This country's government is designed to have checks and balances on power. Congress isn't supposed to rubber-stamp every suggestion the President makes about spending -- they're the ones in charge of those decisions. Judges, particularly at the highest levels, aren't supposed to be partisan stooges; they're supposed to follow the law, but that doesn't seem to be what we have now. Nobody outside of the executive seems to want to exert their power, for fear of losing it. Apparently, it's enough to be able to claim having it.

Based on their press release, it looks like it's just the case that Chinese automakers are using them more. On their "ecosystem" list, you don't see any Waymo/Jaguar, Tesla, or other companies making cars for the U.S. market (except Volvo).

It's easy to forget how utterly fucked up things have become, compared to how a few decades ago, we(? well, at least I) thought things would evolve, and one of those has to do with dedicated services for secure communications.

The thing that defies my predictions, is that dedicated services for secure communications, exist at all.

When you wanted to secure email, you didn't use a "secure email" service; you (the user!) just added security onto your insecure email service. Send a PGP/MIME message and the email provider doesn't give a damn that it's encrypted, it just cares about SMTP.

But these days (could I call it the "Age of Lack of Standards"?), everyone is trying to manipulate you into depending on their software and services (inextricably linked; you can't use their software without their service, or their service without their software), so you can't just replace the service or easily "tunnel" security through their presumably-insecure (perhaps even mandated insecure) service. Whatever security they offer, is all you can reasonably get (pretty much the opposite of the classic email situation).

Why do I bring this up? Because the regulations are all about services! Not protocols. Not software. Services. (emphasis mine in all below quotes)

Here's the beginning of The UK Online Safety Act (1)(1)(a):

imposes duties which, in broad terms, require providers of services regulated by this Act to identify, mitigate and manage the risks of harm

Here's good 'ol CALEA (US Code title 47 Section 1002 (a):

Except as provided in subsections (b), (c), and (d) of this section and sections 1007(a) and 1008(b) and (d) of this title, a telecommunications carrier shall ensure that ...

CALEA even mentions encryption:

A telecommunications carrier shall not be responsible for decrypting, or ensuring the government’s ability to decrypt, any communication encrypted by a subscriber or customer, unless the encryption was provided by the carrier and the carrier possesses the information necessary to decrypt the communication.

I haven't dived into the details of EU's DSA, but I see a hopeful sign right there at the very beginning of Article 1:

The aim of this Regulation is to contribute to the proper functioning of the internal market for intermediary services by setting out harmonised rules...

Look at all those references to services! Not the code you run; the services you use.

What does it mean? I think it might mean that even in the UK(!) you might be perfectly fine and legal using secure software. You just can't have it rely on some coercible corporation's secure services. Send your encrypted blobs over generic protocols and un-dedicated services, and the law won't apply to your situation. I'm not necessarily saying "Make PGP/MIME Great Again" but I do think following in its spirit is a really great idea.

If you run a service, what you want to be able to tell the government (whether it's US or UK or France/Germany) is "we don't provide any encryption, though some of our customers supply their own."

Stop asking for secure services. Worse is better. Ask for secure software (which assumes that all services are completely hostile) decoupled from any particular service.

When you typed "Solar keeps on winning. The data is undeniable" you were both wrong AND you probably did not realize you were refuting your own argument.

"As you stated: "This momentum didn’t happen by chance. It's the direct result of a decade of forward-looking policy: Obama’s 2009 recovery investments, state-level renewable standards, and critically, the long-term tax credits extended by Biden's 2022 Inflation Reduction Act (IRA)." - in other words: this is the result of YEARS of government policies screwing with the marketplace, stealing money from some people and giving it to others to push these "renewables" and there's been no actual improvement in the economics of wind and solar; they cannot compete without the heavy hand of government. As you went on to admit: "These policies created market certainty, driving down costs and making solar plus storage cheaper than natural gas in much of the country." - yup, nothing about these corrupt schemes is honest, and thus market forces will not be able to lower the prices for consumers while avoiding shortages. It's just typical Marxist central planning, subsidized by stealing from a marketplace.

Oh, and you are wrong here too: "The only thing standing in the way is a reactionary political agenda willing to sacrifice that progress for short-term political points and campaign cash.", and on multiple levels. The thing actually standing in the way is ECONOMIC REALITY; these things cannot stand on their own (which is why Obama and Biden had to subsidize them so heavily AND wage war on coal and oil and nuclear) , so they'll fall down when the subsidies end, or when the public has had its fill of inflated energy prices and shortages, or when industries can no longer compete while running on these expensive energy sources and they shutdown or leave for greener pastures. Oh, and does "Solyndra" ring any bells? Yeah, a number of these eco-friendly companies have been founded by political supporters of Obama and/or Biden, then had their values artificially boosted by infusions of subsidy cash (artificially and temporarily making them seem like good investments) whereupon those investors sell their stocks to gullible chumps (making a killing) and then when the subsidies expire the late investors end up holding the worthless bankrupt bag - but the Obama and Biden supporters are golden.

If government puts its finger on the scale and presses really hard, then yes, boutique energy sources like wind and solar are the cheapest...but ONLY because government has artificially inflated the prices of the other, actually cheaper, sources.

In the 1960s, electricity companies were constantly encouraging their customers to consume MORE electricity. New nuclear plants were going online and the industry was saying that electricity was becoming "too cheap to meter" - they were starting to talk about just charging customers a flat rate. Then the anti-nuke people got all wound-up and they started fighting every nuclear plant in the courts with lawsuit after lawsuit, while backing anti-nuke politicians and driving an environment with more and more regulation. It eventually got to the point where the regulatory burdens and delays, combined with all the costs of unending lawsuits made nuclear so expensive that we stopped building these plants. The high cost of nuclear had NOTHING to do with the cost of nuclear and everything to do with the artificially-imposed legal and regulatory burdens.

