I think that is really the core of it.

I remember that it took months of discussions, compromises and buttering up specific opposition members to get it passed, and that it was a trimmed-down version of the original Medicare plans.

I wish I could remember where, but when answering a question very similar to the OP’s - perhaps in an interview? - Obama explained that he would have very much liked to tackle two big things: health care and climate, but that his party’s resources were stretched too thin to do both at the same time and that he knew they would loose control of the house in the midtems (2011), so he picked one thing.

I don’t know why that comment is collecting downvotes. They are referencing George Orwell’s “Animal Farm.”

Context: “Animal Farm” is a story about how communism can devolve into dictatorship. In the story, the animals on a farm drive out their tyrannical drunkard farmer. They write on the barn wall: “all animals are equal” and live in communist utopia. But some animals, too, hunger for power and status. Rather than overturn the system, they undermine it by adding “…but some animals are more equal than others” to the barn wall, legitimizing a ruling class (themselves) because they are “more equal.”

Disclaimer: I wondered the same, since 2014, and this is what I puzzled together for myself, read it with that in mind!

I believe a lot of it can be traced back to the wealthy and to conservative think tanks / media control by right wing moguls.

Back in the 1960s and 1970s, conservatives were perceived as well-off business people trying to protect their own wealth (I’ve read that people used to say things like “I’m not rich enough to vote Republican” or children shouting “last one in the house is a dirty Republican”). You can even see old movies dunk on conservatives (i.e. take Stanley Kubrick’s “2010: The Year we Make Contact” (1984), at the beginning, with the satellite dish tower, the protagonist noses off about reactionaries being in control of congress, thus leading the country towards war).

This is the rather extreme election result from 1964:

Because liberals mostly were Democratic Party voters, Republicans and their wealthy donors tried to alter public perception of liberals (i.e. make it undesirable for their Republican indoctrinatees to be liberal). This included taking over the media (and Reagan conveniently cancelling the Fairness Doctrine in 1987, which gave political bias in the media some guard rails), then painting liberals as all things undesirable: arrogant, weak, clueless, leeches, etc.

Having a “hate object” worked so well that they kept capitalizing on it. Much of it was/is just slinging sh*t against the wall and looking what sticks, but think tanks are indeed looking at what sticks, so successful patterns get repeated. Some of these successful patterns I can see are: installing a victim complex in conservatives (feeling their back against the wall, they lash out easier, ensuring anyone talking about conservatives is conditioned to use very soft gloves) and the two-year bogeyman, often trying to capture, redefine and vilify some prior existing concept (thus, when the campaign hits, indoctrinatees can find lots of “proof” online of this thing existing).

For example, social justice used to be universally agreed on as a good thing, woke used to mean remaining aware of systemic inequalities, now they make conservatives pop an artery. This has been going for a while (the “hate object” over time has been rock music, hippies, metal music, supposed satan worshippers, pen and paper games, paganism+atheism, video games, social justice activists, cancel culture, black lives matter, critical race theory, wokeness, …)

And I think, yes, your perception is spot on. This is, for example, what I get when I search for “anti-conservative t-shirts” (if it’s too tiny, try it yourself - they’re all anti-liberal):

TL;DR: conservatives are intentionally made and kept angry. It keeps them unified against a bigger enemy (see Genghis Gambit), drives them to go vote and prevents voters from switching sides even if they do not like some things the conservatives are doing. Add to that Russia amplifying this division like there’s no tomorrow. They’re installing this hate for liberals both in tankies and in far-right bigots (and, as far as I can tell, anti-liberal sentiment is pushed into Russian society, too).

Just some thoughts:

• Current LLMs (chat AIs) are “frozen brains.” (Over-)Simplified, the synapses on the AI’s input neurons are given the 2048 prior words (the “context”) and the AI’s output synapses mean a different word each, so the synapse that lights up most strongly is the next word the AI will say. Then the picked word is added to the “context” and the neural network is executed once more for the next next word.

