So what did you mean when you began your comment with “actually it’s the inverse”? Inverse of what?

I’m a bit confused by what you’re trying to say here. It seems non sequitur if you are trying to say “borrowers of higher interest rate benefit less from inflation”.

Your maths is not right. Inflation, in absolute terms, is a larger benefit to people with higher interest rates.

Let’s consider the scenario where inflation is 10% for simplicity, and two borrowers who each borrow $100, but Borrower A at 5% annual simple interest and Borrower B at 25% annual simple interest. Both borrowers borrow the money at the beginning of Year 0.

Borrower A owes $105 in Year 1 dollars at the beginning of Year 1. This is equivalent to $95.45 in Year 0 dollars.

Borrower B owes $125 in Year 1 dollars at the beginning of Year 1. This is equivalent to $113.64 in Year 0 dollars.

Compared to a 0% inflation rate, Borrower A saved 9.55 Year 0 dollars and Borrower B saved 11.36 Year 0 dollars. Borrower B saved 1.81 more Year 0 dollars than Borrower B due to inflation (but paid 17.55 Year 0 dollars more overall because of interest).

Inflation reduces the real buying power of the money used to repay the loan by the inflation rate each year, regardless of your loan interest.

In absolute terms, inflation is better the higher your interest rate is, because the number of dollars it saves you goes up.

No, I go online and just order another one for same-day pickup from a local electronics retailer. Then I restore my files from my backup.

It’s not an LLM, but Stockfish does use AI under the hood and has been since 2020. Stockfish uses a classical alpha-beta search strategy (if I recall correctly) combined with a neural network for smarter pruning.

There are some engines of comparable strength that are primarily neural-network based. lc0 comes to mind. lc0 placed 2nd in the Top Chess Engine Championships in 9 out of the past 10 seasons. By comparison, Stockfish is currently on a 10-season win streak in the TCEC.

One of my mates generated an entire website using Gemini. It was a React web app that tracks inventory for trading card dealers. It actually did come out functional and well-polished. That being said, the AI really struggled with several aspects of the project that humans would not:

• It left database secrets in the code
• The design of the website meant that it was impossible to operate securely
• The quality of the code itself was hot garbage—unreadable and undocumented nonsense that somehow still worked
• It did not break the code into multiple files. It piled everything into a single file

I think one other factor that people have not considered is the monitor. To run all games at 4K maximum settings, yes, this type of PC might be required. But at lower resolutions, such as 1080p or 1440p, this is overkill and one would be able to run any game as maximum settings even with a computer costing a third as much.

Important distinction: A triangle is a three-sided polygon. For example, a quarter-circle is not a triangle, despite being a three-sided shape.

I am not the parent commenter, but the argument for and against wealth taxes is a lot more nuanced than many people would originally think.

For one, a great deal of wealth in this country (the overwhelming majority, actually) is not money but takes the form of illiquid capital goods like real property and shares in companies. There is a real concern that people subject to tax just won’t have enough dollars in a bank account to pay for it, and forcing the sale of that many goods could render the markets illiquid as it wipes out the red side of the order book every April.

A potential way around this is if the tax can be paid in kind, similar to how wealth taxes were collected historically, such as in the Roman Empire. This could be stupid easy to administrate—a 1% wealth tax against companies can be enforced by just minting 1% of every registered company’s outstanding shares in new stock and then transferring it to the control of the Government. Though the downside is that this sort of tax is very indiscriminate and difficult to target towards certain demographic groups. While shareholders are largely wealthy individuals who would be the target demographic for a wealth tax, they aren’t exclusively so. Effectively that becomes a tax on holding shares in companies, which is a good, but not perfect, proxy for wealth. The drawback to collecting shares in kind is that the stuff that is raised is not really “revenue” for the state, in that it is not money that can be spent, and to liquidate it would incur significant loss for the state as well. Which is basically throwing wealth away. This wasn’t a problem when “in-kind” meant grain and barley that could be used to feed the army, but soldiers can’t survive on a diet of stock certificates.

I am in favour of large-scale wealth redistribution from the billionaire class to the working class, but doing so isn’t as easy as saying “You, billionaire, give me 1% of everything you got, cash.” I think a policy of combined high income tax, high capital gains tax, and taxing loans for personal expenses secured against shares as income is more likely to be effective.

You’re being downvoted because your assertion that hosts are responsible for what users upload is generally false.

(1) Treatment of Publisher or Speaker.—No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.

(2) Civil Liability.—No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be held liable on account of—

(A) any action voluntarily taken in good faith to restrict access to or availability of material that the provider or user considers to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected; or

(B) any action taken to enable or make available to information content providers or others the technical means to restrict access to material described in [subparagraph (A)].

47 USC § 230c, a.k.a. Communications Decency Act 1996 § 230

Hash matching is really easy to get around. Literally modify 1 bit of the image or just re-encode the video and you’ve gotten around it.

I think you’re overthinking it slightly.

