Telemakhos

United Airlines offers the game for entertainment while you're flying.

https://liveandletsfly.com/united-airlines-air-traffic-contr...

The future is bleak if you are attempting to cross borders with a forged or stolen passport. Nobody else is adversely affected by this.

Musk bought Twitter looking to build an “everything app,” the western WeChat. AI came along and promised an end to apps via an agentic OS that does what its user wants and vibes whatever it needs to accomplish that as it goes along. The agentic OS is basically the same thing as the “everything app,” and I doubt Musk will let go of that.

It was required when I was a student in American schools. I don't think it really had much to do with democracy, though. I suppose there are lessons that you could generalize to any state, like "don't hire mercenaries," but I wouldn't say that it gave lessons especially relevant to either Athenian style democracy or to the mixed constitutions called "democracies" from the late eighteenth century to the present.

An American and a European sit at a bar drinking. Their Chinese friend, who had been detained by business, comes and joins them. After he's started his drink, the bartender warns them all that it's dangerous to drink and drive. The American and European stop drinking and sit around chatting, hoping to pass enough time to sober up before heading home. The Chinese man, however, reasons that the American and European have cumulatively consumed more distilled pleasure than he has, and so it is his right to keep indulging, despite having been warned about the danger that drunk driving poses to himself and others.

In the face of what is advertised as an existential global threat, the argument that the Chinese should be excused for failing to curb their emissions, on the grounds that others in the past also emitted, contradicts the idea that emissions pose an existential global threat.

It's pretty common to read "attack surface" in security.

US Greenhouse gas emissions are down 18% from 2007 levels. CO2 emissions and electricity generation are no longer linked. You might not like them, but Trump, Musk, Thiel, et al (whoever the et al are) are doing a good job pushing nuclear power as well, which promises a more energy-rich future without greenhouse emissions.

The people who truly don't care are not in the US; they're China and India, whose per capita CO2 emissions are exploding to the upside. China alone makes up like a third of the world's emissions. They don't talk about cutting emissions but about slowing their growth, and yet people are upset at US politicians as the US is busy meeting climate goals it doesn't even profess (and which don't bind China). When you look at actual data, the people you're blaming aren't the ones you should be blaming.

Recognizing that the exposure myth of Romulus and Remus is an analogue of the exposure myth of Moses, of Cyrus, and of a host of other famous figures gets one thinking that early Roman history and early Jewish history, among others, map common Eurasian stories onto particular agendas.

"How do I build an effective weapon?" and "How do I effectively control the masses?" were research projects for the US government before you were born. One gave the world the Manhattan project, to name only one example, and the other MKULTRA. The government and cooperating companies had knowledge in both fields beyond the state of the art publicly available and continue to hold that edge over the public and foreign adversaries today. There is precious little new about the government having an uncensored model while you get the nerfed version.

A useful comparison might be made with the realm of firearms: civilians need to jump through hoops to own a fully-automatic weapon and can run afoul of the law simply by drilling a third hole near two others in a hunk of metal, yet the better trained among the government's soldiery can operate fully automatic weapons. You get the nerfed version, and the BATFE will have problems if you try to circumvent that restriction. I wonder, though, how many people advocating for popular access to uncensored AI models also advocate for an unrestricted (not infringed) right to bear arms or an unrestricted right to freedom of speech.

The fourteenth amendment doesn't say "within the jurisdiction" but "subject to the jurisdiction": if you break a window as a tourist, you expect to be prosecuted because you committed a crime within that jurisdiction, but you do not expect to be conscripted into military service or to pay income tax, because you are not subject to the jurisdiction.

Birth tourism is definitely an issue for conservatives worried about China. Here's a 2019 ICE press release on prosecuting someone who was running a birth tourism ring to benefit Chinese government officials: https://www.ice.gov/news/releases/chinese-national-pleads-gu... The right is concerned that Chinese-American dual citizens born in the US but raised in China might, upon reaching adulthood, act with impunity as US-citizen agents of the Chinese Communist Party.

Americans however like their gas guzzling F150s.

Pickup trucks have always made up between 10% and 20% of vehicles on the road in America; it's the SUV that has picked up from next to nothing in 1980 to almost half of all new vehicles now, while the sedan has plunged from 80% to about 25% of new vehicles today.

A big part of that transition to larger SUVs (which are not F150s) was the CAFE (Corporate Average Fuel Economy) Standards, which sought to make cars more fuel efficient. They regulated based on the size of the vehicle, so larger vehicles (including both the SUV and the F150) became cheaper to manufacture, while smaller cars were squeezed out of the market as meeting CAFE became too expensive. Larger cars also perform better on safety tests and have an easier time passing onerous safety regulations. Had environmental and safety regulations been handled differently, or if there weren't any, Americans might well be driving more fuel-efficient smaller coupes and sedans.

That said, the Chevy Bolt and Mustang Mach-E are, in fact, being manufactured—the Bolt was recently brought back, and the Mustang Mach-E was never discontinued. The Ford F150 Lightning has been discontinued. Tesla outsells all of them by far.

The Epicureans were particularly hostile to the Jews and Christians, because Epicureans deny Providence or the active intervention of the divine in human affairs. See Horace Sermones 1.5.

Alternatively, they're launching improved products soon (like the rumored touch-screen OLED MacBook), and they want to raise prices now to (a) discourage people from buying last-gen tech ahead of increased prices for next-gen tech, and (b) give the new prices enough time to simmer in the consumer consciousness before launching the next-gen tech, to dull the shock of the price increase for next-gen tech.

