Went back and checked: Walter was 50 at the start of the series. The series spanned two years of in-universe time, and he died at 52.

Anyway, the point stands. Cooking meth is a valid shared interest for an older man and a younger man to bond over.

This is basically the plot of Breaking Bad.

Russia was always Turkey’s number one geopolitical antagonist; even in the best of times, a dangerous frenemy. Now, Turkey is probably the number one beneficiary of Putin’s botched war. Its main antagonist is defanged, maybe permanently, and it’s become a geopolitically indispensible regional power that the US and Europe desperately need to keep onside. It can dick around with stuff like hosting Putin visits, just to flaunt its own importance. Everything is coming up Erdogan.

Shutting down polluting businesses, relocating others away from where people live, and traffic congestion control are all valid approaches to air pollution control, used not only in China but around the world. Not sure why you need to put scare quotes around the word “solved”.

Chrono Trigger. It’s basically the evolutionary peak of the NES-era console RPG. Every aspect, including the story, art, game mechanics, and music, are best-in-class, with no obvious room for improvement given the technical constraints of the time.

Let’s all be grateful that Google handled GChat and its successors so incompetently. There was a window of time in which the world might have gotten hooked into using Google for instant messaging, which would have been a privacy disaster. Lucky, they fucked it up.

I know this upsets a lot of people, but the ruling isn’t without justification. $450B++ in government spending should not be accomplished through a legal loophole. (Quite aside from the fact that fiscal stimulus is the last thing the economy needs right now.)

for some fucking reason

The reason is that she expected Hillary to win and the satisfaction of the first female president appointing her replacement.

It’s a great example of how these justices aren’t as wise or smart as they seem to think they are.

Pull for scantily-clad farmhands.

This is a deliberately obtuse take by the Telegraph. Central banks are literally empowered to create or destroy money; the profits and losses they themselves make are accounting fictions.

I think it’s the other way round. AI writes, the human editor touches things up a little, and they poop out hundreds of articles a week.

Yeah, I tried for a long time to use DuckDuckGo, but honestly the results are worse than Google, even given the present day enshittified state of Google search. And it eventually just became too annoying.

The regulation not only puts obligations on users. Providers (which can include FOSS developers?) would have to seek approval for AI systems that touch on certain areas (e.g. vocational training), and providers of generative AI are liable to “design the model to prevent it from generating illegal content” and “publishing summaries of copyrighted data used for training”. The devil is in the details, and I’m not so sanguine about it being FOSS-friendly.

A lot of people can’t look past the gacha, and understandably so, but Hoyo’s games really have a remarkable amount of craft going into them, including top notch world design, battle system design (Genshin Impact still has negligible power creep, 3 years and 20+ characters later!), and character design.

The theorycrafting and lorecrafting surrounding Genshin (and to a lesser extent the new Honkai Star Rail) reminds me of Blizzard in its heyday. For that matter, so does the rule34…

Well, here’s my worry. From my understanding, the EU wants (say) foundation model builders to certify that their models meet certain criteria. That’s a nice idea in itself, but there’s a risk of this certification process being too burdensome for FOSS developers of foundation models. Worse still, would the FOSS projects end up being legally liable for downstream uses of their models? Don’t forget that, unlike proprietary software with their EULAs taking liability off developers, FOSS places no restrictions on how end users use the software (in fact, any such restrictions generally make it non-FOSS).

One major issue that concerns me about these regulations is whether free and open source AI projects will be left alone, or whether they’ll be liable to jumping through procedural hoops that individuals, or small volunteer teams, can’t possibly deal with. I have seen contradictory statements coming from different parties.

Regulations of this sort always bring the risk of entrenching big, deep-pocketed companies that can just shrug and deal with the rules, while smaller players get locked out. We have seen that happening in some of the previous EU tech regulations.

In the AI space, I think the major risk is not AI helping create disinformation, invading privacy, etc. Frankly, the genie is already out of the bottle on many of these fronts. The major worry, going forward, is AI models becoming monopolized by big companies, with FOSS alternatives being kept in a permanently inferior position by lack of resources plus ill-targeted regulations.

I run a self-hosted copy of Commafeed, which is a seamless and fast replacement (workalike and lookalike) for the late Google Reader. The main issue, really, is the long term decline of the blogosphere, which has severely decreased the number of interesting RSS feeds for me.

Public companies have a duty to protect value for their shareholders, among other obligations. This is actually not an unreasonable rule of thumb, because public companies have a multitude of owners (the shareholders) who can’t always be polled on what the company should do, but one thing they have in common is that they want their investment to make money.

Private companies can do whatever the owner wants. In Twitter’s case, the only other party with standing to sue Musk for destruction of shareholder value is the Saudi sovereign wealth fund (Kingdom Holdings), which declined to relinquish its stake when Musk took Twitter private. The Saudis probably don’t want to raise a public stink (i) it’s a loss of face, and (ii) they have more money than they know what to do with, anyway.

That’s very true. That’s why Musk was talking up his plans to turn Twitter into some kind of super-profitable super-app (a la WeChat)… but that’s definitely not materializing, because how many people would trust Musk’s Twitter enough to use it as a super-app?

I think Twitter will have to end up defaulting on those loans. The banks will be pissed off, but they’ll have to work out some kind of face-saving deal with Musk to write off the loans, because at that point only a masochist would want to run/own the company. But who knows.

A lot of stories like this have been coming out, but it’s not clear that they foretell the doom of Twitter as so many people are assuming (or anticipating).

Donald Trump’s various businesses showed long ago that large companies aren’t necessarily harmed by shitty practices like not paying bills. And mid-2010s Reddit showed that a social media platform, once established, can survive terrible technical deficiencies (remember when Reddit was crashing daily?), simply because people tend to be too lazy to move.

Most likely outcome is that Twitter continues to chug along, maybe with outages here and there, not losing much traction. Maybe it ekes out a small profit, which Musk can use to salve his ego.