I’d buy one if it came with every David Attenborough (or similar) nature documentary included. I don’t need 8k for games or movies or anything else but I’ll watch the shit out of whatever high budget nature documentaries are produced and put my nose against the screen to see the critter details.
I’ve seen a lot of bands doing that at their merch table. I think for most bands, it’s just a keepsake like buying a T-shirt or sticker or whatever after a show. I’m sure there’s plenty of people who prefer cassettes (or at least the Walkman aesthetic) but for the most part, it’s just a souvenir.
I’ve never been into tapes but I collect vinyl. Part of the fun is all the extras tossed in. It’s like buying a boxed set or special edition DVD/Blu-Ray. Tapes don’t really have the same space for fun stuff but Taylor Swift probably has the budget to do something “extra” and make it a whole thing people put on Instagram.
I’m expecting December/January to be when Americans will really start to see widespread price rise and shortages. Every big company was trying to import/warehouse enough stock to get through the holiday shopping season without paying tariffs. But at some point, the price hikes are coming.
It’ll be noticeable before December/January for anything that can’t be stacked in a warehouse or frozen or whatever. But that’s not going to last forever. If nothing else, Kona, Hawaii is the only place in the US where coffee beans can be grown. Even well-off people will notice when coffee costs more.
The other way a partisan gerrymander can backfire is that there’s fewer truly safe seats. So a smaller shift can cause a wave election. Like, to squeeze every drop from a gerrymander, you don’t create 80% GOP, 20% Dem districts; you make several 55% GOP, 45% Dem districts. It doesn’t take as seismic of a shift to flip an aggressively Gerrymandered map.
I don’t think there’s many consumer use cases for things like LLMs but highly focused, specialized models seem useful. Like protein folding, identifying promising medication, or finding patterns in giant scientific datasets.
No. Katrina was a colossal fuck-up for Bush. His aides had to make a DVD of the news coverage to get him to realize the severity of the situation and that he needed to deploy significant resources. It was a huge embarrassment for the administration.
And then several Republicans in Congress were questioning whether the city should be rebuilt at all. People had to sit them down and explain that it’s important to have a port that basically every navigable river east of the Rocky Mountains is a tributary and the Port of New Orleans is critical national infrastructure. A lot of agricultural exports go through it. It was so stupid.
There were mistakes by the mayor and governor but a lot of the federal government was just oblivious (aside from the Coast Guard, who saved hundreds, if not thousands of stranded people.) And that’s just New Orleans. Katrina was massively wide and Mississippi and Alabama were having issues too.
Probably more like “Elon Musk tells some manager to tell an engineer to delete the posts and then gives hazy, contradictory instructions while in a K-hole.” It’s not like he does stuff besides raise money and be a mascot.
I don’t know if it even helps with productivity that much. A lot of bosses think developers’ entire job is just churning out code when it’s actually like 50% coding and 50% listening to stakeholders, planning, collaborating with designers, etc. I mean, it’s fine for a quick Python script or whatever but that might save an experienced developer 20 minutes max.
And if you “write” me an email using Chat GPT and I just read a summary, what is the fucking point? All the nuance is lost. Specialized A.I. is great! I’m all for it combing through giant astronomy data sets or protein folding and stuff like that. But I don’t know that I’ve seen generative A.I. without a specific focus increase productivity very much.
You can give your info to the registrar and then make it anonymous to whois domain.tld searches so it’s not public. Cloudflare is the registrar I use these days because it’s a one-stop shop and used the company address but, at least in the U.S., they need your info for both credit/debit card processing. (Processing fees are cheaper the more info they provide but usually any address with the same zip code is enough.)
If you have nefarious plans, I don’t have a good recommendation. But if it’s just about privacy, I don’t know if it’s really possible to be completely anonymous anyway. I guess you could use a gift card or something but at least in the U.S., if you own or buy a house, your address is public info already anyway. Shit, city hall will probably give you blueprints of any house.
I don’t want age verification for social media — I’d rather parents, who in 2025 probably grew up with connected devices, be responsible for it — but if they do force this, it should be part of the operating system. Sort of like Apple Pay and Google Pay where sites and apps can essentially put some boilerplate code in that’s easy to implement and all the sites/apps get back is a yes/no answer. Users only have to go through the process once. It protects privacy way more than giving your info to every “social media” site that comes along.
It’s not ideal but it’d be way more workable than having to provide ID to every site that has social media functions. I mean, you could classify any random forum or site with a comment section as “social media” if the definition is too broad. Things like Fediverse instances wouldn’t have to each write their own implementation. (Eventually, there would be trusted, mature libraries, obviously, but that could take awhile and presumably would need to be part of every browser/app language but also at least some code for every back-end language to store the data.)
The Blackberry era was my favorite. You could do all the important stuff and even check sports scores or breaking news or whatever. You couldn’t really doomscroll because no one had done that yet. Even Facebook — which was just for college students at that point and was legit useful. You could find people in a class you were taking and lived in your dorm and get notes from them if you missed class. And you could just download any song you wanted on Kazaa or whatever. No one’s boss emailed them outside of work hours and expected a response.
Probably 2003ish? I don’t know what year it all went to shit. But the Internet seemed like a world of possibilities then.
I’d have also advocated to heavily restrict tlds. Like .org only for real, recognized non-profit organizations.
Tariffs basically never help except in a few select situations. For instance, “infant industry” situations where a country needs time to scale up some industry and there’s real promise that once they do, it’ll be competitive. If a country is trying to corner some critical market by dumping, targeted tariffs can be smart. But mostly, tariffs are stupid.
There’s a legit national security argument for steel and probably aluminum but a better solution for materials used to make things would be to just subsidize those companies for domestic sales so you don’t screw over every industry that uses them. Steel definitely isn’t an infant industry. We have the technology.
An even better solution is to not piss off all your most reliable allies and trading partners. But I guess that cat’s out the bag.
I’d buy one if it came with every David Attenborough (or similar) nature documentary included. I don’t need 8k for games or movies or anything else but I’ll watch the shit out of whatever high budget nature documentaries are produced and put my nose against the screen to see the critter details.