The problem for OpenAI and their ilk is that the actual legitimate uses of LLMs are so few and niche that they cannot hope to pay for the immense cost of developing and running these systems. Like, cool. Sure I can use copilot to generate derivative meme images, but what’s that actually worth to me monetarily? I’m not going to subscribe to a monthly service just to access a tool for shit posting.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/mar/26/blackstone-group-accused-global-housing-crisis-un
https://prospect.org/education/2023-02-28-university-california-blackstone-housing/
https://www.archpaper.com/2025/01/blackstone-cushman-wakefield-landlords-justice-department/
While I don’t support mass shootings in general, if someone is so far off the deep end that they’re going to throw their life away in an act of random violence, I at least hope they choose targets like Blackstone instead of a random elementary school. At least they’re smiting someone who deserves it, for once. The country would be a lot better off if we had several hundred corporate shootings and zero school shootings each year. No shooting period would be better. But if you’re going to go on a rampage, at least go after evil people first.
Frankly, the answer should be for every site to just cut the UK off entirely. Let them have their own little North Korean style micronet. Maybe when the people of the UK can’t visit anything but a bunch of miserable English websites, they will get off their asses and elect competent leaders. If not, well maybe they’re just not the sort of people we should allow access to the global communications network. Let the barbarians stew in their own barbarism.
Jesus. Imagine if we could make gold cheap enough to make into soda cans. They wouldn’t even need that plastic liner. A truly infinitely recycleable solution to packaging of all sorts. Imagine if the bag on the inside of cereal boxes was made from gold foil. What’s so great about gold is it’s incredibly chemically stable. That means it won’t interact chemically with any food you package in it. And it’s an element, not some forever chemical that will pollute our bodies and environment.
I want to see a world where all cheap disposable packaging is made out of gold.
I’m referring to the Independent. The article is trash. They’re accusing her of “being a man.” It’s 2025, and newspapers are still using this disgusting language to refer to trans people.
Nothing like some casual transphobia. The UK is a garbage heap.
By Israel’s own numbers, Hamas killed two civilians for every military casualty on October 7. This number includes Israeli civilians killed by the IDF to prevent them from becoming hostages. Since the attack, the IDF has killed far far more than two Gazan civilians for every member of Hamas they’ve taken out. They’ve leveled Gaza and corralled its population into concentration camps.
The reason there has been no peace is that Israel doesn’t want peace. They are an expansionist state. They continuously expand their borders through the following method:
Have Israeli citizens living right next to Arab populations (Palestinians and others.)
Israel antagonizes their neighbors until some militant group responds violently.
Send in the Israeli military to fight the militant group.
Use fighting the group as cover to expel the Arab population from an area. Justify this by saying a “buffer zone” is required to separate Israelis and Arabs, like the Korean DMZ.
Allow Israeli civilians to settle inside the “buffer zone.” Once again have Israelis living right next door to Arabs.
Antagonize their neighbors until violence again erupts.
This is how Israel slowly expands its borders. And they’re not stopping at Gaza and the West Bank. They’re doing the same shit in Lebanon and Syria. Arab land today. Buffer zone tomorrow. Israeli cities and towns the day after. It’s a slow claiming of Israeli lebensraum one bit at a time, and they’ve been doing this for decades.
Yeah the motive is revealed in the methods. Conservatives never propose legislation that specifically addresses any advantage trans women have, instead opting for blanket bans. The science shows that trans women have very little if any advantage in sports, and in my sports we’re actually at a competitive disadvantage. Hell, even the chuddiest of chuds could realize that trans women certainly can’t have an advantage in all sports. Do trans women have an advantage in women’s gymnastics? Have you seen the type of bodies that excel in that sport?
I would be open to conversations of sports fairness if they came from a place of honest good faith, but they don’t. The default stance should be equality first, with restrictions only introduced when absolutely necessary. Is it possible there’s some sport that trans women have some massive advantage in? Well trans women should quickly dominate that sport’s upper echelons. If you find such a sport, then maybe we can have the conversation about fairness. But even then, it should be limited to just what is absolutely necessary to ensure fairness, nothing more. For example, maybe some handicap system would be appropriate for an individual sport. But even then, such intervention should only be done if there is some enormous unfair advantage that trans women are systematically demonstrating.
