Pissing into the wind.

Yeah, that’s been a long term problem for them.

I don’t want to see a modern Japan on war footing. I also don’t want to see a modern China on war footing. But here we go.

1.5% per month. Don’t compare directly to your home country’s annual inflation yet. Unless you’re Turkey or Russia.

Someone I know was in St Petersburg last week. The government shut down the internet due to this meeting, and we totally lost touch with them. But the internet being shut down in a major Russian city to quash any attempt to protest doesn’t even make news anymore.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidaxe/2025/01/22/like-the-spartans-in-thermopylae-a-dozen-ukrainian-commandos-battled-scores-of-north-koreans-for-eight-long-hours-in-kursk/

https://www.forcesnews.com/ukraine/british-commandos-helped-generals-leave-ukraine-start-war-investigation-finds

You have a confirmation bias.

Corporate journalism is digging (no pun intended) its own grave in many cases.

A feedback cycle where no one wants to pay for content, so advertisers are needed to fund their staff, which means clicks and engagement become the metric of success. But, the solution is either publicly funded news (largely unpopular), or regulating the open internet (more unpopular). So, yeah, the death of corporate journalism is coming.

I wrote for Ars for a brief period, on Linux topics. This was prior to the digg exodus. As a writer, I got a set rate for each page of content, with an expected average word count per page. I’d get a bonus anytime my story hit the front page of digg, slashdot, or similar aggregater. It happened a few times.

But that bonus incentive meant I was encouraged to specifically write stories that would resonate with those audiences. It wasn’t fraud or a scam – it was free market economic pressure. But the effect was the same – I was tailoring my content to maximize aggregator exposure.

I began to submit my own stories to Slashdot and similar, because a minute of my time could pay me $100 or whatever.

I am not sure that reddit is biased towards these publications as much as they are likely intentionally gaming the algorithms, and encouraging their writers to do the same – write content you know will hit the frontpage. I don’t think it is wrong necessarily, but it certainly isn’t organic.

That said, Ars generally has very high quality content due to some very good reporters. Eric Berger comes to mind. So it could be both effects: quality and gaming the system.

Things like platinum notwithstanding, It will almost always be more expensive to go get things in space than on earth.

Hell, even on earth it is often too expensive to get metals like iron if there isn’t rail or a port nearby. Imagine having to fly iron ingots around and the associated aviation fuel cost. Whatever crazy fuel bill you’re imagining, multiply by a hundred or more if you’re imagining getting it from space.

No, all of those metals in space are best used to build some future version of our civilization _in situ. _

Very true. However, it doesn’t add new material to the equation. If we need it to build electrical infrastructure, recycling won’t suffice.

Recycling aluminum is actually literally the best thing you can recycle in terms of environmental impact and cost efficiency. There are other things we recycle, but nothing pays off nearly as well.

That alternative material is aluminum. It’s like a top four abundance material in the crust. It’s just super fucking hard to refine from minerals that don’t like to give it up without oodles of energy. Like, turn minerals into plasma levels of energy. So the irony is, to grow our energy economy past the need for copper, we will first need to grow our energy economy.

Should fusion ever actually meet its promise, then this is one of the likely things we could do with this level of energy.

If we ever become a spacefaring civilization, it’ll almost certainly be necessary during the colonization of other planets/moons/asteroids, since the geological processes that concentrate copper on the earth are not present in those places. Whereas aluminum is plentiful any place rocky.

Bernie would have arrived with a plan, at at least something better than a concept of a plan. Assuming he decided to put tariffs on China, he probably would have raised tariffs slowly, announcing everything clearly in advance. So the market has time to spin up alternatives instead of sudden shocks causing inflation.

American ingredients in domestic made stuff is the next target.

Yeah, it’s easy to forget sometimes that they were actually pretty good coders to get started. Obviously that doesn’t always translate to corporate leadership. But hey, assembly is far better than Zuckerberg’s start (PHP?)

Probably mostly AI written.

That’s paraphrasing a bit. Chekov’s rule is about conservation of narrative real estate, no about the gun itself. It wasn’t even consistently true of his own works. The real world is not a stage play and armies created for deterrence don’t need to be used.

Long article for one sentence of trivia and no info on the algo itself. The death of the internet is upon us.

That’s a crazy amount of people under any circumstances. World, take note - this is how you protest.

This is because AI (vis-a-vis LLMs) became a religion to many, rather than a technology.

It’s going to be much much worse than just “hard to get a visa” – this shitball is rolling downhill and anyone brown should be considering another country.

First they came for…