tal

Yeah, I don’t like Trump even “joking” about things — especially since he often then claims that he was ‘just joking’ about something to justify having said things. I don’t want Newsom lowering the bar on joking about censorship or similar such things.

Frankly, I’m not interested in this social media politicking in the first place, but regardless of that, I think that Newsom can manage to criticize Trump in other ways if he really looks for it.

Personally, I’d rather not have my elected representatives not engage in shit-flinging on social media in the first place, but I suppose that politicking is politicking, and it’s not only my preferences that matter in getting elected, and some people clearly do revel in that sort of thing.

But I also think that part of the problem with Trump is that he’s intentionally violated lines on social norms that I don’t want violated. I want as few politicians as possible even “joking” about using the legal system to go after their political opponents, things like that. Just legitimizes and popularizes the idea.

EDIT: I’d also add that I’m personally really skeptical that this is actually a good idea politically, at least for the Democratic Party as a whole.

As I understand it, the primary political goal that Trump has is mostly peeling off enough white, blue-collar voters from the Democratic electorate to tilt things towards the Republican Party, people from post-industrial areas around the Midwest and the like. Things like encouraging racial conflict between them and other members of the Democratic coalition or focusing on wedge issues there are useful, and a lot of why Trump tries to create conflict.

If you’re a leading Democratic politician — perhaps even a future presidential candidate nominee — I don’t think that you want to be encouraging cultural divisions like that. That’s only facilitating that division. You don’t want to actively go manufacture an image for the Democratic Party as “anti-country music” or whatever.

I mean, I’m listing it because I believe that it’s something that has some value that could be done with the information. But it’s a “are the benefits worth the costs” thing? let’s say that you need to pay $800 and wear a specific set of glasses everywhere. Gotta maintain a charge on them. And while they’re maybe discrete compared to a smartphone, I assume that people in a role where they’re prominent (diplomacy, business deal-cutting, etc) probably know what they look like and do, so I imagine that any relationship-building that might come from showing that you can remember someone’s name and personal details (“how are Margaret and the kids?”) would likely be somewhat undermined if they know that you’re walking around with the equivalent of your Rolodex in front of your eyeballs. Plus, some people might not like others running around with recording gear (especially in some of the roles listed).

I’m sure that there are a nonzero number of people who would wear them, but I’m hesitant to believe that as they exist today, they’d be a major success.

I think that some of the people who are building some of these things grew up with Snow Crash and it was an influence on them. Google went out and made Google Earth; Snow Crash had a piece of software called Earth that did more-or-less the same thing (albeit with more layers and data sources than Google Earth does today). Snow Crash had the Metaverse with VR goggles and such; Zuckerberg very badly wanted to make it real, and made a VR world and VR hardware and called it the Metaverse. Snow Crash predicts people wearing augmented reality gear, but also talks about some of the social issues inherent with doing so; it didn’t expect everyone to start running around with them:

Someone in this overpass, somewhere, is bouncing a laser beam off Hiro’s face. It’s annoying. Without being too obvious about it, he changes his course slightly, wanders over to a point downwind of a trash fire that’s burning in a steel drum. Now he’s standing in the middle of a plume of diluted smoke that he can smell but can’t quite see.

It’s a gargoyle, standing in the dimness next to a shanty. Just in case he’s not already conspicuous enough, he’s wearing a suit. Hiro starts walking toward him. Gargoyles represent the embarrassing side of the Central Intelligence Corporation. Instead of using laptops, they wear their computers on their bodies, broken up into separate modules that hang on the waist, on the back, on the headset. They serve as human surveillance devices, recording everything that happens around them. Nothing looks stupider, these getups are the modern-day equivalent of the slide-rule scabbard or the calculator pouch on the belt, marking the user as belonging to a class that is at once above and far below human society. They are a boon to Hiro because they embody the worst stereotype of the CIC stringer. They draw all of the attention. The payoff for this self-imposed ostracism is that you can be in the Metaverse all the time, and gather intelligence all the time.

The CIC brass can’t stand these guys because they upload staggering quantities of useless information to the database, on the off chance that some of it will eventually be useful. It’s like writing down the license number of every car you see on your way to work each morning, just in case one of them will be involved in a hit-and-run accident. Even the CIC database can only hold so much garbage. So, usually, these habitual gargoyles get kicked out of CIC before too long.

