Also, the times rats got into the networking room and ate random cables. I should add the network was built by volunteer students in the ‘90s.

I was once responsible for a student house (we don’t have dorms in the US sense, this is the closest we have) and I have similar experiences but less extreme. My favourite was when I had forgotten to configure DHCP filtering and someone plugged in a router the wrong way so it started offering DHCP (that didn’t work) to everyone in the building, in a race with our upstream ISP.

I needed it for a printer the other day!

It really is an annoying piece of shit

They usually get a slap on the wrist; cf instigating race riots gives longer sentences than blocking a highway.

Sounds like that should be assholes without cars

I tried to read the linked Twitter thread from Ars and good god it’s terrible. Half of it is people complaining about the demo version without understanding that it’s the demo version. Even though people in the thread keep explaining it to them.

A lot of Americans supported the equally illegal invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, I still don’t think they deserve even how shitty their non-occupation civil government is.

Given how war works I’m almost certain there will be war crimes against the civil population here. Not as bad as what the Russians are doing in their occupied territories I sure as fuck hope and expect, but worse than anyone deserves. I can see Ukrainians getting to be a bit vindictive etc about this, they’ve earned it, but as armchair commentators online at a safe distance we should fucking show some empathy for people in a shitty situation they have very little control over.

I can’t control my government and I live in a democracy. I don’t blame Russians for most of what their state does either.

Does this happen to you often? My impression is people usually tell you after they’ve succeeded.

Kyriarchy encompasses sexism, racism, ableism, ageism, antisemitism, Islamophobia, anti-Catholicism, homophobia, transphobia, fatphobia, classism, xenophobia, economic injustice, the prison-industrial complex, colonialism, militarism, ethnocentrism, speciesism, linguicism and other forms of dominating hierarchies

Anti-Catholicism? You mean the global formal hierarchy that’s solidly historically in support of fascism and against feminism? O…Kay. Why is that the literally only religion listed there? I get why you’d want to protect minority religious practices but why single out Catholicism?

In this case I think the terrible code really, as they say in fashion, completes the look

My wife talked about how Grok apparently seemed promising in AI benchmarks for a while until everyone realised the way they’re winning is by absolutely blindly outspending everyone on GPUs and brute forcing the fuck out of the problem rather than having good anything.

This seems to match that approach (and, more generally, everything Musk is doing).

It’s almost a by the book buy off. You don’t get a salary that can afford anything like good food and clothes because we want salaries to be cheap in the west while we increase the profits from rents, fees etc. However, we will pay you off by externalising all the costs of getting you cheap crap on other people that you don’t have to see (and the environment in general).

It’s of course not an actual conspiracy, just a confluence of terrible impulses and motivations.

I think I you heard the wrong argument here

Does this mean Germany is going to have a bad time and fuck up the power grid for all of Europe this winter again?

This is one of the hardest earned lessons I’ve ever learned, and I’ve had to learn it over and over again. I think it’s mostly stuck now but I still make the same mistake from time to time.

As in efficient per watt or some other metric?

and Intel was releasing foxes and shit

I realise this is an autocorrect error, but it’s still funny 🦊

Scandi here, sorry to tell you our system also sucks. It has almost exactly all the problems of the soviet system (queues, poor quality, corruption) AND the American system (inequality, horrible if you’re poor, inefficient focus on luxury production), but in moderation. You can call it better (I would, or I’d have moved), but it still sucks. You need a system that’s fair, transparent, efficient, and provides enough.

We have the capacity to do that, but I don’t think it can be combined with capitalism. Capitalism eats everything around it (and inside it). It cannot be negotiated with, except for at most a lifetime in exceptional circumstances, usually less.

By the way, a unique problem with social democracy is that capitalist interests have a huge incentive and ability to commandeer whatever shit implementation of democracy you have to extract profits. If you have centralised social services (housing, healthcare) they’re very very vulnerable to takeover, selling our, deregulation where private entities can cream the market and leave the difficult cases to the publicly funded variants etc etc.

Another issue is the EU, which demands universal market liberalism. The Swedish housing system with universal public housing as opposed to social housing for the poor was explicitly fucked by this after a EU court ruling demanding they operate their rental flats like profit-driven companies, which of course completely destroyed their ability to provide the service they’re designed to provide.

It’s been zombie-ish for a while now!