EnsignRedshirt [he/him]

Many such cases.

People were wringing hands and clutching pearls about Trump destroying democracy and here he is actively talking about the next election.

Surely there must be some downsides, though.

Researchers suspect that this is because screen time displaces sleep by taking up time when people would otherwise be resting.

So if we went back to the old way of doing it where we stayed up late sitting upright at the computer until we couldn’t physically stay awake any longer, that wouldn’t be considered disruptive? I’m just trying to be cozy for my late couple hours of browsing. I’m not going to be going to sleep earlier. This has nothing to do with bed. Bed is a saint. You leave bed out of this.

Whom among us has not accidentally opened the wrong video while someone was watching?

In many ways this is already his third term.

Incredibly big dick move to be a career video game designer and respond to controversy by saying “This is all a bunch of dumb nerd shit. Touch grass.”

Critical support for the commendable work the Trump administration is doing in undermining US legitimacy on so many fronts.

This isn’t about supporting or opposing anything, I’m stating the current conditions. US foreign policy is the same now as it was before Trump’s inauguration. The difference is that Trump is bad at his job, and that’s good for opponents of US imperialism. I’m confident that a Harris administration would be much more competent at achieving the goal of Palestinian genocide, and less likely to experience problems of internal cohesion.

Trump’s actions should be opposed, but that’s a given. A Harris administration would also require similar opposition, because the policy is the same.

I’m not siding with anyone, just pointing out that incoherent and incompetent US foreign policy is preferable for Palestinian liberation than coherent and competent US foreign policy, because US foreign policy supports Palestinian genocide.

Trump was always going to be the better hope for Palestinians for that reason. Biden/Harris would have continued the status quo. Trump might destroy it out of incompetence.

He’s also much more likely to change course on it if it becomes unpopular enough. He’s a Zionist insofar as he publicly supports Israel, but he genuinely does not care about what happens over there other than how it reflects on him. His ego would never allow him to get publicly dogwalked by Netanyahu like Biden did.

I mean, it’s only real insofar as Trump is allowing it to be real. It would evaporate instantly if Trump played golf with someone who said it made him look like a loser. Musk isn’t actually doing anything, he’s just taking credit for things that are being done. If I didn’t know better, I’d think Musk was being set up as the scapegoat for when all of this quickly and inevitably falls apart.

While I do believe that there’s a real possibility that the tariffs will stick, I think it’s still the most reasonable position to assume that they won’t, or at least that it’s not worth panic-selling over the prospect that they might.

There’s definitely a lot of vibes, but more specifically I think there’s a sort of brinksmanship going on between investors and the government. Government doesn’t want to get blamed for deflating a bubble, so they keep propping up the market at every opportunity and basically saying explicitly that they will continue to do so indefinitely. Investors then price equities as if there’s a built-in backstop for downside risk, knowing that the government will do bailouts and incentives and tax cuts if there’s a chance that line might go down too much. Public equities are essentially government-backed securities with equity-like returns and credit-like risk.

It’s basically the same thing as all the housing bubbles. So many people need their home equity to retire, and so the government can’t take the risk of trying to deflate the bubble, but that just means that homes are a zero-risk investment and open to speculation with no downside, so the prices will just go up forever (or until the music stops, at least).

It’s not sustainable, but as the saying goes, the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent.

I gotta say, after decades of making fun of people for blaming high gas prices on the president, it would be really funny if the president was actually directly responsible for higher gas prices this time.

“Get that bag, king!”

Yes

He very specifically describes a stochastic parrot, which can closely mimic a conversation but obviously has no underlying awareness of the conversation. I haven’t gotten to Starfish yet, although it’s on my list.

I read it, and it is different. If your favorite part of Blindsight is the spaceship stuff, the follow up is going to be a bit lacking. However, if you like the world that the author created and want to see more of it, absolutely give it a go. Fair warning, it’s no less depressing than the first, but that’s just how art works sometimes.

I just read this a few months ago. Incredible read. Heavy stuff, but very compelling. The bleakness of the world is a little over the top for science fiction, but if you categorize it as sci-fi horror it hits every note.

What really struck me is that this book was published nearly two decades ago, but the author perfectly describes what we would today call a generative AI. Like he understood the theory enough to extrapolate it and put it into a coherent narrative that a reader could understand. Granted it’s not light reading, but it’s not gibberish, either, and I would argue pretty skillfully done.

It’s pretty high on my list of must-read hard sci-fi, although I think if you’re outright turned off by horror elements then it might not resonate.