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The termination of USAID caused no casualties.

And they mostly hated the Nazis and were glad to be rid of them. Plus secercy obviously no longer mattered now that a bomb had actually been used. Nothing they had to say could materially advance an enemy’s nuclear program.

That seems like a great question to ask if you had just been briefed on the same matter by your other advisors, or knew that you were about to be.

> I think you're operating in enough bad faith that normally I wouldn't respond

No, I am being completely straight forward about Trump. Go read the book.

> Trump does not think in any kind of structured axiomatic way at all as of his decaying health in 2026…

There’s where you make your mistake. There’s no evidence of that at all. Well, he’s physically somewhat frail, but that’s pretty normal at his age.

> No, Canada should not be put in a position where they consider the choice of being multiple U.S. states! What is wrong with you!

I think that Canadians are strong enough to rationally discuss any idea. We don’t need to shield them. Besides, apparently Canada is going to join the EU now. And they won’t even get to be a full member; they’re opting to be a junior partner instead. Will they even be allowed to vote on things, or will the EU expect them to meekly adopt whatever new rules they are given?

If Canada decides instead to team up with the USA then they should insist on becoming as many states as they can get away with. They are 10% of the US population and will therefore have about 10% of the seats in the House, but they should aim to have about 10% of the seats in the Senate as well. 13 new states would probably be a hard sell but you might be able to swing it.

If it makes you feel better, Trump and the ambassador to Canada probably never actually brought up the idea with the Canadians. They were negotiating in the context of the existing trade agreement so they were just talking about trade. The quip about the “51st state” was merely something Trump said on television.

Quite frankly that’s even worse, if true. It looks the same to Americans who hear about it, and the Canadian government would have no reason to balk at a trade negotiation over it. They could let themselves be talked down to completely eliminating the tariffs without losing anything. The Canadian response looks more and more irrational the more I hear about the details.

Splitting the earnings differently between Canada and Canadian railway companies is a zero–sum game. It just changes which company makes what percentage of the profit. The real win for Canada will be additional production. The Prime Minister of Canada stated that the new pipeline would allow them to “export an additional 1 million barrels a day to growing markets in Asia.” That’s a net benefit for everyone. It’s additional profits for Canadian society and increased supply on the world market.

I wasn’t complaining about the agreement specifically, merely recounting what those who support Trump see.

That said, saying that the tariff is never collected is itself misleading. The importers know about the quota, and naturally they avoid going over it. It’s a restraint on trade either way and Trump proposed getting rid of it.

I am saying that even if these battles did take place, there is no evidence that “the Sea Peoples” fought any other battles anywhere else at all. The story of a wave of violence sweeping around the entire Mediterranean and ending all of the civilizations there is largely fabricated.

Furthermore, just because these inscriptions didn’t give the raiders a specific name doesn’t mean that they were from an unknown civilization.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49923712

> The US hasn't withdrawn from CUSMA. On July 1st it declined to extend the agreement past 2036, which isn't the same thing. The deal stays in force until 2036 with annual reviews, and no withdrawal notice has been given.

> Also, the 6 year review is about whether to extend the term. Withdrawal is a separate clause that a nation can use at any time on six months' notice.

These are good corrections; I was merely oversimplifying. The main point is that what Trump is doing is not some kind of horrible betrayal, he is simply using the terms of the treaty as written. The treaty explicitly specifies how and when either party can renegotiate, decline to renew, and withdraw. You could argue that the treaty ought to have been more permanent than that, but then your beef is not with Trump but with the Canadians who agreed to the treaty as written.

I actually disagree with you there. Trump is an open book. Literally, he published a book called “The Art of the Deal” where he described exactly how he negotiates. Anyone who doesn’t know at least the outline of what’s in that book is working at an extreme disadvantage. Go check out a copy from your local library!

First, he decides what he wants. He does this in advance specifically so that he can avoid agreeing to any deal that gives him less. Then he asks for the moon, knowing that the other party won’t want to give it all up. Instead he wants them to negotiate him down. He will agree to almost any deal that gives him what he wants, but of course hopes that they’ll give him more than that.

So when Trump says that Canada should join the US he is asking for the moon. He knows that Canada would never actually agree to it. It’s not an unjustifiable position; he can offer arguments about why they should (it simplifies the defense of the continent, it eliminates the expense of maintaining the border, it eliminates the possibility of trade barriers between us, etc, etc), but he expects to be talked down from that position. Obviously Canada should at minimum demand to be brought in as multiple states rather than as one oversized one. Or Canada could just offer to lower tariffs instead. It’s up to them.

So Canadians who took these statements “seriously and literally” were in fact overreacting.

Technically you must balance the population and jobs numbers rather than the number of zoned tiles, but that is only one step away. Most of the challenge becomes maintaining the balance as the density of your zones changes over time.

Cities: Skylines has a much more interesting simulation, but if you examine the CPU requirements you can easily imagine why Maxis didn’t take the same approach until 2013.

I remember discovering hex editing when I was a kid too. I used the hex editor built into a commercial editor that my father had bought called VEdit.

I remember using it to edit some DOS directory entries and accidentally corrupting them.

I remember when a friend and I were playing Spacewar. He was disappointed (or annoyed) that it said “May the farce be with you!” when it exited, so I showed him how to correct it to “force” using the hex editor.

Great times!

There’s no evidence of that either.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49923712

No, most Americans would be surprised to learn that Canadians consider the US an enemy.

Most don’t see it as Trump’s fault. The trade agreement between the US and Canada allowed both sides to renegotiate the terms every six years. It also allowed both sides to withdraw if those negotiations failed. Trump simply took that option and proposed to renegotiate, which Canada rejected. So Trump took the obvious next step, exactly as anticipated by the treaty itself, and withdrew from it. Nobody should have been surprised by that.