This guy hasn’t been kicked out yet. And to judge from the quality of his equipment – which is very expensive – he’s been at it for a while. So he must be pretty good.

If so, what’s he doing hanging around this place?

“Hiro Protagonist,” the gargoyle says as Hiro finally tracks him down in the darkness beside a shanty. “CIC stringer for eleven months. Specializing in the Industry. Former hacker, security guard, pizza deliverer, concert promoter.” He sort of mumbles it, not wanting Hiro to waste his time reciting a bunch of known facts.

The laser that kept jabbing Hiro in the eye was shot out of this guy’s computer, from a peripheral device that sits above his goggles in the middle of his forehead. A long-range retinal scanner. If you turn toward him with your eyes open, the laser shoots out, penetrates your iris, tenderest of sphincters, and scans your retina. The results are shot back to CIC, which has a database of several tens of millions of scanned retinas. Within a few seconds, if you’re in the database already, the owner finds out who you are. If you’re not already in the database, well, you are now.

Of course, the user has to have access privileges. And once he gets your identity, he has to have more access privileges to find out personal information about you. This guy, apparently, has a lot of access privileges. A lot more than Hiro.

“Name’s Lagos,” the gargoyle says.

So this is the guy. Hiro considers asking him what the hell he’s doing here. He’d love to take him out for a drink, talk to him about how the Librarian was coded. But he’s pissed off. Lagos is being rude to him (gargoyles are rude by definition).

“You here on the Raven thing? Or just that fuzz-grunge tip you’ve been working on for the last, uh, thirty-six days approximately?” Lagos says.

Gargoyles are no fun to talk to. They never finish a sentence. They are adrift in a laser-drawn world, scanning retinas in all directions, doing background checks on everyone within a thousand yards, seeing everything in visual light, infrared, millimeter wave radar, and ultrasound all at once. You think they’re talking to you, but they’re actually poring over the credit record of some stranger on the other side of the room, or identifying the make and model of airplanes flying overhead. For all he knows, Lagos is standing there measuring the length of Hiro’s cock through his trousers while they pretend to make conversation.

I think that Stephenson probably did a reasonable job there of highlighting some of the likely social issues that come with having wearable computers with always-active sensors running.

It’s not clear to me whether-or-not the display is fundamentally different from past versions, but if not, it’s a relatively-low-resolution display on one eye (600x600). That’s not really something you’d use as a general monitor replacement.

The problem is really that what they have to do is come up with software that makes the user want to glance at something frequently (or maybe unobtrusively) enough that they don’t want to have their phone out.

A phone has a generally-more-capable input system, more battery, a display that is for most-purposes superior, and doesn’t require being on your face all the time you use it.

I’m not saying that there aren’t applications. But to me, most applications look like smartwatch things, and smartwatches haven’t really taken the world by storm. Just not enough benefit to having a second computing device strapped onto you when you’re already carrying a phone.

Say someone messages multiple people a lot and can’t afford to have sound playing and they need to be moving around, so can’t have their phone on a desk in front of them with the display visible or something, so that they can get a visual indicator of an incoming message and who it’s from. That could provide some utility, but I think that for the vast majority of people, it’s just not enough of a use case to warrant wearing the thing if you’ve already got a smartphone.

My guess is that the reason that you’d use something like this specific product, which has a camera on the thing and limited (compared to, say, XREAL’s options) display capabilities, so isn’t really geared up for AR applications where you’re overlaying data all over everything you see, is to try to pull up a small amount of information about whoever you’re looking at, like doing facial recognition to remember (avoid a bit of social awkwardness) or obtain someone’s name. Maybe there are people for whom that’s worthwhile, but the market just seems pretty limited to me for that.

I think that maybe there’s a world where we want to have more battery power and/or compute capability with us than an all-in-one smartphone will handle, and so we separate display and input devices and have some sort of wireless commmunication between them. This product has already been split into two components, a wristband and glasses. In theory, you could have a belt-mounted, purse-contained, or backpack-contained computer with a separate display and input device, which could provide for more-capable systems without needing to be holding a heavy system up. I’m willing to believe that the “multi-component wearable computer” could be a thing. We’re already there to a limited degree with Bluetooth headsets/earpieces. But I don’t really think that we’re at that world more-broadly.

