Yes… But White House staffers know how terrifying it would be for the public to realize Trump is an actual superhuman, so they put his diapers on him pre-loaded to not tip anyone off.

Just for what passes for fun in this hellscape, who would be worse: Justice Eileen Cannon, or Justice Alina Habba?

I get the snark, but honestly, we are all capable of synthesizing information from multiple sources - a story can be useful even if it supplies just one or more true premises of a valid conclusion.

It’s a valid comment, but I disagree that you have to reach that conclusion.

This poll gives a better picture of US citizens’ ability (or lack thereof) to obtain and understand basic facts when you combine it with actual data. I.e., the facts alone tell us only what reality is, and the opinion poll alone only tells us what Americans think, but together they tell us how well-informed Americans are.

That, in turn, helps suggest (even if proof is harder) how effective right-wing information technology is, how seamless the Fox News/influencer/social media info bubbles are.

And, as depressing as it is, opinions (the perceptions of a party’s or candidates’ culpability and capability) decide elections where reality and opinion are in conflict. 2024 proved at least to me that we have reached an inflection point and entered the Disinformation Age, where propaganda actually can consistently win out against reality by sheer flood of disinformation, if it’s not moderated or regulated.

Republicans and administration staffers don’t believe it any more than anyone else. To anyone in this administration, lies are just tools to win, even if they are just passing them off second-hand.

I guess I’m happy some media is talking about this. When they no longer can stop you, then exercise corruption openly to show everyone the opposition’s helplessness, or to counterintuitively kindle anger against that opposition which appears feckless and powerless.

It’s the reason Putin poisons people in ways obviously traceable to Russia.

It also directly contributes to hypernormalization, since the autocrat will then deny - with obvious lies - the truth of that corruption, which further exhausts the populace who eventually gets tired of trying to keep track of what is true and what is a lie, thereby handing more power to the autocrat to shape reality.

Trump, of course, is speedrunning every step of this.

Just like when he got rid of NAFTA because he thought it showed he was powerful only to replace it with something functionally similar but worse. All he can do is break things and replace them with masking-tape-and-popsicle-stick versions with “Trump” written on them in crayon.

Sorry, my bad. I have seen so many people argue against this that I saw a phantom. All good and my apologies!

Just consider this option before rejecting it:

Bad faith, trolling, community or instance rule-breaking, and other edge cases deserve downvotes. Everything said in good faith even if you disagree with it deserves no-votes or upvotes.

The benefit is that this does not chill discussions and create an echo chamber. Because that’s what downvoting just because you don’t agree does. It means those people and opinions and stories just don’t appear after you disincentivize people from posting them. And it’s worse for stories - a smart person will want to see stories that reflect reality, even if you don’t like them (which is what this post is).

So actually, the type of downvoting you are (I assume) defending is precisely what creates that no negative, only happy, toxic positivity safe space.

With the Notes bots fact-checking the Post bots, and AI Scraper bots reading the posts, I think the hard work is done and we can all just never think about Twitter again.

That’s why we should fund a secure ballroom for each US school.

I mean, you’re not wrong that this moment is probably China’s best opportunity, since the US administration is corrupt and incompetent. Normally the threat of US and allies’ punishment for violating export controls counts for something. But we’re historically distracted right now and I’m sure China is trying to take advantage.

It’s unlikely. It’s not just the machine but decades of proprietary knowledge that is not easily exfiltrated out of ASML. The machines they are trying to rebuild from spare parts from the grey market are not even the latest gen. There’s so few of them and they’re only held by companies that can afford to pay the $400 million for a single machine, so it’s not like they’re just falling onto the market without a clear chain of ownership and responsibility.

Well, treason is defined in the constitution as “only [] levying War against [the United States], or [] adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort.”

Arguably a fund set up that is meant to funnel money to J6 insurrectionists or to support right-wing militia groups for a new insurrection is treasonous.

