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Don't compare it to the entire balance sheet, compare it to how much you'd have to pay someone to optimize it.

At $500/store/year times 1,000 stores, you can pay an entire team of experts for a year to come up with a way to save that money, and come out ahead. That team's manager can then go to their boss and say, look, I saved the company half a million dollars a year, and they'll get a nice bonus from it.

The theater lets you get by with a lot fewer armed men backing it up, and with a lot less usage of them. Even authoritarian countries with preordained verdicts engage in this theater. Why? It's not because they're worried about being extremely precise with their language or because they're really into centuries-old fashion. It's because the whole thing helps to convey a sense of authority into both the involved parties and the populace at large, and that makes it easier to control them.

I don't think it's entitlement if it's actually doable. They're not saying they expect the world to give this to them on a silver platter. They're saying that they can actually do it. And if that's what they want to spend their money on, who are we to say that it's not a good use of their resources?

I don't think understanding is the issue. It doesn't take a lot of tech knowledge to understand "the SSNs were all being sent, they were just hidden poorly."

What we need is fewer vindictive, fragile people in positions of power. Unfortunately this is an unsolved problem.

I would expect it to be illegal (I am also not a lawyer). It’s clumsy and stupid and unlikely to work, but if that was addressed as ATTENTION: COURT OFFICER or whatever, it would very clearly be an attempt to exert undue influence over the court.

Court is basically justice theater. The funny clothes, the formality, the titles, it’s all there to give the feeling of authority, which is vital to their actual authority. You can’t have people screwing around undermining that.

This doesn’t make the slightest bit of sense either. If the heat pump can maintain temperature when the weather is cold, it can also maintain temperature when the weather turns cold. Are you waiting for the interior of your house to become freezing before you turn the heat on? Why? Nobody does that.

> but that's cause heatpumps do not create heat, but move heat.

Are you seriously using this as some kind of gotcha? Who the hell cares whether it creates heat or merely moves it?

And apparently people have a serious problem understanding that the same words can come across very differently depending on who’s saying them and how. Why not just read the script and save yourself some time if that’s how it is?

You can easily find videos of Gilbert Gottfried. Go find some and give me your honest opinion if you think the listed attributes would apply just as much to a Picard portrayed by him using the exact same scripts.

I’m not trying to sell Stewart’s work in terms of what some others can’t do. I’m trying to convince someone that the actor matters at all. There’s no point in discussing the specifics to someone who thinks it’s like praising a chef for the restaurant’s decor.

“Honorable, wise, but humble, diplomatic, reasonable, with high morals, and fortitude under pressure.”

Acting has a lot to do with those attributes. Imagine Gilbert Gottfried playing the role and tell me you’d still describe the character that way.

A bunch of different writers contribute to the character’s performance, but only one actor.

A bunch of different sous chefs contribute to the food, but only one head chef.

Nope, not adding up.

That’s ridiculous. The guy who puts the hot dogs on the rollers has essentially zero influence on the taste.

It’s more like a famous chef dying and lots of people praising his food, and you’re here saying all credit should go to the farmers and the chef just assembled the stuff.

30B models aren't that good for now. They keep getting better. Qwen 3.8 27B is as good as the best available model from a year or two ago. Will 2028's 30B models be as good as the best available today? No idea, but I wouldn't dismiss the possibility.

I'd also wonder about what you can get done with a smart model running very slowly. You can run the biggest open weights models on relatively mundane hardware if you don't mind measuring your speed in seconds per token. That's going to be untenable for interactive use, but might be fine for "go hack this thing for me" if you're patient.

Depends on what takes more effort. It's not at all clear to me that the 1,000,000 custom setups takes more effort. The first few will take some, then you'll start to see patterns and it'll get easier as you go. Custom setups aren't going to be all that unique in practice.

