2024-11-25
populist and good, self-hosting NewSpeak, Tate hate, Masters' degrees worthless, streaming 1993, c++ geek war, usury actually good, Danes rewilding farms, which way did it tilt, then?
etc
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Popuphobia’s Javier Milei Problem - by Bryan Caplan
I offer that definition in “One Cheer for Populism.” Not three cheers. Not even two. But one. Contrary to what Dalmia and Karlson say, populism is not necessarily bad. It can be good. Indeed, under certain conditions, it may be good’s only hope. What then is good populism? What is an example? The best current example is Javier Milei of Argentina. He is both populist and good. Milei’s populist credentials are unimpeachable. He works in opposition to his country’s established structure and its elites—he dubs them “the caste”—who ruined Argentina. Milei justly blames them for their failures. His personal authority and political movement did not rise out of a traditional political party with a traditional platform.
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Ancient fish-trapping network supported the rise of Maya civilization
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2k-Year-Old Psychedelic Potion Found in Ancient Egyptian Mug
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Rescuers describe 20-hour ordeal ending with amputation of rafter's leg
Horseshit
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Satya Nadella and the three stages of scientific truth
The sociology here is extraordinary. The field has often treated me as a pariah. The media sometimes treated me as a crank. Practically an entire field, including researchers and executives, tried to shout me down, long before the data were in. The disparagement, dismissal, and revisionism here are all textbook Schopenhauer.
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Young girls are using anti-aging products they see on social media
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Self Hosting is an Unhelpful Term – Terence Eden’s Blog
I think he misunderstands something about self-hosting because, as a term, it is both misleading and unhelpful. When people say "Defund The Police" what they mean is "Move funds away from miliary style policing and give it to trained mental health professionals" - what people hear is "Abolish the police and let anarchy reign". The ability to "Self Host" doesn't just mean "run this on a Raspberry Pi in your cupboard and be responsible for constant maintenance". Yes, you can do that if you're a masochist, but it isn't restricted to that.
To me, "Self-Hosting" means "I am in control of where I host something". I currently pay a company to host this blog. It has previously been hosted on Blogger, WordPress, my own VPS, and a variety of other services. Tomorrow I could decide to host it with a big company, or I could run it from my phone. I get to choose. That's what "Self-Hosting" is - a choice in where to host.
It is absurdly privileged to think that running your own services is something normal people want to do and are capable of doing. Strong regulation helps everyone, people want simplicity, and ecosystems can be fragile.
- "War is Peace" and "Freedom is Slavery" was supposed have been satire, dammit.
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Helpline for Yakuza victims fears it leaked their personal info
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New York City Hotel Rates Soar to Record Heights as Holiday Travel Nears
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Kids are getting ruder, teachers say. And new research backs that up
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Why Does the US Still Have Lead Pipes? Blame the Lead Industries Association
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Wildlife monitoring technologies used to intimidate and spy on women
celebrity gossip
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Andrew Tate's site ransacked, subscriber data stolen
The website of self-proclaimed misogynist and alleged sex trafficker and rapist Andrew Tate has been compromised and data on its paying subscribers stolen. His now-ransacked Real World site is where the antagonistic online influencer preaches eyebrow-raising life advice primarily to young disillusioned men. The British-American ex-kickboxer charges subscribers $50 a month with a promise to help make them wealthier, fitter, and more masculine. The site is said to have more than 113,000 active users, and the guy himself has accumulated millions of followers on various social networks, some of which he has been banned and unbanned from.
Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering
Religion / Tribal / Culture War and Re-Segregation
Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts
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Is your master’s degree useless?
New data show a shockingly high proportion of courses are a waste of money
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Judge Rules in Favor of School That Gave Student a Bad Grade for Using AI
Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising
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Google seems to have called it quits on making its own Android tablets – again
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Supreme Court allows multibillion-dollar class action to proceed against Meta
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Despite its general failure to launch, Interactive TV was, for a time, a big field with big ideas. For example, you've heard of MPEG-4, but what about MHEG-5? That's the Multimedia Hypermedia Expert Group's effort towards an object-oriented, television-native hypermedia environment, and it's exactly as terrible and fascinating as that description would lead you to believe. But I'm not going to talk about that today. Here's what's on my mind: what if I told you that MSN TV was Microsoft's second attempt at interactive television? In 1994, Microsoft formed a partnership with two cable television carriers to launch Cablesoft. It was such a big hit that Microsoft spent most of its brief life trying not to talk about it.
Microsoft and Bill Gates and Paul Allen were all kind of obsessed with streaming media and on-demand delivery in the 1990s. It's hard to keep track of all the failed ventures they either launched or invested in, there were several each year. If you read into the history of the TV distribution industry Paul Allen especially just keeps popping up in weird places. It's fascinating to me because our modern experience shows that they were very much right, in that on-demand streaming delivery via computers would become the dominant way media is distributed. But they were also pathologically ahead of their time; Paul Allen was basically trying to do Netflix in 1993 and all of these efforts just sucked. The infrastructure was simply not there and the many companies trying to build it tripped over each other as often as they made progress.
