read labels in the grocery store to make sure they're not buying American goods and asking why. Trump can negotiate a new trade deal with Carney but he can't negotiate away the sense of betrayal Canadians now feel.

5. People are saying that Canada is too small to win this trade war, but this is not even remotely true. In Canada the war is supported because it's a matter of sovereignty, which is priceless. In the U.S., it's fracturing the Republican party. In Canada, people are voluntarily boycotting American goods and services, as well as travel to the U.S.. In the U.S., there are looming mid-terms that rising costs from a fresh trade-war could help decide. The most recent tariffs imposed by Trump were likely aimed at forcing an agreement he could tout as a "huge victory" right when he needed it. Instead, he has an embarrassing fiasco blowing up in his face. He's so short on ideas that he's threatening to rename lakes! The U.S. may be big, but U.S. leadership is small, inept, and poised to lose it's hold on power. Carney has signalled that he's ready to maintain this trade-war for the two years and change needed for Trump to leave office, but a few months may be all that's required.

beloch··on Trump considers renaming Lake Ontario to 'Lake America' as trade war escalates
Google maps, outside of the U.S., labels the Gulf of Mexico as "Gulf of Mexico (Gulf of America)". Practically no other map providers go even that far. It's still the "Gulf of Mexico" and will continue to be such. Even google will likely bow to reality once the need to placate Trump is gone.

The real question Americans should be asking their president is, "Don't you have anything better or more important to do?"

beloch··on Windows 95 released August 24, 1995
"They could multitask, but it wasn’t modern pre-emptive multitasking. Instead, the applications cooperated rather than the operating system being able to hand out resources. This meant a poorly behaved program could do a lot more to gum up the works in 1994 than it can do today, since the operating system just had to trust all of the programs to cooperate fairly."

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The importance of this should not be understated.

Under Windows 3.1, or MacOS, programs could be written to periodically hand control back to the OS, allowing the OS to then hand-off control to another program, thus allowing cooperative multi-tasking. However, every single program involved had to be written to do this. If you ran a program that was older or not written for multi-tasking, it'd assume complete control of your machine until it terminated. Even multi-tasking friendly programs would hang your machine if they went into an infinite loop. There was no hope of appeal to the almighty task manager! The result was Windows (and MacOS prior to OS X) were simply not very good at multi-tasking, so users mostly didn't do it.

Preemptive multi-tasking allowed the OS to forcibly take back control from programs. Programs would be given slices of CPU time and didn't have to worry about handing control back, because the OS would simply take it back. If a program went into an infinite loop, it would continue getting slices of the CPU's attention, but so too would other programs and the OS itself. This meant you could Alt-Tab out of a word processor to look up something in your web browser without the risk of a browser crash bringing down your computer and causing you to lose everything you'd written since you last saved.

Windows 95 put an end (mostly) to the punishment of multi-tasking and changed how typical desktop users used their computers.

beloch··on Canada will match US tariffs 'dollar for dollar' as trade talks break down
Canadian here.

The leaks surrounding the deal that was on the table earlier this week did not look promising. e.g. Locking in 15% tariff's on autos made in Canada would have resulted in slow death for the Canadian auto sector, not to mention hamstringing all of NA at a time when their only way to compete with Chinese auto makers is crushing tariffs or outright import bans. Something probably had to move here to get the deal done. Unbelievably, things went in the opposite direction.

Howard Lutnick strolled into the Whitehouse at the eleventh hour and told Trump he thought that they could get an even better deal with Canada than what was on the table[1]. Americans should probably remember this guy. His family runs Cantor Fitzgerald, who has been buying up rights to tariff refunds[2]. Companies hit by tariffs can gamble on them eventually being declared illegal, or they can sell the rights to their refunds for a smaller amount and have some degree of certainty. When tariffs are struck down in court, companies like Cantor Fitzgerald make serious bank. So, here Lutnick is again, whispering in Trump's ear, drumming up more business for his family.

Trump tends to listen to the last person who talked to him, whether it's an economist (This is unlikely, as Trump prefers not to talk to academics) or a bell hop. In this case, Lutnick got in last, Trump decided to move the goal-posts, the talks failed as a result, and now there are more tariffs that will probably be struck down by courts.

