Either the one from the Robot and Monk series (psalm for the wild built by Becky Chambers) or the Culture series.

oder Apertus aus der Schweiz, nur auf urhebertechnisch/ethisch nicht fragwürdigen Quellen trainiert, aber entsprechend auch nicht sonderlich gut in den Benchmarks.

But only for good things. That rare medical condition, complication during surgery, traffic accident etc, nah, won’t happen to me.

I think they also need to come up with a better term than ‘western countries’, to something that does not include the US but is open to include others. ‘Countries that try to not be complete asshats’? Idk, the bar is in hell. But there are quite a few non-western countries that could fit the bill if it weren’t for US fuckery.

oh, definitely, and I’m not saying that they’re doing good or anything like that. I mean, the profits for investments have to come out of someone pockets. I’m just saying it’s a bit like having a parasite where removal might kill the host if not done carefully, not a free lunch where you just tax them and everyone lived happily ever after. They had a long time to embed themselves in all kinds of systems, and them not paying taxes is kinda built into the expectations of those systems.

yes, though to be fair, it’s not like this is just sitting in their bank account doing nothing. It’s mostly invested somewhere doing stuff to make them richer. So if they were taxed at a fair rate, idk, 90% or so, that would mean less investment, which in turn does help companies grow and pay salaries, R&D etc. They don’t send a trillion to a scrooge mcduck bunker on the cayman islands, they create shell companies there that own their stock etc. for them. They could not pay this tax since they just wouldn’t have the cash to pay x% of 3.5T. Which would either force them to sell stock to pay tax, potentially tanking the stocks value, or pay the tax directly in stock, making their holdings more government owned over time.

As a socialist, I’m fine with either tbh. just saying this is not cash floating around that can just be spent to tackle humanities problems, if only it was just taxed properly.

Why drop the ‘to break racial ceiling’ part from the title?

Definitely, this summer is bicycle summer!

I really hope he likes it more than the kayak, as soon as I’d get close to the shore, he’d jump out and swim to shore.

Measuring my dog to get an appropriate size dog trailer for the bicycle.

Is this related to the dudes hanging weights from their balls?

As a one size fits all kinda thing: sourdough bread, that takes me like 24 hours from start to finish, with incubating over night in the fridge.

Other than that, it depends. We already cook good for ourselves regularly, no need to wait for there to be guests. So we cook just regular food, whatever we think our guests might enjoy.

I really enjoyed it. only complaint I had was that it felt a bit too railroad-y sometimes. As in, I almost felt forced to figure things out, with the UI holding your hands a bit too much.

I wouldn’t fully agree with that. There is some of that, but then also there’s very little historical record of poor people. Up until like 1850ish, only rich people could really read/write, and their books and correspondence is what a lot of historical research is based on. And the rich people themselves didn’t write about the filthy poors a lot. And there are historians that would very much like to study this topic, l but it’s exceedingly difficult for lack of resources.

Now that said, there is quite a bit of bias still. Not just toward poor “unimportant” people, also towards women. E.g. Milan was ruled by the Visconti family, which was a powerful name back then. The last Visconti ruler died, leaving his son in law in power. He’s called “Francesco I Sforza” in most history books, even though Sforza was kind of a minor name back then, and he himself would sign letters with the Visconti last name of his wife, Bianca Maria Visconti. And even his sons (and I think Grandsons) would still use the Visconti name. But because 18th and 19th century historians thought it’s no good to refer to a man by the last name of his wife, and that the wife must have been unimportant anyways, this was the new Sforza reign, not the continued Visconti reign. But we have letters of her managing the whole city while he was off, of her disagreeing with him quite strongly and openly in letters, leading everything when her husband was ill, dealing with diplomacy and military affairs etc. So in a lot of ways they were reigning together, not one single strong man doing everything.

There is a growing group of historians that do study these kinds of things and it is slowly shifting. And I don’t doubt that this also happens in regards to poor people, just less so due to lack of available sources. But of course there’s also institutional pushback, nationalistic infighting, funding being assigned based on biases etc. it’s not all rosy.

And I’m no historian, so this in large part based on the “inventing the Renaissance” book by Ada Palmer(History professor at Uni Chicago and also a really good scifi writer). It’s an amazing read, not just about the period, the different power dynamics and personalities, stuff like homosexuality and atheism in the period etc., but in large part also on how historians work, how perceptions among historians changed through the ages, how some misconceptions (like “women aren’t important”) persisted for centuries. It’s without a doubt the best history book I read in a long time and I can’t recommend it highly enough.

Oh absolutely, you can only do this so long, and you can still see it if you look closely, but is seems that many investors forgot how to look closely?

Microsoft specifically had 13 billion capex on AI in January 2025, the last time they mentioned it separately. And like 75-100 billion revenue from cloud iirc, which was growing a lot because of AI financing shenanigans. So that could still hide the growing expenses at that point.

I don’t even know that this is a scam, or just a very misguided attempt by someone to make nicer pictures of their place. At least going by the original posting, it could well be that it actually exists and is not a bad place. Not that I’d ever go for this. No reviews is probably the biggest other tell. It’s also on booking.com which magically mentions reviews from somewhere, though it says it got the listing from interhome, which does not have reviews. All very weird.

In any case, I’ve reported it for inappropriate images, I wonder if anything will be done.

Some of the other pictures are just as weird, e.g. all the reflections of the bathroom mirror just don’t make sense (in terms of brightness/clarity)

[edit] They forwarded my concerns to the person who created the offering. Well, thanks for nothing.

I’ve just finished reading a very detailed book on 13-16 century renaissance history and yes, always fucked. Though less dark ages than you’d think and more fucked politics, same as now.

Plus we only really know the history of rich people up until very recently, so no telling how fucked the poors were.

Not disagreeing with your overall point, but they can and do fudge the numbers to some extent with reporting tricks.

Like, you don’t want the public to know how terrible the AI business is? Merge it with the profitable cloud business internally and just report the numbers as a single line item. Overall the numbers are still correct, but you can hide unprofitable stuff inside larger, profitable stuff.

Or you suddenly increase the depreciation of GPUs from 3 years to 6 years, even though they wont actually last that long, to hide/spread out the huge investments you made.

Yes, i hate this in these kinds of discussions. It so often devolves into how you’ll be safe from surveillance by world governments (spoiler: you won’t be, if they really care).

And here I am, just not wanting to hand data over to giant corporations that have been proven to use it for no good.

Heck, even if there was no good actor/solution, not giving all your data to the same bad actor is already a step up.

It can be done but doesn’t work that well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0rliFQ0qyAM

Actually anyone can post using the API, and many people did. Lots of the heavily publicized posts were written by humans