For any product, I just have to ask — what’s the benefit it provides me with? What is the use case? Who wants to use it?

If you get one, it’s $800. It provides you with a different input mechanism than a smartphone, which might be useful for certain applications, though I think is less-generally useful. It provides you with a (low-resolution, monocular, unless this generation has changed) HUD that’s always visible, which a user may be able to check more-discretely than a smartphone. It has a camera always out. For it to make sense as a product, I think that there has to be some pretty clear, compelling application that leverages those characteristics.

I mean, Trump’s a pretty bad president, but under the system, as it stands, if an unjust prosecution happens, the courts are expected to shoot it down. That’s why one has a court system. It shouldn’t fall over just because he demands prosecution of political opponents.

In Japan, you have a system where prosecuted cases virtually always lead to a conviction, where for practical purposes, the “filter” happens at the decision to prosecute:

https://www.nippon.com/en/japan-topics/c05401/order-in-the-court-explaining-japan’s-99-9-conviction-rate.html

MURAOKA: The conviction rate in most countries, including those with plea bargain systems, is generally over 90 percent. Many trials do end in acquittals, though. By comparison, Japan’s 99.9 percent conviction rate is unnaturally high.

Prosecutors in any country generally pursue cases where they are confident of a positive outcome. However, they are still required to prove the defendant’s guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. Japan’s conviction rate creeping toward 100 percent has raised red flags among legal scholars overseas who question whether judges are actually ruling according to the law or are merely deferring to the prosecution.

But that’s not how the US works.

There’s a legitimate issue in that a prosecution can cause a defender to incur legal fees — and maybe it’s the case that we should try to mitigate than more than is the case today. Or maybe nuisance. Trump certainly has managed to fire people in the Executive Branch who he was angry at. But I’m not especially worried that Trump is going to be just running around convicting people of crimes because he doesn’t like them. Trump was prosecuted and convicted because he broke the law. He is, no doubt, pissed off about that. But it doesn’t mean that he can just readily go out and have people convicted who he personally doesn’t like who haven’t broken the law.

I’d also add that even past judges acting to throw out cases that flagrantly don’t have any merit or to rule in favor of a defendant, even if you could somehow compromise a judge, the common-law system has the right to a jury trial to add yet another barrier to a compromised government attempting to misuse prosecution.

Finally, there’s the pardon, something that Trump has used himself very vigorously to remove punishment from people who he liked, which can come from a future administration.

This is something that the system is already designed to handle. It doesn’t need out-of-band involvement.

IIRC, COVID-19 policy and remote schooling policy was found to be pretty harmful for student performance. We lost some educational time because our schools weren’t operating as effectively. I remember discussion at the time that this would have some amount of lasting negative impact. It also hurt other countries. I don’t know how much of this is due to that, but we expected a fall.

kagis

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10266495/

Some snippets:

A Policy Analysis for California Education report found that by the time students completed interim winter assessments in the 2020–21 school year, they had experienced a learning lag of approximately 2.6 months in English language arts (ELA) and 2.5 months in math (Pier et al., 2021). Moreover, economically disadvantaged students, English learners, and students of color experienced a more significant learning lag than students not in these groups (Goldhaber et al., 2022, Pier et al., 2021).

Engzell et al. analyzed performance in reading and comprehension of factual and literary subjects among 350,000 primary school students in national exams before and after an 8-week lockdown during the COVID-19 pandemic (Engzell et al., 2020). The results revealed a post-pandemic decrease in reading performance of more than 3 % compared with pre-pandemic test results (Engzell et al., 2020). Similar unfavorable results were reported by Rose et al.’s study in England during the spring and summer of 2020 (Rose et al., 2021), which followed 6000 pupils for two years and evaluated learning performance using National Foundation for Educational Research standardized tests. The results revealed significantly lower reading performance in 2020 compared with a 2017 sample, with 5.2 % of students scoring two marks fewer. Moreover, reading assessments revealed a 7-month progress delay in 2020, compared with a 2019 sample (Rose et al., 2021).

As I recall from past reading, in general, the US runs up the least deficit during periods when control of the government is split. That is, the Democrats block some of the things that the Republicans want to do with funds, and the Republicans block some of the things that the Democrats want to do with funds. Tax cuts, spending, whatever.