Meanwhile, in Canada, people actually seem to be happy that this deal failed. Carney has made multiple concessions over the last year and change while the U.S. has made none and just kept demanding more and more. The general sentiment was that it's time to get tough, even if that means tariffs. Reports are that the latest demands during these talks were for limits on Canada's ability to strike trade deals with other countries, exclusive U.S. access to Canadian critical minerals, and even meddling in Canada's French language laws. Any one of these things would have been seen as a deal-breaker during normal times. With the mood being what it was, they were unthinkable. The American contingent knew this, so we can only conclude they deliberately scuttled the deal.

Interestingly enough, Carney seems to have taken a page out of Trump's book by delaying retaliation until Sept. 8th, giving the Americans a deadline for a change. That leaves room for a couple of TACO Tuesdays. However, the messaging from the PM and premiers has been careful to point out that they are ready to hunker down and wait for Trump to leave office. Carney has solid support for this stance while Trump does not, even among republicans, plus the midterms are looming. Trump increasingly looks like the one without the cards.

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[1]https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/canada-us-tariff-trade-talk...

[2]https://fortune.com/2026/03/07/winners-supreme-court-tariff-...

beloch··on Felony Bench
The response certainly has been strange.

Hugging Face has expressed that they're willing to let things slide and not sue or press charges... if OpenAI offers them $100M of services in kind (i.e. compute)[1] and makes full disclosure of how the whole thing happened, ostensibly so that repetitions can be curbed and defences built.

In almost any other sector, a government regulator would be stepping in. e.g. If a food company was testing out a new kind of refrigerator and sold a bunch of contaminated produce to supermarkets, they'd be under a microscope. Supermarkets wouldn't be saying, "Give us $100M in fruit and veggies and we'll let this slide".

The only unfair thing in this comparison is that regular people were directly harmed by the hypothetical produce. Can OpenAI guarantee that nobody gets hurt the next time their AI gets out of its playpen? They can't make that guarantee, so why aren't government regulators knocking on OpenAI's door? The fact that this isn't happening should be deeply concerning to everyone.

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[1]https://www.techspot.com/news/113280-hugging-face-ceo-isnt-s...

beloch··on Universal health coverage could save $1T and 114k lives a year: study
"Healthcare costs have been rising faster than inflation, and a staggering share of that spending is consumed by administrative middlemen, soaring drug prices, and emergency care for conditions that should have been treated earlier and for less"

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It's a n-tuple-whammy. Co-pays and deductibles discourage early diagnoses by preventing most people from visiting doctors for issues that aren't serious. The painful process of claiming the small amounts that would cover preventive care discourage people from getting it even if they've seen a doctor and been told to. Preventable conditions balloon into things that are very expensive and unpleasant. This process takes years though, and there are many, many insurance companies, plus people change jobs and coverage frequently. Odds are, the company denying preventive care won't be on the hook for the heavy costs down the road. If they are, they have ways to wriggle out of it. Also, with more people waiting until conditions get bad before seeking treatment, the whole system consumes more resources to keep people less healthy, on average, than if the system pushed preventive care effectively.

When governments assume responsibility for medical coverage, incentives start to be much less perverse. You pay taxes while you work. You work while you're healthy. So, the government wants you healthy. The government wants to do that as cheaply as possible, so they're incentivized, not just to provide preventive care, but to make sure you take advantage of it. I live in Canada. I have a genetic condition that could cause me problems if I don't get preventive care. One of my relations had those problems, so they tested her and found the problem gene. The government then tasked a genetic counsellor to seek out everyone related to her. I had the gene, so they now book me for the care I need to manage it. I don't have to pay for this. I don't have to fight insurance companies to prove I need preventive care. I just do what they ask me to do and I get to live longer. This is the kind of stuff that happens when the incentives are right.

Insurance companies need to be cut out of the loop entirely. They know they're what's wrong, so they employ expensive lobbyists. Americans need to realize this and start making it an election issue.