• Coming up with the weights of the synapses takes insane effort (run millions of books through the “context” and look if the AI t predicts the next word correctly, if not, change a random synapse). Afaik, GPT-4 was trained on more than 2000 NVidia A100 GPUs for somewhere around 4 to 7 months, I think they mentioned paying for 7.5 Megawatt hours.

• If you had a super computer that could keep running the AI with live training, the AI’s ability to string up words would likely, and quickly, degrade into incoherence because it would just ingest and repeat whatever went into it. Existing biological brains have these complex mechanisms of distilling experiences and evaluating them in terms of usefulness/success of their own actions.

.

I think that foundation, that part that makes biological brains put the action/consequence in the foreground of the learning experience, rather than just ingesting, is what eludes us. Perhaps at some future point in time, we could take the initial brain structure that grows in a human as the seed for an AI (but I guess then we’d likely have to simulate all the highly complex traits of real neurons, including mixed chemical and electrical signaling and possibly even quantum-level effects that have been theorized).

I think you’re mistaken there.

Wine is a vanilla Linux executable that runs as the user who launched it. The Windows program it runs thus also runs under that user. That’s possible because Wine doesn’t do anything system-wide (like intercepting calls or anything), it already gave the process its own version of i.e. LoadLibrary() (the Windows API function to load a DLL) and can happily remap any loaded DLL to Wine’s reimplementation of said DLL as needed.

Here are, for example, the processes created when I run Paint Shop Pro on my system (the leftmost column indicates the user each process is running as):

Also, some advice from WineHQ:

After reading, the gist of it seems to be:

• Vanilla far-right indoctrinated dumbo (his vision: “Reds” welcome, “Blues” not, “Anti-Blue Propaganda” on public view screens)
• Wants exploitative capitalism on steroids with companies controlling everyone’s lives completely
• Claims current capitalism is only bad because it’s “woke capitalism” which he claims the “ruling class” is pushing
• Wants tech bros to butter up police and give security staff jobs to their children as a favor, i.e. intentional social classism

.

In short, just another out of touch entrepreneur who sells snake oil cures to people suffering in the current system, so that they may invite in the boot that stomps them down for good.

I’m always hopeful, but at this point, I seriously doubt Russia’s sincerity. Past ceasefire agreements, for example, were broken by Russian attacks, usually within hours of the agreement taking effect.

That would (just like Git LFS) store full, separate copies of every single version of the large files I manage. I really, really don’t want to go there, nor do I have even a fraction of the hard drive space for that…

That’s what I meant when I wrote “Git submodules can only point to a whole different repository” - they can’t point to a path inside a repository, only to another repository root. That unfortunately renders them useless for me (I’d have to set up in the order of hundreds of small repositories for the sets of shared data I have).

I’m already using Git for source code related versioning, but some use cases involving large binary files with partial updates aren’t well covered by Git (I’ve gone into some detail in my reply to @vvv@programming.dev).

There’s also the lack of svn:externals in Git. Git submodules can only point to a whole different repository as far as I’m aware.

I’m already using Git, thus my experience with Gitea. I am well versed with svndumpfilter and git-svn to extract and migrate individual Subversion repositories to Git.

I’m not only hosting code, but I have several projects involving large binary files with binary changes. Git’s delta compression algorithm for binary files is so-so. Git LFS is just outsourcing the problem. Even cloning with --depth 1 --single-branch gives me abysmal performance compared to Subversion.

So I’m still looking for a nice WebUI to make my life with the Subversion repositories I have easier.

After finding out that tools that are to “bureaucratic” don’t stick with me (bureaucratic as in, I need to fill out forms to create projects/tasks, update them and follow defined workflows), I ended up with Trilium.

It at first looks like a very free-form note taking app (a tree of documents on the left, click and edit away), but it has a lot of extra functionality that lets you construct journals and tasks lists in the document tree (like its Task Manager which is already set up in the Demo notes of a new Trilium install).

There’s a hard sci-fi novel (1970s or 1980s) called “Tau Zero” that features this idea.

