I signed it but had the same assumption that it wouldn’t pass with 400k signatures over the first 362 days. But it did! The graph the last three days must look vertical.

Anyone who’s eligible and wants to sign it can still do so today, Saturday 17th. To show the popular support.

The marketing documents provided with the photo say there is “no regulatory oversight — U.S.D.A. confirmed in writing.” It’s not clear what the company means by that. A spokesman for the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Seth W. Christensen, said he was not able to confirm whether the agency had corresponded with Haemanthus. “U.S.D.A. does regulate vet diagnostics,” including blood testing, Mr. Christensen said.

Ah, yes, medicine. A field without regulations. Hope they have some non-scammers in the family that can take care of the kids.

I’ve never looked into how they do the phrenology but was immediately struck by the “female” skull having larger forehead. So they say women are big brained?

I work with IT at a STEM company, but the typical education is chemistry. People are grounded in measurements and real world practicality, but sci fi is also rather popular.

Some people got hype last year, but most people was more in “new stuff, will this mess with my work flow?” mode. After getting and evaluating tools, some small uses were identified, mostly first draft of meeting minutes. Trying for themselves seems to have quelled the hype. Now there is mostly concern for how AI processes in surrounding companies will affect our products and sales.

So from that small measurement it feels like the hype is breaking. We have a sane and reality based management though, and that helps.

Hm, I don’t believe in biblical apocalypse stuff, but if I did I wouldn’t think that the climate activist gambling her life to get supplies to the starving population in Gaza is the anti-christ.

I think a power hungry, wannabe vampire, billionaire with companies named after corrupting artifacts, more fits the bill.

Luigi was framed

A tangent: the tablet.

Why is the tablet ok for taking notes? Is it banned from the wifi? Does it lack a browser? Or are todays students unaware that most sites can be visited without an app?

Really good.

You are quite right in describing the zero interest rate as central banks taking the foot of the brake. Similar to how a brake can decrease speed but not increase it, the interest rate can destroy demand but not create economic activity.

The reason for not using tried and effective method of Keynesian spending is of course ideological. In the euro zone it was ruthlessly enforced by the ECB and the Commission were the deficits created by automatic stabilisers were taken as breaking the Maastricht treaty and those countries had to be put through austerity.

I also wonder if revealing the fact I’ve looked at job listings might hurt my standing.

If honesty isn’t the best policy you can always work in that while looking into that company you noticed that they have no one in your role and in fact is actually hiring their first. You don’t have to mention where and how you found it, people will probably assumed you used a search engine.

As I have pointed out here previously, Microsoft is jacking up prices on 365 licenses, so when they say they have increased revenue on other cloud services, think squeezing the economy through their chokehold on governments and corporations.

I don’t have statistics, but having gone through licenses during last year and ended up just avoiding a price increase (instead of getting savings), it’s pretty clear that is what are doing.

And he is brave enough to say that:

• There is a sensible compromise somewhere between the Biden/Harris immigration bill that would have got rid of due process for suspected illegal immigrants and the Trump policy of just throwing dark people into vans for shipment to slave labour camps.

• Genocide is just sensible bipartisanship.

• Trans people are not people.

Much centrist, much sensible. Much surprise he is getting into race science. It the centre (defined as the middle ground of Attila and Mussolini) moves, the principled centrist must move with it.

My kids use Duolingo for extra training of languages they are learning in school, so this crapification hits close to home.

Any tips on current non-crap resources? Since they learn the rules and structure in school it’s the repetition of usage in a fun way that I am aiming for.

I followed the 2008 crash in some detail and as far as I remember it the pension funds and little towns in Norway that got swept away in the financial avalanche were not known before the crash. Then the surviving banks were allowed to rebuild their balance sheets by both government largess and fleecing their customers. And in the euro zone there was the whole euro crisis as spill over effects hit the banks and French and German banks were saved by fleecing Mediterranean EU countries, payed for by destruction of their economies. Which had some nasty political effects like the direct inheritors of Mussolini’s party now running Italy.

I don’t think we can know even the direct knock-on effects of the crash without knowing what financial institutes and pension funds has gambled on the line going up.

Anyway I expect the oligopolies to receive government support and fleece the rest of the economy. They can probably jack up prices at least 10-15% every year without CEOs going to their IT department and saying “fuck it, teach me Linux, we are switching, this is just to expensive”.

Starting a cult to build god, control god and upload your consciousness into god?

Well, at least it is an ethos.

One author (Daniel) correctly predicted chain-of-thought reasoning, inference scaling, and sweeping chip export controls one year BEFORE ChatGPT existed

Ah, this reminds me of an old book I came across years ago. Printed around 1920 it spent the first half with examples of how the future has been foretold correctly many, many times across history. The author had also made several correct foretellings, among them the Great War. Apparently he tried to warn the Kaiser.

The second half was his visions of the future including a great war…

Unfortunately it was France and Russia invading the Nordic countries in the 1930ies. The Franco-Russian alliance almost got beat thanks to new electric weapons, but then God himself intervened and brought the defenders low because the people had been sining and turning away from Christianity.

An early clue to the author being a bit particular was when he argued that he got his ability to predict the future because he was one quarter Sami, but could still be trusted because he was “3/4 solid Nordic stock”. Best combo apparently and a totally normal way to describe yourself.

I found the article gross.

He is a suspect in a murder case, not convicted, and they spend very little space on the case. The cops say he had his fake id, the gun and manifesto on him. His lawyer says he is yet to see the evidence. That is all.

Then they basically go through posts he has made online and ask people he knew about them. There is a public interest in the case, but courts are supposed to adjudicate guilt. What if he is innocent, then they just went through his posting history and showed them in the worst possible light.

What if my mechanical watch went rogue and killed Bezos?

On one hand Bezos is responsible for a lot of suffering and some deaths.

On the other hand, killing is wrong.

On the third hand, it couldn’t do that, because it is just a machine.

(It’s a watch, it has three hands. It also has about as much consciousness as an LLM, it “knows” what time it is. Much more energy efficient though.)