The Chinese government doesn’t want to have to deal with routing the world’s email spam through their domestic servers. Nevermind the nightmare of latency going round trip from a terminal in Sao Paulo to a data center in Beijing, just so some mid-level bureaucrat can know the porn habits of Brazil.

I would say the bigger threat of Chinese hardware is an end to the effective technology embargo the US sanctions regime has imposed on the Global South. Far scarier to Americans than a Chinese bureaucrat with access to the Amazon web store history is a Cuban Communist with a standard of living that outpaces their Miami peers.

I mean, that’s absolutely where this is going at a business level. Cloud computing has been in the cards for decades, and the only real question is who will do the hosting.

With the price of RAM and CPUs going asymptotic, these big cloud compute companies are building an effective monopoly on high end processing capacity. They’re cornering the market on hardware. Eventually, you either use their computers or you stick with legacy hardware (that’s seeded with Planned Obsolescence time bombs) or you (shudders just to think of it) start buying computers from CHINA.

When you think about it, there’s really only one option.

Getting maybe 20% of the features of Notepad++ standard was nice out of the box. For a fleeting moment, I almost kept it as my default.

Gmail has started injecting a fat “Suggestions for responding to emails” feature into my composition space. Really fucking annoying when you’re trying to type something out on a phone. No idea how to begin disabling it, I couldn’t find configurations anywhere in the settings.

I’ve had this email address for over 20 years. Not looking forward to changing it. But enshitification won’t stop.

Accelerationists have never been more bullish.

He’s one of the richest men in the world and you’re harshing his vibes. Isn’t that enough?

Round here we gotta cure fer callin anodder man feadderless, hehehe…

:-/

You can definitely mine a bit of gold out of that pile of turds. But you could also go to the library and receive a much higher ratio of signal to noise.

Plato: “Everything is a shadowy echo of its perfected nature. Even gender.”

Ken Paxton: “Any teacher caught mentioning that last bit is fired.”

Aliens: “We have the cure for cancer.”

Humans: “Great! What is it?”

Aliens: “Just stop your cells from reproducing. That creates translation errors which can result in run-away mitosis and mutation.”

Humans: “Uh… okay, but if we’re not using cells, what should we use to form our bodies instead?”

Aliens: “Sandstone is good. Marble is better.”

Humans: “Okay, we’ll give it a shot.”

3000 years of Egyptians and Greeks perfecting the sculpture later…

Humans: “Nope. Still got cancer.”

Can’t not read that in his voice

I mean, graded take home essays are a waste. It’s like assigning weight training. Good for exercising, and we can talk about your form when you’re done.

But as soon as you start stack ranking the results, the incentive to cheat outpaces the goal of practicing ingesting and outputing ideas.

Gotta begin to question the utility of a device that exists to antagonize you, even after I’ve explicitly gone through the options menu and disabled all the “Would you like us to continue antagonizing you?” toggles.

Teachers are using AI to grade essays. But some experts are raising ethical concerns

We pretend to study and they pretend to grade us.

I would sooner download a tire fire.

Aleister Crowley believed there were three forms of sex magick; autoerotic, heterosexual, and homosexual, (Drury, 2012). He claimed that by performing specific sexual rituals, including sado masochistic sex rituals on young boys, one could achieve financial gains and personal success, (Drury, 2012). For Crowley, the sex rituals were a sacrament and ingesting the fluids from sex and certain biological functions, such as using menstrual blood in rituals, would imbue him with knowledge, power, and success, (Drury, 2012). Certainly, in creating a cult of personality with a devoted following and in being an influencer through many generations, he can be considered successful

Hardly a secret

Satan isn’t a pedo.

I wouldn’t hang my hat on this. Satanists have as much a problem with pedophilia as every other branch of the Christian faith.

You know, if it was anything but Twitter, I could at least have an ounce of sympathy. I remember Tumblr getting a bunch of cheap heat over its active community of furry enthusiasts. Valve cracked down on a bunch of lewd games in their Steam Store, largely out of prudishness. Reddit’s been a notorious hub for revenge porn since forever, and its still been considered draconian to blank-ban the whole site.

But pretty much everyone drew the line at CSAM. Hell, 4chan generally drew the line at CSAM. Sites that had virtually no moderation still managed to swing their tiny hammers at CSAM wherever it cropped up.

Twitter seems to have fully embraced this shit with an enthusiasm that can only be described as satanic. Just really, nakedly, unapologetically evil. Maybe Sweeny just doesn’t get that, and he’s reflexively defending another billionaire from the oppressive hand of Big Government Regulation. Maybe the dude’s just a nounce and thinks CSAM is no big deal. Either way, someone needs to rub his nose in it until he gets the picture.

We’ve had affordable, consumer grade solar since the 90s at least.

I’d hardly call the 1998 average of $12/W affordable. It was possible, but not practical.

I don’t think people were questioning the viability of solar in 2016.

Even in the mid-'10s, solar instillation were something of a luxury and - thanks to the high cost of batteries - only practical for deferring daytime electricity consumption. The root of the Solyndra scandal was Obama pushing a domestic solar manufacturer as an alternative to Chinese solar imports (which were, themselves, far more expensive than they should be thanks to steep US tarriffs imposed in 2014)

I don’t think anyone was questioning solar viability. But we were still talking about break-even prices on a 5-10 year horizon, heavily predicated on electricity costs outpacing inflation. As a hedge against periodic brownouts or price spikes during a heat wave, it was useful. Now the materials are a third the price and the number of installers has surged to accommodate rising demand. It’s just a much better deal.