IIRC there’s still an ICANN fee that has to be paid by the registrar per domain registered

I might be wrong, but I seem to recall there’s an ICANN fee associated with registration as well.

Great idea! This will save the taxpayers literally hundreds of dollars in domain registration fees! That’s over 0.0001¢ per taxpayer!!

If you actually bother to read it (regularly, not just once or twice on selected columns that you saw posted online), you would not think that. The opinion column is very neoliberal with a hint of libertarianism.

The Taiwan issue has exactly to do with the fact that sending official diplomatic representatives to it means recognising its legitimacy and sovereignty. Even though most Western countries already believe this, sending the representatives would be to express that they believe this which is what upsets the Chinese government. China doesn’t care what people think as long as they keep it to themselves. It’s when they get “embarrassed” on the world stage that Chinese leadership thinks it demands action.

Especially not their opinion column but I’m just posting here because it’s interesting to see what the neoliberals think about it and it’s a good discussion point

Washington Post columnists said it would probably just capture the “Never Trumper” moderate Republican voters who currently begrudgingly vote Democratic because they understand that the Republican Party is nominating only yes-men and fascists.

The whole system of formal diplomatic recognition needs to die. Right now, “recognising” a government seems to be tantamount to acknowledging that government is legitimate and representative of the people. This is a very obstructive and unproductive system. It doesn’t matter whether you “recognise” a government and it also doesn’t matter what you decide to call your representatives to it. Refusing to recognise a government doesn’t mean that group of people doesn’t hold power or doesn’t actually control territory. It just prevents you from engaging with them in a constructive manner. It’s just a head-in-the-sand approach to intergovernmental relations.

If there’s a group of people calling themselves a government that holds power over a group of people or a piece of territory that you are interested in, it shouldn’t have to result in this whole game of charades. You should be able to send official representatives to that group without having to worry about offending everyone else. The whole concept of “recognition” is just nonsense.

Someone tried this with a dating app for right-wingers only called “The Right Stuff”, which has faced significant criticism for lacking female users.

Important distinction: it was cited 29 times [by non-parties to the case who filed amicus briefs carrying no legal weight].

It was not cited 29 times in the actual ruling.

Which is easier? Squatting down to count how many caps say “Coca-Cola” or counting the number of bottles with red caps?

There is a real reason that the caps are painted. Glass beverage bottles are usually stored in a crate and grabbed from the top, so the design on the lid is what restaurant or store employees used to distinguish what drink is contained within it. This allows employees to distinguish similar-coloured drinks (e.g. Coca-Cola vs Pepsi or two different brands of beer) just from looking down at the top of the bottle.

But there probably is a way to paint them without using plastics

Parent commneter implies that people who consume soft drinks or alcohol aren’t concerned about their health because these beverages are not healthy

Odd. I would have thought that the paint, being on the exterior, wouldn’t leak into the beverage contained inside the glass.

But apparently, they found that blowing air over the caps reduced the amount of detected contamination by 60 per cent. So it seems like an easy fix that manufacturers can implement inexpensively (literally just an electric fan)

This is a fantastic idea. The brilliance of the 47th president strikes again. Give them work permits, ensure they are paid a fair wage and the labour standards are adhered to, and it will guarantee that they become hardworking honest taxpayers who contribute to the American economy.

Wait, that is the plan… right?

Right…?

The party of domestic terrorism strikes again

It would be cringe if you were using a shared server and set this as a default for everyone or if it was interfering with something. But if you’re just minding your own business I could not care less what customisations you put on your terminal as long as it isn’t using excessive resources

There are some languages that use strictly phonetic writing systems. Cherokee (indigenous American language) and Esperanto (constructed international auxiliary language) come to mind, but I’m sure there are others. None of the major world languages (English, Spanish, French, Arabic, Russian, Standard Chinese) are perfectly phonetic.

French people will see a 10-letter word and pronounce it as a single syllable. No language is particularly good in this respect, English is just the most common target of criticism for this

It’s not an LLM, but Stockfish does use AI under the hood and has been since 2020. Stockfish uses a classical alpha-beta search strategy (if I recall correctly) combined with a neural network for smarter pruning.

There are some engines of comparable strength that are primarily neural-network based. lc0 comes to mind. lc0 placed 2nd in the Top Chess Engine Championships in 9 out of the past 10 seasons. By comparison, Stockfish is currently on a 10-season win streak in the TCEC.