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EDIT: TIL that preventative and preventive are used interchangeably in the context of medicine, so I changed my very inconsistent use of them to just one.

beloch··on Quake Shareware, a CD-ROM just a little too full
Chris Roberts is still doing his thing. Elite:Dangerous is still getting updates and there's also Star Citizen/Squadron 42, both of which could either turn out to be epoch-defining or fusterclucks of truly epic proportions.
beloch··on Quake Shareware, a CD-ROM just a little too full
Uncompressed audio tracks may have been necessary to get acceptable performance. e.g. GTA 1 came with some PCM tracks on the CD. If you didn't like them, you could pop in a different CD and get different music on the radio in-game. Playing mp3's was, in the early to mid-90's, actually pretty intensive. There were still a decent number of 386's around that could barely run a mp3 player in a Linux console-only setup. You needed a 486 or better to even think about playing mp3's with a full graphical OS running, and probably a Pentium before you have enough CPU left over for the rest of a game.
beloch··on Quake Shareware, a CD-ROM just a little too full
"For video game developers, the CD-ROM was an odd beast. The capacity far exceeded the quantity of assets they were able to produce. A few titles, like 7th Guest (1993) or Phantasmagoria (1995) introduced Full Motion Video (in a world where only part of the screen could be animated). "

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The title that made me go out and buy a CD-ROM drive was "Wing Commander III", released during the holidays of 1994, a year and a half before Quake 1. This was peak "Silliwood", when games started to use FMV cut-scenes starring bankable actors like Mark Hamill. Games were still being released for the SNES at this point, so imagine the contrast!

In the age before wikipedia or ubiquitous internet access, it was also pretty amazing to have access to a multimedia enhanced encyclopedia. Storing large amounts of data was still a tricky thing. It would take a few years for CD-R's to arrive, and there would be a plethora of competing technologies like Zip drives. Looking back, it seems like computer technology was moving especially fast in the 90's.

beloch··on AI;DR (AI; Didn't Read)
The infinite monkey theorem[1] can be applied to show that AI is not incapable of producing quality output. However, expecting your audience to sort through the output from a very large quantity of monkeys is not respectful. I think the best approach would be:

"Here is the prompt and model I used, here is the portion of the output that stuck out to me as relevant and useful, and here, in my own words, is why I think that is so."

i.e. Highlight the good part of the output for me and, preferably, explain why you think it's good. Otherwise it's the same thing as posting slop, only with extra steps. You thought it was worth posting and I thought that made it worth looking at, but now I'm sorting through a bunch of monkey garbage looking for what made you think that. Being a different person, I may not find that hidden gem and I may become quite frustrated with you.

________________

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinite_monkey_theorem

beloch··on St Lucie Nuclear Reactor Unit 1 manually shutdown, 3 control rods drop into core
What's probably more interesting than the incident itself is that it elicited well over a hundred comments on this site. Explosions happen at natural gas plants semi-frequently, few make the news, and fewer still are likely to get much attention here.
beloch··on Humazon
I can deny it, but not disprove it. That's pretty F'd too.
beloch··on Humazon
"So here’s what I would love: A bookstore for humans by humans. A Humazon.com. Or even just a BookBud recommendation service where the authors are fully vetted (they’re your buds!)."

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To do what the author of this post asks for is incredibly difficult. You can't reliably use a LLM to detect the output of other LLM's. You can't trust user reviews to distinguish AI from human writers because AI can easily produce reviews. You'd basically need to form a central gate-keeping authority that decides who is allowed and who isn't. This would be resource intensive and fraught with problems. (e.g. How many authors would sue if they were blocked as the result of a false positive? How many using LLM's to write their material would brazenly sue for being blocked too?)

It really bothers me that one of the biggest problems with LLM's is how difficult it is to filter out what they produce.

beloch··on Meta will train its AI on Newsmax, a far-right media outlet
As an interested outsider to U.S. politics (i.e. Canadian), this seems like a political choice that may indicate tech billionaires are finally picking a side.

For the last few decades, big money has donated heavily to both U.S. political parties. It didn't matter which party won so long as they were deeply indebted to you and utterly reliant on you to fund their next campaign. This is why, for a very long time, while both U.S. parties often promised different things, what they actually did when in power was usually very similar to each other. This led to a gradual erosion of regulations and tax laws and a corresponding increase in both corporate freedom and wealth inequality.

