Everybody from a more recent generation looks on average younger than the generations before. In the middle ages people didn’t have sunscreen and bathed once a year. But even if you look at older movies, Sean Connery is 31 in Dr No but he looks like in his 40s. All those cigarettes, the booze, the lack of regular exercise, and only eating full Scottish breakfasts all the time. Fast forward to today where more people worry about their appearance and next to not smoking, not drinking, eating healthy, exercising, etc. people have a range of cosmetics and/or cosmetic surgery at their disposal. Of course they look younger.

That will not ban me for saying my opinion freely.

That depends very much on your opinion and how you choose to express it. Can you give us examples of how and where your freely expressed opinion has run afoul of moderation before?

There is this idea in international politics that the rest of the world should have a say in US elections. Because the outcome inevitably affects us all outside the US. Since we don’t have a say, we still rely on you to be the instrument of checks and balances on your government. And when it is as erratic and boneheaded as your current one, no amount of trade we do with the US should abrogate your responsibilities as the aforementioned instrument. Nor do I think we should stop encouraging protest against the dumb policy of tariffs, which is hurting your own economy as well. Or the end of Roe v Wade. Or the illegal kidnapping of a not much liked head of state. Or the illegal war in Iran. And while this is not exactly the example to follow, the French are rioting for much less these days. It started with bad conditions in schools.

Capitalism works very much with countries’ economies complementing each other. You have the IT sector, high tech military companies, and whisky. Europe has luxury brands, wine, and various niche industries. You buy our shit and we buy yours and then there is no need to produce your shit here as well and vice versa.

That’s a result of decades of a transatlantic relationship that worked in everybody’s favour. We invest in your economy and get security guarantees in return. It’s in a way an extended payoff of the Marshall plan. Your tech sector would be much worse if Europe had built up parallel infrastructures. Which nobody thought necessary because we were all friends. And especially arms deals are often decades in the making. So this “you buy our slop and guns so stop telling us to protest our idiotic government” doesn’t sound quite right to my ears. I think that’s too easy an out.

Rest assured though that Europe will be spending less of its money in the US. The loss of trust as a result of 45/47 is nearly instant. Rebuilding it will take more than a couple of saner administrations. Meanwhile, the US’s purchasing power is shrinking too. Europeans buy military equipment in South Korea and Canada looks to the EU for closer ties. And we haven’t even talked about the bubble yet.

It’s surprising really that you aren’t protesting more.

I don’t have much experience with Collabora but what I have wasn’t great. I’m very much in favour of governments ditching MS for something like Libre Office. But I also know that the formatting errors can be a pain in the røv especially if you have 20 year old Excel sheets full of important information spiked with macros that civil servants who have long since retired made ages ago. It’s minefields within minefields.

So I think many things can be true at the same time. Denmark would like to rely less on American software and services. It was in the interest of the government to communicate that loudly at a time when the mad orange hand was reaching for Greenland (and may do so again because what’s in a treaty?). The Collabora trial could have been an earnest effort that failed for many reasons I don’t have trouble imagining. Or it was a show piece, a signal to the Danish voters as well as American companies. Your contacts may not be as certain any more. It may have led to some increased MS lobbying bts. And this doesn’t mean this is the end of the effort. Just this one, at this point in time.

The big problem is this: success stories of governments switching to something open source are rare. You don’t win elections when people are fed up with long processing times in government services. They’d have to be sufficiently pissed off with the mad orange to tolerate that out of spite. And with the urgency of the Greenland crisis having subsided, the level of pissedoffness will have also declined.

The US didn’t use colours for political leanings until 2000 when this whole blue, red, and purple terminology started in earnest. And using red for the conservative side is certainly unique.

Red has traditionally been the colour of socialism/social democrats. All the other colour assignments tend to vary by country. But blue or black or thereabouts tends to be conservative. Green introduced itself in the 70s.

Canada is just normal in terms of “political colours.”

I think they are doing that wherever possible. Schools and ICUs moved underground where it is possible and necessary. In war time, you don’t have the time or the money to finance big infrastructure projects unless there is a clear military advantage to them, e.g. reopening a bridge. And I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that EU funds have already been used to strengthen civilian infrastructure underground in some areas of Ukraine.

I just had a quick search about temperatures in a crematorium. Around 800 °C. A structure that can withstand that sort of temperatures is probably also able to withstand exploding batteries. If I remember the Galaxy 8 disaster, they go pop and then it’s just mostly a chemical reaction releasing heat and gas. 30 batteries might be a lot. It may not end up destroying the place but it will possibly leave it in need of repair.

Why do you want to create this sort of fireworks show in a confined space where under normal circumstances nobody will be present to witness it?

Slim chance is the objective way of expressing a low likelihood. Fat chance is a colloquial expression using irony. You say one thing but mean the opposite. It’s more often used as just a quippy two-word reply.

Language doesn’t make sense. When flammable and inflammable can mean the same thing, all bets are off. You cannot make sense of these things; you can only accept them.

Thanks for pointing that out. I have edited that part and one more.

In simple terms, PHP is a language telling servers on the internet what to do. There is a problem with it, one that’s been known for a long time. But it wasn’t considered a major one because using this problem for hacking purposes was thought to be so much work nobody would use it.

