To put that into perspective, the World Bank estimates global GDP as around $100 trillion, which is peanuts compared to the prospective fine. Google would therefore have to find more money than exists on Earth to pay Moscow

I’m not sure that GDP is the best number to use here. That’s annual economic activity. I’d think that that wealth would be more-interesting.

According to this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_wealth

…total global household wealth in 2022 – which I imagine is closer to what one wants – is about $454 trillion.

I think that it’s more impactful this way.

To be fair, it’s not very evenly distributed. I can imagine some states being grouchy that a wildly disproportionate share of their land cannot be put into economic use, when other states are not kicking in something comparable.

https://ballotpedia.org/Federal_land_ownership_by_state

Wyoming has 46.7% of its land be federal. Nevada 80.1%. New York has 0.8%.

The liquid, which the Palo Alto Fire Department has deemed to be a nonhazardous mixture of borax, lye (also called sodium hydroxide) and green dye,

One of the workers told Hedblom that the liquid was a coolant. That’s also what the fire department told the Governor’s Office of Emergency Services, which wrote in its Oct. 18 spill report that the liquid was “used for the chiller system to cool the Tesla Artificial Intelligence Supercomputer.”

“The Palo Alto Fire Department recovered approximately 550 gallons of the mixture from the storm drain,” the report said. “The incident occurred while Tesla personnel were draining the system.”

That’s quite a liquid-cooled computer that they’ve got going on.

The ‘Black Insurrectionist’ was actually white. The deception did not stop there

He isn’t an insurrectionist either?

I mean, there’s a cost-benefit thing here.

kagis

Take, as a random example, Dagsboro, Delaware, population 805.

Do you really care much about the town admininistrator there? Enough to expend Chinese resources on it that could be working on other things?

Yeah, that’s true – that’s a risk. You’d have to structure the system in such a way to minimize that. But…you gotta also remember that the existing government also has access to a lot of things like wiretapping capabilities and such; this isn’t our first rodeo with potential for an incumbent to try to abuse government powers.

I can think of legal and oversight structures that can help mitigate risk of an incumbent trying to abuse the US government being responsible for providing that sort of service…but it’s hard to do much about state-level foreign intelligence services otherwise.

Apparently, some London residents are getting fed up with social media influencers whose reviews make long lines of tourists at their favorite restaurants, sometimes just for the likes.

As Gizmodo deduced, the trend seemed to start on the r/London subreddit, where a user complained about a spot in Borough Market being “ruined by influencers” on Monday:

“Last 2 times I have been there has been a queue of over 200 people, and the ones with the food are just doing the selfie shit for their [I]nsta[gram] pages and then throwing most of the food away.”

So, I don’t know what the situation is in London.

But COVID-19 really clobbered a lot of commercial establishments, and particularly eateries. I’m guessing that at least some traffic might be a return of the public to restaurants, with the supply of restaurant capacity at a low due to having gone through hard times over the past our years or so.

kagis

Ah, right. This is Europe, and while the US got hit by higher energy costs too, the Ukraine invasion really dicked up energy prices in Europe for a while. And then you have the hangover from the COVID-19-related spending happening, as inflation bites, and reducing spending on restaurants is an easy thing to cut on one’s budget. And this points out that restaurants are a labor-intensive industry, and Brexit has driven labor costs up by cutting the labor pool.

https://www.ft.com/content/a36ad5fd-db20-4ba8-89ea-e185838c8aa0

UK restaurant sector hit by cost of living and Covid legacy

Stuart Devine thought his chain of fish and chip restaurants in Aberdeen had survived the worst when the UK government lifted Covid-19 lockdowns for good in spring 2021 and customers returned to enjoy the classic British meal.

But before the Ashvale could fully recover it was dealt another blow, when Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 disrupted global supply chains and sent energy and food prices soaring.

Devine’s struggles are shared by roughly 40 per cent of UK restaurant owners, who are operating at or below break-even point, after the sector was hit by a perfect storm of pandemic shutdowns and the cost of living crisis, according to data from UKHospitality.

The trade body estimates that up to 30 per cent of businesses in the sector have closed since Covid struck. About 1,169 restaurants shut in the past year alone, equivalent to more than three a day, according to UKHospitality and consultancy CGA by NIQ.

“The money coming from the front door is just not enough to offset the significant cost of doing business that the restaurants are facing,” said Kate Nicholls, chief executive of UKHospitality.

While energy prices have fallen from their peak over the past 12 months, restaurants continue to bear the brunt of elevated food costs. The particularly labour intensive industry has also struggled with staff shortages, worsened by Brexit, and to keep pace with the statutory minimum wage. It stands at £10.42 an hour and will rise to £11.44 in April.

Devine said “the hardest thing is that the only thing you can do is put your prices up”, noting that there was a limit to how much lifting prices could help at a time of already weak consumer confidence and tight household budgets.

