China needs us economically as much as we need them for manufacturing. Sure, we’re trying to be more independent and make more domestically, and they are trying to be more independent economically through BRICS. Neither country is doing a very good job of attaining their goals of independence, but to keep up appearances both countries like to simultaneously pretend there’s not a relationship and also that they are the top in the relationship.

The reality is both countries have some wealthy “oligarchs” who exploit workers and governments that mostly only work to benefit themselves and their oligarch friends. China will take out an oligarch here and there when they decide they’re getting too powerful, and Americans get to elect some of our leaders, other than that we’re not very different. Deep down both governments understand it would be political suicide to antagonize the other to the point meaningfully harming them. At least both current governments that is, Trump is probably too dumb to realize we need each other, so that’s a potential wild card, but North Korea is almost certainly a bigger threat to both the US and China than we will to each other for decades.

I still use DDG as my “daily driver” (I know there are better options for privacy and avoiding big tech, but I haven’t yet found anything independent that is good enough for me to switch to full time yet). I bookmarked Stract a while back, and it proved useful a few months back when Microsoft had an outage that took down Bing and by extension, Duck Duck Go. I do like Stract, their index seems to be enough larger than MoJeek (another independent search with their own index) that it gives me better results.

Stract might not be as open as I’d like, but it’s nice to have as an option, and I’m never going to complain about having more search providers with independent indexes.

And then once your person wins, shout at them every day about the things that are important to you. Pester and annoy them so much that they are both motivated to do what you want just to get you to leave them alone, and also so they have support they can point to to convince their colleagues to join the cause. We’d be in a very different place if we had demanded getting rid of the Electoral College even 10 years ago, and a vastly different place if we had gotten that changed 25 years ago.

I know it’s a lot of work to stay loud about political issues all the time, but if you don’t use your voice, someone will take your silence as contentment and nothing will change.

As long as they don’t remove my ability to still have a separate search field beside the address bar, I’ll still be happy. I know it has probably been a decade since Chrome merged the search and address bars (and Firefox followed), but IMO it makes the experience of both searching and typing addresses worse, in exchange for a at best mildly cleaner UI.

It’s for the other wealthy assholes who have never worked at McDonalds (or any other working-class job) and are so out of touch they think this is good outreach to the poors, showing Trump as a relatable everyman. They have no awareness of how much he just looked like a rich asshole who has never done any real work in his life, showing up to work an average job for a couple hours during the slow part of the day and walking away with a warped view of what it’s like to be working class.

As someone who grew up in Christian-Nationalist churches and circles, just dress like a Jehovah’s Witness or like a young Ben Shapiro. Even if someone does call to complain, they will describe 70% of the people there and they’ll probably address it as a gentle reminder to all the canvassers in a meeting rather than one on one. At which point someone more right-wing will stand up for everything because they actually believe every one of the policies are good things, and everyone will think they were the problem, not you.

Yeah, it’s like they think buying solar panels from overseas is the same as importing oil from overseas. When China is selling real “energy independence” from for less than you could make it yourself.

I’ve been using Syncthing-Fork (on F-Droid) for the extra features it has. I wonder if that developer will be able to continue.

While I’m not the person you replied to and don’t know what their argument would be, I’ll take a shot at giving my own answer. In many cases when people post examples of AI giving unhelpful or bad information, there’s often someone who runs off to their favorite LLM to see if it gives a better result, and it usually does, so it gets treated like user error for using the wrong LLM or not wording the prompt properly. When in other examples that person’s favorite LLM which gave the correct answer this time, is the bad example hallucinating or mixing unrelated concepts, and other people are in the comments promoting other LLMs that gave them a good reply this time. None of the LLMs are actually trustworthy consistently enough to be trusted alone, and you won’t really know what answer is trustworthy unless you ask several LLMs and then go research the topic on your own anyway to figure out which answer is the most correct. It’s a valid point that ChatGPT got the answer more right than Gemini this time, but it’s somewhat useless to know that because other times ChatGPT is the one hallucinating wildly, and Gemini has the right answer, but since they’ve all been wrong before who do you trust.

LLMs are like asking an arrogant person who thinks they know everything, who rather than admitting what they don’t know, will pull an answer out of their butt, and while it might be a logical answer, it isn’t based in reality, and may still be wildly wrong. If you already mostly know the answer, maybe asking the arrogant person works, because you already know enough to know if they are speaking from their actual knowledge or making up an answer, but if you don’t already have knowledge on a topic, you won’t know whether the arrogant person is giving useful information or not.

He’ll get two miles of underground sidewalks put in during four of those two years.

I kinda want a Grandpa Joe movie starring David Spade. There’s a bit of a physical resemblance these days, and there’s so much weird stuff going on with Grandpa Joe in the movie that you could have a pretty full movie without Charlie, Wonka, or the chocolate factory.

I’ve started to come around on the 25k down payment assistance. It definitely has it’s problems, and there will absolutely be those who gouge because of it. But because it’s specifically down-payment assistance it will still help first time buyers get mortgages on houses they can afford the regular payments on, but don’t have the extra to set aside for a 10% down payment because rent is taking everything they could be setting aside for a down payment. And it’s limited to first time home buyers, with 2 years of on-time rent payments, and says “up to” 25k. Wouldn’t surprise me if it ends up being limited to 10% of the purchase price (which gets you more favorable loan terms).

That’s part of it. Unions also made a difference for a while, until the propaganda machine convinced a bunch of people that Unions were bad. When in reality, Unions are a benefit to everyone, they protect workers from bad bosses, and historically they also protected bosses from getting the shit beat out of them by their employees.

I have had someone tell me that they’d rather live in an economic system “like we have in America” where people have a chance at rags to riches, than a system “like Germany, where the social safety net means the average person doesn’t have a chance at making it big.”

If anyone ever tells you wealthy people are intelligent, don’t believe them.

A high-coke rail off a hand rail on high-speed rail.

Tesla announced they can do this before they even announced the price of the cybertruck. As part of the buyer agreement, there is a stipulation that the original buyer can’t sell the cybertruck until one year after getting it, and that breaking the agreement could result in the vehicle being remotely deactivated.

Honestly, that’s probably what happened here, it was probably less that Elon personally deactivated it, but that it was sold to an intermediary, who then broke the Tesla agreement by “selling” it within the first year, getting it remotely disabled. Alternatively it may have just been a stolen cybertruck, which probably get it deactivated as well.

This is correct, and along side the Rust development, they also started work on a web renderer, in Rust, called Servo that at one point was considered as a possible future replacement for the Gecko engine. Around the time Rust transitioned to the Rust foundation, Servo was also pretty much abandoned by Mozilla, moved to the Linux Foundation in 2020 and then Linux Foundation Europe in 2023 where it is finally getting some steady development again. There is also some recent progress on building a browser based on Servo, although it will probably be some time before it’s ready for daily use.

Jefferson was the one who rewrote it without the magic and miracles. Franklin proposed his own rewrite, but only did a chapter of Job as an proof of concept and said he didn’t have the “necessary abilities” to do it himself.

Not to be pedantic, but wouldn’t making an endorsement make them no longer “Uncommitted”? Yes, Harris could and should be better on the genocide happening in Gaza, but “Uncommitted voters still uncommitted after not meeting with candidate” also isn’t much of a story.

If the Democratic party gets to be too large of a tent, and the Republican party shrinks, eventually the Democratic party will fracture too, and we might get a real progressive party out of it.