riskable

I'm an atheist but if there were a god that wanted to send a clear message about the consequences of picking the most antichrist-like leader to run your country it would be this:

You vote antichrist, you get a plague.

It already happened once 🤷

And by "antichrist" I don't mean the literal antichrist from the Bible. I mean, the person that's most unlike Christ:

• Hates immigrants and the poor.
• Super racist (let's just say he would never wash anyone's feet if they weren't Caucasian).
• Hoards wealth.
• Lies constantly.
• Cheated on all his wives. Has children from three!
• Intentionally spreads plague (e.g. COVID-19 spread first in Democratic strongholds/cities so he decided that was good for his chances at reelection and told people they didn't need to wear masks or get vaccinated).
• Extremely vain. I don't know if it's possible to be more vain than Trump.

It's actually him replaying how his last meeting with Putin went.

He was on his knees at the time though.

She is continuing to work despite the diagnosis, and will be joining the White House's new advisory council on AI, the Presidential Council of Advisors on Science and Technology.

Of all the fucking things. Forget all the blatant corruption and illegal behavior of this administration for a moment. This is why Republican administrations are always a bad idea: They put non-experts in roles that require experts!

I'm 48 and every single Republican president in my lifetime has pulled shit like this. From John Tower (first Bush) to the severe incompetency of the George W. Bush administration (e.g. "Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job.") to the catastrophic incompetency and corruption of both Trump administrations.

Democratic administrations aren't perfect, but they at least try to appoint actually qualified individuals into any given position. For Republicans, the only qualification necessary seems to be loyalty and/or making friends with the right people (and who knows what back room/hidden dealings).

Supposedly tanks are meant to be portable bunkers with a swivel cannon instead of embrasures. However, they cannot move forward and hold ground without air superiority. They need support and a supply line (usually a big, long one) to stay fueled and protected from drones, rockets, etc.

In the Russia/Ukraine war, neither side is able to maintain air superiority which is why a $500 drone can take out a $10 million tank.

I'm sure the military brass in Russia knows that they're using tanks poorly but those above them are idiots that demand specific regions be taken/taken back for political reasons (have to keep the dictator happy and as in the dark as possible!). Hence why we see regular footage of Ukraine troops blowing up lone, unsupported tanks with drones.

That tank shouldn't be all alone like that.

A tank alone is a deathtrap.

It might even be that troops are given orders to move from position A to position B and they think it's safest to take a tank. Since the Russian side is absolutely full of barely-trained, poorly-educated folks who were forcibly drafted out of their incredible corrupt, economic hell hole, lone tanks suffering this kind of defeat makes a lot of sense.

They should've just sucked it up and moved on foot. In fact, I'm surprised that motorbikes aren't everywhere in that war. They can carry troops quickly across the exact type of terrain we see in videos and can be easily modified to work on snow and ice. More powerful versions can even be hooked up to trailers to move equipment across rough terrain.

My only guess as to why they're not being used is that the Russians don't want to be giving Ukraine lots of free motorbikes (because unlike tanks, the bike is usually fine after "a kill")

To be fair, the CIA is the one organization in the US government that can hire literally anyone. They have to pay "bad guys" in sketchy ways all the time in order to gain intelligence, cause trouble for enemies, and generally just move around the world (so they can be anywhere).

They are also experts of compartmentalization: They're famous for hiring people that are literally insane but are still capable of performing important work. They just keep said people isolated and only given what they need to do their job.

Everyone knows the term, "handler" but what they probably don't realize is that a lot of handlers are just people working in CIA offices, making sure dangerous/crazy people stay on task (or just come to work and go home on time!).

They should just stack them on top of each other like in Ready Player One. No need to demolish them, that's a waste!

The employees that work for these places should unionize.

"We brought in the union busters, but they went on strike." Would be just 👌

Careful: Random cats make love when they find cozy, secret places. This could be an ominous sign of things to come.

The article completely misses the problem that Mythos brought into the light: Business can't patch fast enough.

Example: Let's say you're running Kubuntu on your desktop and Mythos uncovers 1000 vulnerabilities in various open source packages. The maintainers of said packages will have a really busy few days putting together patches/fixes and then it'll be a few more days while Canonical packages up the new versions and updates the repos. Then everyone running Ubuntu (or derivatives) will get a really big package update and then the world will be mostly done with something like a "Mythos patch rush."

Now consider the same situation at a business where everyone's running Windows desktops. There's no central package manager and pushing out updated software is always an involved process. Most businesses have a mandatory one-week or even one-month waiting period before they apply any Windows updates because Microsoft has screwed them up so horribly so many times they can't be trusted.

Even if a business is using a 3rd party software management/deployment tool, they're all mostly manual things. That is, someone has to put that updated package into the system and mark it for immediate deployment/push. If there's 1000 packages that need to be updated, that's going to completely overwhelm most IT departments for quite some time.

...but this is just scratching the surface of the patching problem in the world of business! Most businesses have legacy software that they rely on that needs to be tested against the newer stuff that gets updated. This means they can't deploy any updates until that testing is done.

Sometimes that testing takes months. Sometimes it can take over a year! And then there's the nightmare scenario that's more common than you'd think: Vendors that won't let you update your shit until they have completed their testing.

Example: We have a vendor product at my employer that takes about six months to complete testing of any new version because it requires coordinating with over 100 teams (because the product interacts with their stuff). A new version can only be deployed after all those people sign off on it (saying that they tested their product against the new version and it worked as it should).

Businesses have pretty much learned how to deal with Windows updates by now, with all sorts of protections and back-out plans in place. Yet with all of that it still goes horribly wrong all the fucking time! Now imagine thousands of random software installed across your enterprise all needs the same treatment. Like... NOW.

They don't have enough IT people. Their IT architecture was never meant to handle this scenario!

TL;DR: Just use Linux and enable automatic updates! Make sure all your shit gets updated via the package manager too!

7.7 square mile nation that's 80% uninhabitable due to mining phosphates with approximately 10,000 people in the middle of nowhere finally makes the news again after decades of nothing happening.

There is a story people tell about AI regulation, and it goes like this: the technology is moving too fast, governments can't keep up, regulators are overwhelmed, and by the time anyone writes a law the thing they're trying to regulate has already evolved into something else entirely.

No. That's not the story people are telling about AI regulation. It goes like this:

If we regulate AI, that will give an advantage to AI companies in other countries. They will surpass our AI capabilities and leave us in the technological dust.

There's a related story:

If we regulate AI, we're likely to create more problems because Boomers don't understand technology.

For those wondering how TF a data center that is not even online yet could be using so much water:

• Soil compaction
• Dust suppression

That's it. For the scale of that project, that's all it would take to use 30 million gallons.

When they're done, they also need to flush miles of pipes which could also use a few million gallons but I don't think they're at that phase yet.

This amount of water would be used no matter what buildings they were constructing in that amount of space. Meaning: This article is pretty misleading clickbait (because a lot of people hate data centers lately, the headline will generate clicks).

The alternative is to have loads of data centers instead of one big one. That's more expensive, so they build a single big one.

If you don't like data centers, it makes sense to build a few really, really big ones like this rather than lots of smaller ones. Because data centers are necessary and important aspects of modern living. They're not going to just go away. There's nothing that could replace them.