jiggawatts

Coloreds are still hugely overrepresented in the criminal "justice" system, they're still much poorer on average, are still disenfranchised en-masse through gerrymandering and voter ID requirements that accept shooters' club membership cards but not ID cards poorer blacks might possess, etc.

For all intents and purposes, the USA has a caste system that has evolved from an earlier system that was apartheid in all but name.

There's no "meeting of minds" and there's no exchange of value if I simply benchmark a piece of software and then don't use it any further.

This is a bit of a grey zone legally, and steps all over a bunch of consumer protection laws, free speech laws, etc... depending on the jurisdiction.

IMHO governments should explicitly ban these "gag clauses" because it prevents free market competition if customers are not allowed to benchmark software and publish the results.

Got a reference for that?

Every time I use Oracle, I regret it.

Just this month, I tried to hook it up to a modern .NET app with the latest Oracle client and discovered that if you cancel a transaction, the connection enters a broken state and is returned to the connection pool, "infecting it". After a half a dozen of those, the whole app server just dies with endless cancellation related exceptions. This isn't even the only such bug, apparently there's a whole family of pool-corruption bugs that have workaround config settings and everything!

This was with version 23.26.301 which suggests that they've had a lot of major releases, bug fixes, etc... but basic functionality like "connect successfully to the database server every time" is totally broken and has been for many years.

The issue tracker forums have tumbleweeds rolling through them and play the sound of wolves howling in the distance to provide just the right kind of "what are you still doing here?" ambiance.

Machine learning trains the network to do... anything that you reward it for. If you keep training, it keeps getting better.

Next word prediction can always keep getting better.

At first, simply "learning" spelling is what makes the predictions better because tokens are word chunks, not always whole words.

Then, the models "run out of steam" and can't get any better by learning more spelling rules, but the gradient descent forces them to get better... so they do... by learning the rules of grammar.

At this point the AIs can output correctly spelled and grammatically coherent sentences, but the sentences ramble on about nonsense topics.

So what happens next as the models run out of grammar rules is that they're forced to learn the rules "above grammar": logic, world knowledge, coherent story telling, etc.

At some point they learn to output pages and pages of fluid, coherent text, but... if they're not smart, if they don't think, and if they don't know what they're talking about, then they're still "suboptimal" and their forced gradient descent will make them close those gaps.

Eventually, the only way they can improve at "next token prediction" is by building up to human-like intelligence, including an inner monologue, theory of mind, and everything.

We can even read their "thoughts": https://transformer-circuits.pub/2026/workspace/index.html

It’s like “using JSON” but actually encoding objects indirectly through your own made up object notation… that is structured.

So far they’ve paid something like €20 million out of €4.0 billion in GDPR fines.

I looked it up: they paid almost none of the fines.

If you get a ticket from a speed camera, the government will garnish your wages if you don’t pay the fine. For trillion dollar organisations payment is apparently optional.

Chinas has hundreds (not thousands) of islands in its territory, which has increased from 287 in 2019 to 431 in 2026. This is not "defense".

> nobody can take your takes on this seriously.

Russia moved mobile crematoriums up to the Ukraine border in February 2022, and people still dismissed the chances of their invasion as vanishingly unlikely.

Dismissing an obvious military buildup from a country that has plainly stated their intentions is an error.

https://www.reuters.com/graphics/USA-CHINA/TAIWAN-INVASION/z...

https://www.ft.com/content/36a00ba4-6178-4267-9786-3e0b59abe...

https://www.wsj.com/world/china/china-taiwan-military-naval-...

> "Iran is 6 weeks away from building nuclear weapons"

It is the breakout time, not the schedule.

It is incredible to me how pervasive the misunderstanding of this statement is!

I've had real-life conversations with project managers just like this:

PM: "How long would this project take?"

Me: "One month."

... two weeks later ...

PM: "How long would the project take to finish?"

Me: "One month."

PM: "You said that two weeks ago! It should only take two weeks to finish!"

Me: "Why would you think that? We never started the project! It wasn't approved. You didn't approve it, personally. The effort is four weeks. If you approve and we start today, it will still take that long to complete."

... two more weeks later ...

PM: "Why isn't the project finished!? You said one month a month ago!"

Me: "... wat?"

For now.

The majority of solar panels are made in China (85%), and they plan to invade Taiwan in just a few years, possibly as soon as 2027, at which point either we let them take control of AI chip production or defend Taiwan and cut ourselves off from the source of almost all manufactured products, and especially solar panels.

Something I tell junior developers: There is one way to correctly spell out a word in full, but many different ways of abbreviating it. Don't make me guess or memorise which one you chose, completely arbitrarily.

UNIX and languages "born from it" are especially prone to a ludicrous level of abbreviation because of its start in the earliest days of computing when serious machines had mere kilobytes of memory, and so every byte was precious. Compounding that were the use of teletypewriters, which did not generally allow edits and were glacially slow. Tab complete was impossible.

This has become so ingrained in the early generation of computing science pioneers that they passed on these behaviours almost like religious doctrine, like dogma or rituals that must be preserved. Perhaps it was mostly subconsciously done, but I have seen programmers in the 90s and early 2000s still instructing others to do these things, to shave bits and bytes off identifiers to 'save space'.

    CAR = Contents of the Address part of Register
    CDR = Contents of the Decrement part of Register

So if everyone has "too busy" AI slop art, then the rich will switch to very plain art, even downright minimalist.

I'm betting that up-market stores will soon have hand-carved wood signs out the front just like in the 1800s to show off that a Real Human(tm) made their signage.

