I’m reminded of Jon Ronson’s observation in “So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed”, that the religious right are surprisingly tolerant of sexual misconduct scandals in a way that progressives aren’t.

The current MAGA position seems to be that they weren’t children, they were just very very very young adults…

The kind of people they’re pissing off with this, are the same people most likely to switch to bittorrent.

Not even a good film.

One of the many stupid things about it is that generally speaking, most measures to reduce cars have the effect of making car travel more pleasant. It’s building tons of extra lanes that drives its own demand and makes driving slow and unpleasant.

The problem there is that a religious text loses its authority if it’s full of demonstrably incorrect statements. Falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus.

Once you’ve decided that you can just ignore anything that looks wrong, the Bible stops being a source of truth and becomes a Rorschach ink blot for you to see whatever you want in it.

My 3rd generation iPad became functionally useless after only 6-7 years even though the hardware was pristine. Almost half of the apps on it, including some major ones like YouTube, started refusing to run because they had a mandatory Update, and the App Store wouldn’t provide updates for the newest iOS version that the 3rd gen could support.

Meanwhile my Windows laptop that I bought at the same time is still in service after 12 years. Windows going out of support just means you don’t get the security updates; Apple going out of support means they’ll brick your machine.

Fuck Apple to infinity.

You use the lines of the chart that are relevant to the kind of journey you want to make. This should not need explaining.

You’re just being argumentative for its own sake.

I’d still measure both by ability to move dirt if my objective is to move dirt. This chart compares modes of transport; if your purpose for riding a bicycle is pleasure or cost or whatever then you can make your own personal adjustments, but if you want to decide what’s the safest way to do a daily 10 mile commute then this chart will give you that.

They spend over £50,000,000/year on care, research, and conservation.

A significant portion of what we know about the ancient world is a direct result of their research sharing and activities; for example when the Rosetta Stone was in French hands they kept it to themselves, when it was in Egypt they did nothing with it, but when it came to Britain it was shared with research departments across Europe as well as in Britain, resulting in our ability today to read hieroglyphics and demotic script.

Think about that for a second: if the Rosetta Stone had been left in Egypt, there’s every possibility that Egyptians today would still have no idea about most of their own history or how to read their own ancient texts. You might dismiss this as paternalistic or white-savioury, but it’s true nonetheless.

Even as recently as last year we had researchers finding things like https://www.ancient-origins.net/news-history-archaeology/babylonian-map-world-0021631 that simply wouldn’t have happened without the British Museum’s work. So, I’m inclined to cut them some slack.

Some of those are astonishing.

Safety Index: 71st, lower than Belarus, Lebanon, and Egypt.

Healthcare: 39th, worse than Argentina, Sri Lanka and Mexico

People give the British Museum a lot of shit, but it’s free all year round for everyone.

Because being in debt to the US and Europe has worked so many wonders for Africa…

I’m not sure how legit that account is. I’m not on Twitter, but I’ve definitely seen that handle at the top of a few other “magat gets their comeuppance” reposts.

It’s an issue with cost, but that also extends to the perception of the degree itself. Even a few decades ago I always found American culture to be generally more disdainful towards degrees and degree holders than most of Europe or Asia.

One of the worst things you can be in America is “elitist”; it’s a loaded word that describes a fundamentally Un-American attitude. And you can see why - there’s plenty of idiots with rich parents and a degree, and a lot of intelligent people with poor parents and no degree. So elitism and intellectual snobbery also imply classism and racism.

In countries with free/cheap tertiary education, it’s less controversial to say that people who are qualified to do a thing are likely to be better at that thing, and that getting qualifications is inherently a good thing.

In some ways it’s just as well to occasionally get a reminder that loyalty to a brand is a fundamentally bullshit concept in the first place.

Epic Boss Tim Sweeney can go fuck himself

He gazed up at the enormous face. Forty years it had taken him to learn what kind of smile was hidden beneath the dark moustache. O cruel, needless misunderstanding! O stubborn, self-willed exile from the loving breast! Two gin-scented tears trickled down the sides of his nose. But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.

If you can’t get your LLM to not deny the holocaust, then your LLM is not ready to get platformed on a major internet site.

I do too, but all the ones I used to visit have gone offline, and whenever I try looking for one on some relevant topic the most recent post is from 2017.