includes, but is not limited to:

I am of course fully aware of the Gaza genocide. I was going for a bit of dramatic understatement.

My point is that Israeli “settlers” have been pulling this shit for decades, and that the practice has a lot of religious tie-ins. The active genocide of Palestinians is abhorrent, though if we are being technical, simply an escalation in scale and intensity, considering the apartheid Israel has functionally enforced for damn near their entire existence as a state.

I just don’t like it when religious dogma is used as an instrument of repression in any context. That includes, but is not limited to:

• mysoginistic, patriarchal practices that all abrahamic faiths have problems with, but that Islam is a particularly visible and well-known practitioner of
• intolerant, close-minded thinking when it comes to psychology and identity (see: how large swaths of ALL abrahamic faiths treat LGBTQ+ people)
• how Israeli “settlers” (read: arch conservative Jewish traditionalists), amongst many, many other things, generally treat Palestinians as non-humans while the Israeli government essentially encourages the practice

Ironic that someone is using an LLM to respond to OP.

I see your em-dash, clanker.

Haha, neat, now I can improve my spatial reasoning while internally cringing and sobbing!

g’day Bruce; Bruce; Bruce.

Frankly, I don’t see… checks notes… “banning compulsory gender-dichotomized clothing, whose wear is chiefly motivated by the dictates of a single monotheistic abrahamic faith where the intent of said wear is to enforce a culture of shame on women” is controversial.

Because at its core, that’s what strict enforcement of Islamic garb is: an inherently patriarchal and religiously-motivated visual symbol of control and submission by men over women. I don’t like that when non-Islamic people do that, and I don’t like it when Islamic people do that. The specific religion is incidental, and only gets called out specifically because it specifically includes those misogynistic and gendered clothing dictates. I would have the same reaction to any other religion trying to foist its dictates on me and the people I care about, clothing-oriented or otherwise. Making such overt and intrinsic displays of control and submission publicly unacceptable - and even illegal - is not a bad thing. Normalizing that prejudicial societal pattern is an awful fucking idea, and having laws against it - in, it should be added, a largely secular society where the societal norm does not exist - is sensible and good.

I do, however, agree that the selective enforcement on the prohibition being clearly presented here is complete bullshit. The French “work and public life* restrictions on traditional Islamic women’s garb is far more sensible than the swimwear-oriented bans.

Wow yeah that actually sounds quite illegal

Their hardware (pointedly, the steam deck) has begun a diametric shift towards Linux gaming. The fact that our fuckwit Captains of Industry are pinning the throttle and driving at a wall, and in the process gutting the consumer electronics market is, ultimately, just really awful luck and timing. If it weren’t for that, I dare say Valve would be looking at becoming a Serious Player in the hardware market. As it stands, this will certainly significantly stymie the adoption of the GabeCube… but I hope that ultimately, when the market stabilized (or corrects) in time, they’ll still be on track to do that.

At the same time, standing still and doing nothing is a recipe for someone else to eat their lunch.

My point is that Valve is fundamentally a for-profit company, not a charitable organization. Expecting them to do nothing in response to the wildest market disruptions that the consumer hardware industry has ever seen is frankly unrealistic.

At the end of the day, Valve has been successful because they have been able to balance strategic, long term profitability with providing a genuinely good service at a reasonable market price to the vast majority of their customers. Note that that is specifically not giving things away at cost (as nice as that might be in the short term for customers. In the long run, zero (or negative) profitability would mean Valve ceases to exist.

I’m not trying to suckle at the corporate teat here - I’m simply pointing out that pretending Valve isn’t a corporation is flat out delusional. Not to mention, everyone else’s prices are going to be spiking too. They’re not “the bad guys”, and they will absolutely not be the only ones doing it.

So like… genuine question: what do you propose they do? Operate at a loss indefinitely? Go into an industry they have zero experience and domain knowledge in and just “build a factory”? And industry, I should add, that is probably the single most complicated and technically - as well as capex - intensive industry that humans have thus far derived? What’s the play here? Drive themselves to bankruptcy out of altruism?

This is the most correct reply to this article that I’ve seen so far

You’re probably just out of date. I had some issues recently on Waterfox, realized I was running a not-super-new version, and things worked great after I updated the flatpak.

Oh yeah it 100% explodes your token usage by establishing a contentious paradigm. But that’s what the C-suites want, and they don’t understand (or care to understand) the subtleties of how this development methodology works. So we’ll all (somewhat maliciously) follow orders until they change their minds when they see the absolutely ludicrous LLM bill 🤪

It’s an explosive. It is going to be effective against your computer, unless your computer case is made of rolled homogenous armor.

Then, we move on to shaped charges.

Now ask it why it’s apologizing

The best sort of methodology I’ve found to coerce Claude or whatever (we are strongly encouraged to use it, because you know, tech these days) is (for a single agent) to define a process that includes proving its work and citing sources. For agentic flow, you basically just assign a contrarian role in particular domains to some of the agents - ideally all of this is also hooked into an MCP server that includes deterministic utilities to improve accuracy and solution arrival speed.

It’s basically just a shitty, brute-forced, massively over complicated Monte Carlo algorithm that’s wildly inefficient in terms of energy usage and infrastructural cost, that also happens to be turning our economy into a highly flammable house of cards.

Can you tell what my opinion of all this bullshit is, despite knowing how to do all of this crap reasonably well? 😛

Lmao fantastic

Exactly: the numbers that are being cited by the companies which have a vested interest in pumping up LLM usage stats, even if it’s just the appearance thereof, are - surprise, surprise - fundamentally biased. And of course, the spineless fuckwit generation of journalists that most of the populace uncritically relies upon fail to dig any deeper than the first-order patterns in the data, or to point out the likely obvious biases.

This is not hard-hitting journalism. This is the appearance of hard-hitting journalism.