“Ok, I was lying / exaggerating”?

$1.35/day to eat? No expenses for entertainment? I guess you’re posting this from the public library, because your expenses don’t include internet or a cell phone. The library must also be where you get your entertainment.

In addition: no laundromat or new clothing for a month and a half? Your clothes must reek. Speaking of which, no gym membership or hotel days, so is that 1.5 months without a bath or shower?

Also, 1.5 months and no insurance payments, so does that mean the vehicle is uninsured? I hope (assuming this is USA) that you have some kind of health insurance, despite not making any health insurance payments.

Something about this just doesn’t seem plausible.

So, don’t fund the larger projects. Fund the smaller ones, they’re the ones that probably need support anyhow.

Besides, I would bet that if you asked Mr. Torvalds, he’d have a list of kernel contributors who live in the EU and would love to be paid for their work.

For number 2, require that the people doing the open source work live and pay taxes in the EU. That way you’re keeping the money in the union, and you’re investing in local knowledge and skills.

As opposed to proprietary software where you’re basically handing dollars over to American companies (or to supposedly “Irish” companies that just so happen to be named almost identically to American companies, but somehow are magically based out of Ireland and don’t pay proper taxes anywhere).

Two economists are walking down the street and pass by a pile of dog shit. One of them (a sadist) turns to the other and says “I’ll pay you $1000 if you eat that dog shit”.

The other performs an internal utility calculation and eats the dog shit.

Continuing their walk, the second economist sees another pile of dog shit and makes the same offer to the first. The first economist also agrees, and eats the dog shit. They walk on.

After a while the second economist says to the first “I can’t help thinking we’re worse off than when we started this walk. We both have the same amount of money we started with, but we both had to eat shit.”

The first economist replies “Worse off?! We’ve just engaged in 2000 dollars worth of trade!”.

Look, by certain ways of calculating GDP growth and trade, it’s probably true that if the money isn’t being spent on software licenses and so on, it means there’s less economic activity going on.

The whole point of open source / free software is that you’re not locked into someone’s proprietary software ecosystem. You don’t have to continue paying license fees. So, if the governments simply stop paying for software licenses, it’s probably true that their GDP will technically shrink. But, that assumes the money won’t be spent on something more useful.

I’m fine with going fast on a sled being a sport. That’s cool. But, it seems like something where it’s only valid if everybody involved is actively doing something on the way down, not just being ballast.

One person sledding makes sense. But, in this sport, the guy on the bottom can’t possibly be anything but ballast, can he? He can’t see anything, so he can’t be steering or braking, right?

Same with bobsled, the guy at the front is steering. Maybe the people in the back help with something, but they can’t be too actively involved because they can’t see.

Why are you so angry? I’m trying to determine if there’s actually a use for these text generators, and you first say “Sorry but if you can’t make LLMs useful there is something wrong with how you are using them.”, and then you refuse to actually explain what you’re using it for, instead making vague hand-wavey statements.

What do you mean by “medical help”?

What is it that you find useful?

It works by predicting the most likely words to follow the sequence you already have, with a bit of noise added. The result is that if you ask it a question, it is effectively designed to sound as much like an answer as possible. Whether or not that answer is true is out of scope, and not something that technology could ever consider.

I like to talk about it as if it’s the world’s best prop master. You ask for a prop, and you’ll be given one of the most realistic props imaginable. You want a medical chart, it will give you a chart that might fool a doctor. You ask for a legal brief, it has one that might just fool a judge in court. If you ask it for a computer program, what it spits out might actually compile and/or run. But, of course, these are props. They’re only designed to look good on camera. At most, someone will stream it in 4k, pause it, and try to read the prop while it’s on screen.

As someone who has been annoyed with props for decades, I love that. No more “computer code” scenes where it’s just random gobbledygook. But, someone trying to use the output as if it’s real is just as clever as someone who tries to spend prop money from a movie.

Note, this is happening for the same reason Reddit started enshittifying much harder all of a sudden. Discord wants to do an IPO and so they’re going to suddenly start squeezing their users to make the numbers look good just in time for that IPO. Their bet is that they have enough momentum that enough people will stick with them long enough for the IPO to succeed, and after that happens, it’s someone else’s problem.

The battery is the first thing that tends to fail for me.

My phone is a few years old now and recently I wet it down on the inductive charger overnight and missed, so when I woke up it was at 20% battery. I decided that I’d let the battery drain to 0 before charging it, because AFAIK it’s still true that it’s good to do that occasionally so the battery management software can recalibrate things. So I used it for a few minutes and it very quickly dropped to 9% battery, and then it hung out there for like 10 minutes without moving. I gave up on actively using it to drain the battery and just put on a YouTube live stream and put the phone down. Eventually it moved past 9% battery and slowly drained down to 1%. And at 1% it lasted at least another half an hour just sitting there playing full screen video.

From my experience with previous phones, there’s a chance that the battery management software might be able to tune things so that it is more predictable. But, if I’m unlucky it’s already in its death spiral. It’s a shame because it’s still a fairly decent phone. I might want to upgrade anyhow, but it sucks that once the battery goes bad the phone is almost e-Waste. I’ve used a local guy who does repairs to change the battery in a tablet a few years ago, and it went from having horrible battery life to having good-as-new battery life. But, while the battery is still decent on it, the model is so old it’s no longer getting any software updates, which means a lot of apps simply won’t run on it. So, even if I replace the battery in this phone, it’s getting more and more useless by the day.

