my favorite is the white dude in the background with programmer neck who has no idea how to dance to the song despite it literally shouting instructions at him

I thought as you but oh man after trying it there’s no going back

Get the speed skeleton and stabilizer. The stabilizer sounds boring but is actually a fucking jetpack. You can then launch yourself across the map like you’re on the moon, it’s amazing.

Edit: here’s a video (spoilers for some late game gear) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQDIzfmgmgg

Edit 2: this can only reach its full potential in the director’s cut btw

Biden and Trump die of natural causes on the same day within hours of each other. It is truly a coincidence but produces an incredibly convoluted & dull set of conspiracy theories that will be repeated for the next hundred years. Kamala loses to Trump’s VP pick, who is a woman. Republicans crow about electing the first woman president for the next several decades, which is how long it will take to elect the second woman president.

is it actually true there are maoists in the everglades whose snake breeding operation was blown open by a hurricane that let out all the snakes or is that just a meme

Of course the LA Times would write a puff piece about this fascist dickhead but anyway, good article.

that train is obviously heading away from the white house

Spitballing, this could really be paving the way for him to actually drop out. Obviously if it were going to happen it should be sooner rather than later. Giving him the nomination means if he drops out he gets to direct who the successor will be using his pledged delegates. If he drops out before getting the nomination his delegates can vote for whoever.

the audiobook for Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus has the voice actor do impressions of all the relevant historical figures and his nixon is fuckin hilarious

I think this is probably true. It is a very common tactic in dysfunctional organizations (that I’ve even employed myself a few times). When someone is being incredibly obstinate and heading down a path you know leads to disaster, sometimes all you can do is switch to a cheerleader encouraging them to rush headlong off the nearest cliff. Then nobody can ignore the crash and there is the opportunity to build something better from the wreckage.

will always remind people this person got $52,157 in covid-era PPP “loans” that were then forgiven by the government, which is a fancy way of saying the state straight up gave them $50k cash. anyway they then turned around and then shit on the concept of student loan forgiveness

“it was a bad debate”

as though he gave uninspired answers to some questions instead of conclusively demonstrated that his brain is pudding

That’s interesting, I’ve always heard the controller is the best part of the PS5

The steam deck specs & form factor is honestly peak. I don’t think anything will top it within the next decade, unless VR really takes off

The US federal funds rate. Basically the interest rate at which big banks can borrow money from the federal reserve. When the interest rate is low you can think of this as meaning money is cheap; there is a lot of it sloshing around to various less-profitable ventures (and, often, scams) because there are only so many ventures to go around and all the good ones are fully funded. This means companies hire more and are more experimental in their aims. When the interest rate is high, like it is now (relatively speaking), companies cannot get money as easily and so tend to clamp down their spending and direct it toward low risk things they are fairly sure will pay them back.

Christman covers the same broad ground (we benefit from exploitation of the third world and would not like how our economic circumstances changed if that stopped) but I do not think that is what this character is talking about.

I think it’s fine. The societal changes necessary to address climate change are so wild that people literally lack capacity to imagine them. Solarpunk is an art genre to fill in that space.

Why do you think so? He mentions tipping the scale to help people afford cars and houses, so we can infer he means people getting preferential rates for loans. That doesn’t require any brain-genius financeering, big banks have the easiest jobs in the world - borrow from the fed at X%, lend to people for mortgages at X+Y%, pocket Y% as profit. You don’t even have to go to school for that. The function of his profession is to cook up bazinga-brained financial products and then also cook up math to value them. The crisis they’re in is occurring because one half of that task was done and the other half was not. Charitably. One could also say the valuation was intentionally incorrect so banks could package up garbage loans to sell them at good-as-cash AAA rates as a way to raid institutional investor coffers. Which they did, very successfully. Unfortunately some of the banks also got high on their own supply and began valuing these products as AAA internally as well.

If I were being overly cynical I would say this rant is a repackaging of the narrative blaming low-income borrowers for taking the loans banks were offering them as the reason for the great financial crisis. That’s the “tipping the scales” he is referring to, transmuting their giant financial scam into some kind of charity work for the poor. Those poor people all got fucked when their rates adjusted and they could no longer afford their mortgages. They lost their houses and were forced to sell at the bottom of the market.

I reject the classification of any of these LLMs as open source. If an LLM’s training data isn’t bundled with it under the same license then that LLM is not open source by any reasonable definition of open source. The Open Source Initiative (industry group with the objective of co-opting FOSS into free labor for capitalists) is trying to push this ridiculous conception that if you can run a LLM locally then it is open source. It makes absolutely no sense that an impenetrable list of weights counts as source code. Those weights are the derived product of the training data and the learning algorithm, which is readily analogous to compilation. Here’s a good longer post about this: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/why-open-data-necessary-source-ai-tom-callaway-stzcc/

there is no level of fascism that liberals cannot acclimate to