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SideburnsOfDoom

Re:Restrooms along the Norwegian Scenic Routes on Sunday November 01, 2026 @10:47AM (#50326738)
> I don't think Americans still understand what a laughing stock their president is to the rest of the world.

And, I don't think that Americans yet understand what leaders elsewhere are incrementally factoring in: this is not a one a one-off event. It happened twice. There is every reason to expect that it can happen again - this is a thing that the USA will do from time to time, and so they cannot be relied upon. Decoupling is the wise direction.

e.g.

"The world's trust in America is collapsing. That has consequences"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jBcHwbuOKXU

Re:Binance-hacker-1029 – $5.6B stolen from Binance on Friday October 30, 2026 @01:41PM (#50307440)
Proton have been in the news in the last 2 days, bad executive behaviour to the extent that and some see signs of AI psychosis.

e.g.

https://www.404media.co/manifestos-fear-and-loser-thinking-i...

https://www.gadgetreview.com/ai-or-unemployment-proton-is-re...

I started to be wary when they got into Cryptocurrency https://proton.me/blog/proton-wallet-launch

For Proton Mail specifically, they are now pushing AI features, e.g. https://proton.me/blog/proton-scribe-writing-assistant.

The 404 media link is in a comment unthread, reading it does give me the impression that I should avoid the company.

The other issue is that in an election like the US, the results in different states are not independent, decoupled rolls of the dice. i.e. If the results of the first few states lean a few % one way off the polling (within the margin of error) then it's most likely that most of the other states will doe the same.
Re:Meta Employees Denounce Interference in Brazilian Elections on Wednesday October 28, 2026 @03:31AM (#50270263)
1-2 I urge you to read the other comments in this thread that make the same points in other terms.

3 Still not clear if you possess it either.

4 So you're already solved this, and not at all in the way that you're advocating for? That's revealing.

Your responses are myopic, juvenile and add no understanding, so I am at this point going to say: good bye and have a nice day.

1. Meta are an obvious influence factory. Of course they say otherwise in court, but it's well known and not subtle.

2. I was being generous.

3. "Some could argue that you are the opposite of complicit", and they'd be wrong. "If you work at a company that does bad things and" let me stop you there at the "and". Your real job (the stuff before the "and") isn't negated by your hobby, and if they're severely at odds then your work effectiveness will suffer.

4. How did that work out for you?

Pretty much, yes.

e.g. "Across the Caribbean, people have installed roughly twice as many solar panels as official statistics would suggest. ... China ... has exported far more panels to the Caribbean than have officially been installed."

https://www.yahoo.com/news/science/articles/caribbean-nation...

The odds of you, the non-warmonger, influencing your employer's business direction are close to nil. You becoming complicit is a certainly.

The change is not "objectively worse" - it is the same for them and is definitely better for you. This is a pointless take.

Many other comments here expand on these themes - you're not going to influence the company direction by staying. You should not be surprised when the armaments factory makes bombs, or the influence factory makes political influence.

Armaments factory employees denounce bombs.
Re:The 1.5°C goal of the Paris Agreement is no longer viable on Wednesday October 21, 2026 @10:31AM (#50181674)
In actual reality "Joe Biden was a career politician because he'd say..." does not in any way contradict "Joe Biden did x and engaged in more y..." Outcomes matter, regardless of motives. Do you see the difference?

The rest is changing the subject - derailing and inflammatory.

Re:Ofcom Concedes Defeat in the 4chan Case on Wednesday October 21, 2026 @09:41AM (#50180807)
> Do you really want to pursue this line of argument?

FYI, yes they likely do want to argue. That's what they do https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50101690

It's trollish behaviour. You can't stop the pidgeon from playing Pidgeon Chess.

This is the answer.

FYI, this refers to "Large boulder the size of a small boulder" in 2020

https://time.com/5772944/large-small-boulder/

Re:Are we sleepwalking into World War III? on Tuesday October 20, 2026 @02:59AM (#50162305)
> it's a bit of a conspiracy theorist

FYI, the account that you are replying to has promoted a range of conspiracy theories - 1) Pro Russia, 2) antisemitic (of course), and 3) Were Dinosaurs real? (yes, really!)

