I really like to build from zero, but some things are better copied, no matter if you fully understand them or fall short. :)

For example, I’m not qualified to check if Hamilton and Euler were correct - I only do as they explained, and later double-check the output against input.

Wow, interesting. :)

Not unexpectedly, the LLM failed to explain its own thought process correctly.

It wouldn’t help. The thing that gives you lift is the mass of displaced air. Difference from the (lack of) mass of the lifting gas is minimal.

A note about dating apps: most of them aren’t better than this. Their interest is keeping the user clicking, paying for services and coming back. If you find the right person for yourself, you will do none of that. So they:

• build awful card stack systems with no search function
• build superficial profile systems with no metadata about personality, habits or world views

…and of course, with such systems, people fail to find suitable partners. They come back and pay, but society suffers, because someone needs to make money.

I would vote for a politician who would promise that the ministry of health and social security will order a publicly funded dating site that’s built by scientists, with data privacy managed by the leading university in the country.

I’m not from the US, but I straight out recommend quickly educating oneself about military stuff at this point - about fiber guided drones (here in Eastern Europe we like them) and remote weapons stations (we like those too). Because the US is heading somewhere at a rapid pace. Let’s hope it won’t get there (the simplest and most civil obstacle would be lots of court cases and Trumpists losing midterm elections), but if it does, then strongly worded letters will not suffice.

Trump’s administration:

“Agency,” unless otherwise indicated, means any authority of the United States that is an “agency” under 44 U.S.C. 3502(1), and shall also include the Federal Election Commission.

Vance, in his old interviews:

“I think that what Trump should do, if I was giving him one piece of advice: Fire every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people.”

Also Vance:

“We are in a late republican period,” Vance said later, evoking the common New Right view of America as Rome awaiting its Caesar. “If we’re going to push back against it, we’re going to have to get pretty wild, and pretty far out there, and go in directions that a lot of conservatives right now are uncomfortable with.”

Googling “how to remove a dictator?” when you already have one is doing it too late. On the day the self-admitted wannabe Caesar crosses his Rubicon, it better be so that some people already know what to aim at him.

Tesla dealerships… nah. I would not advise spending energy on them. But people, being only people, get emotional and do that kind of things.

As an exception to most regulations that we hear about from China, this approach actually seems well considered - something that might benefit people and work.

Similar regulations should be considered by other countries. Labeling generated content at the source, hopefully without the metadata being too extensive (this is where China might go off the handle) would help avoid at least two things:

• casual deception
• training AI with material generated by another AI, leading to degradation of ability to generate realistic content

It is interesting that Reddit took it upon themselves to remove it. They are government employees, those aren’t their private addresses, but end with “.gov”. This seems to be public data.

In my experience, the API has iteratively made it ever harder for applications to automatically perform previously easy jobs, and jobs which are trivial under ordinary Linux (e.g. become an access point, set the SSID, set the IP address, set the PSK, start a VPN connection, go into monitor / inject mode, access an USB device, write files to a directory of your choice, install an APK). Now there’s a literal thicket of API calls and declarations to make, before you can do some of these things (and some are forever gone).

The obvious reason is that Google tries to protect a billion inexperienced people from scammers and malware.

But it kills the ability to do non-standard things, and the concept of your device being your own.

And a big problem is that so many apps rely on advertising for its income stream. Spying a little has been legitimized and turned into a business under Android. To maintain control, the operating system then has to be restrictive of apps. Which pisses off developers who have a trusting relationship with their customer and want their apps to have freedom to operate.

The countdown to Android’s slow and painful death is already ticking for a while.

It has become over-engineered and no longer appealing from a developer’s viewpoint.

I still write code for Android because my customers need it - will be needing for a while - but I’ve stopped writng code for Apple’s i-things and I research alternatives for Android. Rolling my own environment with FOSS components on top of Raspbian looks feasible already. On robots and automation, I already use it.

Tox is nice. My favourite flavour is qTox.

