That’s a good point. China has construction capacity like no place else on earth.

I also wonder if the technology involved would make this more deployable in the global south due to fewer infrastructure dependencies.

In our view, Hungary fulfills all the qualities of the rule of law

We self-certify our compliance and reject any review. Just give us money please.

From their q&a:

gitspamdum is a bot, I just created a fake account and bid for 999 trillions, no verification were requested in the whole process and 1 nanosecond later gitspamdum bid after me, I tried this twice, my only purpose was to expose the absurdity of the whole thing, if Proton really take this thing seriously please just cancel all auctions and place them in a serious website

You can just immediately resell it to Elon for $44B.

I very badly want this to be true, but I simply cannot imagine it. I think my company might have more SREs than Twitter has employees, but I cannot see how they could do global ops like that. Or even just California ops.

People with money tend to trust people with money because their ego tells them how smart they are because of their own success, and they project that onto others.

Elon is also a brilliant con man, exactly like Donald Trump. They’re so close, it’s uncanny. Elon apparently got $13B in loans from major banks by telling them that his businesses never lose money.

We will have to see if reality is finally catching up with them.

Excellent analysis!

I did read the books on the original series. I have but haven’t yet read some of the others (I have at least one audiobook that was free at the time). I absolutely loved them, after sitting in shock as one “main character” after another was killed in a horrible and tragic way. I had gone in cold, and did not realize that GRRM took the authorial advice to “kill your darlings” quite so literally.”

I didn’t get into them until the pentology was finished, and I remember wondering to myself “Who the hell does he finish this? He’s introduced a major new plot line on the third book (maybe it was the Dorne subplot) and new, major characters kept popping up. I had no idea how he was going to start tying everything together, because even the last book had not started winding things down quite - the tensions were still building. It felt like he was painting himself into a corner while doing the floor like the ceiling of the Sistine chapel. Given the pace of subsequent development, I think I may have been just a bit right on that. I’ve done it to myself and recognize the symptoms.

I appreciate House of the Dragon being good. The problem is that S1 was also good. The problem is in the prequel-ness itself. I know that it all ends with Dany going inexplicably insane and Jamie’s arc goes from scoundrel to hero to … whatever the hell that was. I know the complex plot lines they’re setting up will never be closed. If GRRM ever finishes the book (I’m certainly not expecting two) and winds things down properly, I might again feel invested enough in the universe to try the other stories set in it, but right now it might have just ended with “and then Ned woke up and realized it was all a dream.”

Lastly, you raise a good point and that would have at least maybe delivered some interest. I can’t see anything but civil war with Bran as the bored and incapable god-emperor facing a Stark-Lannister alliance or something. The problem is that the most central and intriguing plot lines were left hanging or ended in the fastest and worst way possible.

“Dany forgot about the Black Fleet?” A queen capable of bringing her people from the literal point of extinction to conquering the known world, with a team of advisors and tacticians forgetting about a major armed force whose betrayal and push for conquest was well known? That’s like “The President of the United States forgot they were at war with China who had dispatched their fleet to attack Washington.” And then to have a ballista, fired from the pitching deck of a sailing ship, and hitting not only a moving target but a flying one? No one in history has ever shot a ballista at a moving flying target, to my knowledge, then pull in the wind and the waves.

I really only picked on Bran in particular because that was the ending-ending. From top to bottom it was absolutely terrible with every authorial decision worse than the last.

Like I said, I think GRRM painted himself into a corner. I think he gets some of the blame, because the show runners are obviously nowhere in the league of GRRM when it comes to story creation, and I don’t know how involved he was at that point. I don’t know if he skimmed a paragraph and signed off or what. Honestly, I don’t think even George knows how to finish his story because he kept adding one more thing. He’s a mature writer and gifted author, but I don’t have a competing hypothesis right now.

I do blame the showrunners for deliberately turning out an absolute piece of crap just to finish the thing even after being offered additional seasons by HBO. It was the worst example of deus ex machina I’ve ever seen.

“Who has a better story than Bran the Broken? Let’s make him king!”

Okay, not happy in the moment, but it was supposed to be. I’m still mad about it. Of all the shows I’ve re-marathoned, I’ve never even been tempted to redo GoT. It was like S8 was so bad it went back in time and ruined the entire rest of the show. I can’t even entertain watching any spinoffs.

I may buy the rest of the series as novels (ha) but even then it will be with trepidation.

This is what a draft is. People were likely sent notices, then didn’t appear.

