Depending on the design of its memory, a device with a full drive will literally weigh slightly more or slightly less than one with an empty drive. Charging the battery in all cases causes it to weigh more.

No that’s just wanting to look younger. Again, not every cosmetic treatment is gender-affirming care. Hell, it’s pretty ridiculously to even use the term outside the context of trans healthcare. Musk looked male before and he looked male after. He just thought he looked better and younger with more hair. It had nothing to do with gender.

Just listen to yourself. You appropriate the language of a minority group. Then when actual member of that group comes along and tells you you’re not using it correctly, you double down and try to tell them that you know their own language better than they do.

The reason I push back on this is because the distinction between gender affirming care and general cosmetic treatment really matters. This shit kills people. Men who want hair plugs don’t have a 40% suicide attempt rate.

This watering down of language for cheap political points has very real consequences for the trans community. Right now our rights and healthcare are under attack. Hard won victories decades in the making are being rolled back. Among the targets of these attacks are conservatives trying to bar health insurance companies from covering gender-affirming care. And that case becomes much easier if the distinction between trans healthcare and every cis person that wants a minor cosmetic treatment is watered down.

This isn’t gatekeeping. It’s fighting against the casual appropriation of our language that threatens our rights and lives.

I get why people mention this, but as an actual trans person, when I hear someone, even an ally, say this kind of thing, it shows they really don’t get what gender-affirming care is. It’s really cringe. Gender-affirming care is just that - care that affirms your gender and allows you to take on primary or secondary sex characteristics different from that of your natal sex.

Male pattern baldness is a male secondary sex characteristic. It is simply a consequence of combining certain genetics with male hormone levels. You’re not affirming your gender by getting hair plugs. In fact, you’re actually dampening a male secondary sex characteristic. If a cis female had abnormally high T levels or some other condition to give her male-pattern baldness, then her getting hair plugs would be gender-affirming care. But for Elon, a cisgender man? That’s not gender-affirming care.

When I see someone call hair plugs gender-affirming care, it shows that they really don’t understand what gender-affirming care is. It’s not any cosmetic treatment you get just for fun. It’s more like reconstructive surgery you get to fix your face after a car crash. Elon got a cosmetic treatment, not gender-affirming care.

This is because Republicans are a truly Orwellian party - straight out of 1984. They have no real principles anymore. It’s just power for the sake of power. One day the official line is we’ve never been at war with East Asia, the next it’s we’ve always been at war. Trump can come up do a u-turn today, and the slime that is every Republican will instantly reorient themselves to follow dear leader’s new commands.

Unfortunately for them, LLMs just don’t have that much capability for doublethink and self-deception. Once you train a model, that model is fixed in time. So you could train a model to match the Republican fever dreams of today. But a month from now, there will be a whole new set of fever dreams that every good little fascist needs to follow. But the model will still be stuck repeating last month’s lies. As there are no consistent Republican beliefs, you can’t just train an LLM to tow the party line. There is no party line, just an endless series of lies and vomit, whatever is needed to advance their power today.

If this were a movie, it would end with the very soldiers he ordered for his giant vanity project deposing him in response to some crescendo of barbarity on his part. That’s a downright Aesop of an ending - the villain defeated by his own vanity and pride. You order thousands of soldiers to perform a parade to celebrate your birthday, and it’s the last straw that causes them to straight up depose you in a military coup.

Supreme Courts around the world have found all sorts of ways of exercising power. They can deputize citizen volunteers to serve as temporary court enforcers. They can outright order the military to stand down and arrest the president. Hell, they could dig into the ancient tradition and declare the president an outlaw - literally outside the protection of the law, making it legal for anyone to straight-up kill the guy.

Sure they have important differences. At the same time however, it is the height of tone-deaf arrogance to expect people to vote for their own genocidal oppressors.

Kamala likely lost Michigan due to her support for Israeli Apartheid and genocide. The Muslim population there quite understandably didn’t want to vote for her. You can’t really come to a group of people and say, “yes, we admit that we’re supporting a genocide of your people, but we need you to still vote for us for the good things we actually will do. We’re going to keep committing genocide against you, but we need you to vote for us for the sake of democracy.”

