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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • Except many many experts have said this is not why it happens. It cannot count letters in the incoming words. It doesn’t even know what “words” are. It has abstracted tokens by the time it’s being run through the model.

    It’s more like you don’t know the word strawberry, and instead you see: How many 'r’s in 🍓?

    And you respond with nonsense, because the relation between ‘r’ and 🍓 is nonsensical.




  • Maybe if you threaten their sense of self-preservation, you might cause them to notice.

    I think that’s really the unstated point of large protests. You get hundreds of thousands of people being present and obviously angry, but “peaceful”, you have to be doing the calculation of how many of those are on the brink of something more if their voices are not heard and things proceed or even accelerate.

    Of course, on the other hand we are dealing with an administration that thinks an ethnic cleanse of Palestinians to set up a resort city sounds like a safe idea, so not sure there’s anyone really thinking about the risks.


  • Given the dire situation, I’d hope to see thousands in each protest.

    Given the reality, for this to work, it really needed to be presented as a recurring protest if they want to at least have something on short notice with chance for it to grow in subsequent events. Hopefully by the 3rd or 4th protest it actually seems compelling.

    As it stands, it seems exceedingly underwhelming. To those that followed nuance, they know that someone sprung this idea on the internet and this is the result of less than a week and a half of planning and the modest attendance is unsurprising. To those that just see what the protests looked like without context, it doesn’t seem particularly engaging. When those same people that saw the underwhelming attendance also see people saying that the news didn’t make this out to be the biggest thing ever was just because the news is suppressing dissent, they are disinclined to take it seriously.


  • I mean my news gave it a fair shot, but ultimately it was just about 50 people waving signs in the middle of a city where 50 people are not even a noticable increase of people usually on that street. I’d say my news was even being generous, by zooming in to try to make the “crowd” fill the screen, but there just wasn’t enough to go on.

    We have to face facts that this was a pretty poorly planned event. Someone thinks of going for it on January 25th and expects to organize a national protest in all 50 states with boots on the ground with less than two weeks total in the middle of a school/work day?

    If this were, say, the first of a routine series of protests, ok, then over iterations it might have a chance to grow. If it was to be some overwhelming event, well you’ll need more actual planning to get there. As a disorganized blast of thought for a one and done… it was not a good idea.



  • The thing is if everyone said “fantastic! This will be huge” and the actual protests are underwhelming, well that serves to confirm the false narrative that a very small minority of people are upset.

    Declaring high expectations and delivering low is a path to undermine your cause. Waiting until after the fact to explain why sounds like making excuses rather.

    The protest in my region was like maybe 50 people. I don’t think this is because people are broadly happy, it’s because as many many people pointed out, this was poor planning. The optics of pulling off a huge protest in only a week would have been amazing, but just impossible in the real world.


  • Totally on board.

    Physical media meant straightforward ownership. I have it and I will have it. The distributor I bought from went out of business? I don’t notice, my copy still works. My distributor turns out not to have had the rights to sell it to me? Well that’s bad but it’s done and I have my copy. I start a series and I know I can finish it before the rights move to some other distributor.

    Netflix early streaming days were magic. One service had rights to pretty much everything and was relatively affordable. Now each service has a tiny fraction of old Netflix and each one costs more than twice what Netflix streaming did. Frankly paying 3x the netflix price would have been fine if the trend continued except for pricing, but alas, here we are. Also, there’s no amount of money to pay to some of these services to make them shut up with ads, even with ‘ad-free’ offerings/plans.



  • The really neat trick is the land is way too risky as it stands for any developer to take on even putting aside the horrific context. There’s just too much dangerous stuff lying around.

    So he spends US government resources to get things nice and ready by spending taxpayer money and then hands it over to his family to make their money when the area is suitably ready.

    Just like the sovereign fund where he wants to toss a bunch of tax money into a fund and then use that fund to give to Elon so Elon can use taxpayer money to buy TikTok, while the US government makes TikTok worth less through screwing with their business.





  • To a point. If they are cut out of the loop, how are they supposed to reap the benefits of their position? They only want the capitalism to rule the country so long as they get to reap the benefits. If bypassing legislature and going straight to executive works, then the legislature will still get pissed, if only for their own self interest.

    In fact, that was the whole design. That the branches would be eager to undermine each other to the extent they are allowed. The concept of a branch just surrendering their authority was insane.




  • While the nuance is appreciated, I think it’s a trajectory worth considering.

    When Trump is no longer able to even pretend to lead, in his circle there are not any obvious successors that seem likely to have the same capacity to steamroll the GOP into whatever the hell they like while also being a legal candidate for president. However if he uses his transient status to overly enable Musk to lead in ways he is legally forbidden to do so, then it elevates the risk of Musk as the heir apparent to the Trump problem.


  • The apps may have been a bit anemic, but it was early enough that all the app stores were not great. They were certainly hurt by their initial “JavaScript only” stance.

    Really painful was that they had exclusivity with Sprint of all carriers. That was a really limiting decision.

    I think ultimately the singularly fatal issue was the HP debacle. The initial circumstances of the acquisition might have been ok for the platform. Thanks to some leaked material HP under Hurd actually seemed to have some vision for reinvigorating their consumer brand including an emphasis on former palm products. But Hurd was ousted and that whole initiative was canned and the new leadership killed the product line that they had just bought. Which was the most baffling call, they didn’t make room for some other smartphone or tablet platform, they just shrugged and killed off a product that was their only shot at relevance for a clearly exploding new consumer market.