You start your life by forgetting your past. All the times you fell over, were hungry or overtired, or shat your pants as a baby or toddler. You don’t remember that time unless something happened that’s traumatizing in the extreme. Somewhere between that age and when you start school you start retaining memories. Not all of them but enough to reminisce. You’re growing still so every day is a new experience and not everything makes the cut. And then you age. Once you cross 40 you’ll notice a lot more that you cannot remember why you went to the garage but you can remember all the teachers from your elementary school days. Most of your classmates too but that guy’s name in Accounting who you talk to every other day is nowhere to be found. And when you reach an age where death is becoming likely every day, you reminisce and you remember lots of stuff from ages ago but not what you had for breakfast. Dementia fucks with you but they remember their moody teenage music tastes and react more to that than their own offspring.

Memory retention is not a linear thing.

I’m going to guess yes, the mass increases. I’m not sure about physical size because it may just be density. But I also feel like I should stop talking out of my ass now.

Trick question: it’s until the heat death of the entire universe. You get turned into this long spaghetti that gets absorbed at an increasingly slowing rate. So your scalp or your feet never quite make it to the inside.

This may be less than accurate because I’m not an expert.

It’s funny you picked Apple computers because they were in a legal fight with Apple records of Beatles fame who’ve been around longer and were only allowed to keep the name if they stayed out of the music business. Which went well until iTunes and then they found themselves back in the lawsuit.

I’m not an Apple user so I cannot answer your question there. I just wanted to add another way to get ad-free podcasts. If the podcast offers a patreon feed, any RSS-based podcatcher anywhere will be able to do this.

They would have to try fighting it on non-trademark grounds. However, being able to point at having been awarded one afterwards may carry some weight there as well. My impression is that their strategy doesn’t rest on this alone.

The strategy behind this is also to be able to sue after the fact to get a cut of whatever was created from stuff that ought to have been protected but wasn’t. It’s not just a clip of him doing triple alrights that he applied for TM for. There is also one of him sitting down, one of him standing up. They tried to cover a whole spread of sora et. al. generated bullshit. It’s an interesting strategy that is only necessary because the law on the books lags behind the developments in image or video generation. It may not work at all but it’ll be a success if they win one case with this.

I hope you are right. I personally don’t see it. I think we cannot underestimate the cult factor. All it takes is a Vance or an orange (or even the deviant MTG) to point at it and screech like a Body Snatcher: “It’s socialism! It’s handouts! Kill it with fire!” It won’t matter what you branded it as. Their branding will be stronger.

I am afraid that this isolated (and probably edited and not very scientific) example of people seeing the power is reason will not scale to the masses. The fear of socialism is irrational and I don’t think you can fix that with rational explanations alone. It’s not like people like Sanders or Ocasio-Cortez aren’t trying and there is enough of a base to get them elected - but not into executive power. On top of that you have the MAGA cult followers who would happily vote against their own self interest if they can say they owned the libs in the process.

I chose him because he is generally well liked. I haven’t heard anybody shit talk him. I don’t see him as a person of inaction or unaccountability. I do see him as somebody who acts from a set of values and who can heal wounds thoughtfully (without letting perpetrators go unpunished). Go ahead and replace him in your mind with somebody who fits that profile.

The problem with American politics is that it affects the whole world but the rest of the world doesn’t get a say. If you organize armed resistance against 47, that becomes very active when he declares himself king with no more elections, you are looking at a civil war 2.0. The right-wing supporters are already armed and organized, you’d give them something to shoot at. And the standing military will probably majority side more with the other side. At the same time, while the US is distracted by killing each other at a higher rate than usual, China will grab Taiwan, Russia will push through to the Elbe river, etc. So it would be better for the rest of the world if you could not solve this predicament by force/assassination. Protest, strikes, use politics. But I can totally understand why the sentiment to use the 2nd amendment for its stated purpose for a change is an appealing option.

A socialist will not win 2028, provided there even is an election. NYC is not representative of the whole country. And most Americans are still on this cold war hangover where socialism became a dirty word. An outspoken socialist would not win. Unless we get another great depression - which will if history is our guide more likely lead to war. Or if they manage to fake centrism so believably well and are then okay to be a one-termer once they show their real colors. The Democrats need a Mr. Rogers type politician (preferably male, blame the Midwest) without scandals (so nobody from CA) who can appeal to a sense of decency again. #MADA

I don’t think this would’ve happened though if there hadn’t been the societal impetus that aided adoption. The singular they may have been around since Chaucer or Shakespeare - ~30 years ago, people didn’t really use it. There was far more “he or she” going on, that’s now been more commonly replaced with a “they,” also because it’s shorter. English benefits from the fact that the neutral pronoun slots right in to the existing grammar. Other languages struggle with finding such a neutral replacement because it’s more often than not a new word and a slightly altered grammatical function. English is okay on the first problem and arguably okay to mostly okay on the second.

Laaaast Christmas …

So this scientist believes this? Huh.

Jenson Huang is doing a lot of damage there.

I’m not in front of my desktop right now but IIRC there is a setting as what browser Vivaldi should present somewhere in the settings. My suspicion is you have that set as ‘Chrome.’

You’re right, it could’ve been a case of preemptive obedience by the censors, based on popularity and face-losing potential of the meme. I vaguely remember reading about him not being pleased. But it’s also been a decade.

In terms of how this is reported, at what point does this become streisanding by proxy? I think anything from the Melon deserves to be scrutinized and called out for missteps and mistakes. At this point, I personally don’t mind if the media is overly critical about any of that because of his behavior. And what I’m reading about Grok is terrible and makes me glad I left Twitter after he bought it. At the same time, these “put X in a bikini” headlines must be drawing creeps towards Grok in droves. It’s ideal marketing to get them interested. Maybe there isn’t a way to shine the necessary light on this that doesn’t also attract the moths. I just think in about ten years’ time we will get a lot of “I started undressing people against their will on Grok and then got hooked” defenses in court rooms. And I wonder if there would’ve been a way to report on it without causing more harm at the same time.

The economy is shit. No matter who will be in charge, they will fight an uphill battle.

There is one example in recent history where the reinstallation of the monarchy went great (=as well as it could): Spain. The monarch let the country slide from a dictatorship into a constitutional monarchy. One that decided to pull the veil of silence over the crimes of the old regime but still a democracy. So let’s hope the possible return of the Shah follows the Spanish example more than anything else.

I don’t think anyone can predict what will happen in Iran. My gut feeling is that a collapse of the current regime will lead to a fracturing of the country, something like a civil war between moderates and religious fundamentalists. A mix of what happened in Libya post Gaddafi, Iraq post regime change, and Syria post Assad. The overthrow of the mullahs will only be the first step.