I see these estimates fixating on the cost of US artillery.

I rarely see the estimates of damage inflicted on Iran, outside the anecdotes of destroyed power plants and water systems. Nobody seems interested in the horror we’ve unleashed on the Iranian population or the clear genocidal intent of the Israel/US military policy. It’s always and forever westerners wringing their hands over their own budgets and balance sheets.

We’ve deprecated a lot of the old TV/radio signal bandwidth in order to convert it to cellphone signal service.

But, on the flip side, digital antennae can hold a lot more information than the old analog signals. So now I’ve got a TV with a mini-antennae that gets 500 channels (virtually none of which I watch). My toddler son has figured out how to flip the channel to the continuous broadcast of Baby Einstein videos. And he periodically hijacks the TV for that purpose, when we leave the remote where he can reach.

So there’s at least one person I can name who likes the current state of affairs.

But the user wants a gui.

Firstly, plenty of Linux instances have GUI. I installed Mint precisely because I wanted to keep the Windows/Mac desktop experience I was familiar with. GUIs add latency, sure. But we’ve had smooth GUI experiences since Apple’s 1980s OS. This isn’t the primary load on the system.

Secondly, as the Windows OS tries to do more and more online interfacing, the bottleneck that used to be CPU or open Memory or even Graphics is increasingly internet latency. Even just going to the start menu means making calls out online. Querying your local file system has built in calls to OneDrive. Your system usage is being constantly polled and tracked and monitored as part of the Microsoft imitative to feed their AI platforms. And because all of these off-platform calls create external vulnerabilities, the (abhorrently designed) antivirus and firewall systems are constantly getting invoked to protect you from the online traffic you didn’t ask for.

It’s a black hole of bloatware.

Found out about this while watching “Halt and Catch Fire” (AMC’s effort to recreate the magic of Mad Men, but on the computer).

Doherty Threshold

In 1982 Walter J. Doherty and Ahrvind J. Thadani published, in the IBM Systems Journal, a research paper that set the requirement for computer response time to be 400 milliseconds, not 2,000 (2 seconds) which had been the previous standard. When a human being’s command was executed and returned an answer in under 400 milliseconds, it was deemed to exceed the Doherty threshold, and use of such applications were deemed to be “addicting” to users.

Less electable than Herschal Walker

Isn’t it more having difficulty focusing for extended periods?

According to OP, they can’t even make it to the end of a sentence. shrug

I’d say the phenomenon is more hyperfocusing long enough to figure out the point,

and then getting frustrated as the speaker takes a long time to illustrate that point.

I definitely get feeling annoyed when someone rambles. And I get tuning out when a work presentation or a school lecture drags on. And I get feeling frustrated when a conversation or discussion is sidelined by minutiae.

But the “Um, aktuly, I don’t need to listen to this because I already know the answer” shit is extremely toxic behavior that inevitably sets people up to fail. If you’ve ever had to deal with student drivers before, it’s the way someone responds moments before they bend a fender.

Getting Overwhelmed is entirely different from Knowing The Answer In Advance.

be proven correct

ADHD is having difficulty focusing.

Hubris is assuming your inability to stay focused is some kind of precog superpower.

Annoying to deal with kids who insist “I know what you were going to say” one minute and “You didn’t tell me that!” the next. Infuriating to deal with adults who double down with therapy language.

Reminds me of an old joke.

Would people cut trees down if they could scream?

Omg, yes, absolutely. That would be the only way to shut them up.

Actually, that’s not the truth. That’s propaganda from <insert person or group I don’t like>.

Epstein didn’t keep a low profile. He was everywhere, taking pictures and glad-handing other plutocrats and showing up at events.

Like, if anyone is on your short list, I would think it would be Elon Musk. Musk’s initial gambit was throwing a bunch of keggers at Stanford to make friends with the prior generation’s Silicon Valley failkids. That’s how he met Thiel and got into Paypal, made his first billion, and became an ahem Angel Investor for all sorts of glamour projects.

this was a CIA Mossad operation that got out of hand stupid and sloppy

Pretty much the history of intelligence services in a nutshell.

the rich pedophiles really REALLY started liking the setup

I do kinda wonder what the final shoe to drop was. But my money is more on Epstein extorting more money/freedom than his handlers believed he was entitled to.

The fact that Trump took over in 2017 and Epstein was arrested/murdered a few years later suggests - to me, at least - that he maybe called up his old friend and started making a few too many insistent demands. And it occurred to Trump (or someone in his immediate vicinity) that it would be easier to just arrest this guy and wack him than keep paying him off forever.

Opus 4.6 is genuinely pretty decent at programming now if you give it a good backbone to build off of.

Soup from a Stone.

Amazed they didn’t ask for 5-10 years of experience in AI coding.

we applauded nixon for making inroads with china.

YMMV. The John Birchers hated that shit.

the volume of such posts surged from just under 2,000 per day to more than 6,000

I refuse to believe Twitter only had 2,000 anti-islamic posts a day.

And decoupling only started to really happen last year.

We began decoupling when we took a militant policy against immigration. You can take that back to Clinton in the 90s or all the way back to Eisenhower in the 50s. But we’ve been adopting strains of isolationism straight back to the final days of WW2.

You could describe the Cold War as an enormous globalized decoupling event, which we tentatively recoiled from a few times before collapsing back into it.

assigns them a score if a citizen walks on the sidewalk correctly

Funny story about Jaywalking

The automobile lobby in the US took up the cause of labeling and scorning jaywalkers in the 1910s and early 1920s. In 1912, for instance, Popular Mechanics magazine reported that the term was current in Kansas City: “The city pedestrian who cares not for traffic regulations at street corners, but strays all over the street, crossing in the middle of the block, or attempting to save time by choosing a diagonal route across a street intersection instead of adhering to the regular crossing, is designated as a ‘jay walker,’ in Kansas City.”

In 1915, when New York City’s police commissioner Arthur Woods sought to apply the word “jaywalker” to anyone who crossed the street at mid-block, the New York Times protested, calling it “highly opprobrious” and “a truly shocking name.”

Originally in the US, the legal rule was that “all persons have an equal right in the highway, and that in exercising the right each shall take due care not to injure other users of the way”. In time, however, streets became the province of vehicular traffic, both practically and legally.

Anyway, enjoy your hyper-criminalized car culture hellscape while making spooky fingers about Evil Foreign Country.

You were not born when the decoupling began. You will not live to see it end.

I suppose the plan was to decouple the world from the dollar all the time.

I mean, depends on who you ask. But there’s definitely been a deliberately effort from within the Silicon Valley wing of the economy to force people into using Cryptocurrency as a legally-compulsory dollar alternative.

laughing from my desk job at a Fortune 500 O&G company

Eh. Depending on where those parts were sourced…