People want to be followed. Maybe there are times when the politician sees the future before the people and needs to lead. But, right now it seems like both major US political parties are stuck in the past.
What Mandami is doing is listening, not leading. That's why he's popular. He has some ideas, like city-run grocery stores. They're probably good ideas. However, what's making him really popular is doing things like making sure the streets were cleared after the snowstorms and filling potholes. That's not leadership. That's simply listening to the voters and fixing the priority issues.
Aims to. As in, has never once reached. So, you're suggesting that in a state that has never happened, but theoretically could happen, then it's OK to have a for-profit business.
That's an "if" big enough to drive a train through.
There has never been a classless society where everyone's basic needs are met. So, pretending that that's the starting point for this hypothetical is a sign you're pretty desperate.
That's really amazing. Before I got my 1080 I remember how having a video card that was just 5 years out of date meant many new games were completely unplayable. I wonder if I can hold out long enough for the next batch of AMD cards to come out. I'm on Linux these days and would really prefer to buy an AMD card, but I don't want to buy a medium spec card, and the last high-spec card AMD released was the 7900 type cards from 3.5 years ago. I wouldn't want to replace my 10 year old card with one that's 3.5 years old. That seems pointless.
Is it surviving? I'm on a 1080 and there aren't many games I can't play, but I'm finally having to make noticeable sacrifices in quality to get a decent frame rate. I can still run games at 1440p though. But, for a 10 year old card, it's amazing what it can do.
It's unbelievable how well that one line of cards is holding up. I'm on a 1080, no Ti. Still runs most games on decent quality settings at 1440p and 60+ fps.
And, arguably, what they're doing with LLMs isn't even infringing copyright. If I look at a copyrighted picture, learn from it, then paint my own impression of it, my painting shouldn't be infringing the copyright. Do that with an LLM instead of a brain and it's a similar argument.
The dual standard is really the issue. Meta downloaded terabytes of books from LibGen and loaded them into its model. If that's not infringing copyright, then anybody should be able to download a book from LibGen and read it without worrying about copyright infringement because they're just loading them into their brains. But, I have a feeling that Meta will get away with it as fair use, but individual people will still be nailed for "copyright infringement" for loading media into their brains in exactly the same way.
Elephants are megaherbivores. They eat up to 300 kilograms (5% to 10% of their body weight) of food each day. To meet their needs, they require 50,000 to 70,000 calories daily.
Even if they're eating the cheapest plants you can buy that they can digest, that will still probably be hundreds of dollars per day.
I'm considering getting one. I currently have a nearly silent computer working as a HTPC but I can't play games on it. I can get around that with Steam Link, but that isn't ideal. So, it would be an upgrade that would let me play games on my living room TV without needing to tie up the gaming computer.
The other thing it looks ideal for is a travel computer. Gaming laptops suck. Often they're absurdly expensive. When they're decently powerful, they're almost always obscenely loud. That fan whine really bothers me. Plus, they almost always have major Linux compatibility issues. The current laptop I'm using with Linux has weird driver quirks. Like, for example, to re-enable WiFi after it goes to sleep I need to wake it up from sleep, turn on airplane mode and then turn it off again. Only then will the WiFi work again. And getting an external monitor to work after sleep... ugh.
Also, I think it's easy to underestimate the value of what is effectively a Linux gaming console. I'm almost exclusively a PC gamer these days, but one thing I always appreciated about consoles is that you never had to ask "will this game run well on my console?" 99.9% of the time, if a game was released for a console, it was optimized for that console. Even when a game was multi-platform like say FIFA, each console got a build that was as good as possible for that console. For PC games, I think that means most developers will have a Gabecube and ensure all their games run as well as possible on it. The fact that it's Linux-first is also important to me. It means any drivers or software updates will be tested and optimized on Linux. It won't be an afterthought like it is most of the time.
