Both things could be true.

7-11 theoretically already has it for their app; you scan with your phone and pay with Apple or Google Pay. The only thing is that you’re supposed to sort of wave the completed transaction at the cashier as you go, but the only reason you’d really need to use portable self-checkout is if the cashier is busy, and when they’re busy they don’t want you breaking in line or to stop what they’re doing to see that you’re showing them a plausibly legitimate checkout screen.

In a completely, utterly, definitely unrelated story, I got accused of shoplifting by a 7-11 cashier the other day.

I looked into his worldview a bit when the San Francisco lecture happened, and it is deeply, deeply fucked up.

There is a certain allure because it’s based on a well-known philosophal thread of “mimetic theory” (filtered through a then-contemporary Nazi apologist, and Silicon Valley hubris) and for all it’s “Anti-Christ” talk, it doesn’t even 100% require a supernatural belief system, just the commitment to one as an outward-facing and socially enforceable ideology. What makes it so fucked up and dangerous is the almost Foundation-like orthopraxy that it demands.

The gist, IIRC, is that humans want and need something stable to copy from to know what they want, and that modernish (like in the last 300 years) interpretations of major religions, but particularly Christianity, have landed on a perfect balance of giving people boundaries, aspirations, and just enough freedom to keep society going. Therefore, the only way to avoid falling back onto outmoded and dangerous practices like mass scape-goating is to get huge blocks of people invested in that worldview. Ideally it would be the whole world in one ideology, but their nod to reality is to concede that three or four could survive in tension if they’re geographically insulated.

So moving onto the Antichrist, anyone or (importantly for the Thiel version specifically) anything that poses an existential threat to this orderly control of society risks chaos and a descent into destruction and with a Christian context can therefore be comfortably called the/an “Antichrist.” If Palantir watching literally everyone and everything means the enforcement of “western” values on western populations, then opposing that is dangerous to humanity and therefore a threat. Fighting that threat is a crusade, and even justifies the interim use of tactics that will ultimately be rendered moot by the imposition of a religio-philosophical order, such as mass scaepgoating and pogroms (coughjdvancecough).

Then, just as the classist cherry on top, remember that the supernatural part of this is all just to make sure that the stupids buy into the same worldview as the elites who will preserve society by controlling it and directing it towards self-sustaining power structures. So a Thiel can be gay, and a Thiel acolyte like Vance (we’ll look past Musk for now, as I think they probably view him more as a lucky and useful idiot) can marry a Hindu woman from one of the viable global powerbases (though we’re seeing cracks in that as current political realities weigh on him), and he doesn’t even really have to believe any of the specifically dominionist nonsense he preaches, as long as the MAGA rubes do. What it does give them is a handhold where they can legitimately believe that they’re doing what’s best for the world by trying to dominate it, and that is fucking terrifying.

As an aside, Thiel’s philosophical mentor would have been very nearly as horrified as most of us are by the conclusions he’s reached, and this is why you don’t let the software engineers think they’re the only ones who are smart, simply because it’s harder to do calculus than write a B+ Freshman essay. If Girard is “love each other or we all face ruin,” Thiel is “love each other, or we all face ruin, but you’re too stupid to love each other unless a brutal technostate surveillance apparatus enforces adherence to a love-based religion.”

Luke had a pretty decent support system, despite some serious alienation issues to work through, so a hand and part of the forearm were sufficient.

I hadn’t actually looked up any numbers on the RAM shortage. Less than a year ago I got 2 8GB sticks of no-name PC3200 DDR4 for less than $25. I didn’t even really need it for my use-case, but it was so cheap that “why not” felt like a perfectly viable reason to upgrade to 32GB total. Six years ago I got the original two-pack of 8GB sticks for $75. Now that same amount of old-ass DDR4 would be $90-$100. Jeezus. No upgrades for me for a while.

Also sounds like an org that wants its event, which depends on visas for its players to happen at all and on visas for its fans to be a commercial success, to get special treatment from the Orange Menace.

Apart from all the deflection and Putin and Gilded-Age foreign policy policy theories, which may well be right, I think President Dingleberry also found out that Greenland is 1% larger by area than the Louisiana Purchase, which would make him the president that most embiggened America. How can you you deny MAGA if he literally made it greater (in size) than any president prior to him?

It’s also possible he has only ever looked at a Mercator and thinks Greenland is literally the size of Africa or South America.

Teen me had my mind blown when, after finding this song super catchy, I read the lyrics in the liner notes.

plasma gun

One of the first “aha” design moments I ever got was the Doom plasma gun. There was a kid’s toy version of the American M-60 Light Machine gun that I had. The back half was pretty cool on its own, the typical thumper machanism to make noise, but it also had secondary triggers in the stock and a little gear that would advance a belt of soft plastic ammo. Didn’t do anything except move, but the effect was cool.

The front actually came off, and was a pretty decent quality suction-dart shooter. However, if you turned it around and used the the mating surface as the “muzzle…” BOOM! (or “ZAP” I guess… lol) Doom plasma gun, down to the exact number of ridges.

“Language models don’t apply to us because this is not a language problem,” Nesterenko explained. “If you ask it to actually create a blueprint, it has no training data for that. It has no context for that…” Instead, Quilter built what Nesterenko describes as a “game” where the AI agent makes sequential decisions — place this component here, route this trace there — and receives feedback based on whether the resulting design satisfies electromagnetic, thermal, and manufacturing constraints… The approach mirrors DeepMind’s progression with its Go-playing systems.

This is kind of interesting and cool, and it’s not a hallucinating LLM. I’ve designed a couple of simple circuit boards, and running traces can be sort of zen, but it is tedious and would be maddening as a job, so I can only imagine what the process must be like on complex projects from scratch. Definitely some hype levels coming from the company that give me pause, but it seems like an actual useful task for a machine learning algorithm.

And both are delicious.

I don’t seem to hear as much anymore, but for a long time this was me with EVE Online.

And everyone else in the room clapped, I presume?

Peaked in obedience school…

Yeah, I mean there’s not a big huge punchline, but this was clearly a bit of a general send-up, and also prodding at a very specific “Tim Tebow” type of muscular Christianity.

That type of Christian man is big and strong, but also extremely manicured and soft-spoken (even while saying the usual heinous shit) and “effeminate” by certain heteronormative standards. The look and vibe lends itself to fairly easy jokes about men who are closeted or so naive they don’t realize they’re closeted, which will needle some and maybe give others food for thought. Anybody who’s spent time in the Bible Belt will have met the dude in this comic, and maybe his wife.

For a while it was four, but then Nazi Spanish Inquisition pope died.

Very cool, but is anything as cool as that Space Wars Computer Space cabinet in the same scene?

LOOSEN UP!

We’re too close!

Are those OG '83 Return of the Jedi sheets, or a re-release?