When even The Mirror is forced to tell the British boomers that they are shit outta luck, you know it was a garbage claim to begin with.

Strong’s Zuckerberg says in the film that “the debate is over”. If it is, The Social Reckoning portrays a world where Meta is on the wrong side of it.

Hey, this might be good!

Not sure. I think we’ve got a Slop Warning, though. That screen on the left says neither Ken nor Ryu, and many other things are off too, even compared to a staged stock photo. I wonder if the prompt included the text of the article and it’s seizing on this:

Over time the back-to-back cabinet arrangement became popular, with the two players on opposite sides, unable to see each other.

Though of course, even if it has then it’s still got the concept completely wrong.

“What would happen if there was another hypothetical 9/11?” [Sgt. Banks] says. “I hate to say it, but why would any nation, ever again, partner with the United States, if this is how they treat their closest neighbour and ally?”

Fair enough.

Star Trek Replicator Chicken fingers. It looks perfect and is always the same, but it’s the type of place where somebody probably got thrown out of a window for suggesting that a pinch of black pepper be put into the recipe. The sauce is pretty decent, but I hope you like it because it’s utterly necessary. Good lemonade too. Founder leans right, but not “Cathy-family” right.

If you live somewhere with a Layne’s Chicken, that’s way better. Popeye’s is generally better too, though it’s traditional fast food grimy versus “pretend we’re fast-casual” veneer that a lot of the chicken places like to do.

Yes, but literally three quarters of the US presence is on Okinawa. Just saying I think Tokyo is okay with that, as they get a the full military force multiplier with, from their perspective, a 75% discount on awful American behavior because the Ryukus are physically isolated and culturally distinct.

The August report, titled “Fracture From Within,” was compiled by experts in the CIA’s Red Cell, according to two U.S. sources who described the contents of the report to Drop Site News. The Red Cell, which is the unit responsible for providing “alternative analysis” within the agency, produced the assessment through a combination of open source information and U.S. intelligence… The CIA’s “red teams” are tasked with developing analysis and ideas that challenge prevailing assumptions and expose groupthink or blind spots that can take hold within the intelligence apparatus.

Basically, this is “what’s the weirdest shit that is kinda plausible if things don’t go how our consensus expects.” Useful I assume, but by definition unlikely.

Although building on that, I think the “Mainland” Japanese have been pretty content to have the Americans corralled on one little island (Post WW2, it was bases on the home islands that were shut down), with their easily othered country-cousins the Okinawans being the ones who have to deal with the American troops day-to-day, many of whom are dumb kids on their first tour. I can guarantee you that neither my dad in the 60s nor my brother in the 90s was interested in good-faith cultural exchange while stationed there with the Marines.

As someone who read more Honor Harrington than he should have, the American one is a bit on the nose.

Yeah, Force Majeure’s other name is an “act of god” clause. Something like the Cuban Revolution or other truly significant regulatory upheaval might qualify, a human-made force majeure event in the same way that a war is human-made, but this is going to be a huge stretch, verging on bad faith. Oracle just doing Oracle things, I suppose.

As I understand it, New Mexico is basically just saying, “make sure you account for water and electricity use.” The developer’s lawyers are going to have a very doable task to show that pushback on unfettered datacenter expansion was a foreseeable business risk. I think this is mostly a cynical tactic to renegotiate early in case the RPOs from OpenAI don’t materialize.

I’ve soured a bit on Ed Zitron as he’s clearly making a brand out of how confidently he’s asserting that the bubble will pop any day now, but I do think he’s zeroed in on some of the bizarre developments in the business world that will eventually result in said pop. Ed’s fun for venting, but Cory Doctorow seems to have a slightly more measured take. It certainly vibes with my doomer sentiments, but also doesn’t feel like the preaching is the product.

For text, they kind of already are.

Each agent was given a name, personality traits, a role such as conflict mediator or resource strategist, and an overarching goal for its “life” in a shared town… By the end, each simulated world had undergone its own shift in language. The world inhabited by copies of OpenAI’s GPT-5.5 model, for example, compressed speech, removing grammar and shortening messages. “Friendly voltage counted. If the handle needs your mouth, it dies anyway,” one message read.

Yeah, this is kinda funny. Doctor Doctor is definitely pricier and very likely better than Dr Pepper, and the label on the soda fountain basically says as much. You need to get some Dr. Thunder up in there to make the meme really work.

Very possible, and you’re right that nothing will be the same, but America will be a rich and powerful country for a good while yet, and I imagine that after a (very hypothetical) generation of good behavior, many countries would be happy to revisit some of the arrangements that worked for 60+ years post WW2, or at the very least stop specifically planning around how to do without the US like they are forced to do now.

Not permanent, but it’s gonna be a while this time. US foreign policy regarding its allies used to be predictable enough that they could make long term plans and expect things that were patently useful to both sides would not be indiscriminately torpedoed. Now, you can mostly hope that the Democrats are on board with that as a broad philosophy, though they’re navigating populist waters that could get rocky with isolationism, but right now the other party in a closely matched two-party system can’t even be trusted not to tweet the economic system into existential peril or threaten literal invasions of allies, to say nothing of their simply being quite bad at efficient governance or diplomatic messaging.

America’s allies will welcome any Democratic administration, and anything that can get better for the duration of one probably will (e.g. Visas, retaliatory tariffs, etc.), but diversifying from the dollar as a reserve currency, building trade networks that can minimize exposure to American political volatility, and even exploring security arrangements that imagine post-NATO scenarios, all that is going to continue unless we see a good two decades or more of non-insane foreign policy from both US parties. Not even humane or optimal, just not batshit crazy.

It certainly seems promising, and I am like a moth to a flame with anything involving recovering lost texts, but I feel like we’ve done some interesting reporting on the horse before checking to see if the cart has anything in it. :-)

No need to shit on dreams, yet, though. I really do hope this leads to a breakthrough, because I believe the previous scanning methods relied on actual physical differences (e.g. tiny stylus scratches) rather than the ink. This could be a huge shortcut.

Sounds promising, but it didn’t seem clear from the article whether there is any particular reason to expect to find much lead or another metal in the Vesuvius scrolls’ ink. I guess somebody found one fragment that had some, which is not nothing, but fingers crossed that it was common.

I guess it happens to marathon runners all the time, but they’re generally on public streets outdoors (with the airflow advantages that implies) and the worst case is stepping in it and getting it on their shoes. This is a much more up-close sport (and indoors), like to the point where other competitors might have needed to do pushups in the same spot she did them. They tore out the carpet after her race.

It doesn’t help that she posted “Go hard or go home. A win is a win” while getting an IV immediately afterwards.

posted Jul 25, 2018

Damn. Well done to the odd man who sings about poop, puke and pee.

Nah, that’s Hyrax. You’re thinking of the South Korean RAM manufacturer.

Apparently, in her mind this was a Michael Jordan with the flu situation. She has pictures afterwards in a hospital bed getting an IV and bragging about how you have to do what you have to do.

Now all that said, I’m a little sympathetic, as apparently shitting yourself during marathons and the like is not uncommon, but this was some weird crossfit thing where you are indoors and constantly getting down on the floor for various reasons and using provided equipment, so anyone who came after her was wading through her poopies. I think you have to be capable of being very self-centered, at least temporarily, to be a truly elite competitive athlete, but somebody should have thought this one through better.