You'll have to show the dead flagged comments in order top see them, if you need to.

Re:Are we sleepwalking into World War III? on Monday October 19, 2026 @12:42PM (#50154598)
> check the background of key people like Nuland, Kagan, Friedman, Blinken(stein). Where did they come from?

Could you perhaps say plainly whatever you are alluding to here? I'd like you to state your position clearly.

Re:Butlerian Jihad on Saturday October 17, 2026 @11:57AM (#50132214)
Two subtleties in Frank Herbert's original formulation that are often missed:

The first has been covered: "Once men turned their thinking over to machine ... that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them." Men did the enslaving. It describes a techbro oligarch takeover, not an AI takeover. The machines do not have agency.

Hebert was really into the whole idea now expressed as "Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And, weak men create hard times." i.e. good times, people get lazy, then get weak, then get enslaved. (1)

And the second is that "Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind" is not the same thing as "Though shalt not make a machine mind". A drawing or statue of a person is "in the likeness" of that person. It's not a person. It doesn't have to actually be the thing in order to qualify as "likeness" of it.

People who scorn LLMs would agree that they produce something like the output of a human, in the sense that a parody, a caricature, a cartoon is a likeness. An uncanny valley mockery of the thing is "in the likeness" of a thing.

Ultimately, Herbert put this in his fiction because he didn't want to write about robots or machines, just humans and human potential (2). So he wrote it out with a few paragraphs of backstory in the novels' distant past. You can over-interpret it. Herbert wanted to sound deep, but he did not always succeed. And even when he succeeded in that, his views were not always the best.

1) https://acoup.blog/2020/01/17/collections-the-fremen-mirage-...

2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_potential_movement

Re:Tesla Roadster on Saturday October 17, 2026 @04:32AM (#50129096)
Also don't undersell how wildly impractical this known technology is - it requires a skirt that in order to get close to the ground, which will abrade. It loses traction dangerously if the seal is broken, it's very loud and energy intensive. It sucks up dust, pebbles and other road debris and spits them out at other road users, and it takes up a lot of volume in the car. As do those thrusters.

This is a circus stunt.

Re:Tesla Roadster on Friday October 16, 2026 @12:17PM (#50120324)
Agreed. Just think about it for a second. If it was 2 tons like a real EV, could a fan or 2 keep it adhered to a vertical surface?

This is a circus stunt.

Re:Citroen revives the 2CV for an electric age on Tuesday October 13, 2026 @05:06AM (#50068773)
> Original 2cv is wonderfully simple. If they can keep that simplicity, they will win.

In general, an EV powertrain is far simpler than the equivalent Internal Combustion Engine vehicle. Like only 10% of the number of moving parts. Or fewer.

So it depends if you're comparing this vehicle against its ICE predecessor (far simpler!), or against other EVs now on the market for around 20K euros (not yet known).

Re:Ocean the Man Who Listens to Whales on Thursday October 08, 2026 @03:28AM (#50002823)
> We can't understand lions because they are dumb.

Non-sequitur, unsupported conslusion.

Re:Ocean the Man Who Listens to Whales on Wednesday October 07, 2026 @09:26AM (#49992533)
> we can't understand lions because lions are kinda stupid.

Lions understand each other well enough to hunt as a coordinated pack.

> we haven't researched them enough.

I don't think you or I know much about the current state of Lion research. This statement is meaningless confabulation.

Re:Tests Come for Free Now, and Most of Them Are Pointless on Tuesday October 06, 2026 @08:21AM (#49977362)
> This should be titled "I don't know how to write good tests, so I consider them pointless"

Yes. An LLM certainly doesn't know this. Most of the input data to the LLM will not be "good tests" as these are quite rare in practice. The median test in the input data is not good, so the output of a LLM generating more tests won't be either. Most human oversight won't even recognise this either.

> only change when you change that specific behaviour.

Correct, as Kent Beck observed: "Tests should be coupled to the behaviour of code and decoupled from the structure of code"

bad tests "need constant updates" because they reverse this.

> Major outbreaks are regularly named based on their origin: Spanish Flu,

Major outbreaks _were_ named like that, but as the other reply pointed out, the "Spanish Flu" did not actually originate in Spain at all.

