America has 40% more traffic fatalities per km driven than the European Union and has less stringent emissions standards (especially for the Hilux's category, which is actually why giant SUVs became so popular over the years).
The US government doesn't even bother with these spurious pretexts anymore. They openly admit that they want to coddle local automakers to ensure that the government has a supply chain of transportation vehicles in wartime. It's quite literally socialism for the entire American auto sector.
“Today, Apple is proud to report a remarkable, record-breaking quarter, with revenue of $143.8 billion, up 16 percent from a year ago and well above our expectations,” said Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO. “iPhone had its best-ever quarter driven by unprecedented demand, with all-time records across every geographic segment, and Services also achieved an all-time revenue record, up 14 percent from a year ago. We are also excited to announce that our installed base now has more than 2.5 billion active devices, which is a testament to incredible customer satisfaction for the very best products and services in the world.”
Interesting that services revenue growth (+14% YoY) is less than overall revenue growth (+16% YoY).
It really shows the reliance on the iPhone for revenue growth remains, with iPhone giving 23% YoY revenue growth, while Mac and wearables declined YoY.
So what? Google has been plugging its phone with AI features blah blah. The vast majority dont care about AI to the extent its going to hurt Apple at all. They know that too. Hence they continue going-on and not dumping hundreds of billions into chasing AGI.
I disagree. Samsung Notes has always been more useful and better designed than Google Keep, especially the way it works with the S-pen. GoodLock makes it possible to customize your Galaxy phone in ways that are impossible even with developer mode on the Pixel series.
How do those relate? If the agency has been told to look at specific types of people to check for their papers, does it matter the race of the enforcers?
The author did not make such a statement, rather (it appears to me), that they were surprised instead by the lack of empathy exhibited by said similar-origin agents. A feeling that is shared by a lot of people who are opposed to the inhumane brutality being meted out, without repercussions, by ICE agents.
Because race is a story we tell ourselves, it turns out to not be as hard as one might assume to bend the story to make ingroups and outgroups out of people that, to an outside observer, should have more in common than their interactions suggest they do.
Anyone can do that. How often so you think a racist CEO funds a fascist president who funds the opression of immigrants, killing them?
Anyway,you are in personal responsibiliry land and been told you are tge master of your domain. Rarely do people who think individuality is paramount care about society. Your example along allows you to fixate on anecdotes because they hit your dopami e.
It's relevant, because border patrol on the Southern border is heavily staffed by Hispanic officers, in part because they need officers that are bilingual as most immigration happening on the Southern border is from Spanish-speaking countries. But these same officers as a matter of policy are told to racially profile and target vehicles with Hispanic occupants. Power structures need the complicity of at least some defectors from the targeted group to be effective.
Further, within racial groups colorism is also a thing and can result in behaviors that seem incongruent. I've heard some of my in-laws say things like "I'm Mexican, but I'm not Mexican Mexican." It's not something people want to think about or admit, but racial identity is not a bloc, and these types of colorist attitudes can contribute to why folks may defect against their racial group to side with power structures.
Living in South Texas, I see a lot of shit, and what was said in the article neither surprised me nor seemed like a detail meant to evoke a race card. If anything it was pointing out that the officers pitted against the writer should theoretically had some empathy rather than acting out racial profiling. The truth is, that racial profiling happens a lot and sometimes the people doing it are of the same race as those being profiled.
I think people really misunderstand what racism is, and how Trump used the delusion of racists to make them all think they were gonna get "their" racism satisfied, when in fact, he was only refering to his and his staffs racism, which is mostly the same as Nazis.
The fact that he was hispanic is in fact why he was harassed. The fact that some hispanics align with racism in the duty of Trump isn't confusing when you understand they might've thought he was venezualan while they're all cuban or whatever. They might have easily be enforcing their brand of racism.
The reason thinks like "LatinX" were rejected by latinos wasn't cause they hated liberals, it was because most of the south/central Americans have their own ethnographic racisms, and Trump tapped into that by essentially convincing them that he'd go after the "illegal" ones, and all the racists replaced illegal with whatever ethnographic/nationalist they hated.
