klrefg

> subject to and follow the rules promulgated by the elected authorities of that country is normal and just

There are no laws or rules which require Google or any other private entity to use whatever names Trump came up with. That’s just not how it works

Well first the president has to have the actual legal power to “rename” a geographic area or a body of water. Which is not exactly the case. Same way he can’t redefine the meaning of words and such.

Street names are fundamentally different. You wait until the new name actually becomes commonly used and not just a deranged joke.

It’s commonly used to illustrate how absurd are some of the things the US government is doing. It’s not commonly used to refer to the actual bodies of water.

What rules? There are no laws that would require Google or other private entities (or for that matter the overwhelming majority of government organizations) to use any absurd name that the president came up with instead of the actual names. Obviously they feel coerced or are just generally into boot licking but its the opposite of “rules”.

> motivated to pay attention has the means to do so.

Yes, exactly, people who profit directly from certain decisions can afford to spend a lot more time and resources on this than ordinary voters.

Not at all, it’s just that those (i.e. sensible) people just think that this small step is in a direction that’s entirely orthogonal. Unless of course the goal is virtue signaling rather than solving actual problems.

This is not about personal accommodations, though? Usually its coming from people who are supposedly trying to enforce this stuff to “protect” broader groups of people who they perceive need saving or just engaging in general virtue signaling.

> a 10-100x increase in compute usage

What are these numbers based on? Seems hard to believe…

It’s more so zero customer support and no accountability that is the issue here, not the existence of that specific bug.

> This is what taking responsibility is

That is very generous considering their strategy is not having any type of customer support and entirely ignoring their users unless the complain on an online forum where thousands of others can see it.

IMHO WP or alternatively their own OS (but Nokia famously sucked at software so hardly a viable option) was their only chance. They couldn’t compete with Samsung and later on Chinese manufacturers of Android phones. HTC, LG and a bunch of others failed despite of pivoting to Android “in time”, why would have Nokia done any better?

> when the sun is shining.

So no LLMs for 3-5 months a year in most of Europe?

Well… I’m not arguing that the conditions weren’t terrible just that they were better than in most continental countries. US of course was on another level (yet there was plenty of squalor there as well)

Well Erdogan has been the president of Turkey since 2014. Actually these days its pretty much a presidential republic just like the US.

And yes Orban is an exception, the average tenure of a prime minister in parliamentary democracies is considerably shorter than that of US presidents.

Nope, the Swedish version of AfD is a lot more successful and is already well integrated into the political system (it’s the 3rd largest party in the parliament ).

> mature attitude towards democracy.

It’s a bit silly to expect ordinary citizens to have a near infinitely more mature attitude towards democracy than their elected representatives though? It’s not like anybody could have ever expected until relatively recently that one of the (objectively) most immature public figures in the country would somehow end up its president

It’s trivial to remove a prime minister from power, while it’s near impossible to get rid of an US president before the end of their term

No, not really. It’s more like they parked 1000 cars on top of a hill and then just pushed them down to see what they do expecting that the cars will stop on their own before hitting anyone.

They know, they just don’t care

Some weird arguments to make..

> they’re better than the rest at just working.

Yes, exactly what I said.

That appears anecdotal? Real wages for unskilled urban workers around 1900 in Britain were higher than in pretty much any other European country. An average worker in England worked less hours and made more money than their equivalent in France and Germany. Only Denmark, Sweden and Ireland were somewhat close.

> physical state of the British working class compared to their American and European peers

Probably not European, British workers were very well paid by continental standards (cost of living was higher though). If you want an example of pure exploitative capitalism where workers were reduced to near serfdom there is Belgium.

They don’t need to make good products to be highly successful, they only need to make products which are slightly better than the competition.

> a majority of people they market to, a majority of who they design for, a majority of who they product test against

As if Apple is always right and knows what their users want. Sure they are more often than other companies but stuff like the touchbar and Siri itself for that matter prove that they do in fact make mistakes.

The majority of Macs sold have tiny SSDs. So not really.

> Whether you use it or not is not germane to whether the model is justified

Huh.. well yeah, who cares what users need or want. Perfect attitude for a company making money by selling products to consumers.

To be fair.. why not?

> User-upgradable parts have not been part of that vision since Jobs returned.

Macs were quite repairable and most parts were replaceable until ~2012. So it’s hard to blame Jobs for that.

> Before they killed everyone, the relationship was great

Yeah, probably I didn’t express it that well. I mean the ruling class was quite Latinized and had decent relations with the Crusader Kingdoms and often intermarried.

This was not at all popular amongst the masses (and more so the economy and trade being dominated by Italians and high taxes used to fund to fund all the mostly failed military campaigns). Andronikos utilized that in addition to general hatred towards the aristocracy during his coup which lead to the massacres and a permanent political shift. The Empire also lost most of the economic and political control it had over the Crusader States as after that (the Kingdom of Jerusalem was in practice a vasal state of the empire at the time and was reliant on Byzantine funding).