That is a good point.

It really depends if he’s trying to control the narrative (in which case he will want to control the bots) or to just keep people engaged with his products (in which case he doesn’t care).

Security services don’t base their personnel or their user-facing machines in commercial data-centers.

It’s as likely the C&C for Russian Government Propaganda ops is in Yandex data centers as it is that NSA personnel are working from Amazon data centers.

Well, you see, a lot of people have been convinced that Denialism or at best Non-Mainstreamism (a word I just made up) is the same as Skepticism and think they’re the latter when they’re mainly one or both of the former, not understanding that you have to actually think hard to be a Skeptic (as it’s mostly about logically and analytically testing what you are told before accepting it or rejecting it, and it’s definitely not just rejecting everything), not just engage in the low-cognitive near-brainless activities of criticizing everything and/or choose a side whose words one unthinkingly trusts that somehow is supposedly non-mainstream (hence “it’s not the same” as most people when they choose a side whose words they unthinkingly trust).

In a way it’s funny how human stupidity and the far too common lack of self-awareness and introspection have been weaponized in not just one but actually several ways to the point that even people who think themselves as “rebellious” are being led by the nose just like most of the rest.

It doesn’t actually make sense for Russia to be running their Digital Propaganda agents from Russian IP addresses unless they’re trying to make it easy for the likes of Meta and Twitter to just block them.

I mean, all you have to do is ponder for a few seconds on - “what would I do if I was a propagandist from an adversary nation trying to covertly influence citizens in other nations?”. The immediate, obvious thing is “I wouldn’t makes it stupidly obvious for the counter-intel people on the other side who owns them by hosting the fucking bots in my own country”.

It makes sense for them to have Command & Control in Russia, but not the actual bots.

Weak attempt at obfuscation. Nobody thinks “critical thinkers” are russian trolls; quite the opposite.

Oh, some (very few, IMHO) people will definitely call others “Russian Troll” or equivalent if they point out that Russian interference has far less power than the very much local ultra-rich, politicians and News-media owners when it comes to the current state of most Western nations and that it’s more likely that loudly raging about “foreign interference” is a political propaganda tool of mainstream politicians - a scapegoat for the consequences of the pillaging of the West by ultra-wealthy Westerns (paralleling how “immigrants” are similarly used as scapegoats by other mainstream politicians - they’re both very much “blame foreigners”) that said politicians very much supported and still support.

Also, don’t get me started on how the interference of other nations is much larger and more open - for example both main parties in the US and UK openly have groups amongst their “parliamentarians” who are “Friends of Israel”.

Russia almost certainly interfered or tried to, because it makes sense for them to do so and it’s very much how they’ve always operated, it’s just that it stretches belief to blame them for most of what’s going on, especially in light of the explosion in inequality, crash in social mobility, collapse in job security (mostly in Europe, the US was always so) and so on in the last couple of decades of Neoliberal political dominance that are for more likely to explain growing discontent and the News-media owned by billionaires very openly pushing far-right ideations 24/7.

In bigger countries foreigners generally don’t have the kind of influence that locals do, especially the wealthy and well-connected ones.

As I see it, there are definitely multiple manipulation machines in operation out there nowadays and multiple muppets whose brains are only big enough for simple explanations and who have have fallen for the slop some of them feed and will gladly spout their simplemindedness here.

That said a person who writes “The Russian government might not even need bot farms at this stage, because the West keeps undermining their own credibility” (amongst other such “jewels”) like the previous poster did clearly doesn’t fall into the “critical thinker” category.

“The more things change, the more they stay the same”

I’m think just Tech here, or maybe more specifically digital technology - the period till 2000 was mainly driven by techies, after than it was mainly driven by grifters, generally with backgrounds like Finance or Marketing, not Technology.

Many people seem to still have the idea that Techies lead Tech Startups, but that hasn’t been true for at least 2 decades.

Tech Bros have been trying to repeat the Net Boom almost immediately after that bubble burst - I think it didn’t take more than a couple of years after that Crash for the “Web 2.0” to start being paraded around like some kind of new gold rush that everybody should jump into and, as clearly visible in the list of hype techs you wrote, they just kept doubling down on the hype and the fraud ever since.

I actually was in Tech in the 90s and during the Crash, and then came back to that industry and into startups almost 2 decades later, and my feeling is that the point when the entire sector turned into nothing more than a giant grift was either a bit after the crash or, at best, just when the boom before it was peaking - I remember very clearly that in the 90s startups mostly started with somebody having a cool idea for tech, whilst in the 00s and onwards they mostly started with somebody having a business idea which was generally about setting oneself up as an intermediary in a kind of business transaction already done for decades, using the Internet and/or Smartphones to come up with a new twist for it and some way of becoming an aggregator/middle-man between both sides of the transaction.

