Also, Microsoft create many vulnerabilities by using AI on their own code. AI can do it all!

Venezuela needs to sit tight for a week or two until he forgets.

Consciousness is something completely different. It’s what makes you fully feel the present moment. It’s the fact of feeling alive. So it has nothing to do with the ability to crunch numbers or stitch words together into a logical sequence.

And there’s one fact you can’t get around. Consciousness, in every case observed since we started studying it, only ever appears on biological substrate. Never on non-living matter. Never on stone, never on metal and never on silicon. So it’s a fact that looks an awful lot like a law of nature.

This bit strikes me as odd. It suggests we’ve done experiments to check whether consciousness ever occurs in non-biological systems, and concluded that wherever we find consciousness it’s in a loving organism. But has anyone done such an experiment? Could they? Do we understand well enough what consciousness is, what it is for it to be present in an entity, and how to test for that empirically, that we can simply do experiments to test when it occurs and draw conclusions about laws of nature involving it?

You can’t do an experiment until you can say, to a good enough approximation, what you’re looking for and how you’ll tell whether it occurs or not. I doubt we even have a clear enough notion of consciousness to agree on what we’re talking about, let alone how to test whether it’s present, to do empirical experiments and draw lawlike conclusions. And it’s not that we just need to get a bit clearer about the kind of entity consciousness is: it’s not even clear that it is an entity in the empirical world.

Sure, you may be able to buy a cheaper motherboard for a while. But you’ll pay through the nose to populate it, hence the falling motherboard sales.

The old Israeli approach to ceasefires.

There’s going to be a lot of us running 2019-vintage PCs indefinitely.

Casio digital watches.

If only the prices were not so 2026y.

The numbers have been remarkably stable for 10 years, given what a shitshow it has unmistakably been.

Into fascism. But also from fascism.

Over LoRa it’s useful for basic off-grid messaging, but the bandwidth is extremely limited.

A meshnet over the internet would have more bandwidth. Various things have been tried. I2P is a kind of logical meshnet over the internet.

Hey thanks for doing that critical investigation. Although I posted propaganda and that wasn’t smart of me, It’s good to know those numbers are likely a misrepresentation and Israelis may not be as thoroughly extreme as that report makes them look.

On the other hand the responses of Israelis in opinion polls are not encouraging. From last July:

Personal response to the reports from Gaza: From examining the conduct of the state, we moved to a more personal question, asking: “To what extent are you personally troubled or not troubled by the reports of famine and suffering among the Palestinian population in Gaza?” A very large majority of Jewish respondents reported that they are not so troubled or not at all troubled personally by events in Gaza (79%), while the majority of Arabs said that they are very troubled or somewhat troubled (86%).

In the Jewish sample, we found no difference by gender (with 80% of women and 78% of men not troubled), while in the Arab sample we found that women are more troubled than men by the situation in Gaza (women, 92%; men, 80%).

https://en.idi.org.il/articles/60357

Yeah I don’t really do new technology any more. I’m more into keeping the old machines running as long as possible.

Painfully expensive, like all computer hardware these days.

Don’t start negotiating until you have a deal ready to go: that’s how you get the USA to bomb you.

Just once I’d like to see the world’s companies react to dumb local laws by refusing to sell their products where the laws apply. Problem is, other states and countries always introduce matching stupid laws soon enough. California, for example, is introducing a similar restriction on 3D printers.

Sounds good but $60 per month is a lot of money.

I agree in general about self-hosting, but backup seems like a special case. Where do you back up your self-hosted data? An offsite copy of the backup is needed, and it should be automatic. For most people (who only have one site, their home) that’s not easy to arrange except through a cloud backup service.

Mullen, who in 2025 drew a salary of $336,518, is suspended with pay and was required to surrender his badge and gun pending the outcome of the investigation, according to a spokesperson for the department.

Fucking hell. These guys are not worth a third of that salary, even when they’re working and not just on vacation as a reward for being extra shitty.