... in the UK the council replaced sodium street lamps with allegedly more energy efficient white LED lights and in the process turned the fairly dim but usable orange sodium glow into virtual daylight all night. We used to be able to sleep with the curtains open but not now.

Meta/Multiverse was a propaganda tool, not an important technology. Timeline:

1) Facebook stopped making new things, pursuing enshittification as the primary strategy.
2) Facebook pissed off Democrats with Cambridge Analytics, and pissed off Republicans with censorship.
3) Doesn't matter how much of that was true, both parties were pissed off and threatening regulation/antitrust at Facebook in a bipartisan way.
4) Facebook promised COOL NEW TECHNOLOGY and name change. They also scaled up political donations in a bipartisan way.
5) The threats largely went away.
6) The COOL NEW TECHNOLOGY went away.

My favorite thing to do in an empty parking lot is to separate hydrogen from oxygen then rejoin it very quickly.

I admit I did not know about the Getty connection.

He might get away with it if he smiles more (it worked for Trump). I haven't seen him flash a non-sarcastic smile since COVID. Some mysterious sadness has infected the man.

The core of the problem is all these politicians are obsessively looking for someone to hate. It doesn't matter if it's based on race, or trans, or gingerness, or whatever. They choose someone to effectively bully, and a good 30% of the country goes along with it as the latest target. (Some go along with it because they like to hate on others, and some go along because they don't want to be bullied).

If we can stop doing that, the oligarchy will effectively lose their power.

They had the LLM steer the car using a kind of programming language, with function calls that look like this:

They translated those functions into input for some aftermarket car controlling hardware, which looks kind of cool but I didn't know was a thing.

I couldn't figure out from their report how they returned data back to the LLM, but apparently they pasted images and telemetry into the chat window every so often, or something like that.

If your time is worth the savings then why not? I have a feeling the prices reflect the general desirability of the neighborhood the McDonald's is located in so I doubt too many people are going to drive a few extra miles (particularly with gas being expensive) to save a dollar or two on a burger when they realize it means driving through the bad part of town.

The better question is if this will lead to an arbitrage market for burgers. You need not venture to the wrong side of the tacks when a brave Uber Eats driver will make the voyage to save $87.55 on a bulk order for a group of customers. I think I'm going to start working on a script. I'll pitch it to Hollywood as Blade Runner only more dystopian.

Nah, America has become a reality TV nation.

We have zero chance of getting a competent president, for the same reason that the most skillful competitors never won Survivor.

Newsom comes across as bitter, though. He's a nepo candidate, never having won a particularly competitive race. He needs a little positivity. A positive slogan like, "Hope and Prosperity" or "High Time for Change" or "Change for High Time" or something.

This is worth a mod up ^

5k is a heck of a lot of headcount for what Mongo seems to have in terms of scope of product offerings and support services.

 

That made me laugh.

4C shows just how much extra heat from global warming the oceans have actually absorbed. If they hadn't we'd already probably have carboniferous era climate.

... doesn't mean it could evolve there in the first place.It seems life on earth evolved in very specific conditions then slowly ventured out into different enviroments via evolutionary change.

They recently purged the designer of their stealth aircraft after realizing the stealth part doesn't work. https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.visiontimes.com%2F20...

Maybe they want to ensure those weapons designers don't leave before their deception is realized.

In China communism started with education programs for poor people. Once they got some power, they got rid of the landlords who were actually very abusive. So for many people, communism was a step forward. It was better than monarchy (or a system of warlords, which was the alternative at the time).

Communism: a step up from monarchy, a step down from democracy.

Ironically, China is both of those.