TBH I feel that whatever totemistic or workflow quirks you need to keep maintaining flow state is perfectly logical. Software Engineers keep rubber ducks for a reason.
1,771 karma · joined January 31, 2024
The UAE leaving in May'26 and now getting involved in the fight against the Houthis, while Qatar donated Bribe Force One to Trump, is quite telling as to how this is going re: the US though.
//The admin is going after the court on the basis of it prosecuting American allies. However, America loses NATO if they were to invade over this.
Do you believe that's not part of the design at this point?
NATO's founding multilateral principles and the USA have been leading parallel lives for quite some time. Trump already started a war in Iran without mandatory consultation, described them as a 'paper tiger' repeatedly. As the Wpost reported on 3rd April '22, Bolton claimed that Trump came very close to leaving NATO in 2018, and Russian President Vladimir Putin “was waiting for that.” [1]
In addition, the executive branch will take no notice of any 'binding' mandates or statutory notice periods, as already demonstrated in the 2020 withdrawal from the Open Skies Treaty.
Indeed, Congress literally had to enact 22 U.S.C. § 1928f (the Kaine-Rubio provision) in 2023 which expressly prohibits the president from exiting the North Atlantic Treaty without prior congressional authorization. But since any subsequent enforcement is dependent on legal resolution by the Supreme Court, it's not worth the paper it's printed on.
//but the US has a surprisingly poor record when it comes to fighting without allies
Agreed, but a great record at privatising their lands, mineral rights, and energy sources on the behalf of the GOP and aligned industry. You don't need to win a war if you can profit immensely off it and/or disenfranchise your domestic opponents.
// While I'm sure Trump did his usual thing with regards to the death of Harry Dunn, "war crimes" is on a somewhat different scale to "dangerous driving".
A false equivalence. Trump intervened in a case where the ultimate charge was life imprisonment of a CIA Agent based on their inability to drive on the right side of the road or stay off their phone.
The point was that if he'll personally intervene in such a contextually miniscule matter for an intelligence asset, then he can be assumed to intervene with significant force in the case of the ICC taking custody of an 'ally'.
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/03/04/bolton-sa...
Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA) and Cyber Resilience Act (CRA) which enforce mandatory governance and processes like resilience testing and cybersecurity lifecycle requirements.
GDPR & Data Protection frameworks which requires architecture to support CRUD operations on all PII, data minimization, customer-managed encryption architectures and so forth.
...and the anti-vibe code framework aka the EU AI Act, which requires human oversight and data quality controls.
This is completely aside from any industry specific engineering codes like in Finance where you have to adhere to things like ISO 20022 or iXBRL/ESEF standards, user accessibility mandates, and PCI Compliance mandates for things like Security Architecture over and above the CRA.
We already support it to some extent with licensed hardware codecs (HEVC, AVC, VVC etc...), licensed DRM like HDCP, and individual device licensing for audio technologies like Dolby Atmos, DTS:X and video technologies like Dolby Vision.
// If European countries banded together to direct their banks to offer services to the sanctioned ICC judges, for example, I think the US would back down on that - yes even under Trump, although there would be some bluster first.
That's a very good way to force the Hague Invasion Act to manifest in some form or another.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Service-Members%27_Pr...
Trump personally intervened when two US spooks were driving on the wrong side of the road in London, with the driver most likely on her phone, killed someone, and then fled the country.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Harry_Dunn
Compare this with a hispanic american who severely injured someone in similar circumstances. Extradition granted and was convicted for a 32 month prison sentence in the UK.
Capcom in 2016 should have been prosecuted imo - their attempt at "DRM" installed a kernel-level driver (capcom.sys) that intentionally disabled Supervisor Mode Execution Prevention (SMEP), allowing the kernel to execute code in user space...
The current Denuvo DRM to combat 'piracy' (always ALWAYS a pricing issue) is now encouraging both legal and high-seas users to use hypervisor-based bypasses to circumvent its many shortcomings. This is basically handing over the keys to your house in the AI age.
IANAL but apparently also opting out gives you less power in a mass-tort as your class will consist entirely of a contextually miniscule group.
"Sony's EULA, however, eliminates anyone from a potential class except for individuals who specifically opt out. If a person who opted out later chooses to pursue a claim, the class will, at most, consist of those persons who opted out. Nt enough people will opt out. The class is virtually guaranteed to be too small to make it worth any lawyer undertaking representation. So by opting out, you are registering yourself into a group that has no power and no meaning."
https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/kk36d/lawyers_thoug...