The typical pattern over here: if someone uses Signal, you guess they’re some military type (wants things to be secure, doesn’t care much about anonymity, wants things to work one way and simply).

If someone uses Tox, you guess they’re some hacker / anarchist type (wants things to be secure, but also anonymizable, wants things to be flexible, even if it can backfire).

Maybe I’m misreading because one poster above deleted their comment, but I can’t understand: how exactly has TSMC shown “disrespect”? Or was the poster showing disrespect?

Putting corporations aside and speaking of states: the US and Taiwan have respectful and friendly relations. They depend on each other.

Now, a tariff of 25-100% on a partner’s primary export and one’s own vitally important import is more like putting a shotgun to one’s leg out of spite. It would be hurting oneself and hurting the other side - and not a little bit.

The US is a store that Taiwan frequently shops in - a very big defense equipment store, I should say. Some of the toys cost money, but if you buy enough, you get kickbacks - the US gives Taiwan some security assistance for free. It also says it will assist Taiwan if anyone (we can imagine who that might be) attacks it.

Meanwhile, Taiwan is a store the world frequently shops in - a very big microprocessor, memory and microcontroller store. Frequent customers can tell TSMC “it would be nice if you brought some of your business here, we have a vacant spot suitable for your plans”. And it works: one factory will be built in the US, one factory in the EU. Maybe elsewhere too. Getting that to happen didn’t need Trump or insane levels of customs tariffs.

To achieve that, people just negotiated like normal people do. TMSC know they operate in a country prone to violent earthquakes and close to an agressive neighbour, they are quite OK with placing some of their business abroad.

I came here to say that, but you got here first, so have my upvote. :)

Recipe:

• bucket of kale leaves, shredded by hand, rinsed
• half a lemon’s juice
• some teaspoons of salt
• several tablespoons of deactivated / roasted / nutritional yeast
• some teaspoons of your favourite spices (garlic / onion / paprica / tumeric / anything goes)

To be mixed in a huge bowl and laid out into 2 food dryers. Sorry, I don’t have exact quantities, I always use both of my food driers. I run them at +70 C.

Same here. Forums (about science fiction, aeromodelism, electric vehicles) have been important to me, and continue to be important in some fields.

The ukrainian military also have checkpoints in the west border to make sure any male between 18 and 60 doesn’t leave the country so that they can be forced into war.

In the west, you should expect to find the border guard. They are capable of checking databases and patrolling in nature, but aren’t heavily armed. And tens of thousands of guys have taken leave on their own, despite anything the border guard can do. If one doesn’t like the draft, one hikes out via the Carpathian mountains.

As for the draft, yes, it’s a real thing. Of course it’s unjust, people should be able to live in peace - hence no agressor should invade any land. Having to take up weapons sucks. But when a war on this scale gets started, states will draft soldiers into their armies. Many will dodge it. Since hundreds of thousands of soldiers are needed, lots of mistakes will be made, and will be sorted out later (units don’t actually want soldiers who aren’t capable of fighting).

Ultimately, who was called up but absolutely doesn’t want to fight, must choose among these roles:

• emigree
• medical personnel
• defense industry
• logistics
• dodger
• jailed dodger

Obviously, everyone is not competent to become a medic. The remaining positions are attainable. So, in the end, it’s mostly people willing to fight at least somewhat, who end up fighting. Some of them get disillusioned and desert, however. That’s normal too, in a large war that lasts long. I don’t hold it against them.

I’m not from Ukraine, and not a military person, but I cooperate with military people, supplying drones and stuff that helps bring hostile drones down (profit is not involved). So inevitably I do know the approximate situation.

I’ve read some things by Malatesta before (not much from Goldman), so thanks for the reading tips. There is a nuance, though. Once some country has started a conquest attempt, any disarmament will only give them victory. Disarmament is only possible when it’s mutual, and then I fully support it. The article by Goldman that you suggested seems to originate from 1915, when World War I was being fought in Europe. I remind that World War I had no clear agressor, and indeed, anarchists of all countries tried to overthrow the ruling regimes (which were mostly undemocratic, frequently dictatorial and imperial).

