TehPers

A Few Modest Proposals

If anyone was going into this expecting satire like I was, the article appears not to be satirical.

Where I disagree with you is not that the US is bad - the US is terrible, and there is plenty of evidence of that. I don’t even disagree with there being censorship in the US. In fact, Trump is objectively a piece of shit who wants nothing more than to become Xi/Putin himself.

What I disagree with is equating censorship in the US with Chinese censorship. I can call Trump a piece of shit online without worrying that the FBI will show up at my door. The models that are trained in the west will happily entertain any (non-violent) political discussions I want. There may be bias, and Trump may be trying to create censorship, but it’s not quite to that level yet.

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 am concerned that the US will become as bad as China in terms of censorship, which is part of why I’m trying to leave right now. However, it’s not there yet. They are not yet equal, nor are they even close yet.

There’s a strong argument that any consumer facing chatbot AI is “censored”.

If the model is not allowed to spew Nazi propaganda or tell the user to end themselves, that is censorship. Censorship is not automatically bad, but the kind of censorship can make it bad.

This reeks of excluding all nuance to equate two things that are equal only at surface level. You’re bad because you punched the other person (ignoring that they stabbed your SO 15 times and kicked your dog across the room).

Chinese state censorship is well researched and extremely well documented. It does not equate to censorship against violent or inappropriate language. It is political censorship.

At best, western models are biased, not politically censored. You can make them say just about anything, but they will bias towards a particular viewpoint. Even if intentional, this is explainable by evaluating their training data, which itself is biased because western society is biased. You are not prevented from personally expressing or even convincing a western model from expressing dissenting political viewpoints.

If you’re fine with breaking changes now and then, then yes absolutely. I use it everywhere, and it’s been a huge boost in productivity for me.

Imagine being elected president then just deciding, entirely on your own, that a law (that you helped pass) just shouldn’t exist. So much for checks and balances.

FTC learns that the grass is green.

I’d have confidence in them doing something if Lina Khan weren’t on her way out. Even if she somehow stuck around, there’s no way that random court in Texas is going to let her do her job.

Don’t forget Intel’s latest GPU launches either! For custom PCs, there are some really affordable and relatively powerful GPUs available now (for the price). Despite their performance otherwise, Intel is killing it in the GPU space now.

For a lower spec build, you could definitely put together something with a 12100F (or other cheap CPU) and a battlemage GPU. Depending on where you get all the parts, you might be able to hit sub-$500 and get great 1080p performance, or for sure sub-$1k 1080p and likely 1440p performance.

Handhelds also have a lot of good options available too. To save some cash, you can get low end Steam Deck and swap the hard drive yourself. Got myself the cheapest LCD variant and swapped the tiny drive in it with a 2TB drive off Amazon.

If you don’t threaten, tariffs hit and you pay more. If you threaten, he magically remembers what tariffs do and walks it back. At least, one would hope.

Want to make Trump listen? Threaten him with tariffs. He’ll only listen to money and threats.

Not only this, but C# has diverged enough from Java that anything but the absolute basics isn’t going to help much with C#.

Cybertrucks have a lot of problems, but this seemed to be a clearly intentional explosion by somebody.

That aside, can Tesla just unlock any of their vehicles remotely and access all the camera footage on it? That seems like a much bigger problem, especially since Mr. Musk is practically our next president.

For others who also don’t know what this is:

darktable is an open source photography workflow application and raw developer. A virtual lighttable and darkroom for photographers. It manages your digital negatives in a database, lets you view them through a zoomable lighttable and enables you to develop raw images and enhance them.

We tried the iPhone 16 recently, upgrading from a 14. Apple’s AI seemed basically useless. That combined with the dynamic island not respecting reduced motion settings lead us to return the phone instead and keep the 14. The old phone worked fine, but we wanted to try to get ahead of the incoming administration just in case.

Maybe the 17 will be better?

I can’t wait for people to complain about this on Facebook and Instagram, right before doomscrolling for hours.

I hope I’m wrong.

Nah, that’s not him. We were hanging out that day. That’s not your guy. Sorry officers!

Did MS deliver a product through Crowdstrike? Maybe that’s what I’m missing here. I don’t use Crowdstrike myself, so I’m not sure how it relates at all to MS except that it works on Windows.

This article is a lot more clearly written, as expected from Cloudflare. For example, the other article makes it sound like 55% of all user data was lost. Cloudflare says:

During the roughly 3.5 hours that these services were impacted, about 55% of the logs we normally send to customers were not sent and were lost.

55% of logs during a 3.5h window is a lot less of a big deal.

Unless I’m missing what they’re referring to, I don’t see why MS even comes up related to Crowdstrike. A software dev that deploys to Windows making a royally bad mistake doesn’t exactly make that MS’s fault.

Indirectly or directly doing it, they still had the same intentions either way (like you mentioned). Neither is anymore excusable than the other. One is just more legal.

I would normally be upset about something like this happening, and would never advocate for it. But then I think about how many lives this person is indirectly responsible for ruining and I feel less bad lol