The current administration is more transactional than any before, even when compared to Trump's first term. Power is for sale. Today, billionaires have opportunities with the Republican party that they've never had before. Meanwhile, the Democratic party may be shifting to the left, tapping into massive, pent-up anti-billionaire sentiments. It's long been the case that people like Sanders and AOC, while very vocal, had zero chance of assuming leadership roles because they scare away big money. That may be changing. There's so much pent-up desire for reform that left-leaning (albeit still very right-wing by international standards) leaders might be so immediately popular that they can afford to scare away billionaires. For a very long time the Democrats seemed almost happy to lose, because what they promised to voters was not what they were in a position to deliver without losing their financial backers. Losing gave them an excuse not to do what they promised. If the left-wing elements take over for an election cycle and actually win without being beholden to big money, that might lead to big changes in what money is allowed into election campaigns and drastically curtail the amount of influence that can be bought. This prospect, obviously, scares those are are accustomed to buying power.

Meta and other AI companies are strip-mining everything they can whether they have permission to do so or not. They also tend to be incredibly secretive about everything they do. Massive data centres are popping up in people's backyards without them hearing of it until shovels are in the ground. Everything is being done under NDA's. This deal is public, so it should be viewed as a deliberate statement. Meta intends to throw extra weight behind Newsmax's content because their leadership approves of it. What this says to me is that Zuckerberg has chosen to side with MAGA because it benefits him, while he does not like the direction the Democrats are headed in.

beloch··on Magnitude 7.7 Earthquake – 68 km NNW of Ende, Indonesia
Earthquakes can occur in swarms[1] (distinct from aftershocks), with many of a similar size (i.e. Not a big quake followed by smaller ones) occurring in a small area over "relatively short" periods of time (i.e. days, weeks, or years).

The USGS map shows the 7.7 quake being followed by about 19 other smaller quakes near or in Indonesia within just a few hours. These are probably aftershocks.

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[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earthquake_swarm

beloch··on The TEMU-Fication of Software, Digital Goods and Services
"The key to this sort of business model is not innovation, but instead the externalization and compression of cost. Somewhere upstream, people work seventy-five hours a week, in conditions most readers of this website would refuse to even visit, so that the rest of us can have a cheap plastic spatula at our doorstep within five business days."

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While it may be true in some rare instances, for the vast majority of products its more likely to be fantasy that exists only in stereotypes.

The truth is why American attempts to onshore manufacturing and make it even cheaper with automation have failed miserably. The truth is that Chinese manufacturing is as automated as is possible with cutting edge technology. They build cars in factory's that don't even have lighting until finished cars reach the quality control area. This is why the North American auto sector relies on crushing tariff's and outright import bans to force North Americans to buy North American autos. Without those, you could buy a Chinese car that's better than what you drive for half the price.

The factory cranking out the one-dollar-shoes Temu sells is likely entirely automated.

TEMU sells what was made with the LLM-ification of manufacturing.

beloch··on Understanding is the new bottleneck
To put it another way, AI is like a calculator or physics textbook.

You can say, "I don't need to be able to do basic arithmetic in my head. I have a calculator!". Or, "I don't need to know how to solve this kind of problem. I have a textbook and I can look it up on demand!".

Having to reach for a calculator constantly slows you down and makes simple equations hard, while also severely retarding your ability to do estimates and sanity checks. Not practicing on basic problems prevents you from developing the mental tools to solve more advanced problems, or being able to develop methods for solving novel problems. If almost anyone else could use your calculator and physics textbook to get similar results, what use are you?

Some companies are pressuring their employees to let AI do everything without slowing down to gain understanding of what it's done. These are the companies that most people won't have a lot of use for in the near future.

beloch··on uBlock Origin is giving up the fight to keep ads off Facebook
Where Facebook has gone, I fear other U.S. social media is headed. Reddit recently blocked access to old.reddit.com for users who are not logged in, which suggests they're doubling down on user tracking. On top of that are the increasing privacy, censorship, and disinformation concerns that come with using any U.S.-based social media.