Why do the pictures with this article feel so weird? Like, the first one is of a guy in Finland reading a book with an English title while standing in front of a shelf full of books with English titles.

Apple doesn't force you to create an AppleID unless you want to use Music and the App Store. You can still run macOS as a standalone local user. So, it's not government-forced KYC.

Let's say she has ten employees. They all voluntarily agree to work for her: slavery is illegal, so people work for others on a consensual basis. Both the employer and employee negotiated and consented to a salary or wage schedule for that employee. The employer pays the agreed-upon compensation, and the employee receives it.

If the company makes an unexpectedly large profit, the employer is not obligated to redistribute that to her employees in addition to the already agreed-upon and paid compensation. If the employees think that what they agreed to work for is no longer sufficient, they are welcome to renegotiate their compensation or, if they feel they have been wronged and are being paid less than they are worth, to take their talent to a different employer. After all, everything so far has been consensual. The only thing that would be non-consensual would be obligating the employer to redistribute her profit over and above what had already been negotiated.

Alternatively, this is the best advertising for which Anthropic could hope: "Our product, and nobody else's, is so good that the government declared us a threat to national security." If they bring it back for US-nationals only, maybe demanding ID for users, people will think it's the bees knees: "so dangerous that non-Americans can't have access" probably sounds like a ringing endorsement to some C-level decision makers.

Crowdstrike took down airports in July 2024, and its stock was back up by October; it's double the price now. Everyone saw how systemically important it was and how it took down entire industries, and they asked why they weren't using it themselves if it's so important. See also the 2025 cloud outages.

People who have lived in Washington for a long time do not, in fact, welcome Californians to Washington, nor is Washington especially warm and welcoming to anyone else. The Seattle Freeze is real.

I'd like to know when they stopped publishing census data. I have used it for genealogical purposes to track ancestors: you can see exactly who was living in which house, how they are related, and what their ages are (I found that women in my family often reported, both on the census and marriage documents, being younger than they actually were). I don't think I've seen data from after 1950, though.

I don't understand why the census would include SNAP data or income: surely the government already has that information. I have never doubted that the IRS knows my income better than I do. Maybe better use of existing datasets could restrict the census to less invasive questions.

It's not a joke. The Pimpzilla theme stopped working due to changes that Mozilla made to Firefox's layout system, and I dropped Firefox for Safari. Never went back.

Realistically, it is for 99.9% of people who have phones. The 0.1% have to go out of their way to buy, with cash or crypto, prepaid SIM top-ups on flip phones, and by doing so they stand out like a sore thumb.

Back in the days of rotary phones, not only did the phone providers have your name, they even listed it, your home address, and your phone number in the white pages of the phone book, and everyone in town had a copy of it. Before the rise of microcomputers which enabled data tracking and robocalls, which in turn gave rise to demand for privacy from spam, having that information out in public wasn't a problem except for edge cases like domestic abuse victims or people in a witness protection program. The 99.9%, though, are still getting tracked no matter what, and I sometimes wonder if we've sacrificed the convenience and confidence of the phone-book age for an illusion of privacy that relies on anxiety.

I'm not sure what the right vocabulary would be to describe this, but this sounds more like the calculations behind nuclear war than a healthy collegiality or cooperative work relationship. This sets up a competition to determine a loser based on resource scarcity, not a way to achieve mutual goals to advance the organization's goals.

I never went back to Firefox after they killed the Pimpzilla theme.

Thanks for that. I like being able to pipe output into a local LLM to get an explanation of the output.

This sounds like a self-correcting problem, if you don't allow immigration. Schools will have to pay more for teachers, which will raise salaries for native born teachers, instead of paying a lower rate to someone on a temporary work visa.

The matter is a little more complicated than that, because Alaska also has some of the nation's most stringent licensure requirements with no alternative routes for high-demand low-supply subject area teachers. You could probably relax those artificial barriers to employment and get more Alaskans teaching without raising the salary as much as if you kept the licensure requirements. You could also promise student debt relief for teachers who serve in rural areas for a certain length of time.

The first time I was in Switzerland was 1985, and even then, I would not call it "homogenous." The people at the time spoke French, German, Italian, and Romanisch. Switzerland is an excellent example of the "harmonious" rather than "homogenous": it manages to integrate people from four linguistic groups into a well-ordered society.

You're getting downvoted because people don't like what you say, but NPR had a piece confirming this just this April:

https://www.npr.org/2026/04/10/nx-s1-5773327/women-men-jobs-...

Of the 369,000 jobs the Labor Department says were created since the start of Trump's second term, nearly all — 348,000 of them — went to women, with only 21,000 going to men. That's nearly 17 times as many jobs filled by women as by men.

In short, healthcare is the only field adding lots of jobs, and healthcare workers are something like 80% women. Men who are pursuing non-healthcare educational paths are much less likely to find a new job created for them; they'll have to compete for existing, filled jobs.

There are precedents for a lower workforce. It was not so long ago that women did not participate much in formal labor, but rather spent their creative energies improving their families and homes. That might not be an empowering choice today, and I'm not advocating for it, but it shows that the economy has in the past and probably still can get along perfectly well with a lot of sidelined labor capacity. The important thing is that the sidelined labor find some useful purpose outside the workplace rather than simply consuming welfare: in the past, domestic work like childrearing and social/emotional work like building community soaked up excess labor capacity and still had pro-social effects.

Is that movie why seemingly every Linux book in the late 90s and early 2000s used "darkstar" as an example hostname?

I was a bit surprised to see nested <div>s given as some sort of precursor pattern, when <dl> was part of HTML before 2.0 back in the days of table layout.