Good points all around. Thanks for the civil contribution!

Are the directors also isolated from the outside world, strictly sworn to secrecy, with only a subset of members of the board eligible for election by a two-thirds supermajority, unless the last CEO changed the voting rules again?

It absolutely is an election, I wasn’t disagreeing with that. It’s a particularly ritualistic one, which also isn’t a discredit, just an observation about the singular nature of it.

But if you want to defend the legitimacy of the papal elections, I suggest finding a less openly corrupt analogue than corporate leadership. At least the pope has to know about the faith he’s supposed to lead; CEOs only need to know how to manipulate markets to make numbers go up and pretend they can go up infinitely.

Way to reverse the blame on the victims again.

Advice to mitigate issues isn’t the same as putting blame. I think you’re confusing pragmatism for moral opposition. Cops being bastards isn’t their victims’ fault, but that observation isn’t worth jack shit if they continue to be bastards.

Protesters can’t control violent individuals. That’s why you deploy the police in a normal world.

But you seem to mean the protesters need to do the police’s job otherwise police will start crushing protests.

When the police send provocateurs to help them crush protests, you can hardly rely on the police to also control the provocateurs. Of course nobody should have to do the cops’ job, and not everybody can realistically stop someone from starting shit, but on a practical level, isn’t it strictly better if somebody does something?

This would not be possible if the infiltrated policemen were not covered by both their hierarchy (actually they were most likely ordered to start a battle) and the anti-riot police.

They won’t suffer consequences, of course, but that’s not my point. We both agree that it’s the fault of the system for being fucked up.

On the other hand, if they were prevented from doing their job (such as other protesters holding them back from trying to attack), what are the police gonna do? Arrest people for stopping violence? I’m sure that’s a great look.

Pretend of being attacked is not to ease the decent policemen, it’s to keep pretending in medias and court.

It can be both, but either way, isn’t it strictly better to prevent them from being attacked and undermining that pretense? Because that’s what I’m on about: what can be done?

France police is deeply deeply rotted, and might well be beyond salvation.

If you have a suggestion for how to deal with this problem, I’m all ears; that’s what these discussion spaces are great for.

I just don’t think “Shit’s fucked, but it’s not my fault” is a productive mindset. It’s not wrong, just not very useful for unfucking things.

We could debate how fair that election is, but that’s a lost cause with churches anyway. It also certainly isn’t an open, democratic election by any stadard, but again, transparency and democracy have never been their mission statement. I’m also on board with treating the cardinals as nobody (important), but that’s not a literal “nobody” either.

So, yeah, he is elected, and by one of the strangest procedures I’ve ever heard about.

A cop trying to pass as a protester launches a projectile to justify anti-riot cops charging what’s otherwise a peaceful protest.

This is part of why I think nonviolent* protests require absolute discipline, including stopping others from breaking that discipline: clearly, the cops care about having a justification, however flimsy it may be, and the apologists I’ve talked to do use “yeah, well, they were attacked, so they had to defend themselves and keep the peace” as defense too. At least some of them seem genuinely convinced they’re doing the right thing by curbing violence, and even those without any conscience at all may feel more emboldened if they know they have a justification rather than relying on corrupt superiors cover for them.

Any message about police brutality is watered down by reports of violent protestors “starting it”.

Provocateurs provide that justification. Such people are the poison in any movement by throwing even carefully laid plans into disarray. But particularly in a nonviolent one, in an age of ubiquitous cameras, images of protesters stopping other “protesters” from escalating could send a powerful message to counter those claims.

* I prefer the term “nonviolent” to “peaceful” because an effective movement targeting the political will that sustains injustice can look a lot like a war. It’s just that the “weapons” aren’t guns, but strategic disruption and messaging. They have to be a nuisance that can’t be ignored, and they have to show the resilience to communicate that they won’t stop until they get what they want. That’s all easier said than done, of course, but where “peaceful” evokes an impression of people politely asking, protests need to be confrontational - just not necessarily violent.

Die hat bestimmt einen Kader an Experten, die sie fragt, was den Ausbau der Erneuerbaren begünstigen würde und was aktuell noch bremst…

…und macht dann genau das Gegenteil.

Wenn sie für den Mangel an Menschen mit einer Überdosis Data Center kompensieren (wenn wir nur noch mehr Rechenkraft kriegen erfinden wir ganz bestimmt die Super-KI, die endlich Arbeit überflüssig macht und das niedere Volk gleich mit!) bringt das Massensterben unterm Strich auch nichts.

Also they can sleep soundly knowing Iran can never have a nuclear weapon.

Frankly, I wouldn’t put it past him to fuck up that part too

Those (or at least some of them) are probably gonna be the most benign cosmic horrors in existence (and outside of it). "I will consume your pathetic world… " headpats “… some other time uwu”

Of course, that’s what I do. That’s what I recommend everyone should do, or get someone to do for them. My point is that I’m sceptical of the type of person to endorse the opposite.

It’s more about the ethical and cognitive effects of relying on AI. To simplify, I don’t think there is any good use for “leaning heavily” on it for code generation. The worst case scenario is that the code fucks your system in some way.

I don’t know what precautions the author might have made, but to dedicate a paragraph to pointing out how useful AI was to him sounds more like the type of AI hype techbro to just trust the AI to get it right, which makes me trust him less.

Plus, you know, the whole energy consumption and cognitive decline issue.

I haven’t seen this particular code, but I’ve had the pleasure of working with AI-generated code before. There was a single line that I ended up using in my manually written version, the rest of it was just hard to read and maintain. The advice for editing that code I got from the person who sent it was to just feed it to the model and ask it to make those changes.

I don’t want to outsource my brain and I find it untrustworthy to see someone advocate for it.

I was more thinking about the mentality and ethics behind using it and considering it worth mentioning, not so much whether I personally would get to use it. That was poor phrasing on my part, sorry. What I meant is that it implies a certain mindset that I find deeply untrustworthy.

I did read the rest of the article. It’s interesting, no doubt.

Sounds interesting, if it’s all locally hosted it might actually be a good-

I leaned heavily on Codex throughout the build.

Aaaaand I’m out.

I get the argument about quick and easy development turnaround, but I just can’t trust anything vibecoded, let alone models from that company.

Wenn die lauter schreien als wir, werden sie auch mehr gehört. Hilft auch nicht, wenn die Politik schon lange nen rechten Einschlsg hat; das schafft einen Eindruck von Konsens dem dann die Medien sich irgendwo auch beugen.

That would be a lot slower, a lot less consistent and thus a lot less commercially viable for bulk transport

Something with waves and particles, and uncertainty, and they spin or whatever. Things can be linked so that changing one thing has an effect elsewhere… I think that nore or less covers it.

Honestly, that seems like a good analogy. I know a little, enough to be confidently incorrect about cats and could probably bullshit my way through a conversation with someone whose knowledge ends at the term “quantum computer”.

But unlike Musk, I know the limits of my competence and would assemble a board of experts and actually listen to them rather than arbitrarily rejecting their naysaying and substituting whatever “epiphany” I had when stoned out of my mind.

Also, I’m not a kiddy diddler, which already makes me a much better pick for any position of power.

Then I have been misinformed, thanks for the correction. Still, they’re dependent on oil for now, which is gonna become more and more of a problem than it already is.

Don’t forget freight ships. A quarter or so of worldwide commerce is international shipping by sea. I’m not aware that there’s any commercially viable solution for powering these ships with renewables. The closest I know of are US Navy Carriers, which don’t require diesel, but they’re powered by nuclear reactors, which are neither renewable nor commercially viable (not that the USN would care about profitability) and require a huge amount of expertise to maintain.