Cost of hacking a custom setup is going down rapidly. There was broad agreement that the PHP vulnerability was very difficult to exploit in practice. It took two hours for someone to get into Steal My Bitcoin. Apparently all they did was tell a decent model "go exploit that." AI isn't free but it's not that expensive.

Is regulation an obstacle here? From a quick search it appears you can just find a place that performs these scans and book an appointment.

I don’t entirely agree, but it’s not inconsistent. The idea is that government is supposed to protect you from bad guys (criminals or enemy countries) but it’s not their job to protect you from yourself. If somebody wants to shoot you, the government is supposed to stop them. If you want to eat an entire cake for lunch every day, that’s your own business.

DC suburbs here, I can’t remember the last time I saw someone smoking.

This whole thread is complete crazypants. Gosh, how dare you unfairly malign North Korea just because they’re completely awful and have a long track record of doing exactly the kind of thing being discussed.

We must be looking at different things, because right now I see about a thousand times more criticism leveled at Israel than at North Korea. (Making no statement here about who deserves it.)

If NK ever were to join the fold of western-aligned liberal states, it will probably be accompanied by no longer behind quite such utter bastards to their people and a cessation of maligning would be entirely justified.

I just don’t get it. Of all the things to complain about propaganda in the world, why North Korea? This is one where they get it right.

Right, because “the media” is such a broad term that it’s pretty much useless to talk about it as a thing.

I’m not sure what’s supposed to be tame about operating one of the most oppressive societies in the world and keeping their people in poverty while building a nuclear arsenal.

It’s definitely true that crimes against other countries are more frowned upon than crimes against one’s own people. Which doesn’t seem right to me at all. People are people and victims are victims whether it’s their own government or someone else’s. Hence why I’m confused about the snark. This seems like an instance where ugly norms are being broken for a good reason and it’s being treated like hypocrisy.

You don’t see the same outrage around Israel? Have you... looked? It’s all over.

I don’t understand what you mean about faux concern only lasting as long as the media says. North Korea is, as you say, evergreen. And I’m pretty sure it’s based on how awful that government is, not on “the media” telling us to hate them.

They’re demonized because they’re an awful regime that horribly oppresses their own people.

Of all the reasons to demonize a government, that seems like a pretty good one. Why the snark?

Indeed, car crashes tend to just blame one (or more) of the drivers. Nobody excuses a foolish driver with systemic excuses.

On a surely unrelated note, car travel is by a substantial margin the most dangerous mode of transport most of us ever use, and the most dangerous activity most of us routinely engage in.

It's strange that the internet, which reduces friction and allows strangers to talk directly to each other more easily than ever before, has given rise to these massive companies that do absolutely nothing but serve as middlemen. Uber, DoorDash, Instacart, Lyft... in a normal transaction with these companies, nobody who actually works for them ever does a damned thing for me. They exist solely to transmit a few hundred bytes of information from me to the driver, along with some of my money while keeping a bunch of it for themselves. For doing what, exactly?

At the end of the day, I guess their real product is trust. I wouldn't give $50 to a random stranger and ask them to drive me to the airport, but I would give $50 to Uber so they can give $25 to the stranger. It sure seems like a lot to pay for trust, though.

It is a bit weird. And yet a lot of people are willing to pay a lot of money for stocks that show no sign of ever paying out dividends. Seems like it's probably more than just collecting cards.

It is extremely important to distinguish between people who are here illegally and people who are subject to a deportation order. ICE's mission is to deport people with deportation orders, and get people suspected of breaking the law in front of a court. The way you've worded it makes it sound like their mission is to go straight from "here illegally" to "deport" which it very much is not.

I don't think buybacks are really the thing here. The question is why a stock would have value if it doesn't pay dividends. If there's a good reason for that then buybacks are perfectly sensible. If there isn't then such companies are engaged in some sort of weird scheme regardless of buybacks.

It's not going to be a popular take because you're defending pretextual stops and you're repeating the lie that illegal immigrants vote.