The current situation somewhat differs. There is a clear agressor, which happens to be a dictatorship and an empire, supported by other dictatorships and a messed up theocracy. There happens to be a clearly defined victim of agression, which happens to be mostly democratic, supported by places that are reasonably democratic. I believe that if Malatesta lived today, I could convince him to start a charity that supplies Ukrainians. :)

I hope for revolutionary conditions to arise in Russia, but that will be a long wait. My comrades there tried and lost, they’ve mostly emigrated by now. Some are imprisoned, some still keep trying (I can’t estimate what the percentages are, people don’t talk openly of such things), but there are approximately 4 times as much cops per capita in Russia compared to a normal country, so their chances are miserable.

If you are sure about something, then bring evidence of considerable off-label activities.

In response to your response about “Nordic Response”:

Surveillance, patrols, road control posts, vehicle inspection, control of air space, minesweeping, evacuation of civilians, and riot control were important part of the exercise.”

Those are realistic military duties in war time. Every military practises them. Where do you find a fault?

An example from real life: the Ukrainian military has checkpoints on roads near the frontline. Moving with a vehicle, you’d expect to show papers, say a few words and maybe even show transported goods. The purpose? Finding reconnaisance / sabotage groups, which every competent enemy is expected to send. If an opponent doesn’t send recon or saboteurs, they are fools. If a military doesn’t learn how to deter those, they’re fools.

How does one learn? After dry reading in a classroom: one holds an excercise. There’s a home team and an opposing team. The home team checks, the opposing team infiltrates. Both teams report what they achieved, results get compared. If the blue team found the “saboteurs”, good. If the red team “blew up” all bridges and pipelines in the area, people think hard about what they did wrong. If they don’t practise, they don’t get to think hard.

Based on this, I conclude: the NATO of today is a mostly defensive alliance with some taints in its history.

It is currently very busy doing a real job - opposing a conquering dictator named Vladimir Putin.

I wish it luck, as long as it sticks to its declared purpose. If it oversteps, I will revise my opinion.

So, NATO had a problematic operation, trying to establish (and coordinate the establishment of) guerilla stay-behind troops to use in the event of Soviet takeover - and the operation went especially problematic in Italy during the Years of Lead, where some of those guys associated with right-wing terrorists. The year was 1969 or so.

Basing on this, how do I conclude anything about the NATO of today?

Disclaimer: I was asked to hold an anti NATO speech during a protest event during a NATO summit. Being a moderately honest anarchist, I held a speech denouncing the practises seen in Afghanistan (the year was 2012), but emphasized that collective self defense is a valuable thing to have (a common attitude here in Eastern Europe), and added that if the alliance would bother doing what it says on the sticker, I would support it.

NATO is an alliance of various countries. Some of them aren’t nice or democratic (classic example: Turkey). Mixed bag, and constantly changing. Membership in NATO is not a letter of indulgence for a member state to do anything - allies are obliged to help only if someone attacks a member state. If a NATO member attacks someone else, allies can ignore the affair or even oppose the member (example: Turkey recently bombed Kurdish troops in Syria so sloppily that threatened US troops shot down a Turkish drone).

No conclusive proof. It didn’t have a passthrough for one electrode of the two. It did have remains of acid inside and corrosion on the electrodes. One can speculate whether it was an experimental device, a faulty device or something else entirely (one alchemist trying to replicate another’s secrets and doing it wrong?).

To add insult to the injury, it was lost or stolen during the war in 2003, so more analysis can’t be done until it gets re-discovered. :o

I haven’t heard an alternative hypothesis, though… I try to imagine what else besides electrochemistry would one do with two dissimilar metals in an acid. It ruins the metals, it doesn’t make any known medicine or effective poison, it likely fouls the jug too… for a person to put copper and iron into a jug full of acid, there has to be a reason for doing it…

No problem, just tell them to ask from Baghdad, they should know where it is. :) A jug of wine or vinegar, one electrode of iron, another made of copper, voila… the Baghdad battery.