Given the ubiquity of explosive drones specifically I feel like we need that calendar cartoon with March 2026 being torn off to reveal July 1864

I have never heard of this before and rather than Google it I'm going to decide that if you put 5-10 parallel rail lines to spread the weight you can actually put a whole oil tanker on rollers to drive it across the desert to the other side of the continent.

10/10 no notes

Okay but now I need to once again do a brief rant about the framing of that initial post.

the silicon valley technofascists are the definition of good times breed weak men

You're not wrong about these guys being both morally reprehensible and also deeply pathetic. Please don't take this as any kind of defense on their behalf.

However, the whole "good times breed weak men" meme is itself fascist propaganda about decadence breeding degeneracy originally written by a mediocre science fiction author and has never been a serious theory of History. It's rooted in the same kind of masculinity-through-violence-as-primary-virtue that leads to those dreams of conquest. I sympathize with the desire to show how pathetic these people are by their own standards but it's also critical to not reify the standards themselves in the process.

And I'm sure he's sent several notices explicitly declaring that lack of contract between them that a judge evaluating the lien would be interested in.

Not gonna lie, "enforcing the line between ketchup and tomato sauce" isn't the sort of thing I'd expect the government to be into, but I guess I'm not mad about it?

I mean, I feel like the core problem with billionaire philanthropy isn't that they aren't effective enough at choosing causes; they're supporting exactly what they want to, whether it's saving lives and improving conditions in poor countries or making more classical music happen in rich countries. Rather the problem is that that much money can be thrown around by a single individual at all without public oversight. Like, EAs have a point in that philanthropic activities can mobilize a world-changing amount of resources. But then they do the libertarian thing of assuming that this is a necessary and inevitable fact of the world that must be worked around rather than considering the circumstances that created that ability and the degree to which the existence of billionaires requires African kids to die of malaria.

I feel like in a lot of cases the context is also sometimes important to differentiate between a real-life idiot and someone who is "Just Asking Questions."

The trite disclaimer is one thing, but explaining how you came to the specific question you're asking helps me trust that it's worth giving you an actual explanation rather than the dismissal that some folks want so they can post it on wherever the new home is for "so much for the tolerant left" bullshit.

Note that the image here isn't from the AI project, it's from actual Doom. Their own screenshots have weird glitches including a hit splat that looks like a butt in the image I've seen closest to this one.

And when they say they've "run the game" they do not mean that there was a playable version that was publicly compared to the original. Rather they released short video clips of alleged gameplay and had their evaluators try to identify if they were from the AI recreation or from actual Doom.

Even by the abysmal standards of generative AI projects this is a hell of a grift.

See, I actually agree with making prompts polite and respectful. Not because the model is going to care, but because that kind of respect should be automatic and habitual and using it unnecessarily is better than being a dick to the checkout guy because you're tired one day.

He does mention that you'll need a military to defend your borders, though of course he's more concerned about opportunistic "legacy governments" taking his iceborne super country away from him rather than pirates showing up to fish anything valuable out of the sea as it all predictably and rapidly falls apart.

Gee, I wonder if there were any major shake-ups in the Ukrainian government circa 2014 that could have explained this change in tune.

Ukraine wasn't able to join NATO because of active territorial disputes regarding Russia's 2014 illegal annexation of Crimea. The 2022 invasion and intervening Russian-backed fighting in Donestk and Luhansk were naked imperial land grabs trying to force Ukraine back into the Russian sphere of influence despite their democratic processes repeatedly trying to move towards the EU.

Or in simpler terms, imperialism is actually still bad when Russia does it and it's weird that you don't seem to understand that.

I got as far as "he says crypto is bad but also didn't make any money in crypto!" before I couldn't go any farther. Up until that point the author was at least doing a pretty competent job of using negative space (i.e. not engaging with the specific issues of racism, cult of personality, etc.) and using sufficiently boring prose to avoid seeming completely insane.