So the combination of all those things would tend to have squeezed the supply of restaurants, and it might be that if there’s enough demand to consistently fill restaurants in London, expand existing or open new ones, that things will tend to return to a more-normal state.

Our entire government has played like it cared about infosec for years, but has always made weird exceptions for high-up officials.

This isn’t the government, though. Like, this is Trump being hit on campaign, not as a sitting president, and Vance has never been a sitting VP, just a candidate.

Trump and Vance, as of today, are just private citizens.

When Trump was President, or when Hillary Clinton was Secretary of State or something like that, okay, yeah, I get you. I’m not saying that we always do the right things for government officials – like, I’m not saying that your broader concern isn’t valid.

But for this particular Trump/Vance compromise, I don’t think that that’s what’s driving the situation – I think that it’s the vulnerability of political candidates, people who are not yet officials.

I mean, Russia and Iran have broken into campaign sites. I suppose China isn’t going to want to miss out on the fun.

I commented earlier that I think that perhaps the government should provide IT services to secure presidential political campaigns. That isn’t a full counter to espionage; poking around in someone’s stuff before they have actually kicked off a campaign might well itself be interesting. But it seems like kind of low-hanging fruit, given that candidates on the campaign trail are clearly being actively, repeatedly, and successfully targeted by foreign intelligence agencies. And those are only the cases that we know about – it’s probably a safe bet that penetrations have occurred that we haven’t been able to pick up on.

And I’m skeptical that political campaigns have the resources and expertise to secure themselves against national intelligence agencies.

I think that this is probably a general issue for democracies. Governments will typically have counterintelligence agencies and policy in place to protect incumbent leaders against espionage. They may or may not be successful, but at least they put the best tools they have on the job. But…in democracies, power can change, candidates are not protected in the same way, and targeting candidates may be a potent way for a foreign intelligence agency to either swing elections or obtain information and leverage useful for down the line, when a candidate has become a new leader.

In a column published on The Post’s website Friday, Post Publisher William Lewis described the decision as a return to the newspaper’s roots of non-endorsement. The Post only began regularly endorsing presidential candidates in 1976, when the paper endorsed Jimmy Carter “for understandable reasons at the time.”

Hmm.

On one hand, I frequently complain about media partisanship.

On the other hand, I care much more about bias – especially willingness to distort a situation in the name of that advocacy, or mislead readers – being inserted into articles. I really don’t have a problem with a newspaper writing a single endorsement and clearly explaining their case for doing so. In fact, I suspect that it’s probably got potential to be one of the more-articulate places to make a case for someone.

I ended a subscription to The Atlantic, years back, because I was tired of reading preaching for Obama in every couple of articles, years back. I didn’t have a problem with Obama. However, I was exasperated over having political advocacy constantly being inserted into everything I read.

Speaking for myself and what media I’d rather read, that is what I’d rather have changed, rather than the presence of an endorsement, something which only really occurs once during election time and is clearly marked.

In total, there were 118 false positives — a rate of 4.29%.

Earlier this year, investors filed a class-action lawsuit, accusing company executives of overstating the devices’ capabilities and claiming that “Evolv does not reliably detect knives or guns.”

I mean, in terms of performance, I’d be more concerned about the false positive rate than the false negative rate, given the context. Like, if you miss a gun, whatever. That’s at worst just the status quo, which has been working. Some money gets wasted on the machine. But if you are incorrectly stopping more than 1 in 25 New Yorkers from getting on their train, and apply that to all subway riders, that sounds like a monumental mess.

Klofkorn stated that he committed the arson because he wanted to be arrested

Well, sounds like he was successful there. This guy have a history?

kagis

https://recentlybooked.com/AZ/Maricopa/Dieter-Klofkorn~960_G090676

April 2024:

Charge Code: 13-3407A1
Charge Description: DANGEROUS DRUG-POSS/USE

Charge Code: 13-1504A1
Charge Description: CRIM TRESP 1ST DEG-RSID/YARD

Charge Code: 13-3415A
Charge Description: DRUG PARAPHERNALIA-POSSESS/USE

So I’m gonna guess here that dude’s got drug issues and I’m gonna guess that that first degree trespassing is probably because he’s homeless, maybe arrested for squatting somewhere.

kagis more

Back in 2018:

https://www.abc15.com/news/crime/pd-duct-taped-suspect-held-for-glendale-police-after-attacking-surprise-officer

PD: Duct taped suspect held for Glendale police after attacking Surprise officer

Authorities say a construction worker helped an off-duty Surprise reserve officer who was being attacked by a man.

Glendale police report that on August 7 officers responded to the area of 75th Avenue and Bell Road.

There they found 29-year-old Dieter Bradford Klofkorn bound in duct tape.

Witnesses reportedly told police that Klofkorn appeared homeless and dehydrated, so workers offered him a chair to rest in and water to drink.

