The UK issued silver dollars once. They were dated 1804 and considered “bank tokens” as they had less silver than their denomination required at the time. They basically stamped a new design on Spanish colonial 8-real coins and passed them as five shillings.

The UK had a hard time with coin supply for most of the 1700s until 1816 when they finally downdized many coins.

Try RiscOS for a glimpse of a world most of us missed.

I suspect it could be seen as a proper noun.

If Acme and FooCorp create a bridge between their private network spaces, it’s an internet (common noun) but not the Internet (proper noun, referring to the one with Goatse).

Let’s find an English teacher. And yell at them for forcing us to read the same terrible novel in both 10th and 12th grades. Maybe after that, return to this subject.

I’d say it’s a bad thing because it’s the wrong threat model as a default.

More home users are in scenarios like “I spilled a can of Diet Sprite into my laptop, can someone yank the SSD and recover my cat pictures” than “Someone stole my laptop and has physical access to state secrets that Hegseth has yet to blurt on Twitch chat”. Encryption makes the first scenario a lot harder to easily recover from, and people with explicit high security needs should opt into it or have organization-managed configs.

The Global Foundries split was probably a way to get AMD out of the hyper-capital-intensive fab business. And without a tier-1 customer, Global had less reason to pursue smaller nodes.

Intel has that national-champion thing to keep it afloat. I can imagine there are defence contracts that will never go to a “TSMC Arizona Division” and they’ll pay whatever it takes to keep that going.

Once an egg sac hatched at our communal postbox and it was magical, all these tiny yellow spot sprite things bumbling around and setting off. Put a good narrator on and people would have watched for hours.

I think it’s more the £50 notes. Much like using a USD100 note in the States, it’s a bit big for most daily purchases.

I ended up dumping most of mine on a couple expensive souvenirs in shops expensive enough that they’d deal with it or breaking them in banks.

It’s easier just to price in the fee than having to shut down or retool a project.

The problem with attribution is the difficulty of 1000% accurate compliance.

If you grab 100 lines of code from a repository, or five paragraphs from a story, there’s probably a claim there. If you grab a single word, there’s probably not. But in the middle, there’s a paralysis of uncertainty-- is n lines similar enough to create liability? Can you remember where you saw what reliably? You end up with a bias towards “over-attribution” and it becomes difficult to pare it back. Does everything need a full Git-style commit history? Are we forever stuck keeping a credit on a project because it’s difficult to prove you’ve fully scrubbed their contributions?

Focus on how we pay artists (ideally lush grants) and forget about credit. Maybe establish a culture where it’s voluntary and acceptable-- that people feel that they’re allowed to cite their raw materials, and reuse doesn’t make the work lesser-- but don’t try to use the courts to force people to try to remember and track where they saw something when they just want to create, or it creates a hostile environment.

Hey, the broken clock’s right!

IP law always had a built-in scale pronlem. Without a registration-required copyright model, and probably some sort of mandatory licensing rate system, the sheer logistics of finding and arranging rights made a lot of business models inpractical. (For example, why aren’t modern bookstores just print-on-demand kiosks, or streaming services have All The Content? In large part because it would cost thousands to track down owners and negotiate terms for $1.87 in royalties multiplied by every item in the catalog.)

This was ignorable for a long time, or even a commercial advantage for firms with access to large, pre-negotiated catalogs. The AI boom created a surprise market of non-incumbents who need to get access to a lot of IP in a streamlined manner.

If we open the door for bulk IP clearance to grant the AI bubble a stro ger legal footing, it can also allow other, potentially more interesting business ideas to slip through.

Air-conditioned dhed with high volume air cleaning for toxic actibities like soldering, plastic models, spray painiting, 3-D printing…

And a 3-d printer with a cross section of a metre on a side. I am sick of having to cut up designs, I want to print an entire extended-ATX case in a single run.

Keep an eye out at thrift shops-- I’ve seen huge tranches of Star Trek novels.

Who are the skeletons fighting? Do we need to do well intentioned symbolic support gestures on social media?

Operation Bernhard is a literal example. The Nazis tried to flood thr UK with counterfeit notes to undermine their economy.

I could see him loving the idea of expansion to manufacture a legacy. Jefferson may have been a philosopher or a slave-romancer but that’s college academic stuff: every middle school student learns he bought Louisiana. McKinley got us as close to an on-paper empire as we got, and they put him on the $500 note for it.

Soft power will never fill the same goal. Being the cultural or moral lighthouse for the West is inherently different from actually raising a flag over their capitals.

It must also be weird for the sycophants who he just nominated to staff it too.

The equivalent of “Daddy got you a pink convertible and you get three minutes to drive it before the repo guy comes”

Oil burning was common in some regions. The Southern Pacific had a lot of oil-fired engines. Their famous “cab-forward” steam engines could only make sense as oil burners without fundamental redesign.

Part of it might be that the last holdouts for steam, who made the most technically advanced engines, were predominantly coal-carriers. They didn’t have the oil infrastructure, and didn’t want to burn relations eith their customers.

But what data would it be?

Part of the “gobble all the data” perspective is that you need a broad corpus to be meaningfully useful. Not many people are going to give a $892 billion market cap when your model is a genius about a handful of narrow subjects that you could get deep volunteer support on.

OTOH maybe there’s probably a sane business in narrow siloed (cheap and efficient and more bounded expectations) AI products: the reinvention of the “expert system” with clear guardrails, the image generator that only does seaside background landscapes but can’t generate a cat to save its life, the LLM that’s a prettified version of a knowledgebase search and NOTHING MORE

We’ve seen decentralized education and it tends to have problems with resourcing and economies of scale, and content policies get easily hijacked by loud people with personal vendettas.

That’s what baffles me with the DOGE fracas. How long will solidarity hold when there are some very clear winners and losers within their own class?

There are a lot of billionaires who have fat revenue streams coming out of the federal budget, and I don’t think they’re all eager to trigger some sort of Mad Max/Medieval social collapse just so they can be the Archduke of San Jose after America implodes. I doubt they all bought the Network State story.

A fair number of them, expecting to live for more than 10 years and wanting to remain rich, probably invested aggressively into “skate where the puck is going” businesses that are now being slaughtered in the name of doubling down on fossil fuels and uncompetitive domestic manufacturers. Will Elon eat their losses? Of course, he’s committing financial seppuku too.