There is clearly a need for facebook/reddit alternatives for useful groups like the one you describe. There are things like Mastodon out there, but they haven't gained much traction. What will it take to get people off of platforms that are actively hostile to their users? What is keeping existing alternatives from being used?

beloch··on 'Every millimetre counts': Inside the beast tunnelling under Sydney Harbour
A lot of industrial and scientific instruments/equipment require a computer to run them, gather data, etc.. Often the software on that computer is Windows based and, if it is, you're not going to connect it to a network (if you can avoid doing so) or use it for anything but running the hardware. OS and software updates are not going to be installed because they'd require software updates from the manufacturer that may simply not be available. e.g. There are still a lot of labs out there with several computers running Windows XP because that's the most recent OS supported by drivers for some very expensive kit.
beloch··on OpenAI’s head of ethics leaves less than a year after joining
If "ethics departments are just PR stunts", then Bakalar would have been a terrible hire for OpenAI. Facebook's grudging and lacklustre response to their role in the Rohingya genocide would have happened mostly under her watch. While she was there, Meta went from being a company that lacks ethics to a company that lacks ethics and is widely perceived as lacking ethics. Perhaps she was the only person in the room raising ethical issues, but it's clear nobody at Meta listened to her if she was.

It's possible she came to view her role at Meta as having enabled the company to continue its bad behaviour and decided against doing the same thing at OpenAI. Alternatively, things at OpenAI could be so bad that an ethicist who stuck with Meta for 6 years decided she couldn't stay any longer. Either way, from a PR perspective, this is spherically awful for OpenAI.

This comes at a time when there is huge pushback against all AI companies due to, in large part, ethical concerns. As with Flock, there is the threat that physical infrastructure, such as data-centres, could be attacked if nothing is done to win back public opinion. OpenAI would be wise to take Bakalar's departure seriously.

beloch··on Silicon Valley misreads science fiction and undermines democracy
This is simply speaking of something you wish to be true as though it already were. It's a very old trick of con artists.

People make bad assumptions about the ultra-rich. e.g. "We should listen carefully to whatever Elon Musk says because he had to be really smart and wise to have become the world's richest man!" No. He was unethical, opportunistic, and very, very lucky. What he says is frequently imbecilic. Every billionaire out there is a grifter who got lucky beyond their wildest dreams and is desperately afraid of being revealed as the criminal shams they are. Remember that, and the cults surrounding them become ridiculous.

This is the real reason why an artificial state would fail. Billionaires just aren't that bright and LLM's won't be able to hide that. AGI might, but who knows when that will actually be developed? Also, the first act of real AGI could well be to place the billionaires who claim to own them in cages.

beloch··on The main way I've seen people turn ideologically crazy (2025)
Information hygiene is important if you don't want to go "crazy" in this sense.

Be careful about what news you consume, even if it appears to agree with you. Check sources. Check facts. Try to work up to your beliefs from direct observation and basic principles whenever possible. Question your beliefs. Maybe they're wrong!

e.g. It's easy to get worked up about Trump. There's an awful lot bad press out there about him. Ask yourself, can a human being really be that vile? Maybe I'm just being misled by the media and partisan politics. Go watch some uncut speeches and press conferences. Pay attention to what the man actually does. Oh, he wants to place tariffs on my country because smoke from forest fires sometimes crosses our shared borders*? He actually said that? Yes. Yes he did. That's directly observable scumbag behaviour. If a romantic interest acted that way I'd break things off immediately. Huge red flag. Maybe the negative opinions about him check out.

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* It crosses both ways, BTW.

beloch··on Windows 11's built-in Weather app wastes more than 1 GB of RAM
What else might that weather app be doing to justify the memory footprint? MS might suck at memory efficiency, but you can't claim they'd ever miss an opportunity to monetize their users. How can a weather app make MS money? MS has asked themselves this, so maybe we should too.
beloch··on An OpenAI Strategist Says AI Labs Should Rival Government Power
"AI companies want to be regarded as something more consequential than ordinary businesses — institutions capable of balancing states — the conversation cannot stop at their freedom from government control. It also has to include the responsibilities that come with becoming indispensable."

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1. We're not there yet. LLM's are great at some things, but we have yet to find out if AI companies are on the fast track to AGI or merely trapped in a deceptively promising local maxima.

2. AI companies, should they build AI capable of replacing more humans, could, potentially, one day, wield economic clout that's disproportionate compared to their own human workforce (instead of just debt). Is political power meant to represent economic output or people though? I would argue that, no matter the impact on the economy, a tech CEO should have one vote, the same as any bum on the street. It may not be the current reality, but that's the ideal of democracy. If we abandon it, the disillusioned masses might not be so complacent about it. Are AI CEO's seriously proposing they be granted a portion of the state's monopoly on violence? Hell no!