Similarly, coal, which has always been the absolutely cheapest energy in the US, has had its price artificially boosted by lawsuits and regulations. Coal is still cheap, and coal-burning power plants are still cheap to build and operate (why do people think the Chinese are building so many?) but the politics have shifted and now government is artificially pushing the price up to an absurd level to artificially make wind and solar LOOK cheaper. Note that nearly every source of the claim that coal is more expensive is made by some entity associated with "decarbonization" or a government agency implementing ant-coal policy and they never want to talk about the actual cost per kilowatt hours but rather they talk about the "true cost of coal" (in which they artificially inflate the cost) and when they do comparisons now they talk about the costs to build and maintain the coal plants under the new regulatory systems that inflate the prices.

I know there will be left-leaners here and environmentalists who will HATE this argument and mod this post TROLL, but they need to answer this basic contradiction: IF wind and solar are truly cheaper without artificially inflating the costs of coal and nuclear, then why have the rates consumers pay per kilowatt hour skyrocketed as we have moved from coal and nuclear to wind and solar? A second issue they need to address is that power companies now urge their customers to use LESS of their product (a phenomenon not seen an ANY free market economic situation where a for-profit entity makes a profit on each unit of its product). When a vendor urges his customers to use less, there is rationing occurring, AND in any free market, the supplier would bring more units of product to the market as soon as possible to boost profits. The effective rationing of electricity in CA is all the proof anybody needs that wind and solar are actually NOT cost-effective - the power generation people are not willing to spend to bring them online fast enough to get past rationing (and the pace of deployment is thus tied to government subsidies).

To have TRULY honest numbers, wind and solar must be subjected to the same sorts of regulatory burdens as coal and nuclear, and have added to them the costs of any lawsuits that some activists opposed to them could possibly file. They need full environmental impact studies and permitting that goes on for years and looks into every possible effect (including studies into the effects of harvesting that much energy from the kinetic activity of the atmosphere, the birdstrikes of endangered species and confusion of whales etc of windfarms etc). They also need the same sort of in-depth examination of the extended environmental costs for things like the strip mines used to get the materials for solar and wind, and the disposal costs for wind and solar, and environmental studies into the potential toxic releases when wind and solar are retired, etc. Let's see ho much a solar array costs when there are 20 years of litigation in a dozen courts attached, and when a president and his party pledge to ban all solar panels and put in place regulatory schemes to advance that cause...

I'm actually NOT anti-solar (I run my home completely on solar) but what I am opposed to is fake distorted economics. I want the efficiency of the marketplace, NOT the inefficiency of the peoples' committee. I want all energy sources to compete on actual raw costs, or on equally-government-inflated costs, NOT on a biased-by-corrupt-politicians and their activist pals phony numbers. California is the result of the latter - we've shut down all but one of our nuke plants and gone heavily into wind and solar and batteries and we now have some of the highest energy prices in the nation, which are doing severe harm to people not as well setup as I am. Incidentally, I made MY solar decision NOT because it was best in raw numbers (it was NOT) but because it was best [1] after government subsidies and [2] when considering that California was waging a war against all traditional energy sources and thus electricity here was going to get more and more expensive.

Do I really need to point out how hysterical you sound? Applying the burden of proof and standards of evidence of criminal court to a free association question? Really?

That's basically treating the possibility that someone might not want to go on a date with you as in the same category as the state laying criminal charges against you; which is lunatic tier.

Obviously, anyone treating internet hearsay as particularly reliable is about as sensible as someone who believes online product reviews; but both of those groups are an order of magnitude, or more, less wrong than someone who thinks that internet hearsay or online product reviews need to be on a beyond reasonable doubt basis with FRE and an appeals process and stuff.

EarPods

Not really. You can start with a GPU, which you almost certainly already have. That would be enough to test and debug your model.

You can rent GPU time online by the minute. You can leverage open-source models. You'd need very little money to get started. Then bootstrap from there.

Those who believe that language has a natural pace of intonation have no Indian co-workers.

First, I was responding to a post from somebody posting as "Anonymous Coward". Are you Anonymous Coward?

I quickly scanned to see which of your posts in this thread were based on "My own personal experiences and needs, no talking points, no one else's opinion or influences"... and found none. So, if you aren't posting in the thread, I agree that your posts aren't based on oil company talking points, because they are non-existent.

I agree, but for porn, it usually looks better when softened with a slight blur. Who wants to see pimples?

YouTube is sharpening images.

Fine with me.

The price you pay isn't based on the average cost of generation.

It is based on the marginal cost of the most expensive source.

Solar is cheap for me because I have my own panels.

No modular reactors are operating anywhere in the world.

If they are great as you say, profit-seeking capitalists would be building them with enthusiasm.

They're not.

Nope.

All these talking points originate from "think tanks" (euphemism for propaganda factories) funded by oil companies.

Do keep in mind that oil companies have a trillion dollar a year incentive to slow down or stop electric vehicle adoption. They are very good at crafting propaganda. The slashdotters that suddently pop up out of the woodwork to slam time electric vehicles every time the subject is mentioned are just repeating it.

You actually make a reasonably convincing argument for the idea that the republican party does have principles; they just overlap pretty weakly with the ones they pretend at.

The most striking break with history is the bit where Nixon-level criminality used to be politically problematic.