• French flag represents the language called “French”
• Spanish flag represents the language called “Spanish”
• Russian flag represents the language called “Russian”
• German flag represents the language called “German”
• Portuguese flag represents the language called “Portuguese”
• Japanese flag represents the language called “Japanese”
• Korean flag represents the language called “Korean”
• Chinese flag represents the language called “Chinese”
• Italian flag represents the language called “Italian”
• But somehow, the British flag doesn’t represent a language called “British”, but rather, one called “English”, despite there existing an English flag

Scottish people having to click on a British flag knowing it will display English (there is a perfectly good flag for England that people refuse to use 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿)

Firstly this is surprisingly high-quality coverage. I’ve never heard of this website but I’m pretty impressed.

Secondly, regarding the lawsuit in general, I think that patent and intellectual property law regarding game mechanics and software processes in general are badly in need of reform. There doesn’t seem to have been significant legislative action to address this in any major economy that I know of. The number of bullshit parents being filed, unclear and vague rules as to how copyright/patent law works with respect to software, AI, and game mechanics, is really leading to a lawsuit culture where the only way to find out what the bounds of the law are is to spend millions of dollars on lawyers to litigate it in court, when really, legislatures should be actively writing new and clearer rules to deal with these issues before people need to sue each other to find out.

The Internet of 2025 is just way too different and complex to operate using the copyright rules of the 1990s.

If I were in writing the rules, there’d be separate categories of intellectual property for software libraries, game mechanics, fictional characters, and so on, with clear definitions on what is and is not considered fair use of these sorts of intellectual property. It should not be possible to copyright the design of a widely-used software API or game mechanic. And any such protection on those things should be comparatively short in duration (not more than a decade) so that others can eventually re-implement the design, and probably do so better than the original inventor.

If the question is asking about Trump, Orban, Putin, or your other favourite dimwitted world leader, it’s because these people usually don’t actually want to fuck everything up. They want to make their country (or their notion of the groups of people they regard as their country) prosperous and glorious. But they’re just unable to take in the fact that their policies and leadership are actually leading them further away from this goal. It really is just a deadly combination of incompetence and inability to self-criticise.

In the case of Trump, who is a pre-eminent example of this, he really does think that tariffs will make the US richer. He is a moron, of course, but that’s what he thinks. He doesn’t “know” that tariffs will damage the American economy and America’s international reputation, because he doesn’t grasp the concept at all. Anyone who has observed his thinking for any period of time after he got into politics can observe that it is very feelings-driven and not very fact-based. And a lot of his government’s policy is also ego-driven, which explains why it is seemingly always falling for Russian propaganda and why he wants to be on good terms with Putin. Though Putin is no universal genius either, one thing that he is very good at, as a result of his KGB training, is manipulating others to get what he wants. It certainly does help Putin a lot that Trump is pretty easily manipulated. And as for Trump’s comments about wanting to take over Canada, take over Greenland, take over Panama, &c. &c., most non-US observers describe that as clear evidence of his mental decline. J. J. McCullough, a Canadian political commentator, described it as being “obvious” that Trump is “losing it”.

And ironically, since Joe Biden’s mental competence was called into question in the last US election, while Biden’s senility manifests mostly in the form of stutters, speech blunders, and random mostly-inert goofiness, Trump’s senility seems to manifest in a desire to take over the world and become God-emperor of Mankind, which is objectively more dangerous for a world leader.

Hey, the British were bloody imperial colonialists, not fascists though. Get it right!

Except that Sodor is noted to be in the United Kingdom, which means Thomas was loyal to His Britannic Majesty and served his king and country, not those Nazi scum.

This is some gamble to make with unclear payoff. It costs billions of dollars to get the manufacturing contracts, hire the engineers, and obtain the procurement contracts. Not to mention the years of effort it would take. Unless you spend decades growing your own talent, the only way you’re going to be able to attract the talent needed to build this project is by poaching them from Apple, Intel, Nvidia, and Huawei by doubling their salaries. And by buying out their non-compete agreements or hiring the best lawyers in the world. You’re betting on two facts to remain true:

1. That the issue of avoiding American products will even be salient in three to four years’ time. By that time it’s pretty likely that America has either taken over the word or been reduced to rubble. Trump will either be god-emperor of mankind or leaving office a broken, defeated man (or perhaps in a coffin before that—the man eats more Mcdonald’s than can be good for him, especially at his advanced age)
2. That people care enough about this to pay double the price of an American-made cell phone.
3. That your customers don’t count the fact that their phones were made mostly by American or Chinese engineers against you. America attracted all the best tech talent in the world with high salaries and China basically brute forced it with sheer numbers.

Number 2 is really the problem here. Even if you could get a competitive cell phone to market literally tomorrow, it’d have to cost twice as much as an iPhone and four times the price of the latest Huawei or Xiaomi model. While customers are more than happy to pay $6 for Quebec maple syrup so they can avoid $3 Vermont syrup, the proposition of paying $3,000 for a Canadian cell phone versus $1,500 for an iPhone is a much more difficult one to accept. And one that not many people are likely to be able to afford.

It is not because of a shortage of asphalt that potholes exist. It is a shortage of attention and money to fill said potholes.