Lou Katz @lou@entropyservice.com

Working at a dollar store is incredibly dangerous, thanks to low staffing levels that make them easy targets for armed robbers. Then, they jack up prices, selling goods in "cheater" sizes that are smaller than the normal retail packaging, and which are only made available to large dollar store conglomerates:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/27/walmarts-jackals/#cheater-sizes

10/

Walmart didn't just *happen*. The rise of Walmart - and Amazon, its online successor - was the result of a specific policy choice, the decision by the Reagan administration not to enforce a key antitrust law. Walmart may have been founded by Sam Walton, but its success (and the demise of the American Main Street) are down to Reaganomics.

1/

Another fundamentally useful feature of Google Search has disappeared: cached pages.

'We indexed the entire web over and over again so you can find stuff! But we won't tell you when we found it or what it used to look like!'

Allegedly, this is a new "Russian joke":

Putin has a nightmare because of events in Kursk, and the ghost of Stalin appears to him.

Putin pleads with Stalin: "The Nazis are invading Kursk! My army is retreating! What can I do?"

Stalin tells him: “Do just as I did in 1943! Send your best troops from Ukraine to the front, and get American supplies!"

Just this evening I spoke to a friend who is a professor teaching EE and CS courses. I mentioned that I hoped that Mechanical Engineering wasn't doing the equivalent, which would be to turn into a "Using AutoCAD" degree. He reports that his colleagues in ME have complained about that very thing.
2/

The White House should stop ignoring Musk’s behavior & insulate agencies against risk, starting with shifting unique agency activity off of X. https://civic-texts.ghost.io/if-x-and-musk-are-not-politically-neutral-democracies-need-to-act-to-mitigate-the-growing-risks/
No American should have to use a private platform to read official statements or interact with our elected representatives or appointed officials.

@brouhaha @teajaygrey So it seems.

Well, Google has decided to essentially become a catalogue for the web, abandoning the notion of indexing knowledge, with only a few particularly noteworthy "authoritative" authors on topics older than 10 years being considered worthy of keeping.

That means corporations and /some/ academic institutions, probably. Everything else? Maybe the corposcum masters like you, maybe not.

It's gross.

@teajaygrey Depending on the search engine it could be worse than on others.

Google is basically deindexing anything older than a decade that isn't backed by a corporation at this point.

@mattblaze
Get well soon!
I would add a reminder that the far-right people. who claim that because vaccination and masks are not 100% effective, we shouldn't use them, are 100% idiots. Vaccines are much more effective than the stats those idiots cite, because even when a vaccinated person gets infected, they usually have only.a mild case, and are significantly less likely to develop Long Covid.

Musk and Trump on nuclear weapons (1:20:48):

Musk: "Hiroshima and Nagasaki were bombed, but now they're like full cities again. So it's really not something that, you know."

Trump: "That's great."

Musk: "So it's not as scary as people think basically."

Capitalism, Mass Anger and the 2024 Elections https://www.counterpunch.org/2024/08/14/capitalism-mass-anger-and-the-2024-elections/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=mastodon

"Mohammed bin Salman Al Saud, the crown prince of Saudi Arabia known as MBS, announced a growing presence in Silicon Valley by dining with investors Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen and Altman, renting the entire Four Seasons Hotel."

*Shudder*

Just a reminder that LLMs have never provided actual answers to any question asked of them or any actual prompt set forth.

They have, however, provided answer-shaped responses, and we as humans are seriously lacking when it comes to telling one from the other.

Folks, a banana-shaped piece of wood is not edible, and I am embarrassed for our species that you cannot tell the difference.

For those who did not receive the last memo:

THE VOID is for screaming.

THE ABYSS is for staring.

Please do not scream into THE ABYSS. And under no circumstances should you ever stare into THE VOID.

That is all.