If I could load another OS on it, I could find a use for it. I have headless computers and it would be great if this could be a temporary screen / keyboard for those. It could be a dedicated bike computer. I could use its camera and monitor 3d prints. But, none of that is possible if the manufacturer says that it’s too old for them to bother with and their app store no longer has apps for it.

You’re indirectly helping Google though. If the second hand market is better for Pixels than other devices because of Graphene, then people are more willing to buy Pixels, so Google sells more of them.

It really is a huge stretch.

“Grab 'em by the pussy” was about adults. It was presumably about over-the-clothes groping. It’s something that you can talk about in public, as evidenced from the fact that the famous clip comes from a time when Trump was bragging about it to someone.

The phrase “He measured the children’s vulva and vaginas by entering a finger and rated the children on tightness” is not something you’d expect to hear except in a courtroom where someone is being tried for child sexual abuse. And, we’re supposed to believe that happened at “Calendar Girl” parties at Mar-A-Lago? I just don’t buy it. This would have leaked a lot earlier if it were true. I mean, this isn’t even about a private island where it’s easy to control every person who comes and goes. Mar-A-Lago is just some private club in West Palm Beach, Florida, which presumably has a lot of cooks, janitors, waiters, security guards, groundskeepers, IT people, etc. coming on and off-site regularly just to keep the place running. Even if you think that somehow there was a cabal of child sex predators who were buddies and were honest enough to all trust one-another and not turn each-other in. Somehow, you’re also avoiding any of the staff noticing what’s going on?

Keep in mind that we know how lax the security was at Mar-A-Lago, from the fact that classified docs were found just piled in a random bathroom. If we were talking about some place that was known for ultra tight security, where there were presumably back rooms that were guarded at all times and where something secret might have been happening, then maybe I could believe that this might have happened. But, not at Mar-A-Lago.

So, it’s not that Trump might do this that’s hard to believe. I can easily believe he’d do something depraved like that. But, not at a party, in front of a crowd of people who could identify him, at his semi-public golf club.

Look, the kind of people who show up in Epstein’s files are the kind that deserve zero sympathy. They’re the kinds of ultra-rich people who should be lined up for the guillotine just because of their obscene wealth hoards, even if they had nothing to do with child sex abuse.

But, just look at the phenomenon of SWATting. People phone in a malicious tip to the police in the hope that they kick down someone’s door. In addition to malicious people, a tip line is going to get people having schizophrenic episodes, people suffering carbon monoxide poisoning, etc.

To me, these allegations seem about as likely as there being a secret basement at Comet Ping Pong pizzeria where the elites were draining children of their adrenachrome. And, I’d really like it if my side didn’t go all Q-Anon and start believing every possible rumour just because it makes someone they hate look bad.

It was a bribe, but they still made a movie, and they still put that movie in theatres. It’s still going to be embarrassing if nobody sees the movie. There are reports of movie theatres where there are 3-4 people in the audience, and every one of them is being paid to be there because they have to write a review of the movie.

They could have paid Melania for her life rights, pretended to make a movie, and then not released it, or made it streaming-only, making some excuse about protesters, the safety of the theatre goers, etc. Instead they actually put it out into the world and invited the kind of ridicule it deserves.

Look, I think he’s a piece of shit. But, I also think we shouldn’t judge anybody based on anonymous accusations phoned into a tip line. I mean, can you imagine the kinds of nonsense MAGA folks are constantly phoning into tip lines about every prominent democrat?

Sure, like I said, they own lots of IP from their various acquisitions. But, they’re still fundamentally a cable company.

as it leans harder into wireless bundling and other business lines like Peacock and theme parks

Theme parks.

“Kids, pile into the van, we’re going to Comcast World!”

I’m sure they own lots of IP from their various acquisitions. But, fundamentally they’re a cable company.

Investors had a general idea of what was going on at Tesla and thought their profits might be down to 20% of what they were last year, so prices went down before Tesla announced their results. Then the results came out. The results were terrible, but not as terrible as the rumours made it sound. So, share prices went back up a bit.

That makes perfect sense. Stocks are like gambling, where a lot of the bets make sense. This is like the odds on a sports game being very long before an injury report is released, and the odds getting slightly better after the injury report is released and it’s not as bad as feared.

Where TSLA stock makes absolutely no sense is the P/E ratio. That’s the price investors are paying for the shares compared to the earnings per share. An old, reliable company that probably won’t grow very much but that has reliably made a steady profit year after year might have a P/E ratio of 5. Tech stocks that might grow a lot in the future might have a P/E ratio of 20 because the expectation is that they have a lot of room to grow, and that in 5 years their revenues and profits might have tripled.

For a typical car company that’s well run, a P/E ratio of about 5-10 is normal. Volkswagen is at about 8, Toyota is at about 10, Ford is at about 12.

Tesla’s P/E ratio is currently 283.38, and its market cap is $1.386 trillion. So, Tesla investors somehow think that Tesla is going to grow to become hundreds of times its current size and/or massively profitable.

So, the day-to-day movements of Tesla’s stock price make sense in the abstract. Investors assuming bad news sell shares, when the news isn’t as bad as feared, investors buy shares. Where they make no sense at all is that the investors are somehow deluding themselves into thinking this tiny car company is about to do something to juice its share price to the moon, like inventing nuclear fusion, or perfecting a time machine.