hotspur

You were successful, I definitely smirked ;)

Sweet is that what colugo means? If so, it’s a well-applied name for that (lemur? Squirrel?). I’m guessing they’re another weirdo nocturnal primate-ish thing like the tarsiers?

Yes I heard an anecdote that describes this trajectory well on a podcast recently: when a society or economy is at the beginning of a development arc, each mile of sewer, road, power, rail, etc can be justified, as it leads to economic growth that was not possible yet. But like you say, 50-100 years later all of that infrastructure requires replacement, maintenance . And the problem is, that investment does not deliver growth, it simply maintains the economic base you already have. So you’d have to be a really long term thinking society and factor in replacement costs in upfront somehow, which would make development substantially more expensive, all for a population that doesn’t exist yet, that you won’t know… a staggeringly difficult ask.

Have never heard of these before, they are amazing looking. Thanks for expanding my world a little bit today!

I was thinking that also, but perhaps it has it coiled back in between its legs?

This isn’t the term, but I remember reading piece years ago discussing the concept of catabolic capitalism, which has a similar vibe; basically capitalism runs out of new frontiers to mercilessly exploit, and it retools to eat itself. So you end up with an economy (very much like the one we have now) where all growth is in dismantling and busting out the infrastructures and institutions previously erected to support the previous phase.

Very true

Based on my research (watching Justified on FX) they’d sidle up to the executive, say a few pithy lines and draw down on and kill him when he goes for his gun or pen, walk away putting their Stetson back on, then get chewed out by their bosses.

American culture, partly because of bullshit mythos and partly because of religious like devotion to oligarchic capitalism, selects for low-empathy sociopaths and individual atomization/isolation. My favorite low end example is to observe my fellow citizens driving when I go to the suburbs: you are in their personal story, and you are in their way. City living doesn’t fix all that, but having to live in close proximity to neighbors and get used to compromise helps push a slightly more communal vibe.

But basically the entire culture is built around a get-yours-first mentality? And more recently an influencer-inflected sort of hyper-real understanding of one’s value and potential. We’re like a national exemplar for the dunning-Kruger effect, or like kids who cheat at online video games swaggering around proud of their “achievements”.

Seems like we’re in the finding out phase after fucking around though.

I agree with your assessment: I find it both fascinating (who would have thought each new thing was actually possible, what insane bad idea will be launched today?) and horrifying.

Still working out the coping aspect, as what’s going on directly affects me and some of my family, but mostly switch between paying very close attention and trying to game out what the agenda is, and then taking a day to not pay attention and live in calm denial.

No, obviously not. Next article New York Times.

Yeah ok makes sense. Plus like you said you can always over build the piece, etc. and if it breaks after a few months, you can always reprint it haha.

This is the kind of shit that always sells 3d printing to me, when is see someone solve a whacky problem they have that otherwise would be kinda hard to pull off.

I’m guessing that these days the filaments/resins are getting pretty high durability on the consumer market?

To everyone pointing out that he won’t be charged, OP’s question was can he be charged. Yes we get that it’s unlikely given the current configuration of us gov’t, but do his actions meet the basic requirements? Yes, absolutely.

That said, most billionaires probably meet the definition.

Oh and at least with my hardware, the surface keyboard and trackpad worked out of the box, no problems. I’d pay special attention to any special wireless drivers you might need because if wireless doesn’t come up, you can’t hardwire the thing to get the driver. (USB could do it though I guess)

I’ve been in-process trying to flip a surface pro 6 into a Linux tablet for a while now. Can’t answer all your questions but can provide a few. First things first: https://github.com/linux-surface/linux-surface

That’s your hub for most of tue stuff you’ll need to do it. You can look up your hardware in their feature matrix and see what is supported.

Generally touch and stylus work. Things like camera are much more hit or miss.

In terms of distro… welp it’s always kinda impossible to make a “right choice”. Everything will have pros and cons. Originally uninstalled arch just to see if I could. And yes, it turns out you can. Problem is, I use Ubuntu on a couple of spare computers as servers and such and I’m more familiar with how that works, so I thought ok I’m having some trouble getting a couple things to work I’ll just put Ubuntu on here and then I don’t have to remember two different ways of using the OS (mind you I was using gnome in all cases, so really wasn’t a big deal to have to research a few arch specific things).

Problem is, Ubuntu fails to install. I’ve tried about 4 times and it always fails out, and I can’t figure out a way to access any install logs after the fact.

