Maybe it’s a way to launder dirty money or take bribes, the way solid booking a floor at the Trump Tower for a few months is a way to launder money.

Oh teh noes, not UK waging a proxy war on Iran and North Korea!

It’s 2050. The sea levels have risen 3 metres. Hurricane season lasts 9 months of the year.

Eric Schmidt: ChatGPT 4zz++ Premium Elite, how do we solve global warming?

ChatGPT 4zz++ Premium Elite: I don’t know, but I drew you as a minor being abused unprompted.

The only purpose of NFTs is to raise sea levels by metres and inundate every coastal city. Owning NFTs is a crime against humanity. Anyone who has ever owned an NFT belongs in prison

We’re a century away from self-driving cars that can handle snowfall

Just this year farmers with self-driving tractors got screwed because a solar flare made GPS inaccurate and so tractors went wild because they were programmed with the assumption of GPS being 100% reliable and accurate with no way to override

Not sure if we’re agreeing and saying exactly the same thing here, but Uber’s business model is to get suckers who are bad at math to own the cars. Uber’s business model does not work if they have to own their own cars. Self-driving Uber doesn’t work because Uber would have to own the cars and therefore has to cover vehicle insurance, vehicle depreciation, and so on out of its own margin.

Abolish snowfall

“information”

Possession of any cryptocurrency should be punished by 5 years in prison. The only use case is paying ransoms to North Korea, and the side effects are destroying our climate

We do have the additional context outside the story that under the interim CEO Mozilla has made two other unpopular decisions:

• Bought an AdTech company
• Added AI features to Firefox

The Fediverse has 1 million active users. Threads has 130 million active users. This is not an EEE play because a 100% successful EEE play would amount to increasing the Threads userbase by less than 1%. Meta is doing this for non-EEE reasons.

One possible non-EEE reason would be to have plausible deniability for monopolistic practices. If they make a show of interoperating with irrelevant nobodies like us, they can pretend to be a nice tech company rather than a mean anti-competitive monopoly.

Would Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, and arguably Afghanistan be the fault of Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist colonialism?

Stalin made homosexuality illegal in the Soviet Union and continued the Russian colonization of central Asia. Brezhnev invaded Afghanistan. The laws weren’t repealed until Russia seceded from the Soviet Union in 1991

It was occupied by Italy in WW2, which is outside the “Scramble for Africa” period but is an occupation by a European power

The Internet Archive picked a dumb fight that it couldn’t win. I want to donate money to the Wayback Machine, but I can’t because they’ll spend it appealing this stupid thing.

Ontario has now passed two different bills banning cell phones in school. It’s a great distraction from actual problems. I fully expect we’ll pass a third in a few years if our provincial government is re-elected

Teachers don’t need a sheet of paper at a legislature somewhere to take away cellphones. They can do that already, and if the kids disobey a legislature won’t help. I assume no one is expecting kids to go to prison for having a cellphone

If they had spun off Windows and Office into independent companies, Windows would have made a competing office suite and Office would have made a competing OS

Now consider the number of normal people in the world who do not have a server rack in their closet, and how much they are about to be defrauded and blackmailed

Divorcing the author from the work is rather challenging when that author is a living billionaire who makes money whenever you buy any kind of merchandise of their work. While pirating their trademarks without paying is in principle harmless, the moment you cross over into, say, paying money for Harry Potter Lego or Harry Potter Fortnite skins, you are then immediately funding the author’s hate campaigns

The instance name is clever, but I think you will find the concept embarrassing in hindsight. I would recommend not doubling down on the cognitive dissonance