Enter LLM agents. They have all the computing power in the world and time isn’t an issue. They used this vulnerability. And the internet panicked. Lots of smaller operations shut down as a precaution. I think there is a patch in the works. Edit: Patches are out already.

An embargo seems like a natural response to a threat like this. I’m not sure if it’s a good idea because I don’t know if you can just transition to using a different scripting language on any server. I understand it’s a fairly old language in internet terms. So it might be time to move on, I don’t know.

Edit: I think I misunderstood the question. The embargo people talk about is more like the iPhone review embargo. The new iPhone gets released to reviewers ahead of public release so they can test and produce their pieces. And the embargo end day is when they can release their findings. The PHP embargo is, I think, the movers and shakers behind the scenes agreeing to shut up about the details of a vulnerability until the patch is out. If they go public before the patch then more bad actors get the blueprint on how to exploit the vulnerability.

I will take no follow-up questions because I had it explained to me like I’m a 5yo.

They changed the rules to target cosmopolitan gamer sock puppet accounts if I remember correctly.

Don’t beat yourself up for not having a plan. You’re not an aberration in society. The people who plan everything are just the loudest so we think that’s the norm. Sooner or later, out of necessity or love, you’ll hit upon an idea that you’ll pursue.

This seems right to me. It’s the lone gunman riding into the sunset at the end of a Western. The big action has concluded and the end is in sight.

It’s the Hollywood version of “it ain’t over until the fat lady sings.” Which is a questionable phrase by today’s standards but shows how we come up with weird proverbs surrounding stuff ending.

Muse has been downloaded 9 million times in the U.S. and Canada since its launch on September 8, market intelligence company AppMagic, told Rest of World.

I don’t even want to know where they got this figure. Downloads are not the same as users. I would imagine a third is tech influencers and journalists who played with it for a hot minute, produced their piece on it, and uninstalled. The figure is immediately less impressive, isn’t it.

The question of “Western” values over local ones in developing countries is valid. While I would assume the models will be able to learn, I also think the users there will quickly realise that this stuff doesn’t work and stop using it. A similar thing will happen in areas of sketchy internet coverage. People will just not use this crap. And that the vegetable stall on the street market is going to implement an inventory system and publish an agent-friendly website so they can be part of this magnificent technology sounds very unlikely to me. Payment systems, okay. If you can do that on a phone connection. But this much complication? In the PRC in a big city maybe, Burkina Faso maybe not so much.

The agent apocalypse won’t be as bad, I don’t think. There will be plenty of stories of how the Meta agent rather than booking a 10:30am ordered a military drone strike on the nail salon by mistake or something.

The languages are a thing. Even in developed nations like Switzerland or Belgium there are challenges that the “American Intelligence” people have probably not thought about. Brussels is good example where dual infrastructure for Flemish and French speakers exist and really 2.1 language groups live separately and together at the same time. The .1 is all the EU and NATO foreigners in the city plus the odd Belgian German speaker. Booking an appointment at a doctor that doesn’t speak your language through your clever agent isn’t helpful.

There is an element of cat and mouse to this scam. I don’t think you providing a good example case is going to enable the assholes to do a better job. They would get there anyway and then we find other ways to make it harder for them. The benefits of reaching and teaching the clueless outweigh the danger of steepening the enemy in my opinion.

If it’s online it’s out in the open. Even if you make a website and exclude it from search engine indexes, there will be an LLM that doesn’t gaf. You could publish only a hard copy book or VHS tapes to reach the target audience. But then you limit your reach as well.

I read about some research (and it may have been funded by the socials, I don’t remember) that in a Coke/Pepsi blind test, users preferred algorithmic feeds. Most people do not think too much about what is happening behind the scenes and are happy to receive content they like. The unwashed masses are less concerned with things like privacy or moderation of content. I think there is a strong correlation between people who care about such things and their preference for chronological feeds. And we’re the minority.

An algorithmic feed will always be a better vessel to sell ads. Or in a more conspiratorial sense, to serve you “approved content.” So in the end, it boils down to money. Money prefers algorithms.

It’s precedent-ish. The first court in Munich did the hard work from scratch. The Aachen court copied and pasted their logic into their own ruling. There is a strong chance that for the time being other courts will come up with similar rulings under comparable case conditions. But Google may be waiting for a case where they are not quite as likely to lose if they appeal. Funny shit can still happen, especially if the highest federal court can be convinced to rule on a case like this. So it’s too early to tell if this precedent has more long lasting staying power.

If you get to that position and pet peeves are the first thing you’re thinking about you will have proven the Peter Principle correct. Again.

How would you know the baby was your deceased significant other? What have you sniffed this morning?

I think there are more grey areas in the classification. Just take recreational weed use, which is as legal as smoking cigarettes in some regions but illegal in others. Where does the drug classification start? It’s not as clear to me as you seem to indicate.

Also, the content label doesn’t tell the proprietor of a cinema who can come and see a movie. Do they have to look up a combination of letters to see if a 14yo can go see It? How about something like Trainspotting where there is violence, foul language, and lots of hard drug use. A VLD rating doesn’t indicate anything. But for me the movie isn’t R because for all the pearl clutching it may cause for some people it’s a good promotional film to stay away from heroin.

You can run your system parallel to the existing one. And some of the streamers do that, I think. But for legal reasons, in the US as well as most of Europe, you cannot not give an age limit as well.