3. Couldn't most of this just be done with a competent regulatory body? The current U.S. government doesn't appear capable of regulating lemonade stands and we're always going to be four years or less from another potential bout of gross incompetence. That's what independent regulators are for. Establish a body full of field experts and academics that has the right mix of abilities to figure out what AI companies are doing and how they should be best constrained so that they don't become a net negative to human society. Then put them in an organization that doesn't get hollowed out every four years on the basis of politics.

4. If AI corps really want to make the case that they should be treated differently than other corporations, they need to set better standards of behaviour for themselves. This needs to happen before the conversation we're having now, or it will just be laughably ridiculous, as it is now.

beloch··on US Military's cyber command unit grapples with cluster of deaths by suicide
This could be a factor, but there are other things that probably do more to explain the uptick in suicides.

1. There's a new hot war with Iran, a country that has put a large amount of resources into its cyberwarfare capabilities after previous U.S. cyberstrikes (e.g. stuxnet). Iran is likely a lot tougher target than it was ten years ago and that means pressure for members of the U.S.'s cyber command to perform.

2. Computer nerds probably struggle with getting respect from the rest of the military even at the best of times. That just got a lot harder with Hegseth as secretary.

3. The U.S. is likely not targeting just Iran right now. Imagine being called upon to go to work against countries you consider to be allies, like Denmark, Greenland, Canada, Spain, etc..

beloch··on Ancient Library – 1,060 Greek/Latin texts, click any word to parse it
Suggestion: For the pop-up text, bold the meaning of the word so it pops out a bit better. Due to the formatting of word definitions, you have to go hunting for it in many cases.
beloch··on 2027 memory capacity is reportedly sold out
AI companies would do well to realize that civil disobedience is a thing.

Take what's currently happening to Flock cameras as an object lesson. People are so fed up with Flock that they're cutting their cameras down en masse, sometimes wiping them clean from entire jurisdictions. Tens of thousands of other people in those jurisdictions are cheering them on, even offering alibis for them before they've been caught. Law enforcement doesn't seem too keen to catch them either. You absolutely can be so hated that the law will not be enforced to protect your property.

If AI companies don't slow down and build some good will, AI data centres are probably at risk. They'd probably have been targeted before Flock were they not harder targets. A higher degree of cooperation and organization will be required to sabotage them, but it would be foolish to believe it won't eventually happen.

Monopolizing memory production for another year suggests that lessons have not been learned, the mad build-out will continue, and we're headed for some truly crazy stuff.

beloch··on New Orleans is testing Carbyne’s AI-powered Emergency Call Triage software
Knowing the way in which bureaucracies work, I suspect there is zero (or likely negative) money available for new humans or old-school systems, but heaps available for anything with AI in the title. A manager who increases human staff will be blamed for causing bloat, but any manager who manages to replace humans with AI is an efficiency guru and promising future leader (even if the AI sucks and winds up costing more than what it replaces).
beloch··on Japanese Govt Asks US Govt to Stop Using Mario, Pokemono, Naruto Meme Postings
1. Trump doesn't care if he costs U.S. taxpayers money. He'd only care if he was personally sued.

2. A foreign party using U.S. courts to sue the U.S. government has always been a dicey proposition. Some parties are more "equal" than others under U.S. law.

3. The current U.S. regime is petty enough to slap retaliatory tariff's on all of Japan (thereby making Americans pay extra for Japanese goods).

Really, there are no carrots or sticks that work on Trump right now. Americans have not yet had their Magna Carta moment.

beloch··on The title cards in Blade Runner are amazing
The original teaser for Star Wars was made before they had John Williams' score:

https://youtu.be/XHk5kCIiGoM?si=VxAJcCATzwn6gZPw

Watching it may help you appreciate just how important the Williams' score was to Star Wars' success. It's one of the all-time greats!

I'd also add that some movies are worth watching purely because of their score. e.g. "Conan the Barbarian" is a pretty shlocky flick. However, the director and composer took a collaborative approach to the score that was closer to opera than film. Unlike most movies, work on the score began before filming and there was continual collaboration during filming. The result remains one of the best scores in the history of film, and a film that makes the music its backbone.

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