So after all that, I assum you have no idea why hispanics deputized with federal power would pick on other hispanics, do you? Cause what you're demonstrating is the nazi POV of racism.
It's certainly easier than setting up and maintaining a VPS and probably less expensive for most users, but your data is not private. Cloudflare can always read everything that goes through Moltworker and its attached storage.
Hosting Moltbot on your own hardware reigns supreme.
I think if you care about privacy and security, you wouldn't run moltbot in the first place (or wouldn't give it access to anything you wanted to keep private).
That overstates it a bit. Yeah, it's mostly vibe-coded and the main dev has publicly said he has yet to review the reported vulnerabilities. I am aware that it can be easily pwned with prompt injection from its data sources.
I'm running it on my old Mac mini right now and I have not given it access to untrusted inputs like my email inbox. It only has access to my filesystem (synced to my laptop with Syncthing), local applications like Apple Reminders, and OpenRouter. I already find it useful for augmenting web searches with stuff that's in my Obsidian vault.
If you’re letting it access websites then presumably it’s open to prompt injection from those sites you’re accessing? I guess the attack surface is reduced if it doesn’t have access to anything useful beyond that.
The host actually gets RAM back after bursty workloads in the container thanks to memory ballooning. Containers also start up to 5x faster and `npm install` is also much faster because OrbStack uses macOS-specific APIs as much as possible.
The Orbstack dashboard is also something you'll actually enjoy using. It's a native Swift app that launches instantly, not Electron. You get resolvable hostnames for all your containers (though I use traefik instead). Opening a container's filesystem in Finder is another nice trick, I use that one now and then.
Dagger has been a godsend in helping me cope with the unending misery that is GitHub Actions. A big thanks to you and the whole team at Dagger for making this possible.
Thank you for the kind words! I'd love to show you a demo of the new features we're working on, and get your thoughts. Want to DM me on the Dagger discord server? Or email me at solomon@dagger.io
The vast majority of "likers" have never been real people in any case. All of the prominent accounts are boosted by bots and Mechanical Turk users in economically underdeveloped countries. This has been shown numerous times by comparing the likes/impressions ratios for different accounts posting similar content.
Anecdotally, I have been 'liking' (as a verb) posts about 3x more after anonymity went into effect. I used to be anonymous on X until I started meeting people at IRL events and then had to be more cautious about what I broadcast to my network. Anonymized likes gave me back a lot of that freedom.
Pretty much all of these social media companies have been built on a foundation of fraud. It's understandable why, the easiest way to break the chicken-and-egg problem of network effects is to simply cheat and use bots to make the platform look popular. It is nonetheless fraud, and the criminal DNA of these companies never goes away.
> the easiest way to break the chicken-and-egg problem of network effects is to simply cheat and use bots to make the platform look popular.
In relatively early days of Reddit, before mainstream awareness, I thought it suspicious how clever or knowledgeable so many of the comments were. Better than any other general-purpose venue I could think of.
So, when telling people about Reddit, I'd sometimes remark that I suspected they'd enlisted a bunch of writer shills, to frontload and elevate their comments traffic.
Maybe it was all genuine and organic, and an artifact of the voting system and network effects, while the bar for quality was set so low by some other venues.
Though, years after Reddit was mainstream, I heard something about the founders originally writing a lot of the comments themselves.
Reddit is an interesting case but at least to me it felt genuine in the early years. Even today I generally trust Reddit comments, but it's important to check the context and commentor before proceeding.
I feel like even though Reddit has undergone various management changes, technology changes, site UI/UX changes -- the core demographic is still there and I hope they don't fuck that up. Once old.reddit.com is gone I'll know the shark has truly jumped. Or maybe someone intelligent will get reigns and understand that domain is not to be fucked with.
IIRC Reddit used to have an option that only admins could see that would allow them to write comments under other accounts without going through the trouble of registering them/logging into them/etc.
The internet itself went through a similar growth pattern without astroturf. The original users were all researchers, which served as a strong implicit filter, and then the new users were students who had to be taught Netiquette every September, and eventually the floodgates opened to the public and the academics lost the ability to steer the culture in what was called The Eternal September (1993).