So, this machine is nearly silent, runs Linux, and plays most of the games in my Steam library. It's expensive, but maybe it's worth it?
He was a definite hero in releasing what he discovered. He blew the whistle on things that the government was doing that it had no right to do, and that people had a right to know about. He risked his life and freedom to do it, and is paying for that by having to live in exile in Russia.
The "but" is that at times he has speculated on things that he doesn't have any direct knowledge of.
For example, what he revealed in the PRISM leaks is that the US was tapping into submarine cables owned by companies like Google and getting the data that was going between various Google datacenters unencrypted.
That showed up in the PRISM leaks as this slide:
Snowden claimed that Google was cooperating with the NSA, when that slide shows what was really happening. The NSA learned how Google's architecture worked, found a vulnerability, and exploited it without Google's knowledge. Google reacted to the PRISM revelations by putting in a huge effort to encrypt data everywhere, in transit and at rest.
Until then they had thought that the data was safe. The places inside the Google network where the data was unencrypted were protected by significant physical security. They didn't think anybody could get in, at least not get in undetected. But, their threat model didn't include the US government treating them the way they'd treat an enemy country.
Google did "cooperate" with the US government, in that when it received a legal order for someone's data they complied with that legal order. They even set up systems to make that process seamless. Things like the FISA court were a bit of a joke, so it was really easy for the government to come up with a legal order that Google release the data. But, Google still did require that the government go through the motions of getting a court to sign off on the orders. I think that's why they were so surprised that the government didn't think that was enough and had tapped into their backbone traffic.
If you look at what actual full cooperation with the government looks like, look at the revelations of Mark Klein. He was also a heroic whistleblower. What he showed was that AT&T set aside a special room in one of their facilities where AT&T would copy all the Internet traffic hitting their network so that the NSA could sift through it as they wished. There was no need for a diagram of where AT&T added or removed encryption because AT&T was just handing it to them unencrypted.
So, yeah. He is a hero for what he did. But, he was irresponsible for mixing the things he knew for a fact with his own personal speculation on them, because some of his speculations were wrong.
These are annoying in the context of a job interview. But, these are definitely interesting questions to think about. How much does an elephant eat? How much space do they need? What temperature is too cold for one? Do they need to be around other elephants, or is a loving human enough? What are the laws about privately owning an elephant? I know they can make trumpeting noises, but do they do that often? Would they annoy neighbours with their noises?
If this works, it's a flex of the king's power. The other person is bankrupted and the elephant is cared for until that happens.
On the other hand, this could also show that the king has lost a power struggle. Imagine if that lesser noble announced to the court that the king had bestowed on him a great gift, and that all the members of the court were welcome to come to the noble's estate and leave gifts for the king's elephant.
If the nobles did that, it would be a sign to the king that the court was sick of his bullshit and his rule might be in trouble. Just like he couldn't just order a noble to be punished outright and had to gift them a white elephant instead, the king presumably also couldn't forbid his court from giving gifts to this noble to help care for the elephant.
To be fair, Google has been fighting a war against SEO and spam basically since it was started.
I don't think they intentionally degraded their search engine. I think they just diverted resources away from fighting spam and SEO and instead dedicated those resources to AI stuff. Intentionally degrading their search results would require work. They'd have to convince their high-paid employees that for some reason they should make the results worse. But, just letting the stuff rot naturally as SEOs kept up their attacks, that's free.
No, private property is things like a coat and shoes.
If someone owns an industrial lemon juicer, that's part of the means of production, and must be collectively owned. Sorry Jenny, you can't have a lemonade stand.
In fact, Jenny's parents are allowed to own a small lemon juicer as part of their personal property. But, if Jenny tries to use that juicer for her lemonade stand and charges money for her lemonade, that juicer is now part of the means of production (as are the lemons) and she's now operating an illegal enterprise.
The USSR and other supposedly "communist" governments all eventually allowed some capitalism in their economies, because 100% pure communism simply didn't work.