Right now, the Republicans hold a trifecta, control all of the Presidency, House, and Senate, so my expectation is that they will probably tend to adopt policy that runs up more deficit than the norm, since they’re unchecked.

Assuming that the Democrats take the House in the midterms, though, the GOP will need to compromise on new policy after that.

I mean, I’m not saying that it’s a good policy. My kneejerk take is that it’s probably not a good policy. I’m just saying that I don’t think that there necessarily has to be a more-elaborate motive than trying to pull in more tax from alternate sources.

EDIT: Also, a lot of these are multinationals. So in terms of the companies involved, they can probably shift workers for whom the tax would be fatal for visa prospects to foreign offices somewhere, as long as the workers are still willing to work for the companies on those terms. That could keep them working for the company. That will kill the path to US citizenship for the workers, though, which an H1-B permits for. In general, I’m skeptical that discouraging highly-skilled workers from becoming US citizens is a great idea for the US.

EDIT2: I’d add that Trump’s been on record as making statements about his H1-B policy that are extremely inconsistent. Back when campaigning for his first term, IIRC he claimed that he would expand them, slash them, and leave them alone, partly depending upon who he was talking to. Just last year, he was talking about how they were just fine:

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/elon-musk-vows-war-over-h-1b-visa-program-amid-rift-with-some-trump-supporters-2024-12-28/

Trump sides with Elon Musk in H-1B visa debate, says he’s always been in favor of the program

So it might also be wise to take pronouncements from Trump on the matter with a grain of salt. I don’t know how serious this is from the article.

And, as those people who keep posting the rainbow colored “Lets talk about the Epstein files” memes keep pointing out, Trump has had a pretty long history of doing outrageous things to try to direct public attention away from other things that he doesn’t want discussed.

Maybe. Could be just needing to offset tax cuts. The present administration and Congress has has cut taxes on the wealthy. Either they find new sources of revenue to fill the hole, or they run up deficit.

https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/03/04/what-we-know-about-the-us-h-1b-visa-program/

The number of H-1B applications approved in recent years has climbed. Nearly 400,000 were approved in fiscal year 2024, most of which were applications to renew employment. Rejection rates of H-1B applications spiked during Trump’s first term but fell under former President Joe Biden.

Computer-related jobs have been the most common occupation for H-1B workers for more than a decade. Since fiscal 2012, about 60% or more of H-1B workers approved each year have held a computer-related job. In 2023, the share was 65%, and these workers reported a median annual salary of $123,600.

India is the top country of birth for H-1B workers. Roughly three-quarters (73%) of H-1B workers whose applications were approved in fiscal 2023 were born in India.

This would amount to a tax, mostly on the tech industry employing skilled workers out of India, of about $40B/year.

Pew has a list of top employers. Amazon would take the single largest share, at over $1B/year.

On the other hand, Trump also eliminated the de minimis tariff exemption, which was a move that I would guess is probably very advantageous to Amazon (it let foreign e-retailers sell to American consumers while rarely paying tariffs, since they sold product imported in small quantities, whereas domestic e-retailers selling product tended to import in larger quantity and paid tariff).

kagis

https://communicationsdaily.com/article/2025/05/20/cbo-no-de-minimis-would-mean-52-b-in-revenue-first-full-year-2505200047?BC=bc_674b2b83cff7b

If de minimis ends for all imports in July 2027, as proposed in the tax bill currently being considered in the House of Representatives, the U.S. Treasury would collect an additional $5.2 billion in the first full fiscal year after the change, mostly in tariffs, but including $231 million in customs user fees.

So if you figure that Trump effectively levied a tax that principally hit Amazon’s foreign competitors like Shein and Temu with that move, I expect that that partially offsets how hard this hits Amazon.

That being said, a lot of other tech firms are gonna get hurt, and aren’t e-retailers. I doubt that this is a good move in terms of US tech strength.

This doesn’t meet your “human enemies” requirement, but if you’re looking for realistic firearm mechanics, you might want to look at Receiver 2. It does have procedurally-generated layouts, as per your roguelike point, and most of the game is firearm mastery.

I don’t know what type of otter and what type of seal that is, but I’d guess that there are some kinds of otters and seals that do actually encounter each other in the wild, as there are salt water-living otters out there.

[Pope Francis] went further in the 2020 encyclical Fratelli Tutti, calling social media an “illusion of communication.”