Most Americans don’t have a problem with the content of Trump’s proposed treaty either. It would have lowered Canada’s tariffs on US dairy products down from 400% to whatever the US charges on Canadian dairy products. It would have allowed US banks to enter the Canadian market just as Canadian banks are allowed to operate in the US. Etc, etc.

The Canadian government made the soup themselves.

Yes, that’s the exaggerated tale that everyone knows.

In “Destruction and Its Impact on Ancient Societies at the End of the Bronze Age” <https://www.lockwoodpress.com/product-page/the-fall-of-the-b...> Jesse Millek examines 153 sites claimed to have been destroyed and found that 61% never happened, happened during a different time period, or had a different cause.

Even without buying the whole book you can download the appendix where he summarizes the results. A few notable entries:

Shiqmona: The possibly destroyed public building dates to the fourteenth century BCE. No end of the Late Branze Age destruction was uncovered.

Tell Irbid: C14 dates derived from short-lived samples places the destruction event between 1395–1260 BCE.

Krisa: There is only a statement that the site was destroyed with no published evidence of destruction in any structure.

Iria: Some burnt material in a pit was assumed to be a destruction. There was no damage visible to the buildings.

Athens: The Houses on the North slope were not houses at all. It was refuse that was dumped on the stairs.

Ayios Stephanos: Burning was uncovered in one room from Trench Beta 11. No other damage was recorded.

Amman Airport Structure: Evidence of burning in Room VII can be attributed to the hearth in that room.

Pefkakia: Adrimi-Sismani repeatedly cited a destruction, even though the excavators clearly stated the site was abandoned.

Tell el-‘Ajjul: Bell simply placed it on a map as destroyed with no citations. There was no settlement ca. 1200 BCE.

Obviously nobody knows. Whoever wrote those inscriptions apparently didn’t either. Even taking them at face value, however, the evidence that these “Sea People” systematically attacked all of civilization is extremely tenuous. There probably never was a power capable of kicking over all of the anthills and destroying civilization without leaving any other archeological evidence of their existence.

They probably never existed in the first place. Most of the evidence for the “Sea People” story is extremely tenuous. Those maps you’ve seen with lots of cities burnt down? Bogus. Often it is really just one burnt down building in a village or town that looks like it might date to approximately the right century. The maps also cherry–pick the data by showing all the towns that they count as burned down wile ignoring the far larger population that were not, and by obscuring the fact that these fires were spread out over such a long period of time.

They do mean loss. Literally losing electricity as heat because of resistance. You can never reduce this to zero, but various problems can compound to increase the loss to ridiculous levels.

Only an idiot would think that systemd-report is malware. Seriously, do you not understand that this is a service that you would only enable if you need it? It’s not magically sending data to bad guys.

And signing the reports using the TPM doesn’t make it spyware either. It merely allows you to verify that the report came from one of your own machines, and one with a known state. If a bad guy hacks the machine the signature will reveal that the machine was hacked.

And there’s no way to turn a TPM signature into DRM. Suppose Netflix wanted to verify that your computer could not save a copy of a Netflix stream to disk. They could get a TPM signature on some data and use that to verify that your computer was compliant with the rules, right? Wrong! Every single update you ever install will change the signature. BIOS/UEFI updates, kernel updates, bootloader configuration, rolling updates to packages. It all changes the TPM state and thus the signatures. To verify any of that Netflix would have to know every single combination of OS version and BIOS version and motherboard model and so on. In practice all they’d get is a cacophony of noise.

TPM signatures are only useful for verifying the state of your own computers, and only because you control when and how the upgrades happen. And by “you” I really mean large enterprises with tens of thousands of computers (both real and virtual) to manage and a dedicated staff to keep track of everything.

Is that really a requirement for Windows 11? I don’t keep track. Perhaps Windows 11 is the spyware.

It’s no different than a Prometheus stat exporter. If you don’t want it then don’t enable it.

Also, most consumer computers don’t have a TPM.

Perhaps, but if you don’t have revenue then you have lots of problems besides this one.

And electric charge, which is conserved!

There are a lot more rules than that.

But it is true that the rules don’t anticipate a fridge that cannot refrigerate food if the advertisements aren’t playing properly.

I agree with him. All software should be written in safe languages, but there is a wide selection available. For new projects you should pick a language that does as much for you as possible. Ruby and Rails both go out of their way to provide the developer with as much power as they can. They make development less expensive. That’s exactly what you want when you are first building something, before you know exactly what you will need.

Later after you have lots of users and your hosting costs are rising, then you can rewrite it in a language that gets you closer to the machine. You won’t need to do any exploration at that point, and you’ll already know where the performance hot spots are. Of course I recommend Rust for that, but that is merely my personal preference.

Use common sense! You yourself are either an LLM or one half of a self–replicating von Neumann machine. You cannot possibly claim that von Neumann machines are ”unreal“.

MOSH is not suitable for automated usage such as TRAMP, VSCode, sshfs, etc. It is only intended for interactive use.

This is nonsense.

But so is the question. MOSH interprets all the escape sequences and uses them to decide what to send to the client. That way if you tail a log file and then get disconnected, you don’t have to download every line of text that was output to your terminal while you were away; it can just send you what is currently visible.

MOSH is strictly for interactive use; never ever for automated uses like TRAMP or VSCode or sshfs.

> Painting migrants with a broad brush as violent people…

This is exactly what I have _not_ done.

The stats from Denmark show that immigrants from specific regions are more violent than native–born Danish. It simultaneously shows that immigrants from _other_ regions are _less_ violent than native–born Danish. Did you not even look at that graph?

It is not racist for the Danish people to pick and choose which migrants they allow into their country.