If the US were to be invaded and was fighting for its life, it would institute a draft. We did it for a lot of wars a hell of a lot less important than an inside your borders existential threat.

If you don’t like the draft, I get it. If you think that countries and not just people should be pacifist (in essence making that decision for all of the people in the country), I can sort of understand that, although I think there’s unethical consequences. But there’s no reason to pretend that this isn’t absolutely normal. The Russians are doing the same, and they’re the invaders.

Here’s one of the key factors in living organisms, and is actually a factor in complex adaptive systems in general. We have inside of us - from a paramecium to Plato - a model of the world. That model may be very simple and encoded purely genetically, or it may reflect a lifetime of learning. Everything we see, hear, and feel is interpreted through that model.

We use that model to sense the state of our environment and predict the reaction to our actions - things going from State S1 to S2. A paramecium, when food particles bump into the receptors on the outside of its cell, will swim up the gradient. The model, encoded in the genes and realized in the anatomy and physiology of the creature, is “food exists over there at the end of this gradient” or even just “more food = better.” Likewise, it will swim away from poison. We can break it down to the exact molecules involved, but at its heart (and for evolutionary purposes) it’s a model. It’s the same as when a chimp goes fishing for termites or we get dressed up before going out.

So “ignorance” here might be interpreted as an incomplete or incorrect model. The answer is to update the model (or avoid the situation). That, and understand how to use probability and uncertainty.

I think there’s a handful of problems with the idea. For starters (I’m just going with the first returned result because the actual numbers don’t matter as much as the magnitudes), there’s around 64 zetabytes comprising the internet as of 2020, 64 trillion GB. That’s going to be one hell of a zip file. In fact, pretty much the only thing capable of storing that much information is, well, the Internet itself.

Second is the rate of information being produced. These estimates vary wildly, but the rate of growth is increasing exponentially. We will soon be writing more data per day to the internet than is currently there from the very beginning until now.

So maybe we don’t need every product page from every store website around the world. Maybe we don’t need the tens of millions of pages of corporate training manuals. Maybe we need curation rather than SELECT * FROM INTERNET.

That’s what things like Gutenberg and the Internet Archive do. They’re very limited in what they catch, of course. It’s also sort of what Wikipedia does, although curation here includes summarization. It’s also a feature of historical archives from existing media - like New York Times records that go back a century (or wherever they’re at now), or back issues of Nature and Science going back to when they started publication. Those are obviously doable - people are doing them - but each alone is a microscopic piece of the puzzle.

So, given that those exist, alongside the rest of the internet, what value are we creating? Storing something digitally doesn’t give it permanence, and I have an 8” floppy disk for a cash register POS created by an unknown OS to prove it.

Someday (hopefully soon) PDFs will go away and nothing will read them. Hell, the concept of “file” could go away in 50 years. There are written texts from thousands of years ago that we cannot read, and others we’ve deciphered only very recently and imperfectly. All of that archived stuff will have to be ported over, and again that’s going to mean yet more curation. At the rate information is growing you’re going to make Sisyphus look like he’s on a vacation in Tahiti.

Does that mean it’s all one big library of Alexandria? Not necessarily.

Rather than thinking of all those data as a library, think of them as an ecosystem of knowledge. Once Amazon goes out of business, no one’s going to care about that one page of theirs with the nose hair trimmer. We will still have a copy of the NYT when we landed on the moon, or when Nazi Germany was defeated. We’ll also have other information about space programs and 20th century history. We probably won’t have my mom’s recipes or all those pictures I’ve taken of my pets over the years, and my MySpace page is thankfully gone forever. I even deleted all of my Reddit content before moving on.

Maybe my scientific publications will end up archived someplace, but there we get into the tree falling in the forest problem. If no one reads them from now to the end of time, are they really there? Maybe physically, but they’ve sort of passed out of the ecosystem of human knowledge and are now part of the fossil record, if anything.

We’ve also researched how to communicate over millennia. There’s the (kind of silly but a little cool) Long Now project. We’ve also tried to invent symbology that will allow us to put warning signs outside hazardous/nuclear waste storage facilities that will continue to communicate “Danger - Do Not Enter” for tens of thousands of years.

In short, I think that the problem you’re trying to solve is impermanence or entropy, which both Buddhists and physicists will tell you aren’t things we’re going to solve.

I actually think that’s not a bad phrase at all depending on the context. I wouldn’t use it if it’s about signing up for a commercial website account unless you’re a consultant, but if you’re talking about signing up for government services, I think it’s perfect.

