monotremata

A minor grammar point: in this context, the word is actually "disbursing," from the same root as "bursar," a job title you may have encountered in school administrations. "Disbursing" means "paying out from a fund." "Dispersing" means "scattering" or "causing to dissipate." So the old system was disbursing funds. The new system will be dispersing funds.

Citizens United would be a decent candidate. Once it was established that donations were protected political speech, it effectively legalized bribery, and made oligarchy essentially inevitable. Most of the missteps since then have been motivated by folks trying to simultaneously play to populist talking points but also placate billionaire donors. The left needed an actual positive message, like the kind Bernie Sanders was pushing, that would energize folks and unite the overeducated with the working class, but that was never going to be acceptable to the donor class, and so candidates like him always had to be shoved aside for someone who would clearly cater to corporate needs. And someone who would clearly cater to corporate needs was always going to be a really tough sell and not really a solution to the needs of the moment.

That doesn't really account for the rise of the tech bro fascist accelerationists like Mencius Moldbug and the Dark Enlightenment, which is a big part of the current moment and accounts for how the far right was able to hoodwink some billionaires into voting for a social collapse that seems very likely to hurt them also. But Citizens United still seems like a fair candidate for a point at which some of the last paths away from this outcome were foreclosed.

My guess is that the reason they bothered with this, rather than leaving it with the courts, is that this version would allow Trump to abruptly reverse the things that were previously decided under Chevron deference.

Supposedly they're unblocked again, but there's been no explanation from Xitter about the issue. Definitely seems suspicious that this happened while DOGE is having trouble with whistleblowers using Signal, though.

https://gizmodo.com/x-briefly-blocked-then-unblocked-signal-links-as-federal-workers-seek-security-2000564966

I think the issue is with it being just a single wall. The slicer tends to have some trouble with that.

My first thought was just to model the return paths as well, making it a loop, print that in vase mode, then just cut away the unwanted parts. My second thought was to wonder whether there would be a way to use post-processing to set the extrusion to zero for those particular paths, maybe using the multicolor features, and thereby avoid printing the extra area.

https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/digital_data.png

Yeah, agreed.

I think you're wildly underestimating the influence of those sites. And even beyond those sites, think about how many sites can only exist because of payments from ads served by those same operators. It's true they don't control the whole Internet, but they sure have a ton of power.

I also don't think the level of control Trump will have over PBS is worse than the influence he'll exert over mainstream media sites through the threat of legal harassment alongside his indirect control of the discourse on Twitter.

I guess mostly I remember the Internet in the days before it got so corporate, when it was wild and wooly, and all the sites were bizarre little labors of love created purely because someone just really wanted to post information about their Special Interest. (E.g., I had an old Tripod site that was just a detailed explanation of the shape of a module for a five intersecting tetrahedra origami model, complete with folding diagrams and descriptions of the approximations I'd used to simplify it and how the lengths related to each other. Then my hard drive crashed and I went to grab those files back from my site and discovered they'd deleted the whole thing because I hadn't updated the site, which had never occurred to me because, well, it was just this info, it didn't need updating. Those were the early days of corporatization.)

So when I picture a public-subsidized Internet, that's pretty much what I think of. People being people, sharing information out of weird enthusiasm. I think it would work in practice because we've had that kind of thing before. Lemmy is honestly kind of a similar thing right now; it's just that some kind, generous souls are paying for the servers, which is likely going to be hard to sustain eventually.

I dunno. It's dark times for sure.

Musk, Zuckerberg, Bezos, and Pichai were all sitting behind him at his inauguration.

I think it's reasonably likely. There was a research paper about how to do basically that a couple years ago. If you need a basic LLM trained on a specialized form of input and output, getting the expensive existing LLMs to generate that text for you is pretty efficient/inexpensive, so it's a reasonable way to get a baseline model. Then you can add stuff like chain of reasoning and mixture of experts to improve the performance back up to where you need it. It's not going to be a way to push the state of the art forward, but it's sure a cheap way to catch up to models that have done that pushing.

I do love games, but most of what I do at my computer is maker projects. CAD, 3d printing, electronics design, coding. Lately I've been building a puzzle box for my niece's birthday.

Interestingly, I did upgrade my GPU a year and a half or so ago (to a used 3070, I'm not made of money) and since then the main thing I've used that GPU for is actually AI experiments rather than games. E.g. for the puzzle box, I got Stable Diffusion to generate images for a puzzle for me. It's four images, and when you combine them in the right way they reveal a fifth image. I don't think I could have done the same puzzle without AI.

I do still play games, though. I'm just kind of off the big budget stuff these days.

I wouldn't really say Republicans deliver what they say they'll deliver. A week before election Trump was saying he'd have grocery prices lower on day one, and then as soon as he was elected he suddenly became aware that was complicated and the wouldn't be anything he could do about it. Part of his campaign the first time around, too, was that he would provide a brilliant replacement for Obamacare, but after four years he'd done absolutely nothing on that front, and four years after that he still insisted he was going to do that, but admitted that he only had "concepts of a plan."

They carry out a lot of the culture war aspects of their promises. And they carry out the promises they make to their billionaire megadonors. Everything else they hope gets forgotten about.