Who are the skeletons fighting? Do we need to do well intentioned symbolic support gestures on social media?

There are two issues with human rights.

One is selective enforcement. There are a long list of countries with abysmal human rights records, but it’s too strategically convenient or economically essential to look the other way. Whrn was the last time they made a fuss about Jamal Khashoggi? Human rights only gets invoked when sabre-rattling is useful, not as a solid and consistent moral framework.

The other is that it’s a “luxury product”. Can every country support a modern human-rights model, or does it require a certain level of economic and political stability? It’s hard to maintain rule of law amid active insurgency, or if you can’t even deploy the bureaucratic state. Once you’ve gotten past that threshold, will both leaders and the broader population be eager to switch from the system that got them where they are? You’ve got to convince people that being able to write an anti-government op-ed is more important than security, or the price of eggs. This is a long term soft sell: berating countries for not measuring up to Western standards isn’t going to get them to make that choice any faster.

I figured that when the DOGE fiasco imploded, he would scream "treason’ and make Musk the fall guy to placate people. Wouldn’t roll back anything but a few symbolic changes, but it would let him look the hero.

But what data would it be?

Part of the “gobble all the data” perspective is that you need a broad corpus to be meaningfully useful. Not many people are going to give a $892 billion market cap when your model is a genius about a handful of narrow subjects that you could get deep volunteer support on.

OTOH maybe there’s probably a sane business in narrow siloed (cheap and efficient and more bounded expectations) AI products: the reinvention of the “expert system” with clear guardrails, the image generator that only does seaside background landscapes but can’t generate a cat to save its life, the LLM that’s a prettified version of a knowledgebase search and NOTHING MORE

Do cults inherit well?

The leadership of the DPRK transitioned across generations, but there was plenty of institutional alignment and wheel greasing.

Trump will be trying to negotiate with the reaper for six months after he’s dead. I can’t imagine he considers his mortality, let alone in the context of anything that has to survive after his departure. There will be a free for all to grab his mantle.

I wonder what impact a truly high end CPU being open would have on the fab industry.

Right now, there’s a lot of manufacturing secret sauce; if you took an Intel design, it would require significant rework to perform well on Samsung or TSMC process.

Fab owners would have a vested competitive interest to customize the design to perform better on their tooling.

Conversely, buyers might develop a renewed interest in second-sourcing-- if you can take your chip to any fab, you have more control over your supply chain.

The Atari XL seriea computers cut a nice space between retro and futuristic.

They’re much sleeker looking than their 400/800 predecessors, as well as the Apple II and the breadbin VIC 20/64/C16. Only the 64C and Plus/4 really look similarly minaturized and not-in-need-of-a-big-wristrest-for-comfortable-typing.

The use of metal and smoked plastic trim gives it a premium appearance. The 1200XL even hides the cartridge slot on the side to avoid anyone nistaking it for a mere console…

This reincarnation loop definitely needs roguelike elements. Every playthrought is just born-crusehed by capitalism-die.

Not to mention I bent all the pins on my Cyrix MII ttying to get it in that stupid socket.

I’ve seen a lot of cheap little “appliance” machines-- fanless devices meant to be network routers, NAS devices, signage controllers advertised as running on like 4th and 5th generation laptop CPUs.

As someone who has to deal with PCI compliance issues, there’s plenty of noob mistakes, out-of-date thinking and outright “let’s log this data for debugging purposes even though if any regulator found out they’d nuke us from orbit.”

There are valid questions, many of which revolve around how and why it’s used.

Some systems have brain damaged approaches to diagnostics/logging, license enforcement, or remote service/update systems that create security holes but are not intentionally malicious.

Security is hard and we should remember Hanlon’s Razor.

I understand pre-OS X Macintoshes used colons.

Are you using a shell replacement for the XP style titlebars and taskbar?

Calmira was pretty impressive for a taskbar-based shell, but I don’t recall doing a titlebar swap.

I tried custom laser engraving caps, some of my favourites:

‘Attack 0’ and ‘Attack 1’, actual key legends on some '80s Casio home computer

‘Run Stop’ from Commodre machines

The “diagonal half full box” inverse video key from Atari XL/XE keyboards.

I suspect the various Jolly Roger designs from either fictional or real pirates would work well. Or various “spell type” or “faction” logos from games.

I think the last game I bought for my 386 was Nomad. ISTR having to make space since it required like 9Mb of the 40Mb drive.

30-polygon-per-ship level 3-D space RPG with limited combat sequences. I think I played it wrong because I seemed to walk largely linearly through the story and defeat the Big Bad without seeing more than 1/10 of the galaxy

A forced sale guarantees ByteDance gets a fire sale price. If there’s any way forward that allows them to sell not-under-duress, there’s a chance for far more upside.

That works even for pure economics game theory, aside from wanting to continue in what they built on principle/commitment/interest in the project.

Would Zuck give up Facebook for the right price? Would he give it up for a highly discounted price of a rush sale?

I think those are Hungarian banknotes.

My idea was a worm that just torrents random shit and dumps it on your desktop like a cat bringing you a dead bat with “I broughted you a pwesent ^w” energy.

It makes shopping for laptops either super-easy or super-hard.

I can either get a Thinkpad, or try to find the one or two HP and Dell business laptops with one… and we all know how it ends (looks at stack of X230t, E585, and new L13)