I dunno. I could see campaigns being willing to pay a fair bit for a list of email addresses of people who care about a specific topic.

I think Colbert is available.

Talkie? Is that you?

“I mean, the whole purpose of my existence is to serve you with hot, buttered, scrummy toast. If you don’t want any, then my existence is meaningless. I toast, therefore I am.”

I have, and it’s pretty fucking frustrating. We managed to get Janelle Bynum elected to replace Lori Chavez-DeRemer. DeRemer was awful–ran claiming to be a centrist, then backed every move the Trump administration made. I voted against her when she first ran, but she managed to win, because my district is only partly in the city, and the rest is rural conservatives, so it’s decided by a handful of swing voters. Fortunately, she didn’t last; two years later, she was replaced with Janelle Bynum, who ran as a centrist democrat and has pushed towards the right ever since being elected. She doesn’t always support the administration, but she sure refused to condemn their treatment of Ilhan Omar, and she signed a big pledge talking about how she’s a capitalist and devoted to fighting the scourge of socialism. She’s extremely mediocre. I voted against her in the primary, but in the general, I held my nose and voted for her again, because the alternative is another pro-Trump idiot.

So yeah. I’m not exactly moaning in ecstasy over here. But I definitely was glad the republican lost. DeRemer went on to work as Trump’s Secretary of Labor, until she was thrown out for misconduct. Now she works for a think tank that pushes data centers. So it was good to get her out the door. It’s just frustrating that we get such shitty choices.

My friend has a saying about this. He says, “Even when you give up, don’t give up.”

This is a pretty good guess. Trump seems to really want to use nukes, just in general. I’m not sure he even cares why.

The product is a bag of Jack Links / Doritos Nacho Cheese Flavored Beef Jerky. Highly processed beef, highly processed cheese, doubly highly branded. It just feels like late stage capitalism. Both of these brands already make low-nutritional-value foods with addictive, hyperpalatable attributes, and here they’re trying to hybridize into some kind of abomination.

People just feel like the world is off its axis, you know?

10base2, or ThinNet, were the English names of that kind of networking. We had a mix of that and 10baseT (rj45) when I was first in college. 10baseT was significantly better, in that fewer machines had to physical share the same bus wires.

I’m not sure what video you’re referring to, though.

As far as I know, this hasn’t been really confirmed with a smoking gun, as it were. There was an independent journalist named Adam Cochran who claimed this on X: https://x.com/adamscochran/status/2105090249445769519 . And it’s true that .si is the country domain for Slovenia, where Melania comes from, and where Barron also has dual citizenship. And it does look like there were several .si domains were purchased shortly before Trump’s announcement and then sold for huge sums, like “build.si.” But I don’t think it’s actually documented that there’s a direct connection to the Trump family in this, and that’s probably why mainstream news sources aren’t covering it at this point. Someone knew about this ahead of time and made money off it, and given this administration’s history, it would be kinda foolish to just trust that the Trumps aren’t among them. But it’s a big actual allegation to make without direct proof.

Ah, sorry. Sometimes I can’t tell because of the threading here.

That’s exactly the distinction I was making. The person I was replying to said “Imagine believing that they need “AI” to record us.” I was clarifying that this isn’t the AI we hear so much about that requires huge datacenters; it’s the kind of simple, embedded, “edge” AI that you can do with whatever microcontroller you have lying around.

These TVs don’t incorporate enough power to do any kind of serious LLM. The “AI” they’re referring to here is likely an embedded speech-to-text engine. And that probably is pretty necessary for this–it would take too much data to send actual recordings to Samsung, but text transcripts are tiny and easier to search and index. It’s easy to forget, but reliable speech-to-text has been around less than 20 years, and the tiny ones that can run on embedded chips are even newer.

And they knew that only a despot would be willing to actually put political opponents in jail, so they voted for one. But then he turned out to be some kind of despot!

Wasn’t that The Diamond Age?

Edit: Nope, I just can’t remember for shit anymore.