Yeah, a lot of the regulations are written by the industries they’re supposed to regulate.

I don’t understand the Scrum one. Scrum is also agile with short development cycles, and prioritizes communication with the product owners and stakeholders.

I’ve never heard of lean development, but not a fan of “lean manufacturing,” at least not the way it’s commonly implemented in the U.S. (using primarily temp workers so they can ramp up and down their workforce as needed; and it also exacerbates supply-chain problems).

Some of it has to do with CAFE standards using vehicle footprint to determine the target MPG. Some of it is because of better safety standards. Some of it is just because that’s what a certain portion of the market wants, and the profit margins on the large vehicles are higher, so they spend more money marketing them (creating more demand).

I live in Germany, … It also had a confederate flag in the back window.

WTF, I didn’t even know that was a thing outside the U.S. Do they claim “it’s our heritage not hate?”

That’s not true. Kei trucks have comparably low load and towing capacity. They have the same bed dimensions of the most common pickup truck bed size. Most people with trucks don’t hail around stone or heavy machinery though.

This seems like the most plausible explanation. Only other thing I can think of is they want to develop their own CoPilot (which I’m guessing isn’t available in China due to the U.S. AI restrictions?), and they’re just using their existing infrastructure to gather training data.

If you just want it for emergency purposes or irrigation, rain water harvesting can be fairly cheap and easy. Even a proper cistern, with a pump, and plumbed into your house is probably cheaper than whole-house off-grid solar. Probably want good filters for PFAS though.

I wonder what is the general use for the Mac Mini, MacBook Air, iMac, and MacBook Pro? People generally seem to do all the lightweight stuff like social media consumption on their phones; and desktops/laptops are used for the more heavy-weight stuff. The only reason I’ve ever used a Mac was for IOS development.

I was looking at notebooks at Walmart the other day, and I was amazed that they almost all had less or the same amount of RAM as my phone.

I think SSDs are also soldered to the mainboard on most apple products.

Lol, good catch.

Wary of the bill. Seems like every bill involving stuff like this is either designed to erode privacy or for regulatory capture.

Edit: spelling

Where I live, I would still need to pay for a VPN to use torrents. I’ve been banned from an ISP before for torrenting (thankfully, I had multiple ISPs available for me).

At the moment, I just “pay” legally because I get a few “free” streaming plans from my mobile provider and ISP. Occasionally, I just use a free streaming site if I really want to watch something that’s not available to me. Every once in a while, I try anonymous p2p such as Tribler or torrenting over I2P, but it’s still extremely slow, unfortunately. I’ve never used Usenet, but I think it’s about the same price as a VPN or seedbox would be?

I can understand capitalism resulting in slavery, because it wants to minimize labor costs, so slavery is the logical conclusion (also, slavery is still used by capitalists). I don’t see anarchy resulting in slavery, because slavery is inherently hierarchical. I also don’t see socialism resulting in slavery because the workers own their means of production/businesses/workplaces.

What a “man” or “woman” is changes over time and by culture. Some indigenous cultures have more than 2 genders. “Boys” become “men” at different ages, depending on the culture. It is a social construct (though I’d argue constructs are “real”).

It’s also trained on data people reasonably expected would be private (private github repos, Adobe creative cloud, etc). Even if it was just public data, it can still be dangerous. I.e. It could be possible to give an LLM a prompt like, “give me a list of climate activists, their addresses, and their employers” if it was trained on this data or was good at “browsing” on its own. That’s currently not possible due to the guardrails on most models, and I’m guessing they try to avoid training on personal data that’s public, but a government agency could make an LLM without these guardrails. That data could be public, but would take a person quite a bit of work to track down compared to the ease and efficiency of just asking an LLM.

I use LLMs just about every day. It’s better than web-search for certain things, and is useful for some coding tasks. I think they’re over-hyped by some people, but they are useful.

Most CEOs are also conmen and not any smarter. It’s mostly just a nepotism racket at the executive level.

AfD is far right. They are ethno-nationalists that believe only ethnic-Germans belong in Germany. A leader has defended the Nazi SS. They have discussed re-migrating German citizens out of Germany. How do you compromise with people who would like to carry out an ethnic cleansing? Only forcibly relocate Muslims for now, and wait until next year to expel the Jewry?

Most far-right politicians do not debate or operate politically in good-faith. IDK about the people who vote for them. I think it usually takes years of slow progress for people to move away from extremist positions, and it takes a change in their environment to start the process (new social circle, life experiences, media consumption habits, etc).

A lot of the “elites” (OpenAI board, Thiel, Andreessen, etc) are on the effective-accelerationism grift now. The idea is to disregard all negative effects of pursuing technological “progress,” because techno-capitalism will solve all problems. They support burning fossil fuels as fast as possible because that will enable “progress,” which will solve climate change (through geoengineering, presumably). I’ve seen some accelerationists write that it would be ok if AI destroys humanity, because it would be the next evolution of “intelligence.” I dunno if they’ve fallen for their own grift or not, but it’s obviously a very convenient belief for them.

Effective-accelerationism was first coined by Nick Land, who appears to be some kind of fascist.