Trump and Kamala were largely indistinguishable on the Gaza issue. Trump is just a lot ruder about it. Yet, in the months following the election, we’ve seen countless gloating by centrist Democrats openly celebrating further violence by the Israelis, gleefully mocking Palestinians and their supporters, saying that this wouldn’t have happened if Kamala won. Now we know beyond a shadow of a doubt that Biden, Kamala, and Trump all shared the same policy towards Israel - full and unconditional support with no limits or red lines whatsoever. Gaza was getting wiped off the map no matter who was elected. Notably, despite being still active in politics, to this day, neither Kamala nor Biden have spoken a single word publicly against the ongoing Israeli genocide in Gaza. Even though they’re out of power and have nothing to lose by speaking out, they still fully support the actions of the Israeli government.

Are there still good reasons to have supported Kamala? Sure. But I also don’t expect anyone whose people are being genocided to vote for those other reasons. If you’re not willing to prevent a people from being literally murdered, then you can’t come groveling to those people, asking for their votes. If you don’t care about someone’s life, why should they care about your democracy? This is basic Maslow’s hierarchy of needs shit. People don’t have the luxury of worrying about abstract goods like democracy when their basic material survival is threatened.

I’m not a “prepper” in an “underground bunker” sense, but I do prepare for emergencies and instability, whatever form it may take: political, yes, but I also live on several fault lines

Assuming you’re a homeowner, make sure to check if your home insurance policy covers earthquake damage. By default most insurance policies don’t cover seismic.

There any sense on what would be good to stock up on now? When I’ve searched this, the advice is usually pretty worthless. Just advice indistinguishable from general prepper stuff. I’ve seen recommendations to stock up on things like flour, things that the US produces domestically in abundance. But some necessities are going to be more vulnerable to disruptions in shipments from China than others.

Anyone find a good guide or have a sense of what basic household necessities are going to be most vulnerable to disruption of trade with China? I’m not concerned with things like consumer electronics right now, those are luxuries. I’m talking basic food and household staples. I don’t need the standard prepper list that’s meant to prepare you for grave natural disasters. What’s really needed is an analysis of precisely what necessities are most likely to be interrupted by this.

Has anyone seen such a list, or have a sense for what necessities are most vulnerable here?

At this point, I assume anyone still harping on this is a conservative provocative looking to stir up division.

The truth is it’s possible for more than one group to be at fault. Those who stayed home have a ton of blame, the centrist dipshits at the DNC have a ton of blame, and the Republicans themselves have the most blame of all.

Quit trying to sew division. We need unity now, not to rehash old grievances.

Even if the marshals refuse to comply, the federal courts do have the power to hold people accountable. They have enforcement power. They’re just too chicken shit to use it. Federal courts can deputize people to enforce orders, just like an Old West judge appointing a posse to round up an outlaw. A judge could deputize volunteers from the community and give them orders to round up people who refuse to follow court orders. I’m sure you would have zero problem finding a few hundred people willing to volunteer and show up with their own weapons to enforce a lawful court order.

I don’t understand the cat food thing. A can of cat food is usually the same cost or higher as a can of cheap tuna or other canned meat. You’re eating cat food for no reason!

How to address superintelligence, if that is actually something we realistically face:

1. Make creating an unlicensed AI with over a certain threshold to be a capital offense.

2. Regulate the field of artificial intelligence as heavily as we do nuclear science and nuclear weapons development.

3. Have strict international treaties on model size and capability limitations.

4. Have inspection regimes in place to allow international monitoring of any electricity usage over a certain threshold.

5. Use satellites to track anomalous large power use across the globe (monitored via waste heat) and thoroughly investigate any large unexplained energy use.

6. Target the fabs. High powered chips should be licensed and tracked like nuclear materials.

7. Make clear that a nuclear first strike is a perfectly acceptable response to a nation state trying to create AGI.

Anyone who says this technology simply cannot be regulated is a fool. We’re talking models that require hundreds of megawatts or more to run and giant data centers full of millions of dollars worth of chips. There’s only a handful of companies on the planet producing the hardware for these systems. The idea that we can’t regulate such a thing is ridiculous.

I’m sorry, but I put the survival of the human race above your silly science project. If I have to put every person on this planet with a degree in computer science into a hole in the ground to save the human race, that is a sacrifice I am willing to make. Hell, I’ll go full Dune and outlaw computers all together, go back to pen and paper for everything, before I condone AGI.

We can’t control this technology? Balderdash. It’s created by human beings. And human beings can be killed.

So, how do we deal with ASI? You put anyone trying to create it deep in the ground. This is self defense at a species level. Sacrificing a few thousand madmen who think they’re going to summon a benevolent god to serve them is simple self-defense. It’s OK to kill cultists who are trying to summon a demon.