LOGIC💣

Welcome to Trump’s America. “Well that fucking sucks for humanity,” might as well be the phrase that historians use to summarize his second term.

If you’ll recall, he tried to withdraw America from the WHO at the end of his first term, but failed due to losing the election before the request was accepted. The WHO’s recommendations didn’t match what Trump said during the COVID pandemic, and Trump will use any means at his disposal to quash dissent.

“Killings at sea” is a better phrase than some I’ve heard, but I wish they’d emphasize that we are using our military to murder civilians. They are non-military targets.

They were not charged with a crime. They had no chances to defend themselves. They received nothing remotely resembling due process. They were not convicted by a court, nor given the death penalty. We in the US do not execute people for possessing or transporting drugs.

Our military is simply murdering people.

What? They get to vote for that? When do I get to vote whether we let Qatar have a base on American soil?

In the main picture, about half of those videos use filters that do something based on the location of the person’s head. Unless they’ve changed the definition since I went to college, that would be classified as a type of computer vision, aka AI.

I have heard that the Tesla board is stacked with people who Elon personally chose. So that is why they constantly give him money and basically do not act anything like a public company. I suspect they are all stealing from the company’s shareholders.

So just firing Elon is not enough. The board needs to be completely replaced, and the new board needs to file the biggest lawsuit in history against Elon and the former board members. That’s really the bare minimum for Tesla to recover.

But most likely, the company simply needs to go under and let some other company buy their IP.

what would you do with an old dell server?

I thought this post was going to be a sea shanty.

Today, we have 0%. At the beginning of the Biden administration, we had 95%. The policies of that administration really caused us to lose practically the entire China market. - NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang

The article says that both Biden’s and later, Trump’s policies have decreased NVIDIA’s market share. He’s really phrasing it in a favorable way to Trump. Like, the same way, you could say the following, “At the beginning of the Obama administration, we had zero deaths from COVID. Now, we have millions.” Just skip over the part that is inconvenient for propaganda, right?

However, the loss of NVIDIA’s market share in China isn’t only attributed to the previous administration, since under President Trump, Team Green had to halt the sales of its H20 AI chip temporarily, and they were resumed only after the firm agreed on a ‘revenue sharing’ model with the Trump government. More importantly, with US-China trade relations being influenced, NVIDIA also suffered a significant setback from China, as domestic regulators and authorities began persuading Chinese Big Tech companies not to use Team Green’s AI chips.

Also, Jensen Huang’s statement betrays an insane naivete about China. Newsflash: China always tries to take international industry and make a domestic Chinese version. If you have a 95% share of something in China and you’re a foreign company, that simply means it’s related to some fresh technology, or that it’s virtually worthless. If it is believed to have value, China will have their own stuff before you know it, and don’t expect IP laws like patents or copyright to slow them down. They don’t give a shit about that stuff for foreign companies.

This reminds me of how police abuse any new tool they’re given.

Like how while trained dogs can actually sniff out drugs, when they’re given to police, they get retrained to simply alert whenever the police want them to, and essentially become a flimsy reason to let police violate your rights and search anybody they want to.

And the police suffer zero repercussions for their actions. If they don’t find drugs, there’s nobody who’s going to take them to court and force them to retrain their dogs or to disallow drug dogs from being used as reasonable suspicion.

A lot of herbivores will eat meat opportunistically, even if they’re not starving. It’s an easy way of getting quick nutrients.

A prominent Protestant cleric from Northern Ireland said Charles should abdicate if he prayed with the pope. Kyle Paisley, a reverend with the Free Presbyterian church and son of the late unionist politician Ian Paisley senior, told the BBC that the joint prayers would break the King’s oath to uphold the Protestant faith.

This sounds a lot like bullshit to me, but I don’t know what exact oath Charles swore. I’d expect that the head of a Christian church would be permitted to pray with anybody they choose, even an “enemy”.

Then you cannot rely on mail in ballots because sometimes mail gets lost. Really if you want to make sure that every vote must count, no exceptions, then you have to design a new method of absentee voting.

The moment that a ballot has left the voter’s possession, it needs to be tracked and kept securely like we do at my local polling place, or else there’s no way to count every vote, no exceptions. So we need something extra for absentee or mail-in ballots.

The line has to be drawn somewhere, is the problem.

The current line is that the vote was accepted by the time that the ballots were counted, and I don’t think you should move the line simply because it’s a close race.

It’s interesting. I’m going to ignore for a second which political party won, etc.

Her ballot was returned by the postal service, despite how she used a preprinted address label that was sent to her.

And had her vote been counted, it would have tied the election.

I’m inclined to say that her vote wasn’t cast in time, even though it wasn’t her fault. I’m sure there are a lot of people who had similar things happen and don’t end up having their vote counted. For example, road closures, transit cancellations, bad weather, lost mail. As long as it’s not a widespread problem, you have to draw the line somewhere and say that the ballot wasn’t cast in time.

Greta Thunberg said that the Israelis bound her and placed her next to an Israeli flag, and then kicked her whenever the flag touched her. So, they even mildly tortured an internationally famous person who was not Palestinian, and who they knew would be released and would share the story.

So, if they’re not afraid of doing that to Thunberg when they know it will be exposed, then nothing would surprise me about what they’re doing when they don’t think they’ll get caught.

Bad people can also be victims. They are not mutually exclusive ideas. In fact, it’s quite likely that bad people are disproportionately victims. They do something horrible to somebody else, and those people do something back. Sometimes, it’s simple justice or comeuppance, and other times, it’s escalating violence between two groups of detestable people.

Regardless of what you think about Palestinians, it’s trivial to see that the Israelis are bad guys in this conflict.

Usually, the world is shades of gray, like with Palestinians, so it’s sort of a relief when you can just point to somebody and say, “Well, those guys are clearly the bad guys, and anybody who supports their actions is also bad.”

O say does that star spangled banner yet wave,
O’er the land of the free,
And the home of the brave?

The answer is now emphatically, “No.”

You could argue that cryptography is nothing but a type of obfuscation. I was trying to explain things so that the very average person could understand it.

People don’t stop doing things just because you make it illegal. You even know this because you mentioned India. However people actually do stop when you make it nearly impossible.

Businesses are a separate use case. Phone companies already handle separate use cases, where they use very short memorable numbers for specific purposes. They just need something similar, whether it’s keeping phone numbers, or using something slightly different. Probably some sort of simple alias.

It’s the phone companies that need to innovate, and the solution isn’t very hard.

I intentionally was vague because there are many possible existing ways to accomplish each thing I said, and it is up to the phone company to innovate.

The simplest way to keep people from guessing phone numbers is to make them very long and sparse. If an autodialer had to dial 1000 invalid numbers before finding a valid number, it would make the endeavor that much harder. This is just a convenient example because the cryptography equivalent is harder to explain, but you could make contact info so hard to guess that it would be basically impossible.

Probably the easiest way to explain how to keep people from passing contact info is to imagine a two step process like facebook has. If I pass your facebook username to someone else, they don’t automatically become your friend. The cryptographic equivalent would involve a chain of trust, but again, harder to explain.