The same "initial implicit filter followed by gradual but inevitable reversion to the mean" dynamic explains your observations of early reddit without implying fraud, although it certainly doesn't imply the absence of fraud either. That said, "fraud" is probably a strong word for reddit astroturf in this present day and age where we have a (comparatively) planet-sized Dead Internet built on geological quantities of ads and slop.
If they started out doing this, why wouldn't they continue to do this in the form of click fraud for advertising? Surely if they could create some minimum % of click fraud for each ad, they make more money and it would fly under the radar of their customers looking into it...
> People buying ads are their real customers, users are there to be exploited.
It's one level further. The global intelligence apparatus is the real customer, and they economically reward those who would build the most-surveillable and/or most-opinion-influencing products and services.
I meant more that what is stopping platforms like Meta from generating a small-ish amount of click fraud, under the guise of the fake user framework they initially setup for kickstarting engagement, to juice their revenue.
> This has been shown numerous times by comparing the likes/impressions ratios for different accounts posting similar content.
That seems like dubious methodology. Obviously if a celebrity posts something that's going to get more engagement than some rando, even accounting for the difference in impressions.
> I wonder what the top Republican leaders honestly think about these foreseeable outcomes
It doesn't matter what they think. Trump's message resonates with the electorate much more effectively than theirs, partly because of his political brand and partly because he has a network of social media acolytes who broadcast his messaging to each segment and demographic. It's a positive feedback loop wherein anyone who dares to go off-message or criticize his decisions gets instantaneous blowback from the MAGA audience themselves, so they quickly recalibrate. At this point, Trump has built a metaphorical tower of skulls of political foes within the party (e.g. Marjorie Taylor Greene).
Despite everything that has happened over the past year, the Democrats only have a few percentage points lead over the Republicans in current midterm polling. As an outside observer: Absolutely wild. I know a lot about the reasons, but it still feels completely surreal.
Trump is not unique. You can find similar parties and figures in most of Europe. Usually the would-be autocrat populist is even more popular than in the US in two party systems. Multi party systems dilute it which just leads to paralysis until eventually >40% of your population is ok with abandoning democracy because the impacts of paralysis are stacking up (France).
The democrats have been an absolute failure of a party for the last decade and the fact their voters refuse to hold leadership accountable for those failures says everything you need to know.
There should have been a house-clearing of leadership up and down the party apparatus in 2016 and again in 2024 but nope. We'd rather hope those perpetual losers get their act together out of fear of the unknown.
The Democratic party is the reason Sanders did not win. Their refusal to back progressives in any meaningful way is exactly what I'm talking about. The dems would sooner let Trump have a 3rd term than allow a progressive like Mamdani to win the presidency, which is precisely my point.
He can’t actually do much with votes in Congress he doesn’t have. Take money from programs via executive order? Ok, I guess. Cut checks to voters with that money? Even the Supreme Court would blush at that.
They don't share Trump's message, or not exactly. They share an edited version of it. That seems to be why Trump has started insisting he's serious repeatedly. The conservative media is ignoring or toning down the least popular ideas.
It matters to me, because they were not powerless to stop this scenario. The point of a representative democracy.
After January 6th, Mitch McConnell could have whipped up the votes to impeach Trump. Forever banishing him from office. Or over the past four years, when asked, "Did Donald Trump lose the election" instead of equivocating, every Congressperson could have said, "Of course he did. Donald Trump is a loser who lost a fair election, but threw a tantrum when the result did not go his way."
Liz Cheney took a stand, and the party punished her for it. Trump was too popular, Republicans preferred to latch onto that energy, despite the consequences.
No raindrop thinks it is responsible for the flood. These leaders enabled this scenario, because they (correctly!) predicted it could help them hold onto power. Now we watch the results unfold as the world does everything to extricate itself from the USA.
America has 40% more traffic fatalities per km driven than the European Union and has less stringent emissions standards (especially for the Hilux's category, which is actually why giant SUVs became so popular over the years).
The US government doesn't even bother with these spurious pretexts anymore. They openly admit that they want to coddle local automakers to ensure that the government has a supply chain of transportation vehicles in wartime. It's quite literally socialism for the entire American auto sector.