It's not that plain wood is better, it's just that it's not commonly available.

It was purposefully deceptive -- Boeing management actively decided to hide its existence from pilots.

The narrative that the pilots were at fault was Boeing leadership covering their ass.

The MCAS symptoms did not match runaway trim. It's not continuous. It stops and starts.

MCAS would also re-activate with a five second delay, just long enough to confuse pilots.

More importantly, deactivating the electrical trim system would make it all too easy to enter a regime where the pilots couldn't physically recover the plane.

This is a Catch-22 scenario: Activate the electrics and be killed by MCAS, or deactivate the electrics and be killed by physics.

I could go through each of your comments in this thread and point out how NTSB crash investigators proved that Boeing was directly or indirectly at fault in almost every aspect, but I don't want to write out ten pages. Others have done so already, more eloquently, and often with more colourful language. Most professional pilots were rightly furious with Boeing.

Boeing's arguments have been mutually exclusive with each other: "Just remember how to operate MCAS... which we hid from you!" and "Just disable the electric trim... which will pit you against forces you can't overcome"... "Which is not a problem because you can turn electric trim back one... but then MCAS will try to kill you again"... "It won't do that because it is dual redundant... an option... that nobody purchased... and we didn't even tell most customers about."

I expect this kind of self-contradictory "logic" from narcissists and sociopaths -- I know one of each and I'm now intimately familiar with the self serving arguments that make no sense, especially in combination.

But doesn’t apply to MCAS because the symptoms and recovery procedures are distinct.

The MCAS system wasn’t documented, pilots weren’t trained on it, it didn’t indicate anything distinct in the cockpit, and it could rapidly put the plane into an unrecoverable attitude where pilots no longer had the physical strength to overcome the forces involved.

It is purpose-designed for exactly this type of proxy/cache load-balancing scenario!

I do use ChatGPT to resolve vague memories of articles read long ago into concrete URLs I can share, which is one of the best uses of the accursed things right now!

I assure you that I am an organic meat human like yourself and the article dates itself to the “before times” and can also be trusted to be free of contamination.

Their economy would implode within days.

Of course, this would be a horrific crime against humanity, comparable in impact on civilians to dropping a nuke on a capital city.

Speaking of which: my partner knows next to nothing about warfare and while watching the news I had to explain that the US Navy submarine mentioned by the presenter isn't just for taking out enemy ships, it is a nuclear-armed "world ending" weapon that could simply... erase... a country. Or two. Probably three. In under an hour.

I saw the talk version of that and it has lodged in my memory. The point he made was that "health.gov" was made by a bunch of teams that made sure that their part worked, but nobody was in charge of making the whole thing work.

This is sadly "normal" for large bureaucracies.

Every time I see a giant, multi-million dollar catastrophe, it's always "proper", "documented", "enterprise", "by the book", and... "a total failure". The reason is always that nobody actually cares about the final outcome, only the paperwork in front of them that they need fill out, the checkbox that needs to be ticked, or the compliance requirement that needs to be met.

There are two scenarios, one of which is a "double tap" and one which is not:

1) There are 'n' targets. The targets get hit in rapid succession, one bomb each. <- normal bombing

2) There is 1 target. It is hit once. There is a long delay, long enough for first responders to show up. The same 1 target is hit again. <- THIS is a double tap.

The IRGC base had multiple buildings. Each building was hit once. That's not what most people would call a double-tap.

Some people ran from one building to another and were hit twice. That's just... bad luck.

The real crime committed by US forces is that they didn't care to update and review their targeting information, resulting in totally unnecessary civilian deaths. Their hubris, their pride, their unfounded confidence in their own superiority resulted in a shameful atrocity.

That's bad enough.

He just couldn't get past the notion that if the six copies in four buildings across two states were all simultaneously physically destroyed, then most likely there are also no more schools left standing, and hence the contracts to clean them are null and void. Also, payment is now in booze and ammunition, not dollars.

You wouldn't organise the equivalent of an elaborate bank heist to break into a child's piggy bank, it's just not worth it.

I have heard of a few high profile crypto heists that appear to be AI-assisted, some as far back as the GPT 3.5 era. There was an article I can't find any more about someone accidentally pushing a security fix to a public repo and getting their wallets drained via that specific mechanism within something like an hour.

Malicious actors are watching crypto like a cat in front of a mouse hole, because a "success" can net them the equivalent of hundreds of millions of USD that they can instantly transfer, launder, and spend.

For comparison, what would they achieve by hacking the web site of a local council or public library? Cause some embarrassment? Attempt to crypto-locker them? What are the chances of a payout? Certainly not a 100%, and you're also certain to get the attention of the local equivalent of the FBI or Homeland Security.

Why? Because it is low-value land due to monsoons turning the dirt into mud, and that dirt doesn't have enough minerals in it so agriculture is too difficult to bother with.

It has free oxygen. It has 1g gravity. You can fly there for about a thousand dollars instead of a thousand billion. The radiation might give you skin cancer, but won't kill you immediately. There's too much water. It has animals you can hunt and eat. Etc, etc...

Practically nobody wants to live there that wasn't already there for generations.

If the human race can't be bothered occupying land like that, then colonising Mars is so, so far down the list it isn't even on the same page, book, or library shelf.

I expected them to have been hacked to pieces by now, but even “maximally vulnerable” internet-facing apps seem to be relatively unmolested so far.

Maybe it’s still too expensive to go after “boring” enterprise targets? Maybe the bad actors targeted crypto systems first for the immense payoffs, if successful?