It is for reasons like that, that WHO best practices now specifically say to not name diseases this way: https://www.who.int/news/item/08-05-2015-who-issues-best-pra...

> Terms that should be avoided in disease names include geographic locations, people’s names, species of animal or food, cultural, population, industry or occupational references....

Re:In Ukraine, distributed renewables foil Russia's assaults on Sunday October 04, 2026 @06:37AM (#49952615)
> The argument that decentralization (diesel or renewable) helps makes sense to me.

Sure, but also in the real world, fossil fuel infrastructure is always centralised. "decentralised diesel" might exist in the sense that you can run lots of generators all over, but that's energy consumption not energy supply.

Those generators have to be supplied with fuel or they're useless. That supply is always centralised. Fossil fuels cannot be decentralised in the same way as solar.

Re:In Ukraine, distributed renewables foil Russia's assaults on Sunday October 04, 2026 @06:30AM (#49952569)
> And is a diesel truck supposed to be fuelling just one house? It's likely a single point of failure for a network of people

Completely correct, but then go one step further: Where does that truck fill up? At a depot where many other trucks do the same. That's an even more tempting target - centralised, stationary, flammable.

I do not think that there is an equivalent node in the solar alternative.

And where does that fuel depot get resupply from. etc. "decentralised" fossil fuel infrastructure isn't really a thing that exists.

Re:In Ukraine, distributed renewables foil Russia's assaults on Sunday October 04, 2026 @05:52AM (#49952294)
> Panels are stationary, easier to target than vehicles.

Panels are small, numerous and widely dispersed, easy to install quickly and incrementally, and non-flammable.

Basically the opposite of (also stationary) centralised fossil fuel infrastructure.

It's clear which one is the more tempting target if you have a finite stockpile of drones.

> If that was their plan

If you are still in doubt about this, I urge you to read the article linked above. Or google the term. I assumed that it was something that "everybody knows" but apparently not.

Re:September 2026: The world today, as seen by one Polish guy on Wednesday September 30, 2026 @11:57AM (#49910645)
> Merkel tried to reign in Putin with Gas.

The key word there is tried. "wandel durch handel" means "Change through trade" (1). That's what Germany tried, it was a part of their foreign policy.

Now we all know that it did not work with Putin's Russia, but that was not the claim made by Germanioum. It is not nonsense that they tried. Even if they tried and failed.

Sentences often make more sense when you read all of the words in them.

1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wandel_durch_Handel

Re:September 2026: The world today, as seen by one Polish guy on Wednesday September 30, 2026 @09:56AM (#49909050)
> So has the US (spent 40 years planning for conflict with Iran).

True, but also worthless - the USA fired or retired people who knew the plan (1), and didn't listen to the warnings. It's more "Everyone knows the plan until they punch themselves in the face"

1) https://fortune.com/2026/04/05/doge-fired-state-department-e...

Re:September 2026: The world today, as seen by one Polish guy on Wednesday September 30, 2026 @09:36AM (#49908760)
Yes, I knew all along that I agreed with what you said, I was not trying to dispute what you said. Apologies if that wasn't clear to you, I should have started it with "yes, and" so that you would not take mistaken offence.

I don't agree that the consequential points are just "more language". I said things that you did not.

Re:September 2026: The world today, as seen by one Polish guy on Wednesday September 30, 2026 @08:04AM (#49907687)
> I would wager Iran is barely hanging on. The question is which side can hang on longer.

I think this applies to both sides, and the issue is that the people in power are not affected by the crises that cause hardship to ordinary people. Fanatical leadership can live by "Some of you may die, but it's a sacrifice I am willing to make" .

The problem though is that people in the USA do have one lever to pull on their government, in the form of approaching midterm elections, that the people of Iran do not. And the leadership of Iran knows it They may be fanatical and awful but they're not stupid - causing fuel shortages causes economic pain to ordinary people causes political pain to the USA.

Notwithstanding that, this assessment of blame is correct ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49907371 ), the missteps that put us in this mess with no clear way out all come from stupid leadership in the USA.

Re:Virus Stole a Human Gene and Won't Let Go of It on Wednesday September 30, 2026 @04:16AM (#49905930)
"Copied" or "borrowed" might work.

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