A 65" 4K TCL is about $400-500. Cheapest equivalent monitor is over $2k that I can find.
https://agroinformacion.com/en/agtechmachinery/john-deere-su...
Or Driving? BMW had to pivot over initial outrage, but in 2022, they launched a "Functions on Demand" program that required drivers to pay a $18 monthly or $180 annual subscription to unlock physical heated seats and heated steering wheels.
https://www.drive.com.au/news/bmw-admits-heated-seat-subscri...
This means you have to settle Disputes between you and Sony through a neutral private arbitrator rather than a judge or jury in a public courtroom, and you give up the right to participate in any class-action tort.
Unless something drastically changes in the US stock market, any publicly traded technology company of significant size is basically mandated to prostrate themselves to the altar of fiduciary responsibility to stockholders.
This quickly escalates to 'Why are you so nervous? You're sweating', 'Your speech patterns and eye dilation gives me probable cause to suspect you', or simply 'What's that I smell?'.
Everybody needs to buy at least one dashcam with motion record, and learn two simple statements:
"I don't answer questions" "Am I being detained"
Even if you're a shark of a criminal attorney, this is literally all you should ever be saying to an American law enforcement official.
In the US alone Amazon has received over $11 billion in cumulative taxpayer subsidies, and governments spend an average of nearly $43,000 per fulfillment center job created.
This is ramping up exponentially with regard to their data center rollout. In a single instance in rural Oregon, five AWS data centers will avoid $1 billion in property taxes.
This is completely aside from the qualitative damage done to traditional retail, shopping districts as a whole, SME innovation on consumer products, and distorting market competition beyond all recognition.
Amazon Germany/France/Spain won't ship a huge variety of items to Ireland and obviously won't have the same composition of goods as English speaking countries.
It's just about worth it for Prime Video and Deliveroo Silver, but the Irish Prime membership doesn't even support household or family sharing...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootk...
Sony have already introduced a change via a March 2026 firmware update to combat refund exploits and digital piracy (specifically targeting web-store refund loopholes on jailbroken or manipulated consoles) - but this again is firmware and in-memory address storage which is easily parsed and manipulated by Agentic AI.
Simply put, GTA V thinks its running on real hardware. Any sort of hardware based validation check (e.g. hitting hardware specific functions that are HLE in the emulator as more general API calls) will be patched nightly if the likes of the dolphin devlog in recent times is anything to go by. Online checks are even more easily bypassed, unless there's some sort of esoteric quantum or one-time pad style implementation which I can't foresee.
"CoPilot, download that PS5 emulator everyone is talking about and then set it up for me."
// Still, I’d imagine Rockstar easily being able to sue anyone in the US who tries to play this illegally
How on earth would they know? At the very least the gold master will be playable in perpetuity. If their netcode is anywhere near as bad as GTA V as well, every piece of DLC or online-service will be replicated on Private servers.
We already have a full eco-system and community-driven multiplayer modification framework for GTA V on PC in the form of FiveM. I'd imagine many talented people (and/or those with token capital) are chomping at the bit to replicate the same with GTA 6.
//Consoles subsidize hardware on the bet that they'll make more in the long run on game licenses,
The PlayStation 5 @ $499 became profitable to manufacture within its first year on the market.
https://www.pcmag.com/news/sony-says-499-ps5-no-longer-sells...
Sony Is also Making 59% More Revenue Per PlayStation User since Lockdown, with $230 more spent by the average active PlayStation user now than in 2018.
https://www.ign.com/articles/sony-is-making-59-more-revenue-...
If the introduction HP-65 was the first time an individual was capable of fully replicating the logical and cryptanalytic functionality of the WWII Turing-Welchman Bombe, then the roll-out of Agentic AI could be said to represent the first time an individual was capable of replicating the functionality and deliverables of the WRENs of Bletchley Park. Mindboggling.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WRENS
Even more impressive is the Astra-6 report recently. Given access to the Crypto Cellar Research archive of unbroken intercepts, the AI wrote its own custom Python and C++ software to simulate an Enigma machine and a mechanical Enigma Bombe.
https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intell...
The marriage bar forced female civil servants in Ireland to resign from their jobs when they got married and stopped married women from joining the permanent civil service.
We were far from the only country to have such mandates, and it was done so as an equivalence with the governance processes of the private sector. Divorce was only legalised in Ireland 1995.