i changed my mind about gun ownership sometime in the last two years

i used to think that like, sure i get that it would be nice if nobody in the world had a gun, but the cat was out of the bag. and remember when the covid lockdowns started? there were lines around the block at gun stores. it just seemed crazy to me to be the only person without a gun, like what if shit hits the fan?

i think i changed my mind around uvalde, because like, that event made it pretty clear that guns dont really contribute to the rule of law. all guns did in that scenario was allow cops to kill a child an hour after he murdered 21 other children.

i really had to kind of re-evaluate the pros and cons. sure guns would be great if, in the 0.05% likelihood event that society turns into mad max, i need to murder my neighbor for tomatoes so i can delay getting scurvy for another week. but in the meantime every single time someone has like a fucked up teenager phase or watches an insane amount of youtube incel shit or whatever, we're making sure that they have immediate access to a means to kill like 100 people before anybody can do anything about it?

it just doesnt make sense to me any more to live my life planning for the worst possible societal outcome in a way that has very obvious and real consequences. itd be like if nobody had invented the seatbelt and the way we prevented car crashes was having giant fucking spikes right at eye level surrounding the car to disincentivize other people from driving into you

very funny to release what is clearly a meticulously crafted response to career ending allegations of pedophilia while still staying in character as like the bad guy in a movie where a golden retriever learns to play counter strike

sorry im not sure if you're asking or offering. if you're offering then absolutely, hit me. if you're asking then these two are pretty good:

https://www.reviewjournal.com/news/nevada-companys-troubles-entangle-gibbons-federal-government/

https://www.npr.org/2009/12/19/121667905/the-man-who-conned-the-pentagon

man i just spent like an hour in the bathtub reading further into this and belly laughing

i will say though that i think the guy who sold mike lindell the 'data' that he's referring to in the challenge might actually be a genius lol. this is apparently the third or fourth time he's identified someone who needs some kind of technological hail mary and then he just shows up and is like "i have.. the data". he sold proof that obama faked his birth certificate and also sold a bunch of completely bogus software to the pentagon during the post-9/11 defense industry boom such as software that "decodes" al jazeera broadcasts into secret al qaeda messages. an employee of his testified that he doesn't even have an IDE installed on his computer. he's literally made tens of millions of dollars off of this grift and despite being basically constantly legally embattled for the past 20 years has apparently not suffered any consequences. i wish him a long and successful career being the smartest dumb guy in the room

mike lindell actually comes away from this looking almost sympathetic because he is so, so clearly a moron whose conception of data is like, a PS1-era spinning icon of a CD-ROM. it's very hard for me to guess whether or not he was acting in good faith: on the one hand, the logical thing to do with proof of election tampering is not 'announce a five million dollar challenge for someone to prove that i don't have it', but on the other hand, it doesn't make any fucking sense to do that if you don't think you have proof either. either way i would love to know how much money he paid for it (by the way, the data is: a text file with a list of IP addresses in mainland china, a PDF with a 'graphic depiction of voting machines', and many terabytes of gibberish binary files timestamped to several days before the challenge was set up). look at this quote the guy is literally zoolander stupid

“I said, ‘Wow!’ This would absolutely explain what I couldn’t explain!” Lindell recalled in an interview. “It was done with computers! I knew that was the only explanation."

i am not familiar with gab, but is this prompt the entirety of what differentiates it from other GPT-4 LLMs? you can really have a product that's just someone else's extremely complicated product but you staple some shit to the front of every prompt?

i can't find it online, but im reasonably certain i heard an interview with this guy on Canadian public radio several years ago that really shook me. he talked basically about how he wouldn't fly on a Boeing plane, knowing what he knows and having seen what he'd seen, stuff like quality rejected parts getting taken back into inventory to meet quotas. the takeaway for me was that the quality control system that had previously worked so well was an invention of equal or possibly higher importance to any kind of aerodynamic innovation present on those planes. i work in an analogous role (in a different industry) and i really do take it more seriously after having heard the interview. nobody likes the work of quality assurance and you'll never see someone doing a non-conformance report on TV but it's a necessary condition for planes to stay in the sky. RIP to a real one and if he got murdered then i hope the industry burns

obviously Epstein killed himself to protect the secret technique of disabling security cameras and putting guards to sleep with his mind

i was confused by the signs you sometimes see on escalators that are apparently warning you of their own existence for a good few years as a child

i dunno, the premise of this question seems to me like homelessness is a riddle that homeless people just have not figured out. im pretty sure that if the answer could be crowdsourced in eight hours from eighty sysadmins on the toilet, it wouldn't be such an intractable problem

look i mean, wherever the line is, im pretty confident nazis are on the other side of it

can anyone with more insight explain what checks and balances had to have failed for this to make it to the field? i understand that this is like obviously potentially lethal but i don't really know how this kind of thing would normally be prevented.

"When you've got a product with a lot of new technology or any brand new vehicle program, especially one that is as different and advanced as the Cybertruck, you will have problems proportionate to how many new things you're trying to solve at scale," he added.

does it have new technology? i thought it was just like, shockingly ugly?