... is the hiring of people with fucking pathetic skills. Now the question is did this spy try to emulate a clueless uneducated US citizen with an inflated ego and a padded CV, or was he really incompetent. Because the second does not sound like professional spycraft to me at all, but the first one would just be an attempt to fit in.

Incidentally, I do not think anybody noticed anything except his email being on that list....

Agree to that.

Indeed. Probably one of the largest cults in history ...

It's not a surprise but this sort of thing (along with the less consumer-facing; but also pretty serious, tariff burdens on obtaining manufacturing equipment) really emphasizes how counterproductive the "announce huge blanket tariffs based on some mixture of nonsense and a quasi-mercantilist-with-a-heap-of-bitterness theory of balance of trade" 'strategy', if you can call it that, really is.

If you want American greatness generally, or onshore manufacturing in particular, you are making things vastly harder for yourself by just abruptly making more or less anything that isn't already domestically manufactured harder and more expensive to get. Does Adafruit or Sparkfun's catalog run a bit into fairly casual nerd toys at the shallow end? Arguably. Does it also include a wide variety of bits and pieces that people who are most likely to be interested in entering the engineering pipeline as they grow up, along with people who are doing engineering and need a given bit or piece quickly and reliably, would definitely want? Indeed it does.

Are you going to win the future by making it harder for someone interested in robotics to get a PWM/servo driver board because it's on a Chinese PCB? Even if your desired end-goal is a 100% vertically integrated mine to customer production chain it's absurd to think that the most efficient(or even possible) way of doing that is by blanket restrictions on basically everything all at once. If anything (not unlike we've been accusing China of doing for some decades) you'd presumably want zero to effectively negative tariffs/other regulatory incentives on certain things precisely because you wish to develop capability in areas downstream of them.

It's only really in more or less purely frivolous consumption goods where just flatly increasing the cost of the foreign stuff isn't obviously self-destructive(still not necessarily good policy; but if football-watchers went from 65in TVs to 45in ones and more tailgating it wouldn't cause obvious injury to the football industry; while someone doing boutique electronics for specialist applications could easily go from viable to out of business if they can't get a PCB spun quickly or get some test leads nice and fast).

Including the remark that the markup may make things unsellable and make the situation even worse. Tariffs are ecconomically massively problematic. Anybody with basic (but real) knowledge how trade works knows this.

At that rate they could also simply wait until the bot-net operators die of old age...

Obviously, this stuff is still not taken seriously at all.

There are actually numbers from sociology on this: About 10-15% of all people are "independent thinkers", which essentially means they do fact-checking by themselves. And about 20% (including the independent thinkers) can be convinced by rational argument, which essentially means they can fact check when being prompted to do it. No idea whether there is any connection to introverts or not.

I disagree that LLMs become an "intelligence multiplier". LLMs can only find very shallow things with any reasonable degree of reliability. Hence they can aid in looking up stuff, but for actual acts of intelligence, i.e. generating insight when that insight is new, they are worthless or counter-productive.

The difference is, I think, people that use AI with restraint and only as a minor tool and those that fawn over it and are under the delusion that LLMs are actually intelligent, for example. For the latter, I propose the term "AIND-user" (Artifically Intelligent Naturally Dumb user).

Indeed. Although the general idea will not work for the rich. Rich people and businesses are not audited at random, but are subjected to it regularly, for the very rich every year. At least that is how it is done in Europe.

I am not sure it has ever been any other way. The difference is that today, actual fact-checking is easier and faster than it has ever been. But most people still do not do it. The wole idea to not fact-check but instead use "belief" is completely alien to me and I can only observe this bizarre behaviour from the outside and accept that it seem to be how most people stumble through life.

Hence I think we are not post-truth. We are in an age were we finally realize that the average person understands nothing, regardless of how much information and education is available to them. In a sense, we find that the the Enlightenment has failed because too many people are too fucking dumb.

I disagree. Simpler hardware migh have done it as well (tablets), but Internet access is a very significant advantage in education.

What the fuck? You pricks have been openly rooting for the destruction of our country for decades. You utterly despise us, just like Europe and the rest of the world. And neither a word is gratitude or respect. And now your number one dream is finally coming true and you don't like it? You people are literally unpleasable. Trump is right to ignore you entirely and do what's best for AmeriKKKa. Why aren't you cheering? Jim Crow. slavery. The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment. racism. Xenophobia. AmeriKKKa is everything you hate. The end of it can only be good

The paper edges of books (for those who grew up with ipads) tend to get dirty from finger oils and grime. Next time you are in someone's house with a bookshelf, check out the closed books and examine where people thumb the pages. You can almost always recognize which books people have *actually* read and which books they've never opened just from that (*) . The effect gets more pronounced as the book ages and the oils stain the pages more visibly.

In the case of school books, kids are especially prone to having dirty and sweaty fingers, so this effect will show up worse. You can clean the books by keeping the covers tightly closed and either sandpapering or rubber erasing the dirty page edges. But I wouldn't recommend that a kid should do it. It's dangerous if you don't hold the book covers tightly shut you can easily damage a page if the book opens up while you're working.

(*) for added bonus: if you see a book where only some interval of page edges are darker, you can also predict which chapters people have read and which ones they have not:)

Secure encrytion has been available with relatively low effort for anybody since the first releaswe of PGP 34 years ago. It did include very readable documentation that was entirely comprehensible to an average reasonably educated person and did point out all that you needed to know.

Why did it not take off except among experts? Simple: People are too dumb to care.

Apparently the stupid assholes that want this can now be neutralized with a reasonable degree of reliability.