An off-duty Surprise reserve officer was also there and went behind a wall where the suspect was sitting to take a phone call.

Klofkorn then allegedly pushed the officer with one hand, while reaching for the officer’s gun with the other.

The officer later told police that Klofkorn nearly removed his weapon before he was able to retain control of the firearm.

The officer turned and struck him, and a construction worker assisted him by grabbing Klofkorn.

He was detained with duct tape until Glendale police arrived.

Klofkorn has been charged with aggravated assault.

Yeah, I’m gonna assume that this Klofkorn guy probably isn’t part of some kind of cabal aiming to swing the election.

your own guilt

Hmm.

I have a pretty hard time blaming Character.AI, at least from what’s in the article text.

On the other hand, it’s also not clear to me from the article that his mom did something unreasonable to cause him to commit suicide either, whether or not her lawsuit is justified – those are two different issues. Whether-or-not she’s taking out her grief on Character.AI or even looking for a payday, that doesn’t mean that she caused the suicide either.

Not every bad outcome has a bad actor; some are tragedies.

I don’t know what his life was like.

I mean, people do commit suicide.

https://sprc.org/about-suicide/scope-of-the-problem/suicide-by-age/

In 2020, suicide was the second leading cause of death for those ages 10 to 14 and 25 to 34

Always have, probably always will.

Those aren’t all because someone went out and acted in some reprehensible way to get them to do so. People do wind up in unhappy situations and do themselves in, good idea or no.

Yeah, I was gonna say…GPUs have to be more significant today for general compute than they’ve ever been.

Okay, yeah, maybe you don’t need one for CAD acceleration in 2024, but that has to be a vanishingly small thing compared to parallel compute on stuff like AI work.

Did NVIDIA stop selling videocards in Russia?

kagis

https://www.pcmag.com/news/nvidia-to-stop-all-product-sales-to-russia

Nvidia Stops All Product Sales to Russia

March 5, 2022

So, yes, though I don’t think that it matters a huge amount, since companies are just gonna re-export them out of China or Kazakhstan or wherever. I mean, it’s not like the hardware has some kind of region-locking. It’s a piece of consumer hardware, sold and resold anonymously all over the place. It’s not some kind of specialized military hardware with four end customers and tight control over the movement of the product.

kagis

https://hardwaretimes.com/nvidia-loses-just-2-of-its-revenue-as-offices-are-shut-down-in-russia/

In October [2022], NVIDIA officially shut down all its operations in Russia as sales of both data center and consumer graphics cards were wrapped up. At the time, around 240 employees worked for the Santa Clara-based company. These folks were given the option to either relocate abroad or look for other jobs.

Furthermore, NVIDIA hardware has been banned from sale via official channels.

Fortunately for Team Green, the Russian Federation represented a minor market for its wide portfolio. Disclosures from the Q3 2022 earnings report indicate that the Federation accounted for just 2% of its revenue and 4% for the gaming business.

Although channel partners are forbidden to sell the latest GeForce RTX 40 series graphics cards, Russian gamers can still procure them from the grey market.

It’ll probably add cost and some risk of getting ripped off and no manufacturer’s warranty, but I would be surprised if someone who wanted a new GPU couldn’t continue to get ahold of one in Russia, given enough funds.

EDIT: Does make me wonder about Windows-side driver updates. Like, people here are talking about Linux. Windows requires driver signing, and I don’t know if those signatures are region-specific.

You can operate a VPN service in Russia legally, but it is obligated to block state-specified stuff internally to the VPN.

https://www.cloudwards.net/russian-vpn-ban/

VPN vendors have to get approval from the authorities to operate within the Russian borders. Usually, this means the provider has to comply with Russia’s censorship demands, like connecting to the FSIS.

Most sanctions, aside from ones aimed at individuals, are going to have indirect effect. That is, they will produce pressure on Russia in aggregate, and that means that they’ll impact the typical citizen.

But that being said, there have been a lot of sanctions applied, and…the impact on Nvidia drivers isn’t, I think, really a huge one relative to those. Like, things like cutting off access to all kinds of electronics parts and payment system access and stuff are going to be, I’d say, a lot more impactful to a typical person in Russia, even if the impact is secondary.

Other than as a mind game, I don’t see the point.

Google provides a centralized service. They own the generator system.

You could solve the whole problem much more simply and reliably by just retaining a copy of all generated text at Google – the quantities of data will be miniscule compared to what Google regularly deals with – and then just indexing it and letting someone do a fuzzy search for a given passage of text to see whether it’s been generated. Hell, Google probably already retains a copy to data-mine what people are doing anyway, and they know how to do search. And then they could even tell you who generated the text and when.

I’ve got no objection to the pistol, but what is the likelihood of being murdered camping alone in the middle of the woods like this guy was?