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.

Fre:ac seems to run in a wine package.

I wonder what impact a truly high end CPU being open would have on the fab industry.

Right now, there’s a lot of manufacturing secret sauce; if you took an Intel design, it would require significant rework to perform well on Samsung or TSMC process.

Fab owners would have a vested competitive interest to customize the design to perform better on their tooling.

Conversely, buyers might develop a renewed interest in second-sourcing-- if you can take your chip to any fab, you have more control over your supply chain.

The Atari XL seriea computers cut a nice space between retro and futuristic.

They’re much sleeker looking than their 400/800 predecessors, as well as the Apple II and the breadbin VIC 20/64/C16. Only the 64C and Plus/4 really look similarly minaturized and not-in-need-of-a-big-wristrest-for-comfortable-typing.

The use of metal and smoked plastic trim gives it a premium appearance. The 1200XL even hides the cartridge slot on the side to avoid anyone nistaking it for a mere console…

It feels like there’s going to be a fire sale on American talent.

Someone should be rising to the moment- the counyry that offers an easy “show your voided American visa/passport and skip through the emigration process” could poach effectively.

I’ve seen a lot of cheap little “appliance” machines-- fanless devices meant to be network routers, NAS devices, signage controllers advertised as running on like 4th and 5th generation laptop CPUs.

Our new defacto president is the avatar of bubble economics.

Even the other oligarchs, thry made something at dramatic scale to justify their wealth. Microsoft did sell a lot of software. Facebook got 176 billion people on board to blast adverts at. They’re trillion dollar firms that do correspondingly large run rates.

Tesla is still a minor player in its space, and SpaceX is inherently a narrow business. Even PayPal, where the horrors all came from, isn’t a major value add, it’s a thin mask atop the clunkiness of American payment rails that should have been replaced by something like FedNow by 2003.

But he’s taken these tiny fundamentals and convinced Wall Street to puff more air into them than a fresh bag of Lay’s.

As someone who has to deal with PCI compliance issues, there’s plenty of noob mistakes, out-of-date thinking and outright “let’s log this data for debugging purposes even though if any regulator found out they’d nuke us from orbit.”

There are valid questions, many of which revolve around how and why it’s used.

Some systems have brain damaged approaches to diagnostics/logging, license enforcement, or remote service/update systems that create security holes but are not intentionally malicious.

Security is hard and we should remember Hanlon’s Razor.

I never seem to get appropriately coded romance scams.

I guess the RFI from my computer is jamming the gaydar.

Are you using a shell replacement for the XP style titlebars and taskbar?

Calmira was pretty impressive for a taskbar-based shell, but I don’t recall doing a titlebar swap.

I tried custom laser engraving caps, some of my favourites:

‘Attack 0’ and ‘Attack 1’, actual key legends on some '80s Casio home computer

‘Run Stop’ from Commodre machines

The “diagonal half full box” inverse video key from Atari XL/XE keyboards.

I suspect the various Jolly Roger designs from either fictional or real pirates would work well. Or various “spell type” or “faction” logos from games.

I think the last game I bought for my 386 was Nomad. ISTR having to make space since it required like 9Mb of the 40Mb drive.

30-polygon-per-ship level 3-D space RPG with limited combat sequences. I think I played it wrong because I seemed to walk largely linearly through the story and defeat the Big Bad without seeing more than 1/10 of the galaxy

I read about this. They make the printer WITH a perfectly good USB port and then stick a “no USB” label over it and attempt to force you to use their wireless setup.

https://post.lurk.org/@yaxu/110833261398955782 for more.