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The Supreme Court will decide the fate of America's low-income broadband fund
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VeriSign: Elizabeth Warren Calls for Crackdown on Internet ‘Monopoly’ You've Never Heard of | WIRED
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Bevy of smart doorbell bugs earn Ekon an FCC penalty for negligence
TechSuck / Geek Bait
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Old School Tape Loading - by Chris Greening - atomic14
I got to thinking - I’ve got an ESP32-S3 - it’s got a bunch of ADC converters - what’s stopping me from loading directly from audio data? Standard ZX Spectrum tape loading is pretty easy to understand (there’s a good reference here). The tape data is made up of pulses, where a ‘pulse’ is either a mark or a space, so 2 pulses make up a complete square wave.
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Oh boy, more personality drama in tech: On "Safe" C++ • Izzy Muerte
In the WG21 ISO C++ October 2024 mailing, Andrew Tomazos submitted P3403, a paper titled “The Undefined Behavior Question” (which HOOBOY man we’re just knocking it out of the fucking park with possible anti-semitic dog whistles today aren’t we?), and then when you open this goddamned PDF you realize it’s a fucking cleaned up transcript of a ChatGPT conversation.
About 20 years ago, I suggested in comp.language.c++ on USENET that the committee's refusal to take memory safety seriously constituted material support of terrorism. That really got some people upset, and the posting was removed from USENET, which is hard to do.
AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World
Crypto con games
Economicon / Business / Finance
Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making
Trump
Democrats / Biden Inc
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Clinton, 78, fumed in his new memoir “Citizen: My Life After The White House” that he “didn’t know” about the “mischief.” “The whole thing bothered me because I had made it clear that I wanted a smooth, cooperative transition and we had done exactly that,” he wrote. “Within a few days some people finally went on the record to say that either no damage had occurred or that the allegations of ‘W’ mischief were greatly exaggerated.”
Left Angst
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The age of the partial outsider
The optimal position in life is that of the partial outsider. That is, someone handicapped enough in a given milieu to see things others might miss, but not so alien as to be unable to work the system. Not all partial outsiders leave a mark, no, but a disproportionate share of those who leave a mark qualify as partial outsiders. Isn’t Donald Trump exhibit A? He is New York but not Manhattan, urban but not urbane, rich but from the construction game rather than from genteel finance. He grew up close enough to the elite to know its frailties, and far enough to itch with resentment at the little slights that are the lot of the not-quite-pukka. I once thought it would be the downfall of modern populism that its leaders were silver-spoon pretenders. Now I see that an authentic Everyperson, a Pierre Poujade type, wouldn’t know how to bend the establishment against itself. Boris Johnson (Etonian but never rich) and Nigel Farage (privately schooled but not a graduate) emphatically do
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Trump and Sanders Are Wrong to Want to Cap Credit Card Interest Rates - Bloomberg
When Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump agree on something, it’s a sign that trouble is afoot. And last week, the senator from Vermont said that he would gladly work with the president-elect to cap credit card interest rates at 10%, a promise Trump made during the campaign. Their complaint is simple: Americans who have to pay 20% or 30% interest on their credit card debt are being ripped off. Those rates do sound unjust, but imposing a cap would just make things worse — for borrowers more so than banks.
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University Responds to Potential Immigration Challenges Under Trump Admin
“The threat that seems to be most immediate is against immigrants and refugees, some of whom are in Middletown, some of whom are at Wesleyan, and that’s what I’m most concerned about initially,” President Michael Roth ’78 said. “But thereto how exactly the policies will be implemented and how the states will have a say in those policies, if they have a say, and then how institutions might protect the most vulnerable students, faculty, and staff and their families, that all remains to be seen. That is definitely on our mind here, the minds of the people who are running this university.”
Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security
External Security / Militaria / Diplomania
World
Russia Bad / Ukraine War
China
Health / Medicine
Pox / COVID / BioTerror AgitProp
Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda
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Source of high PFAS levels in Muskegon Lake foam unknown, researchers say
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How can we use this to straighten the axis and banish winter to the benighted polar lands? the Earth has tilted 31.5 inches because of human activity
The way the planet rotates has been fundamentally changed by the process of pumping groundwater, and it is having a far bigger impact than previously imagined. As a result, sea levels have risen .24 inches in less than two decades and the Earth has tilted 31.5 inches.
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Michigan invokes new dispute with Air Force over Wurtsmith PFAS cleanup
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Developing nations blast $300B COP29 climate deal as insufficient
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COP29 agrees deal to kick-start global carbon credit trading
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Peaches spread across North America through Indigenous networks