Handcuffs can leave signs, but I’m not sure how examining a body could indicate that the person had been blindfolded. Were the bodies returned with blindfolds on?

I don’t understand what he was hoping to gain. Intercepting the flotilla without anyone getting hurt once it got close to Israel was well within Israel’s naval capabilities and received relatively little news coverage because everyone knew from the start that it would happen. Playing around with drones offended the countries that the flotilla was near when it happened, got a lot of unfavorable news coverage because it is such a weird thing to do, and likely wouldn’t have stopped the flotilla even if it had burned down several ships.

Do you imagine that the Russian people could possibly change their situation by voting?

I don’t trust Trump about this, but I trust Venezuela about as much as I trust Trump.

I wonder how they managed to target these guys after previous attacks, both by Israel and the USA, appeared to be largely ineffective. Was it a serendipitous opportunity or does it reflect progress on establishing an intelligence network in Yemen?

My Windows is more like “I am scheduling the restart. Pray I don’t schedule it any sooner.”

I’d be fine with this sort of thing if the people living in the new developments weren’t allowed to register cars. Otherwise they’re using a public resource without contributing their share.

I’m not saying that ice cream is healthier than a normal dinner, just that if I really crave something sweet then the cost to my health of eating it periodically is actually quite low, whereas the cost of some other desserts (baked sweets are often the worst offenders) is relatively high. That means that a lot can be gained simply by replacing one dessert with a different, equally tasty dessert. Hence my ice cream advocacy.

Your points are valid, but I think that building AI has benefits beyond simply enabling people to use that AI. It advances the state of the art and makes even more powerful AI possible. Still, it would be good to know about the amortized cost per query of building the AI in addition to the cost of running it.

I don’t see why this argument works better against AI than it does against microwaves. Those are used hundreds of millions of times a day too.

With regard to sugar: when I started counting calories I discovered that the actual amounts of calories in certain foods were not what I intuitively assumed. Some foods turned out to be much less unhealthy than I thought. For example, I can eat almost three pints of ice cream a day and not gain weight (as long as I don’t eat anything else). So sometimes instead of eating a normal dinner, I want to eat a whole pint of ice cream and I can do so guilt-free.

Likewise, I use both AI and a microwave, my energy use from AI in a day is apparently less than the energy I use to reheat a cup of tea, so the conclusion that I can use AI however much I want to without significantly affecting my environmental impact is the correct one.

I know people whose grants have been put on hold and these people don’t even know if they have health insurance anymore, since grant money pays for that too. This is wild.

What a bizarre story. Toronto voters elect a city government in favor of bike lanes, then for some reason the premier of Ontario decides he knows what Toronto needs better than Toronto voters do, and now a judge decides that removing bike lanes is somehow unconstitutional because apparently the constitution is detailed enough to specify things like that. (Does this mean that it’s unconstitutional to have any roads without bike lanes, or is it just unconstitutional to remove existing bike lanes?) I drive, bike lanes piss me off, but they’re a local matter that should be decided by the local government.

I get permitting these blogs as part of a commitment to avoid censorship - someone with non-mainstream but far less extreme opinions can look at them and say “If Substack doesn’t censor even these guys, it definitely won’t censor me.” With that said, I’m still surprised that Substack apparently doesn’t manually curate its push notifications.

I’m not necessarily supportive of Thiel - he does some things that I oppose, and also some things that I think are silly. He’s not a very likeable man overall. I’m supportive of transhumanism. The substance of this article is merely that:

Peter Thiel hesitated when asked if he “would prefer the human race to endure.”

The article doesn’t even say what his reply ultimately was, but the implication is that even considering that a transhuman future would be better is somehow horrifying, and that’s the implication I’m surprised to see supported here.

Lemmy as a whole is more seems to attract neo-Luddites but I’m still surprised to see someone so against transhumanism in c/technology.

That man has the squarest jaw I have ever seen.

“Defending the free world alongside a European people is apparently already National Socialism for Hans Neuhoff. Neuhoff’s actions correspond to those of members of Putin’s party United Russia,” Schramm responded to accusations.

Quite a comeback.

So this is a matter of religion for you? Which religion is that, and which side are you on?

Are there currently any government contracts put at risk by this? I didn’t think that the feds were major spenders on AI. And is Trump aware that Musk is currently the one man trying to provide the sort of AI that Trump wants?

the 20th century

Yes, that’s why I quoted the part where he also says it’s the worst in the last 50 years.