but what that money was used to get in terms of favours. It undermines the entire system.

Absolutely. Tigers and Flies wasn’t just about restoring public trust, it was started soon after the neutralization of dozens of CIA sources, who had been uncovered with the help of Iran’s own counter-espionage. Before the campaign, corruption allowed for the CIA to effectively pay-to-win in the 90s/00s - they could simply bribe officials to promote assets into more powerful positions.

Subtitle: S◎RRY, we didn’t know it was intelligent.

I wouldn’t be surprised either if it’s guerilla marketing for the military and a captive audience for AI.

Can we upgrade you to a McNuke, sir?

If there’s no specific use-case (this is a general introduction, not Intro to Operating System Design) and this isn’t academic Computer Science teaching, then certainly a scripting language.

Easy to learn, easy to use, and much more applicable for simple automation that benefits the people learning.

C is dangerous if someone doesn’t take care. Java is verbose and personally I didn’t enjoy it one bit. You said this is a non-technical crowd and you expect them to follow at home.

The tool has garnered widespread attention online from both the public and military personnel. A military source with access to the platform, who spoke to Straight Arrow News on the condition of anonymity, said that personnel have already begun testing the chatbot’s boundaries.

Courtesy of stormfront/r/AirForce:

SAN’s source issued a similar prompt [to that post] to the chatbot in an effort to verify the post’s claims. The source said they were given a response that likewise described the actions as illegal.

All you actually have to do is join their network >_

I’m aware that this comment is a copy of a copy, but there’s a nitpick:

That is a direct quote from Stalin which you can easily find.

That order (which probably existed) is not in the Soviet archives. Historians mention there were other supporting orders from commanders in the field clarifying this policy, and there were many cases of such punishment, so again, I believe the order existed, but it’s definitely not a direct quote from Stalin which one can easily find, unless one counts unreliable reddit and blog posts.

The Soviet Calendar has similarities to the technocracy movement (not socialism but has some lines of similarity) functional calendar proposal: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technocracy_movement#Calendar

In lecture form: skip to 7:32 Better quality (skip to 43:23)

only a few hundred

I do not think it will. If it does happen it will be unpredictable and triggered by an unrelated factor.

This sounds overly pessimistic to me, because unpredictable major events seem to be happening regularly, albeit not on a schedule. Look at COVID-19 for a huge example in all our lifetimes, and look at how much it was compounded in places like the US.

I agree with everything else, especially the last sentence. Building the Party and other summaries of the Russian Revolutions era show just how important and unintuitive or surprising opportunities can be. Father Gapon in the Russian Empire is a great example, the kind of person we collectively would likely (and for good reason) dismiss as a police collaborator/asset and a pro-Tsarist. But their milquetoast protest sparked the 1905 revolution, which in turn is generally considered a major factor in the 1917 revolutions.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JztU8cRk7JE

• The most meaningful reforms, like large-scale climate action, won’t happen until citizens present a credible threat to the owning class’s dominance, making reform the appealing compromise.
• The owning class, at least a large section of it, along with loyal reactionaries will wage violent open war before ceding power leftward. They have the option to decide if a peaceful road forward exists, and historically, then tend to mass murder citizens instead.

What’s your most cynical opinion about the world?

The Earth will, eventually, long after we’re all gone, be incinerated by the sun. If life co-exists elsewhere in the universe, I suspect it will be too distant to have much impact on us nor them. So I believe that humanity will inevitably have no meaningful legacy in the long term. And I also believe there is no objective meaning to existence, it’s just a neat little quirk of chaos.

That doesn’t imply I think nothing is meaningful, it doesn’t take long to notice I care deeply about people and what we do. But, ultimately, meaning is temporary and subjective. (I haven’t explored much of formal philosophy but I’ve heard my perspective aligns with absurdism or existentialism)

edit: I didn’t realize this isn’t actually cynicism (a prudent distrust), but more nihlism (a distrust upon belief in meaning)

oof!

maserati SUV, $200k unsecured bond, and rutgers law all says “rich family” to me

That and more.

The premeditated scarification design includes part of the head and ear, not things which are easy to hide, and quite frankly the operational discipline of this hoax is embarrassing, in contrast to the sheer dedication and the extent of the hoax itself. Plus the Daily Beast article mentions they’d subscribed to body modification and scarification communities, so I agree with @Blakey and others that this seems like a rationale (I use that term very loosely) to express an underlying harm kink.

The Daily Beast article on the incident says “A search of Greene’s phone revealed her Reddit profile that included “followed communities” for “bodymods” and “scarification.””. Speculation here, but following the communities instead of just looking up places to get them done suggests that they’re actually interested in those scenes. My money is on underlying kink.

Like some already said, how long ago is “a few years ago”? Because last year my installation had an annoying issue which is now fixed. And maybe five years back, some (newer or rarer) hardware/devices needed a fix through the terminal, but now work perfectly by default.

I haven’t tried Bazzite, but I’ve heard good things about it and what I know about it so far sounds good. Although @jlow mentioned some alternatives which I wonder if they’re even more suitable since you didn’t mention gaming. Out of habit, I still recommend Mint to former Windows users. But I haven’t needed to input a password for web, graphics tools or office apps, only have to type a password when updating, installing new apps or doing special terminal stuff (which I do by choice!)

On one hand, Mint’s default experience (Cinnamon desktop environment) generally resembles Windows which can make the switch smoother. On the other hand, some other ones fix a lot of defaults Windows chose wrong. Even little things, like moving the taskbar to the top (closer to other options) or to the side (takes up less space), so even if you pick a smaller leap to start with, it’s good to casually look around once you’re comfortable.