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Cake day: July 7th, 2023

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  • So are you contending that gay people should be openly supportive of Isreal, a country actively engaged in a genocide?

    You see the problem here, right? These aren’t black and white, one side good, one side bad situations.

    Iran is a terrible country. My partner and I would both be stoned to death there. But there are also queer people living in Iran, in spite of their intolerant regime, many of whom would likely suffer greatly if Isreal manages to force Iran into a war.

    Reality is more complicated than just assigning “good guys” and “bad guys”. That shit is for Star Wars.

    In this specific situation, there is no justification for what Isreal has done. Their attacks on Iran have been unprovoked, and in clear violation of international law. These must recent attacks, by Israel’s own admission, include non-military targets which makes them war crimes. Iran on the other hand has responded carefully and proportionally. Does it feel weird to be giving props to such a horrific regime for their behaviour? Absolutely. But it’s impossible not to recognize that in this specific situation they are being the adult in the room.

    Isreal is actively trying to provoke a war with Iran precisely because they believe it will turn international opinion in their favour, distract from the holocaust they are enacting in Gaza and shore up domestic support for their government. I’m not a fan of anyone involved in this situation, but I sure as hell am not going to express support for the country trying to start a war to distract from their genocide.


  • Fair enough, not your fault, but I want to strongly recommend that you update. As I stated in my previous comment, the title at the time that you posted seriously misrepresents the character and nature of the events being described. People are absolutely right to be aware the Trump is making moves to defy the judiciary, and that’s a five alarm fire if he’s doing it, but it’s precisely because of how serious those moves are that it’s really important not to cry wolf about them, even unintentionally.


  • Rule 4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.

    You are seriously misrepresenting the content of this article with that title change.

    The judge has ruled that while the specific foreign policy argument for detaining him does not pass legal scrutiny, the government is still within their rights to hold him for other reasons.

    That doesn’t mean his detention is just and fair; it means that his lawyers have more work to do. But the government gets to keep him in detention in the meantime. That sucks, but it doesn’t mean that the Trump administration is openly defying the court, which is what this title change is claiming.


  • Trump’s claim isn’t quite that tenuous. Check section (2):

    there is a rebellion or danger of a rebellion against the authority of the Government of the United States

    That’s the basis for this. They’re characterising Angelinos resisting ICE as “a rebellion against the authority of the Government of the United States”, since ICE is an extension of that same authority. It’s a weak claim, but not as completely buckwild as claiming a foreign invasion.



  • I’m here to say Portal as well, specifically because, once you really look for it, you realise that about 90% of the game is tutorial. Like, seriously, basically everything leading up to “The cake is a lie” is teaching you the skills you need for the final sequence. It’s a massive tutorial followed by one level of actual game, and it’s beautiful, precisely because you don’t even notice that the tutorial hasn’t ended.



  • It is vitally important to understand that throughout the “potato famine” Ireland was a major exporter of food to the rest of the UK.

    Irish farmers were growing all kinds of crops. Grains, carrots, cabbage, lettuce, etc, etc. All of these were sold to pay for the oppressive rents that they were forced to pay to English landlords who had stolen all of their land.

    The potatoes the Irish grew were for subsistence, because all of the rest of their crops went to market. Even when the potato crops failed, there was more than enough food for everyone in Ireland, if the English would simply suspend rent collection for a short while, until the crop failures had passed.

    Many motions to do so were put before parliament. All of them were rejected.

    The Irish famine was not caused by a disease. It was caused by the intentional cruelty of the English.




  • We’ve implemented netbird at my company, we’re pretty happy with it overall.

    The main drawback is that it has no way of handling multiple different accounts on the same machine, and they don’t seem to have any plans for ever really solving that. As long as you can live with that, it’s a good solution.

    Support is a mixed bag. Mostly just a slack server, kind of lacking in what I’d call enterprise level support. But development seems to be moving at a rapid pace, and they’re definitely in that “Small but eager” stage where everything happens quickly. I’ve reported bugs and had them fixed the same day.

    Everything is open source. Backend, clients, the whole bag. So if they ever try to enshittify, you can just take your ball and leave.

    Also, the security tools are really cool. Instead of writing out firewall rules by hand like Tailscale, they have a really nice, really simple GUI for setting up all your ACLs. I found it very intuitive.


  • I think the bigger impact here is how it brings the tax imbalance into the conversation. Look at how effective that argument has been at fuelling Albertan separatism. It’s especially effective on Conservatives, who are absolutely suckers for anything that suggests they’re getting a bad deal. “We pay too much for too little” is something that he could easily get most of California to rally around.

    By pushing this line, Newsom is driving a wedge between California and the US. I couldn’t possibly say whether he’s actually trying to fuel separatism, or simply gesturing at it as a threat, but that’s the implied danger here.



  • It does have a large initial cost. It also has a large ongoing cost. GPU time is really, really pricey.

    Even putting aside training and infrastructure, OpenAI still loses money on even their most expensive paid subscribers. While guys like Deepseek have shown ways of reducing those costs, they’re still not enough to make these models profitable to run at the kind of workloads they’re intended to handle, and attempts to reduce their fallibility make them even more expensive, because they basically just involve running the model multiple times over.



  • Assuming it cost Microsoft $0 dollars to provide their AI services (this is up there with "Assuming all of physics stops working), and every dollar they make from Copilot was pure profit, it would take Microsoft 384 years to recoup one year of investment in AI.

    And thats without even getting into the fact that in reality these services are so expensive to run that every time a customer uses them its a net loss to the provider.

    When Amazon started out, no one had heard of them. Everyone has heard of Microsoft. Everyone already uses Microsoft’s products. Everyone has heard about AI. It’s the only thing in tech that anyone is talking about. It’s hard to see how they could be doing more to market this. Same story with OpenAI, Facebook, Google, basically every player in this space.

    Even if they can solve the efficiency problems to the point where they can actually make a profit off of these things, there just isn’t enough interest. AI does plenty of things that are useful, but nothing that’s truly vital, and it needs to be vital to have any hope of making back the money that’s gone into it.

    At present, there simply is not a path to profitability that doesn’t rely on unicorn farts and pixie dust.



  • Yes, but the basic problem doesn’t change; you’re spending billions to make millions. And Deepseek’s approach only works because they’re able to essentially distill the output of less efficient models like Llama and GPT. So they haven’t actually solved the underlying technical issues, they’ve just found a way to break into the industry as a smaller player.

    At the end of the day, the problem is not that you can’t ever make something useful with transformer models; it’s that you cannot make that useful thing in a way that is cost effective. That’s especially a problem if you expect big companies like Microsoft or OpenAI to continue to offer these services at an affordable price. Yes, Copilot can help you code, but that’s worth Jack shit if the only way for Microsoft to recoup their investment is by charging $200 a month for it.