Meta should probably never be blamed for innovating when all they do is steal ideas from potential competitors and crudely duct tape them onto existing products. Instagram was once a useful, good app and now it’s 80% features from Snapchat and TikTok and you maybe see a friend’s post a week late.

Multiple electronics stores caught on fire. I doubt Mossad found a specific box that said “To: terrorists” on it and only rigged those pagers. They just don’t care about killing civilians.

America was founded by a tobacco company. The Virginia Company had the first successful settlement. And then some obnoxious cultists got kicked out of England joined them.

Because the U.S. government gave them $6.6 billion to do it under the CHIPS Act: https://www.reuters.com/technology/tsmc-wins-66-bln-us-subsidy-arizona-chip-production-2024-04-08/

With TSMC, it’s insurance against China invading Taiwan but Intel (and probably everyone else) got a load of subsidies too. After the chip shortage during the pandemic and Russia invading Ukraine, chip production became a national security issue.

It’s because every Sunday, he plays golf at whatever of his golf clubs is nearest to his last event. The secret service begged him not to do that.

When Obama played golf, he played on courses on military bases that are secure by design.

I usually just go camping and ignore it all. Nothing that happens before like October 15th is that important.

I didn’t know who this person was two weeks ago and I still don’t want to know. We can just all ignore her forever if we want.

Edit: to be clear, I said I don’t want to know who she is. Do not tell me who this person is. I don’t care if she’s challenging Nancy Reagan for the throat GOAT title. Not interested.

She has some sort of book coming out and is set to do dozens of interviews but I’m sure they’ll be extremely controlled publicity interviews where she just says cliches.

I had my suspicions before but the moment I realized for certain Elon Musk couldn’t run a software company was when he judged people by lines of code written.

You make a good point about using it for documentation and learning. That’s a pretty good use case. I just wouldn’t want young developers to use it for code completion any more than I’d want college sophomores to use it for writing essays. Professors don’t have you write essays because they like reading essays. Sometimes, doing a task manually is the point of the assignment.

If I was still in a senior dev position, I’d ban AI code assistants for anyone with less than around 10 years experience. It’s a time saver if you can read code almost as fluently as you can read your own native language but even besides the A.I. code introducing bugs, it’s often not the most efficient way. It’s only useful if you can tell that at a glance and reject its suggestions as much as you accept them.

Which, honestly, is how I was when I was first starting out as a developer. I thought I was hot shit and contributing and I was taking half a day to do tasks an experienced developer could do in minutes. Generative AI is a new developer: irrationally confident, not actually saving time, and rarely doing things the best way.

Everyone mad about wolves is probably also mad that they have a feral pig issue or has hit a deer with his truck, which causes a lot more damage than a squirrel.

Or just the price of gas, the only price posted on billboards, and groceries, which we all buy. They’re also, unfortunately, amongst the most volatile (for seasonal, geopolitical, or whatever reason). But it’s the prices the average person tracks and the news reports the 3 stock big stock market indices with a one-sentence summary as if every stock moved up or down for the same reason.

I’m not judging here. Like, food, power, and retirement account (if they have one) should be what the average voter notices. It’s just unfortunate that it’s also basically fool’s gold for long term national policy makers. The weather can change the price of your favorite food more than the president.

Probably Janelle Monae - Archandroid. I love Afrofutrist funk like (Parliament-Funkadelic). It appeals to my 2 identities as a space nerd and the funkiest of the funky. Archandroid was sort of the peak of her sticking close to that genre. (Her three early works called the Metropolis Saga — Metropolis, an EP, Archandroid, and The Electric Lady — form a whole story.) The albums have multiple Suites like classical works so the themes change even within the albums. But Archandroid is my favorite part. And you can totally nerd out on it forever and still find new things.

Another reason to legalize weed at the federal level. There’d be a lot more people in the application pool than the world’s most naïve Utahns if everyone weren’t required to be a complete square their whole lives.

For Robert Kennedy, one assumes, since they had to learn the Earth is flat while rehearsing for the “mission.”

/s The earth is obviously a dodecahedron. Otherwise, water would reflect things like a funhouse mirror.

There’s some bridges where you can follow Twitter or Mastodon/BlueSky accounts (or probably anyone) on your preferred service. You can’t interact, obviously, but if you’re just following reporters for news or whatever, you can get a read-only type feed.

CNBC being rated as left-center is one of the funnier of these.

Unspent campaign money is a whole thing but it usually gets transferred to a future campaign, other candidates, state/local/national party, or used to create a “Leadership PAC,” which is like a slush fund to donate to peers. A more honest example of a Leadership PAC might be someone with unusual star power (like AOC) raising a shitload of money in a safe seat and so using funds to donate to progressive candidates in tougher races. A shadier example might be the Speaker of the House using their fundraising ability to let people know that if they expect a donation, he or she expects their vote on a bill. And I’m sure you can imagine a thousand undeniably corrupt ways to use a Leadership PAC.

They could also refund donors or donate to a real charity if they’re done with politics or trying to stay in donors’ good graces for the next try. But that’s not what ambitious politicians (basically all of them) typically do.

But unless a candidate drops out or is in a safe seat, they really do try to spend every dollar that comes in almost as it comes in. There’s a very good likelihood a candidate ends up in the red at the end of the campaign and has to solicit donations even after the race is over to pay vendors, staff, etc.

I don’t think it’s about abortion. I think they decided allowing a transgender teen to exist is “dismembering children” even if surgery for trans teens barely ever happens IRL. If they were actually worried about gender affirming surgery for minors, they’d want to ban nose jobs and fake tits too. So, it’s just part of the general trans moral panic amongst conservatives and “Won’t someone please think of the children?” bullshit that always accompanies moral panics even if children aren’t involved.

I’m cis but my understanding is that even trans adults find getting access to gender affirming healthcare is a huge, expensive ordeal. Philosophy Tube had a good video on her experience in the UK and I sincerely doubt it’s any easier in America’s labyrinthian, absurdly expensive non-system. It’s definitely not like parents are swinging by the urgent care to get their 13 year-olds free bottom surgery.