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Cake day: July 21st, 2023

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  • Ttereal tellers is ttattElonkows nothing about AI. Anyone involved in the field knows all of the big names because we read their papers, listen to their lectures, and talk about their models. He then goes on to be dismissive of work he’s not even close to understanding. It’s blatant ignorance, and Elon is used to just being able to power through his ignorance by either BSing his way past people who know no more than him or firing anyone who is actually qualified and as a result disagrees with him.


  • At some point, sound mixing just went to shit. My partner was in the industry working in post-production and agrees with me. The sfx are loud and the dialogue is not - thus all of the smart tvs and settop devices supporting features like “Dialogue Boost.”

    I used to notice it a lot with poorly managed concerts - the singer’s mic would get drowned out by the instruments. I guess all the people who were responsible for that moved to LA.

    But now I have a soundbar and two HomePods as speakers, and still turn on subs. And that might have something to do with the number of concerts.



  • Because they make more money than they’re paying in fines. They also may be making more money violating laws than they’re paying in fines, but that’s how they’ll have to determine how they conduct business.

    Basically - and this is mostly for tech but I suspect it applies to other markets - the US is the single largest market. “Europe” is second, depending on how you want to define it, but even just the EU is a very big market. China is big and growing, and most companies are trying their best to keep growth there. Asia collectively could be huge, but the attempts to collectivize Asia have not worked out well, historically speaking.

    But the takeaway is that a company will exit s market if it’s losing money, generally speaking. No one is sacrificing earnings to make sure Belgians have access to the latest phones out of the goodness of their hearts.



  • Can you do a text search and find the word “conviction” in the amendment?

    Here’s the text:

    No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may, by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.

    And, again, this has all gone through Congress. Trump did it. Everyone knows it. Even the Trumpists know it.


  • I want to be clear. I do not blame Ghana’s people for these laws. I do not blame Africans for the many nations that have enacted similar laws.

    Christian church organizations, acting under the rubric of evangelical outreach or even more offensively charitable giving have backed religious and political leaders with LGBT-phobic agendas up to and including execution for being gay. Of course they’re going to do it - they get power and money for doing so.

    The US needs to extend the Logan Act to apply to these situations and make the crime a felony that can lead to the arrest of the people involved and the legal dissolution of the organizations.



  • The House select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol outlined 17 specific findings on Monday in the executive summary of its final report. Here are the findings, with additional context.

    1. Beginning election night and continuing through Jan. 6 and thereafter, Donald Trump purposely disseminated false allegations of fraud related to the 2020 presidential election in order to aid his effort to overturn the election and for purposes of soliciting contributions. These false claims provoked his supporters to violence on Jan. 6.

    Annotation: This reflects the committee’s finding that Mr. Trump’s repeated false claims that the election was rigged had both a political and financial motive. During its second hearing, the panel introduced evidence that Trump supporters donated nearly $100 million to Mr. Trump’s so-called Election Defense Fund but that the money flowed instead into a super PAC the president had created. It was not just “the big lie,” the committee said. It was also “the big rip-off.”

    1. Knowing that he and his supporters had lost dozens of election lawsuits, and despite his own senior advisers refuting his election fraud claims and urging him to concede his election loss, Donald Trump refused to accept the lawful result of the 2020 election. Rather than honor his constitutional obligation to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed,” President Trump instead plotted to overturn the election outcome.

    Annotation: Mr. Trump and his allies filed more than 60 lawsuits challenging the results of the election and lost all but one of them. Many of the suits, the committee determined, were brought even after some of Mr. Trump’s closest aides — including his campaign manager, Bill Stepien, and his attorney general, William P. Barr — told him that there was no fraud that could have changed the outcome of the race.

    1. Despite knowing that such an action would be illegal, and that no state had or would submit an altered electoral slate, Donald Trump corruptly pressured Vice President Mike Pence to refuse to count electoral votes during Congress’s joint session on Jan. 6.

  • Fascism. It’s fascism.

    Economic and social collapse dislocates a lot of people. It dislocates people who think they shouldn’t be dislocated, because they played by the rules. They go to church, they had a job, they’re patriotic to their best understanding of the word.

    Then, in their minds, something must have changed. It might be the immigrants, or the Jews, or the gays, or weirdly drag queens for some reason this time around. Then someone comes along who validates them as victims and promises a return to their historical glory days.

    The last paroxysm is the election or ascendency of a far right populist who elevates that narrative. They promise to restore national pride and return to traditional values, and to return the nation to its roots which had made it strong and put them on top.

    It’s happened multiple times around the world, and there are a lot of books and articles on how and why it happens.






  • Oh, he could actually get in trouble for this one. He’s sort of tanked a big part of his reputation already through the Twitter disaster, the WV market leveling, the questions about reliability, robustness, and FSD, and the rolling disaster that is Cybertruck.

    I don’t mean a “go to jail for treason” kind of trouble. I mean “Pay $500M and turn over full control of the government part of your network to the DoD” kind of trouble.

    SpaceX lives almost entirely by eating the government cheese, right? They’re launching our satellites and I think they’re taking research funding. I read an article the other day that they’re losing a significant amount on every new private customer they add to the network.

    I wonder how much of that bleeding is payed for by the governments paying to use their services, or outright bribe them.





  • Sure, unless there was a correlation between the technologies deployed by the individual companies and their vulnerabilities.

    I’m not saying there is in this case, but it’s a phenomenon we see all the time in systems ranging from technological to immunological. When network (social, computer, whatever) connect systems with correlated vulnerabilities, there can be cascading failures that do not spread outside those networks. It’s been so long (over 30 years) since I’ve even thought about RF and related systems that I have no idea what specific or proprietary technologies the major companies have, so I just shrugged it off as I was unaffected, and penciled in that there may have been a correlation with solar activity.