Reading that formed an interesting question in my (also non-physicist) mind:

If we can, at most, take advantage of relativity to slow down our own time frame, then time could just be our way to describe the pace of how space changes around us following simple causality.

But if, on the other hand, it is possible to move backwards through time, wouldn’t the universe have to necessarily exist not only as a giant block of eternally changing 3D space, but as a giant block of 4D spacetime one could move around in? And would that mean predetermined past and future, or would that 4D block of spacetime change, too, advancing through meta-time, continually changing future and past of the universe?

ScienceClic has a cool video, stipulating that we live in 4D spacetime and are bound to always move forward at light speed. If we stand still in 3D space, we move forwards in time at light speed. If we accelerate in 3D space, we change out motion vector from only pointing forwards in time to pointing slightly sideways (up to completely sideways, i.e. time stops, if we were able to move at light speed). But there may be now way to do a 180 involving the time axis like we could do involving the other 3 axes.

When you have a bunch of computers networked, each of them is assigned a unique number, so when other computers send data on the wire, they can say who it is meant for (imagine each blurb of data starting out like: “yo, I’m sending these next 500 bytes for computer 0A123FBC32, here they come”).

Now the right computer will listen, but it doesn’t know what program the data is for - is it a chunk of a file your browser is downloading? Or the email your email app wants to display? Or perhaps a join request from your buddy’s computer for the Minecraft game you’re hosting?

So in addition to the unique number of the target computer, the data also specifies a “port number”, which tells the computer which of its running programs the data is meant for (programs ask the computer’s operating system: “if any network data arrives on port XY, give it to me”). Some ports have become standards - for example, a program that serves web pages to other computers would typically ask the operating system that any data arriving on the computer that indicates port numbers 80 and 443 should be given to it, and when a web browser wants to fetch a web page, it will send a request to the computer serving the page, defaulting to port 80 o 443.

If you dig deeper, you’ll find that there are even more unique numbers involved and routers/firewalls let data through not only by port number but also by distinguishing between data that is the initial request to another computer’s port number and data that is an answer to an earlier seen request – and more.

I love that example. Microsoft’s Copilot (based on GTP-4) immediately doesn’t disappoint:

It’s annoying that for many things, like basic programming tasks, it manages to generate reasonable output that is good enough to goat people into trusting it, yet hallucinates very obviously wrong stuff or follows completely insane approaches on anything off the beaten path. Every other day, I have to spend an hour to justify to a coworker why I wrote code this way when the AI has given him another “great” suggestion, like opening a hidden window with an UI control to query a database instead of going through our ORM.

I assume that Twitter still has tons of managers and team leads that allowed this and have their own part of the responsibility. However, Musk is known to be a choleric with a mercurial temper, someone who makes grand public announcements and then pushes his companies to release stuff that isn’t nearly ready for production. Often it’s “do or get fired”.

So… an unshackled AI generating official posts, no human hired to curate the front page, headlines controlled through up-voting by trolls and foreign influence campaigns, all running unchecked in the name of “free speech” – that’s very much on brand for a Musk-run business, I’d say.

Vox is a reputable and very thorough news source, though, usually worth the read.

This two-pager, for example, highlights false Twitter journalists popping in Baltimore to politically spin the recent bridge collapse.

Considering the teams tasked with containing political opinion manipulation campaigns were the first to go, I think that is exactly what the acquisition boils down to. A license to manipulate and meddle in public discussion for anyone rich or powerful enough (and of a political disposition agreeable to Musk’s increasingly GOP/Russia-indoctrinated mind).

It’s a “public town square” where the major approvingly smiles as groups of paid shills and remote-controlled opinion pushers insert themselves into discussions and roughen up people they notice going against the opinions they push.

I have a Windows VM that runs Visual Studio and a small number of developer tools so I can test my code on Windows. And another windows VM that runs Daz3D, Clip Studio Paint and the Epic Launcher (to download stuff from the Unreal Engine Marketplace).

Sometimes I misuse either VM by creating a snapshot and installing Garmin Connect so I can update the music library on my watch :)