There are probably a lot of criticisms one could make of this statement, but I think that a really good one is that the only reason I’m reading content from your papal encyclica is because it’s in an article that was submitted to a social media system.

“Sir, I’m not sure how exactly you managed to have this happen, but the pathology lab says that those are ultraviolet-C light burns on your scrotum.”

The relentless pursuit of profit and growth ruins absolutely everything it touches. Capitalist rot.

The factor driving age verification has been laws passed by countries. It’s not private industry forcing it, but government. That comes from people complaining to their legislators that they are unhappy that their kids can see <random thing that they object to> online.

If you want a communist system, fine. But there are far too many users on here who, when faced with virtually anything they don’t like, immediately post a screed complaining about ownership of private industry, when it often has absolutely nothing to do with the actual issue at hand.

EDIT: I’d also add that there are actual solutions if you object to something like this. You can pass a law against biometric-based age validation, which I can certainly understand — that form could be prohibited. You could have some alternative form of age-based validation to be instituted to create a path of least resistance for services, like having government provide and fund a zero-knowledge service to confirm various facts to services like age. In countries which have constitutional law and a higher bar to modify it than lower law, you could pass a constitutional law against any form of age validation (“ageism has no place in our country”) to prevent legislators from easily passing things like age verification laws, which I personally don’t think will fly politically in most places, but it’s at least one theoretical option.

Ah, thanks! Well, that’s one lone ray of light.

I’m still grouchy about a sandwich place that I liked that recently changed ownership putting in kiosks that apparently do facial recognition, as once I walked up, they suggested items that I’d purchased last time. That started me looking, and I’ve been noticing that a lot of the ordering kiosks that places have been installing around where I am have cameras (though none have been actively making suggestions). I can only imagine that that gets hooked into the tracking and advertising system at some point too, though.

Between increasing use of facial recognition and ALPRs, it’s going to be increasingly difficult to avoid targeted ads. I don’t have a fix for that. I mean, it’s illegal to block use of ALPRs. A lot of places also have anti-masking laws, though I suspect that in practice, they aren’t enforced much, and someone could theoretically put something on their face. I don’t especially want to run around wearing stuff on my face, though.

kagis

It sounds like that was a joke from some years back.

https://www.thesixthaxis.com/2018/06/11/skyrim-special-edition-announced-for-samsung-smart-refrigerators/

Skyrim: Special Edition Announced For Samsung Smart Refrigerators And Alexa

If that headline has confused you then let’s be very clear, this is a joke by Bethesda…

They do have a screen and Internet connectivity, but I don’t think that ATMs are actually a great route (unless they force people to stop and wait to get their money, which I don’t think will fly and will cut into capacity). There isn’t much eyeball time on them. The reason a car or a refrigerator works is because you’re likely to be around it a lot.

I will say that the rise of gas pumps at gas stations that play back advertisements is pretty obnoxious, though.

To enhance our service and offer additional content to our users, advertisements will be displayed on the Cover Screen for the Weather, Color, and Daily Board themes.

I really hope that Steam games don’t head down this path over time. Internet-connected refrigerators I’m willing to avoid, but that’s not the only vector for this sort of thing.

EDIT: And as has been pointed out on here before, some Internet-connected cars are starting to have updates to show ads on their UIs pushed out. Any time you’ve already spent the money and are kind of locked in and the manufacturer has Internet connectivity to the device and can update the thing subsequent to purchase, you’re kind of in a bad position regarding leverage.

I’d be pretty comfortable saying that buying enough battery storage to power-shift a year of power is more expensive.

What I want to do is find out what the maximum size battery I would need in order to store all of summer’s electricity for use in winter.

I mean, I think that it’s probably not a good idea for this guy to try to go fully off-grid if he has access to the grid, but for the sake of discussion, if one were honestly wanting to try it and one is in the UK, I’d think that one is probably rather better off adding a wind turbine, since some of the time that the sun isn’t shining, the wind is blowing.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/322789/quarterly-wind-speed-average-in-the-united-kingdom-uk/

Wind speed averages in the United Kingdom are generally highest in the first and fourth quarters of each calendar year – the winter months.

The UK is one of the worst places in the world in terms of solar potential:

https://globalsolaratlas.info/

But it’s one of the best in terms of wind potential:

https://globalwindatlas.info/