Where’s the part about making an account to “share your score with your friends”.

Also missed the “Achievements”: the very first click should’ve triggered at least “Started your first sweep”, “Just got lucky: your blind click wasn’t a mine!”, “Cleared more than 10 blocks on 1 click” and “Cleared more than 20 blocks on 1 click”.

Also didn’t saw any “sweep store” selling things like “Safe-click: is this click hits a mine it transforms into a flag instead of exploding”.

I think this is more if Minesweeper was an AAA game 10 years ago.

The massive financial crash that will wipeout those assholes might the only real “win” the rest of us get.

Of course, judging by the last one in 2008 (which, IMHO, I suspect will turn out to be smaller than the AI one), governments the world over will try to save the assholes and make the rest of us pay for it with Austerity - if there’s one thing I’ve learned from living through a couple of major crashes (in the very industries most hard hit) and several minor ones is that when those in power see that they can rescue the wealthy whilst making the rest pay with no consequences for themselves, they’ll do it again and again in ever more extreme ways, until things at a societal level rather than just crack, actually blow up.

We shall see - there is really no way the rest of us can stop the desperate feeding frenzy amongst the increasingly panicked elites and their politician minions before the whole thing crashes from the systemic accumulation of inbalances, so no matter what we (the common folk) do, we’re going to get a massive AI crash - probably as big as the Net Crash and the 2008 Crash together - the more the feeding freenzy lasts (and governments as usual are activelly trying to delay the day of reckoning, hence making the feeding frenzy last longer and hit deeper) and the more of the broader Economy the sharks can reach, the worse it will be.

I’m still perfectly fine in my 6+ years old Gaming PC with 16GB.

But then again I switched from Windows to Linux about 2 years ago.

Since the time I started using PCs (over 3 decades ago), I went down the route of squeezing as much as I could from my desktop PCs by upgrading the hardware piece by piece rather than periodically buying a new one - to the point that I think I’ve done maybe just 3 full replacements in those 3 decades - the upgrades most of the time being memory, graphics cards and storage upgrades as those tend to be the best bang for the buck, though a few times all the way to replacing the motherboard (which sometimes forces things like memory upgrades and once even a computer box and power source upgrade, in the transition to ATX physical format).

All this to say that in the last few years since Windows has become so bloated and inneficient, Linux’s capabilities to run Windows software have become so good and the prices of the usually best value hardware upgrades (memory, graphics cards) have become so high that, in my (I believe informed) view, the best performance upgrade for one’s PC right now for most people is literally to replace Windows with Linux.

This isn’t fanboyism speaking - I’ve been using Linux for fun since the early 90s when I would install Slackware from floppy disks, professionally for a large part of my career (which was developing software for the server side, were Linux became dominant in the 00s) and only switched my Gaming PC to it 2 years ago because I before I didn’t feel it wasn’t at all hassle free to game in Linux and I didn’t want to come how to unwind from spending all day programming and doing bug-fixing just to be stuck at diagnosing problems running some game or other in Linux - this is genuinelly my analysis based on my experience of improving my PC almost always by targetted upgrading piece by piece to improve performance rather than regularly buying new machines.

In fact, I’ve done this upgrade not just for myself but also for a family member whose Windows 8 (!) PC had become incompatible with pretty much everything the used - put Linux in, put up the desktop shortcuts for them to get to what they use (browser, e-mail), configure the thing to auto-update and it’s problem solved.

What you describe is not at all my experience in Europe (mainly UK and Portugal, plus a bit Germany).

Small tills with not enough room for a big shopping, pushy and badly designed software, the whole “check your age” for alcohol with a single employee handling 20+ self-checkout tills, the thing bitching and moaning if you bring your own bag, different quirks for self-checkout tills in different stores, not taking cash payments and so on, are incredibly common and what’s rare is the ones which work smoothly.

I mean, I would love those schemes some people describe (in Scandinavia?) were you basically check things in as you pick them up, but I have yet to see anything like that myself in the countries I lived in during the self-checkout era.

So far all I’ve seen in Europe are shit cheap implementations which only ever beat the manual checkout in speed if all you have is a handful of things (so, not a weekly shopping) or the store itself purposefully closed pretty much all manual tills and caused huge queues in order to push people to use self-checkout.

PS: By the way, in my experience in Europe, it’s always you that pack your own bags, which actually makes the manual checkout even faster since at the same time the cashier is doing the checkout you’re doing the bagging, so the whole thing can go twice as fast whilst in a self-checkout it’s only one person doing both.

What crossing his legs?

He’s literally fidgeting with his feet and pretty much stammering whilst saying that AI has created more jobs.

I’m actually surprised a guy with the experience he must have in public speech isn’t good at hiding discomfort.