Governments know that administrative burdens increase participation costs. Government agencies and administrators that are trying to reduce utilization of a program without going through the burden or optics of changing a law will make every effort to make it harder to get. Imagine if you could sign up for SNAP, welfare, healthcare, and register to vote with one click. I think we’d find program utilization would soar.

What if someone undeserving takes advantage of the system? Well, that’s why universal programs can be more efficient. There’s no qualifying for a program because it’s universal. Remove tuition from public colleges and universities - you’ve eliminated the administrative burden of navigating aid programs and scholarships and opened up higher education.

Definitely not the worst phrase.

I’m assuming you don’t mean people abusing steroids, but hormones, period (no pun intended), because you say they’re used by everybody.

So, okay. I’m a biologist and I’m not sure how to answer this question except to say that we wouldn’t exist. By “we” I pretty much mean life on earth as we know it.

Let’s start with Wikipedia:

A hormone (from the Greek participle ὁρμῶν, “setting in motion”) is a class of signaling molecules in multicellular organisms that are sent to distant organs by complex biological processes to regulate physiology and behavior.[1] Hormones are required for the correct development of animals, plants and fungi.

A hormone is not a drug.

A drug is any chemical substance that when consumed causes a change in an organism’s physiology, including its psychology, if applicable.[1][2][vague] Drugs are typically distinguished from food and other substances that provide nutritional support

You can take hormones as drugs, but drugs are things that are consumed. Hormones produced within your body are part of and necessary to maintaining your life from before you are a you until the day you die. They regulate your metabolism. They’re directly responsible for keeping your body alive and in sync with the environment. They’re everywhere - animals, plants, and fungi.

So, no, please don’t get rid of hormones. We’re using them.

Now, diseases and disorders caused by hormonal dysfunction are a different story. Those, hopefully, can be treated medically or with therapy. That’s a different question, though.

Unsurprising.

Have the aid agencies all withdrawn by now? They generally don’t operate in active war zones (except perhaps Red Crescent).

This is one of those that gets worse the further you read.

Okay, this is only barely related to what you’re suggesting, but I always found it amusing. I went through a “detective” phase as a kid and got a bit obsessed.

I read an account of a man who thought he had that kind of thing figured out. He used rubber bands to cut off the blood supply to his fingertips, then used a razor to repeatedly scrape off the skin in order to eliminate his fingerprints before launching his criminal career.

He was caught and identified because the scar patterns on his fingertips were unique fingerprints.

This is not going anyplace good.

Also, the hand movements look completely unnatural. It’s like that scene from 30 Rock where Jack Donaghy is shooting that spot and winds up holding two coffee cups.

Also, the woman suppressing a grin while talking about the war in Gaza was beyond disturbing.

And this is their most curated footage. This is their best stuff used to show off their work.

They haven’t climbed out of the uncanny valley yet.

For this, not really. This story just sounds more like a poor man’s Frank Abagnale than a super spy.

The absolute last thing most people involved in intelligence work want to be is “interesting.”

So, typically an employee of an intelligence agency has a diplomatic passport and is attached to an embassy or some such. It is considered generally unacceptable (at least in some countries) to have a cover as a journalist, but other private employment is allowed. Being an intelligence officer with a cover as part of an aid agency is generally not allowed, although that does happen, and results in things like vaccine refusals and the execution of medical personnel who are trying to eliminate diseases. I’m not going into specifics, but one of the places where that happened rhymes with “Wackystan.”

Anyway, the job of the intelligence officer is to recruit spies, like an admin assistant in some government agency. They generally don’t do the physical spying themselves, but they’ll use various approaches to get foreign nationals to send them files and such.

In any case, this person just seems like a cool con man. The absolute last thing someone involved in intelligence wants to do is attract attention (most of the time - some recent Russian operations in the US have been quite blatant), and this person was just having a great time.

I know. I’m thinking of a full court press kind of thing integrating US and foreign intelligence services. Something that goes beyond airdrops of flyers and Tokyo Rose broadcasts.

The US has seen the potential efficacy of targeted full-on intelligence operations to create social-political disruptions. We’ve also seen (admittedly not in living memory) the political effectiveness of the Underground Railroad. I think that the operational disruption would go beyond the loss of manpower, especially if it included senior officers.

It’s harder to operate in Russia than in the US, but today’s Russia also isn’t exactly North Korea. They’re kind of a kleptocracy, which creates its own vulnerabilities.