Instead, we just get bigots that talk about a trans girl “stealing” their spot in a sports competition, as if she doesn’t have the exact same right to compete as any other girl. It’s fundamentally about devaluing the humanity of trans people all together. Trans identities aren’t to be respected, they’re to be tolerated and humored at best, persecuted at worst. It’s no different than the same instincts that kept sports racially segregated for generations.
Fact: Gazans have just as much right to armed self defense as the Israelis do.
Fact: Hamas, by Israel’s own numbers, does a better job at avoiding civilian casualties than the IDF does.
Fact: people who hand wring about Hamas are just classists. They view killing someone with a bomb dropped from a plane as morally superior to killing someone with an AK 47. Their moral judgment in the validity of violence is primarily a function of the income of the person committing the violence.
If you have a problem with the number of people your partner slept with prior to meeting you, you really shouldn’t be dating, as you need therapy to work through your issues before you start mucking about with other people.
You must have hated Mark Twain.
It gets absorbed and reemitted by the walls of the room. Its reemitted as infrared light, due to the temperature of the walls. Eventually it just all ends up as heat.
The answer to the question “where did the energy go?” is “heat” 99% of the time.
A climate of mild paranoia.
And this is why Brian Thompson got what was coming to him.
Zero. Dated for three years, married for seven.
Imagine if on the other side there’s a similarly prominent feature…except it bears an uncanny resemblance to a hand flipping the bird.
Not if they’re incendiary drones meant merely to land on a roof and set a building on fire.
You underestimate the destructive potential of even small drones. Quantity has a quality all its own. Imagine a swarm of thousands of drones, all cheaply built 3D printed things, made by a single individual or small group. They have one task. They fly to a fixed set of GPS coordinates and land. No targeting needed. No AI facial recognition to target some specific politician. No auto-gun mounted beneath a large drone. Just a dirt simple task. They just fly up, over, and down. Once landed, they send a small electrical signal to a small incendiary device, perhaps a thermite charge, installed at the base of the drone. Such drones could be made quite cheaply if made on a large scale.
Imagine fires being started atop the roofs of every building in a city. Oh, and the attack starts with each fire station being attacked by a dozen such drones. Imagine every building in a city being lit on fire simultaneously. Soon a firestorm develops, and the fire starts feeding itself.
Let’s say you needed 10,000 such drones. Maybe you make them for $50 each. That’s $500k to burn down a city. For the cost of a single building you can burn down every other building in a modest sized city.
We are approaching a point where a single determined individual, using the scale of resources regularly available to a single individual, could recreate the firebombing of Dresden.
Unfortunately now Google is ChatGPT. It provides its own shitty AI answers, and its search results have been corrupted by an ocean of slop.
The key difference between all previous civilizational collapses and the one we potentially face is that most people in the past were farmers. Even in the grandest empires like Rome, less than 10% of the population actually lived in cities. Most people lived in the countryside working the land. The city of Rome lost something like 95% of its population. But those people didn’t just crawl in a hole and die. They abandoned the city and joined the vast majority of the population that was living in the countryside. Many in the countryside actually saw their quality of life improve substantially. Many who had been slaves found the old legal system enforcing their slavery no longer existed. Rome collapsing just meant the end of the grand cities; political and economic systems could fragment, and people would just live more locally.
But today? Less than 5% of the population actually works on a farm. The vast majority of the population lives in cities. If the political and economic system collapses, the countryside can’t just absorb all those extra people. Hell, the farms can’t even operate without the equipment, fuels, and chemicals produced by the larger economic system.
Historically, when civilizations collapsed, the common folk just left the cities, abandoned the corrupt elites to their madness, and returned to small villages and rural life. But now there is simply nowhere for people to retreat to.