Regardless of “immunity” (which itself likely would be stricken by a court since it is forward-looking and contradicts the law), Todd Blanche, Donald Trump, and anyone else involved in this need go to jail over this “settlement.”

The “settlement” is built on the fiction that Trump has a viable claim, when in fact Todd Blanche and others at the DOJ were given an IRS memo that put them on reasonable notice that it was barred by the statute of limitations. By agreeing to the settlement when Trump is on both sides of the case despite the fact that there isn’t a viable claim, Trump, Blanche and all other approving parties are impairing the lawful function of the DOJ, to defraud the IRS, and violating this specific criminal statute (if not many others).

https://www.justice.gov/archives/jm/criminal-resource-manual-923-18-usc-371-conspiracy-defraud-us

The statute is broad enough in its terms to include any conspiracy for the purpose of impairing, obstructing or defeating the lawful function of any department of government . . . (A)ny conspiracy which is calculated to obstruct or impair its efficiency and destroy the value of its operation and reports as fair, impartial and reasonably accurate, would be to defraud the United States by depriving it of its lawful right and duty of promulgating or diffusing the information so officially acquired in the way and at the time required by law or departmental regulation.

18 U.S.C. § 371—Conspiracy to Defraud the United States

In summary, those activities which courts have held defraud the United States under 18 U.S.C. § 371 affect the government in at least one of three ways:

1. They cheat the government out of money or property;
2. They interfere or obstruct legitimate Government activity; or
3. They make wrongful use of a governmental instrumentality.

Trump and Blanche are doing all three.

“We are allowed to do unlimited tax fraud, and nobody can investigate us. The DOJ that I control told us we could!”

Unless you are a type of creature that just likes the taste of hooks.

Carmack very visibly just enjoys mental exercise. Watch any of his Quakecon keynotes if anyone needs to see it for themselves. The fact that it results in groundbreaking code for game engines, VR hyper-low latency algorithms, and rocketships is just a byproduct.

And that’s probably the best way to not be turned into an alien by money: never be in it for the result, always find happiness in the process.

I agree Tom’s Hardware is unnecessarily derisive but I also think the performance curve bending to the current date is an exponential difficulty curve. China still has no replacement and no plausible path to a replacement for the most modern EUV nodes that require ASML lithography machines.

They can very very quickly leapfrog older generations of GPU hardware by going straight to the peak of their home-grown lithography processes, that’s not surprising. But getting performance to keep following the curve to the last 2-3 years is a sheer cliff, not a ramp. It took ASML decades to do it and nobody worldwide has replicated it, because it’s just that hard, even as China tries to acquire export-controlled prior-gen machines on the gray market.

Maybe I’ll be wrong, but don’t be surprised if we see no improvement or minor optimizations for years.

Here’s the summary of the app from a few months ago: https://thereallo.dev/blog/decompiling-the-white-house-app

1. Injects JavaScript into every website you open through its in-app browser to hide cookie consent dialogs, GDPR banners, login walls, signup walls, upsell prompts, and paywalls.
2. Has a full GPS tracking pipeline compiled in that polls every 4.5 minutes in the foreground and 9.5 minutes in the background, syncing lat/lng/accuracy/timestamp to OneSignal’s servers.
3. Loads JavaScript from a random person’s GitHub Pages site (lonelycpp.github.io) for YouTube embeds. If that account is compromised, arbitrary code runs in the app’s WebView.
4. Loads third-party JavaScript from Elfsight (elfsightcdn.com/platform.js) for social media widgets, with no sandboxing.
5. Sends email addresses to Mailchimp, images are served from Uploadcare, and a Truth Social embed is hardcoded with static CDN URLs. None of this is government infrastructure.
6. Has no certificate pinning. Standard Android trust management.
7. Ships with dev artifacts in production. A localhost URL, a developer IP (10.4.4.109), the Expo dev client, and an exported Compose PreviewActivity.
8. Profiles users extensively through OneSignal - tags, SMS numbers, cross-device aliases, outcome tracking, notification interaction logging, in-app message click tracking, and full user state observation.