So I’m probably gonna put arch back in there because it worked, mostly.

You’ll have to be willing to tinker a bit and get used to some different ways of interacting. Overall touch was pretty ok and gnome in my case was pretty nice for navigation.

I was using an app called xournal++ for stylus/notetaking, and it seems very well featured for a Linux stylus application. That said, my pen stopped working a while ago, and I could not figure out how to fix it, which is why I was gonna try again with Ubuntu. (Xournal wasn’t to blame for the stylus problems, just couldn’t use it because stylus was useless)

I still think it’s a good learning experience, and probably a good way to resurrect an older piece of tech to usefulness. Personally I wanted to replicate stuff I do on my iPad, but be able to fully Adblock YouTube, etc. my iPad is way better for reading and handwriting, but otherwise is an obnoxious locked down operating system that I find more and more annoying. Basically it’s a great tablet but limited. Whereas like the windows version the surface is not a great tablet, but an acceptable hybrid.

OneNote is such a frustration for me. There are things about it I hate, and I’d certainly like to not have stuff in Microsoft’s hands, but I still can’t find an alternative that syncs well across all my platforms, has good stylus support and has the basic canvas freedom.

I’ve been trying to demo xournal++ on my old surface pro 6, but have been having a pretty hard time getting the stylus to stay working. People are doing great work on getting Linux dirivers and support for tablet stuff, but it still feels pretty in its infancy. My iPad, just works very well for touch and stylus use cases and will be hard to move on from.

Yeah ok, I do basically agree with you. It’s not an accurate equivalency, yet. We’re trending bad though. I’d say the example of Stephen Miller sort of accidentally hinting that they shut down USAID because they all donated to the Harris campaign had some chilling implications for example. He could just be assuming that, since that’s a safe assumption for populous urban areas generally, but they could also have cross checked lists of employees against political contributions.

I’m gonna take a second stab at replying, because you seem to be arguing in good faith.

My original point is that online chatbots have arbitrary curbs that are built in. I can run GPT 2.5 on my self host machine, and if I knew how to do it (I don’t) I could probably get it to have no curbs via retraining and clever prompting. The same is true of the deepseek models.

I don’t personally agree that there’s a huge difference between one model being curbed from discussing xi and another from discussing what the current politics du jour in the western sphere are. When you see platforms like meta censoring LGTBTQ topics but amplifying hate speech, or official congressional definitions of antisemitism including objection to active and on-going genocide, the idea of what government censorship is and isn’t becomes confusing.

Having personally received the bizarre internal agency emails circulating this week encouraging me to snitch out my colleagues to help root out the evils of DEIA thought in US gov’t the last week has only crystallized it for me. I’m not sure I care that much about Chinese censorship or authoritarianism; I’ve got budget authoritarianism at home, and I don’t even get high-speed rail out of the bargain. At least they don’t depend on forever wars and all of the attendant death and destruction that come with them to prop up their ponzi-scheme economies. Will they in the future, probably? They are basically just a heavily centralized/regulated capitalist enterprise now, so who knows. But right now? Do they engage in propaganda? Cyber-espionage? Yes and Yes. So do we, so do you, so does everyone who has a seat at the geopolitical table and the economy to afford it.

The point of all of this isn’t US GOOD CHINA BAD or US BAD CHINA GOOD. The article is about the deepseek models tearing out the floor of US dominance in AI. Personally, having deployed it and played with it, yeah. None of these products are truly useful to me yet, and I remain skeptical of their eventual value, but right now, party censorship or not, you can download a version of an LLM that you can run, retrain and bias however you want, and it costs you the bandwidth it took to download. And it performs on par with US commercial offerings that require pricey subscriptions. Offerings that apparently require huge public investment to keep afloat.

Wow what even is beehaw, I had no idea. At least China is honest about what they’re doing. The amount of bad faith in these replies is insane.

If you’re a shill, fine, good job. But if you’re not, have you paid any attention to the real world around you? We spent the last year enabling genocide, and the best fruits of our over-hyped tech and intellectual innovation factories are being revealed as the bullshit that most people always understood them to be.

The fact that you can accuse me of being dishonest, while providing no basis or evidence, while multiple federal agencies are under a strict gag order from any communication or purchasing with outside contacts… I mean really?

Like are you guys just another CIA adjacent cutout that believes in identity politics and SSRIs but has zero ability to critically assess the actual world around them?