From his body language (look at his feet) and speech patterns it sure feels like he’s just lying his ass off.

The flawed part in the article is the claim that the effect is circular.

Inflation is the change in prices (well, Inflation specifically is the increase whilst Deflation is the decrease), so for Inflation to remain positive driven by oil prices, then oil prices would need to no just go up but to keep going up continuously. If oil prices at some point stop going go up then broader prices stop going up and hence Mathematically Inflation due to oil prices is then 0%

So Iran would need to keep oil prices increasing for inflation to continue to be high (remember, inflation is the change in price, the first order derivative of the price, not the price itself) and hence via the Taylor Rule as explained in that investor letter, for the FED to keep interest rates higher than otherwise.

That means over time oil going up through $150 and up through $200, through $250 and so on.

How exactly can Iran keep oil prices going up if all they have is this one “tap” and they’ve pretty much closed it all already?

Now, you can say that prices keep going up as long as the Supply remains unbalance with the Demand and below it.

True.

The thing is, both Supply and Demand react to higher oil prices:

• If oil prices keep going up that makes alternative and more costly ways of extracting oil (tar sands, fracking of lower yield reserves) become viable so they will start being exploited and oil will come online eventually stabilizing oil prices, so oil prices stop increasing hence inflation due to oil becomes 0%.

• Meanwhile when oil prices remain high, the consumer side adapts and reduces consumption. This was something visible during the oil crisis in the 70s and I expect that in the age of EVs it’s going the happen faster and further. We’re already seeing what I believe is and indication of this happening - the increase in the sale of EV cars as a percentage of total car sales accelerated significantly since gas prices went up. This too will eventually cause a new Supply-Demand balance to be reached for a supply without any oil from the Gulf and oil prices will stop going up.

So there’s pressure on both the Supply side and the Demand side which will, given enough time, stop further oil price rises and maybe even bring oil prices down (which would be the very opposite of Inflation) since because there is a delay in producers and consumers responding to higher prices, the price tends to overshoot the final stable value, and this is especially on the consumer side since the moves to replace oil with for example electric, once done don’t easilly reverse.

Mind you, a one-off that will help Iran push oil prices up is the American and European strategical oil reserves which are currently being drawn down to avoid oil prices going up even more, will run out, by which point we will see the oil prices jump up (or go steadily up if the European and American governments slowly reduce the drawing of oil from their reserves over time instead of going full tilt until they’re empty), but as I said, this is a one time event.

In summary, yeah Iran can do this for a little while (maybe a few years) but not beyond that, plus there is a balancing on it from nonviable oil extraction becoming viable and consumer replacement which make the price over time an horizontal asymptotic curve (meaning it tends towards a ceiling at X = infinity) and it’s unclear what the ceiling for oil prices is, but it won’t be a infinite price and even things like $200 a barrel will open up the exploitation of a ton of oil reserves which are currently not viable to exploit because the cost is too high for it to be profitable at current oil prices as well as convince a lot of people to drive much less and to replace ICE cars with EVs.

Not only that - wiretaps have Judicial Oversight in that they require a Court Order (well, in most of the World, not sure if that’s the case in present day America) which a Judge supposedly only issues if there’s reason to suspect the person whose lines are tapped of committing or preparing to commit a crime, whilst Antrophic’s surveillance of people’s conversations with their chatbot has no Judicial Oversight at all and has no minimum legal threshold that must be reached before it is allowed to happen.

Yeah, I had a similar experience getting my Orange Pi 5 Pro to just allow me access to I2C (though once you figure it out, it’s a lot easier to also get stuff like GPIO, SPI and so on to work).

In fact that’s the general problem with the chinese SBCs compared to the Raspberry Pi devices - their support software, documentation and general support out there on the Internet from other users is a much weaker, at least in English - to get that stuff to work I actually on my Orange Pi I actually had to get an Ubuntu for Rockchip and then figure out how to manually add a device tree overlay with the required devices enabled whilst I believe the Raspberry Pi just has a utility that does it for you.

HOWEVER, the user who had asked for advice higher in this thread only seems to care about hosting, for which you just need “normal” Linux functionality not the embedded side of things, in which case those things work just fine even with just ARMbian - as far as I can tell all those manufactures do make available a Linux distro for their devices which supports the built-in peripherals (most relevant for hosting, wi-fi and when present ethernet) and does the normal things a desktop Linux does. That said, they quickly stop pushing out updates to it, which might be a problem.

This is why I mentioned Orange Pi and in another response suggested general Chinese SBCs - if all you need if run-of-the-mill Linux server functionality in a cheap platform, those probably suffice.

I just checked and at least the Orange Pi ones are maybe 50% up in price.

It’s almost as if they’re trying to sell as much as possible now, at what is likely to be the peak price for a long while …