“Things happen.”

Hey remember when that lady asked a question that wasn’t your favorite question?

“IT’S A FUCKING WAR CRIME AND I TELL YOU SHE NEEDS TO BE FIRED INTO THE SUN”

The US is providing about a quarter of Ukraine’s defense budget at this point, the EU another quarter, and Ukraine the remaining half.

For the size and money disparity between the countries, it is surprising that the US is doing so little. The US military industrial complex has a bad habit it gets into where it often will give enough aid not to lose, but also not enough to win. Dan Ellsberg called it “The Stalemate Machine” and explained how it works in pretty heartbreaking detail.

There’s a friend of mine who had a roommate who was a Sword Guy. People made fun of him and his sword sometimes, and life moved on as it does.

Then one day some kids who had had a disagreement with members of the house started hitting the front door with baseball bats, trying to break in and wreck up whoever they found inside. About the time they broke through the door Sword Guy came quick down the stairs with his sword. It happened basically exactly like in the anime. He said some weird edgelord shit, but also, he didn’t sound like he was backing down and he was holding a real fucking sword. The kids with bats did the math and decided they didn’t want to get sliced up today, and they left.

I won’t say that Sword Guy became cool on that day but people definitely remembered it positively. Because at the end of the day, when the barbarians were at the gate, who came the fuck through? Sword Guy.

1. Branding. Have recognizable stuff, people get a little hit of dopamine from seeing your logo and the style when it is unique and they recognize it.
2. Production values. Have them.
3. Consistency over a long time to let the algorithm build up an audience, as it does. Presumably, how people react to your videos has a lot to do with it.
4. Hire some dudes in China to play it a few thousand times in one of the those big racks of cell phones.

This is pretty standard, pretty much any big lawsuit will involve the sued party moving to dismiss at around this stage. Because why not? It might work, and even if it doesn’t, it will cost the opposition money and energy to respond to.

Ha, I had the exact opposite reaction, the AI thing hadn’t occurred to me.

“Oh, sweet, some kind of new web technology! Let’s see what it is”

“Oh it’s just Mozilla’s marketing department wasting money, carry on I guess.”

More like, neighbour invites everybody to their pool, but if you go, you have to sign a legal agreement that you invite everybody to your whole house.

Incorrect. No one gets access to the rest of your company’s source code. It’s just that, since they gave you a ton of wonderful stuff for free, you have to do likewise if you’re going to build on their stuff. If you don’t want that, then go find some other swimming pool so to speak (which it sounds like you’ve done).

It boggles my mind how people think this is unintended. “My company tried to build on GPL3 software, but IDK if the authors realized this, but we’re not allowed to do that unless we share our contributions back in turn! What an error! As soon as they find out, they’ll surely change the licensing to one that is more amenable to what we want to do in terms of reselling their source code to people without complying on our end with the GPL!”

I can pretty much guarantee you, this will not be a surprise to the people who licensed their code GPL. We have been having this conversation for decades. Your input as to whether it’s “beneficial” to them to restrict you from doing what they don’t want you to do is noted.

“How dare my neighbor put a fence around his pool! I tell you, ever since he did that, my kids can’t swim there and we’ve had to figure out something else to do.”

What the fuck

How did I manage not to know this

Okay, TIL I guess, my bad

Why did they put such tremendous effort and then give all the crabs 8 legs though…

The crab video is really marvelous. I love the absolute clear frustration of the crab “ARGH NO DON’T TURN ME UPSIDE DOWN I HAVE EGGS TO LOOK AFTER YOU MORON”

Yes, but they’re taking home six and in some cases seven figures[1]. And at the end of the day, isn’t that what’s really important?

[1] pretty much all of which is provided by Google as a sinecure to make sure that Chrome keeps being not a monopoly

He didn’t. Some of his allies did, but he was a lot more circumspect about it.

https://www.mediaite.com/media/news/watch-trump-waffle-on-releasing-epstein-files-in-fox-news-interview-last-year/

Just because it would take 15 more years for the rolling average to catch up[1] doesn’t mean we haven’t exceeded 1.5°C.

The single-year data point for 2024 was 1.55°C above pre-industrial levels. Sure, 2025 might turn out to be colder than that. It probably won’t. But whatever, the heating is not decreasing. We have already hit the horrific level, and since we are not slowing down our emissions at anywhere near the required level, we are more or less guaranteed to hit 2°C beyond that, and then the collapse. Every little bit of reduction still counts for a lot (simply because the scale of the tragedy is going to be so apocalyptically globe-spanning) but the time for preventing the tipping points was circa 2000.

[1] If it continued up linearly which it will not

It stands for “Urchin Tracking Module”.

I swear to God I thought this was a joke

Seth Meyers has an absolutely inimitable way of shitting on Trump. It is, basically, just explaining what happened in clear terms, just with a slight amount of humor and occasional jokes. Mostly, though, he’s just explaining what happened.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Coke6nvWs30

I consider myself in pretty bad shape and I just now did 15 push-ups to get some kind of benchmark without having to overly struggle with it. Even considering just the applicant side of it, who are these people thinking that they’re going to do a job which involves physically contesting with people and can’t do these pretty basic physical things?

(I mean, I know the answer to that question, I am just marveling at the situation I guess.)

More than a third have failed so far … To pass, recruits must do 15 push-ups and 32 sit-ups, and run 1.5 miles in 14 minutes.

Applicants check a box and sign their names, swearing they don’t have a criminal record and can pass a drug test. Far too late, recruiters are realizing some of these applicants can’t do that either. And, again, they’re not finding this out until potential hires are already at the ICE academy and engaged in the training program.

Sounds like it’s going great

It’s the reality-ignorer’s constant curse. In this form, it is:

“Surely this crew of misfits and failures will be able to successfully execute this important mission we’ve laid out for them with minimal training and oversight”

Later: “How could this have happened? I think we need more misfits”

Yeah, maybe. I thought I made it pretty overt in the community rules, let’s see how it shakes out in practice.