"UNRWA is paid to support people in refugee camps as refugees, and the UNHCR is paid to get people out of refugee status and to become normal citizens. This, along with its focus on only one group of displaced people does not produce best outcomes for the people that they ostensibly support." @40Years https://40yrs.blogspot.com/2024/01/unrwa-is-problematic.html

is the ad industry going to morph into selling manipulations of AI weights that make your thing more likely to come up in response to related prompts?

will AI come to stand for “Artificial Influencer”?

Not the greatest vocabulary lesson for the kids.

Sometimes I think the main role of tech figures who now weigh in loudly and proudly on public policy (Musk, Sacks, etc etc) is to make traditional policy elites — as compromised and deeply flawed as they are — look sane and competent by comparison.

someday we will all wake up and realize that nowhere actually exists except Canada.

@PhilippBayer 🙁❤️

@akkartik rsync.net looks very interesting. thanks!

both too much and too little wealth are terrible for people. the very rich have it all, but most of them have completely lost it.

@realcaseyrollins I keep backups on local drives (I think I’d rsync rather than sftp), but I do want to “cloud sync” to know there are off-site copies of important things (if some disaster struck my home) and to be able to access documents on the go.

@akkartik I backup locally as well, but only to one drive so far. I’m feeling like I should oscillate between two, because who knows if the backup drive is good? But I basically like to know what’s essential to me is on my main machine, a local backup, and a cloud sync service. For the cloud piece, it’s really storage that’s the bottleneck. I could just rsync if the space weren’t so expensive. (It’s also helpful to be able to access documents from the phone when I’m out and about, though.)

I dropped dropbox for sync.com, but I’m having problems now with sync.com. Any other recommendations for this kind of service?

I’d think about self-hosting, but I don’t know an economical way of setting up a server with ~2TB of not-cold storage.

(I don’t want to physically self-host. I want sync and backup reliably available if my house burns down and when I travel.)

You can get a decision with no impact to your credit score.

When you think a person is extremely wrong, but the whole reason you do the things you do is in hopes you'll make some small difference so that people like him can look back and say they were right all along.

#KevinDrum on his historicostatistical pollyannaism. https://jabberwocking.com/just-how-bad-are-things-really/

@sqrtminusone@emacs.ch @tb forgive me robot, for i have sinned…

My wife plays with Chat GPT as an interpreter of dreams. The results are surprisingly lucid and compelling. “Hallucination” and confabulation are basically the job, in this context features rather than flaws. Astrologers also may need to seek alternative employment.

@admitsWrongIfProven@qoto.org do your best!

Without context:

maybe the supreme court will notice an insurrection when it is against them.

"Like 1980s televangelism with its gold-plated cowboy boots, mansions, private jets, and a dose of of God on the side, bitcoin is all about the price chart with a small helping of cypherpunk ideology." @jp_koning https://jpkoning.blogspot.com/2024/01/do-bitcoin-etfs-conflict-with-bitcoins.html

he hires the best people.