The C-suite people got rich by (to be a little reductionist about it) telling other people what to do, and they can’t imagine that everyone else wouldn’t leap at the chance to do the same.

The Dead Milkmen wrote a song about it.

I am only imagining, here, but I’m imagining that the “play” would consist of attempting to use household objects to engineer a supplementary framework of braces and weights to prevent your $6 battery operated plastic toy from skittering off the desk and messing up.

I just bought a modern version, for just a few dollars, this year. The design was changed, there has been an attempt to replace the push pins that held the stationary gears in place with sticky tack. I didn’t feel like that was going to work, so I got some push pins and some cardboard to do it the old fashioned way. That sort-of works, but it’s tricky without the dedicated, perfectly sized anchor holes the old sets had.

I wasn’t able to get my kid too interested, but I had some fun with it.

The trouble is, the source of the brain worm story was … him. So if you believe it, you’re taking a brain-worm-victim’s word on his condition.

Star drive and Torx are so much better I can’t believe they haven’t taken over the whole world

There are four lines of text in the headline: One word, two words, three words, one word. That’s reflected perfectly accurately in the McConnell photo. You can even see the hypen-capital-C in “-Czech.”

Digital cameras fib about their pixel counts, and they cannot, by nature, resolve anything accurately at the level of individual output pixels. The photo from the paper looks better because it’s in color, and the output of digital imaging sensors gets up-scaled in color, under the assumption that the image they’re resolving is in color.

We’ve entered an age where it’s not remotely crazy to be skeptical about the provenance of images like this, I can’t blame you for your suspicion. But I don’t think it’s fake.

Even The Gruniad characterizes this as “rebellion” and “revolt” when what’s actually happening is people are talking.

This seems like a very totalitarian view of the world to me. Maybe it’s appropriate, given the people we’re discussing here.

If we were talking about (say) Elizabeth Warren being AWOL like this, would we expect to see questions from other Democrats characterized as “rebellion?” I don’t think we would, but perhaps I’m wrong.

When I became the bathroom-cleaner in my household, I switched to sitting. It wasn’t until I got my nose and eyeballs right down close to the floor and the toilet on a regular basis that I learned how bad the splashing situation really was.

Your assertion baffles me. The CC client is sending information about its execution context back to Anthropic HQ in a sneaky, obfuscated way that most people wouldn’t notice.

If that’s not a hidden message, if that’s not steganography, what is?

2009 The pool’s water supply system was updated to eliminate stagnant water by circulating water from the Tidal Basin; the pool was formerly filled using potable water from the city.

To be fair to the regime (there’s something I never thought I’d type) the reflecting pool had been kept clean in the past by paying people (National Park Service workers) to wade out into it and clean it on the regular. Then the DOGE crew laid off a ton of Park Service personnel. Then our dear leader began howling about the green water.

This timeline may imply some details that I’ve got wrong, but it’s hard to be sympathetic to the regime, given the general picture of its priorities it paints, which I believe is generally correct.

I think they’d tell you it was a hallucination, that the new version+1 model will have smarter answers, will tell us how to solve climate change for real this time. Probably by building solar powered concentration camps.

Because powerful actors are not about to start doing what an AI says. Rather, powerful actors will figure out ways to manipulate AI into supporting the things they already want to do. An accountability sink. Like a new sort of religion for people who claim to be “rational.”

Contract prices for DRAM and NAND have risen steeply through 2026 as AI server demand outran supply, pushing memory makers toward 40% to 50% operating margins on NAND in the first half of the year.

So, does that sound like a functioning market?

I’m sort of torn:

Is Whitaker just pandering to the reliably-votes-R base? Is this, the world-famous Buc-ee’s and Chick-Fil-A freedom, really going to impress them as a sacred principle that stands shoulder-to-shoulder with the Bill of Rights? Maybe!

Or is Whitaker pandering to the king, signaling that he (Whitaker) has just as much contempt for the peasants as anyone? “Look at the amazing slop you’ve inspired, sir, look at the peasants gobbling it up, sir,” he says, with a tear in his eye.

1080p stream in acceptable bitrate is around 1MB/s.

I think most of the privacy-violating and abuse-facilitating scenarios that we’re all too plausibly imagining could be served by the transmission and storage of even a single photograph per drive.

Why would car manufacturers even consider doing that? What is the purpose?

All of the existing consumer-surveillance tech seems to be focused on 1) Finding ways to make your attention more valuable to advertisers and 2) Selling information on your movements and proclivities to interested governments.

Pictures from inside a car could fit right in with those priorities. They could tell car makers, advertisers, insurers, and governments a lot about who really drives the car the most, that person’s demographics, taste in clothing, driving ability, distractability, fatigue levels, health issues, etc.

I should be clear: I’m absolutely speculating. But I don’t know how anyone might look at the landscape that exists today, with surveillance in our phones, our televisions, our music players, and our cars, and think that such speculation is far-fetched or unrealistic.

Her kids died over a year ago. Police said “the incident is being handled as a homicide” at the time. The kids’ autopsy was scheduled for over a year ago.

They only arrested her last week.

Maybe you’re being facetious, but everyone should know: Dictionary words make really bad passwords. And including real words as part of a password makes the password much weaker.

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I think the psychology community is probably mistaken, outdated, or out of touch on the “stigmatizing” point. The TESCREAL assholes love to think of themselves as “dark triad” or “dark personality,” they fantasize about bringing about a “dark enlightenment.” “Dark” isn’t stigmatizing, it’s cool. It’s sensational. For that reason, I think it would be great to have a different term. One that wasn’t cool.

(A little aside here: You think the psychologists should be trusted to choose the most appropriate terms, yes? Where did the current “dark” terminology, which is apparently so problematic, come from? I don’t actually know the answer. Do you?)

So my suggestion was specifically to find a term that wasn’t cool like “dark” is. My focus wasn’t on avoiding stigma, because I don’t care if the sorts of people who would be happy to put me and my family in a concentration camp felt stigmatized. But hey, if you want to stick up for their feelings and dignity, you go ahead. You’re still free to do that. You will always be free to stick up for them.

So you don’t like “defective.” Okay. Maybe “antagonistic” would work.

I am very smart, and frankly, anyone who says my idea is obviously fucking stupid is contradicting the psychology community

The contrast you think you see is there because you’re not absorbing my point. Maybe that’s partly my fault. I think it’s partly your fault, though. You’ve charged into this with a chip on your shoulder.

whose opinions on this I’m literally just now glancing at

Yup! Is that a scientific argument, though? Should it matter if I’m an expert or not?