Also, in the age of online communications, when information can be limitlessly copied, it’s impossible for authoritarians to destroy information they disapprove of. It is possible, however, for them to make it difficult to find by flooding the world with vast quantities of plausible-looking alternatives to it, making it hard to identify what is real. Before LLMs, doing this at the sort of scale that would have been effective was prohibitively laborious.

Ariana was a brand name used by a Chinese manufacturer of cheap luggage of the sort you’d find in neighbourhoods with working-class immigrant populations. I once had a backpack of theirs which was the maximum airline carry-on size, which is to say, muy grande.

Isn’t that Donald Trump’s phone background?

Was the video made in Australia or New Zealand by any chance? There are two Microbees (Z80-based computers from New Zealand, virtually unheard of in the northern hemisphere) in the photo,

He’s probably all for it. More persecution of Jews abroad = more emigration to Israel = more IDF troops and settlers for newly conquered lands. Everyone’s a winner!

I’m sure they just wanted them to wish them all a happy Hanukkah. Right?

Isn’t she some kind of right-wing influencer? The crazy was probably a plus.

America! Fuck yeah!

I can vouch for Mythic Beasts

In Ottoman Turkey, burglars would set a tortoise with a lighted candle on its back loose in a house they were planning to rob, to check if there was anyone home.

That sounds really… economically anxious

Correction: Adams’ cause of death was not prostate cancer as earlier reported, but autoerotic asphyxiation.

Update: the pornographic material found at the scene has been confirmed to be AI-generated Shrek mpreg.

Somebody ought to sit him down and explain the Mercator projection to him.

He should be awarded a prize for services to womens’ horticulture, given the number of women at MIT who filled their offices with houseplants just to keep him away.

RMS doesn’t approve

TIL there was a Kirby vacuum cleaner company

Maybe he could get the chatbot to play not only his girlfriend but their kids as well. Then he can beam proudly as he shows people a chat window on his phone. You do you, buddy!

You know the saying “behind every sign there’s a story”? It may apply to laws as well.

Also, almost no Icelanders have last names (in the sense of family names). Most have just a patronymic that translates as “son/daughter of (father’s name)” (i.e., Björk’s father was named Guðmundur), which is why references to Icelanders in the news refer to them by given name. As the Icelandic name pool is limited (there’s a naming committee which must approve all new names, and they’re somewhat conservative), the population register also includes people’s nicknames.