Follow your leader Elon, there’s no way out.

I entirely do not regret mercilessly insulting and mocking him, directly, on Twitter, after he bought it.

… Never had a Twitter account before then, got it banned within 8 hours, very likely by Elon, personally.

Fuck 'im.

Its pronounced ‘About four thirds megabytes.’

… Even assuming the self driving tech was actually capable of doing this, which is won’t be…

How would this even make any sense?

Ok, if you live within about 200 to 300 miles of a Tesla factory, … you have this option?

Fremont, California; Sparks, Nevada; Austin, Texas; Buffalo, New York; Lathrop, California.

Outside of 250 miles ish of one of those places? No self driving delivery for you.

… And I am pretty surr not all models are made at all those locations.

Despite long ago claiming his EVs and charger network would be capable of automatically recharging or battery swapping themselves… to make a long distance journey… that … doesn’t exist, he abandoned all of that.

Even funnier: Imagine a tesla self driving from the as of yet to be completed gigafactory in Monterrey Mexico… through the border checkpoint.

The auto charger network doesn’t exist, the car would murder people, cause an accident or fucking explode in the border queue… and even if none of that happened… how in the fuck is a self driving car gonna get through a militarized border crossing?

If he just gives himself a waiver via DOGE for his cars… congrats Elon, you are now a drug trafficker / arms smuggler, whether you know it or not.

… fucking lunacy.

A nearly 50% drop in booked global TEUs?

TEU means Twenty Foot Equivalent Units, your basic standard shipping container.

Yes, yes, this is astoundingly, apocalyptically bad.

America will be more fucked than others, but this is Great Depression 2.0.

If this persists, and you end up with a the rest of the year of roughly half the TEU… well you’d go from about 900m TEU to about 550m TEU.

The last time global sea trade clocked in at about 550m TEU was 2010.

https://transportgeography.org/contents/chapter5/intermodal-transportation-containerization/world-container-throughput/

So… yeah, just wipe out the last 15 years worth of volume of world trade, and economic activity/growth enabled by that, and oh also you have about 1 billion more mouths to feed than in 2010.

Or… if you look at it in terms of % change… its hard to find detailed, historical, week by week figures without paying for the data, but the entirety of the GFC hitting the global economy in 2009 resulted in an 8.5% decrease in global TEU from 2008.

So… it remains to be seen how long and strong the current downturn in TEU will persist…

But, if you say 2025 TEU drops by 30% in aggregate for the rest of this year… that is a 2025 that has a -22.5% ‘growth’ in total world trade volume, almost 3x as bad as the 07 08 09 GFC, the impact of which was seen in the -8.5% of 2009.

These are spitball guess numbers, I can’t predict the future… but I do have a degree in Econ and I used to work as an executive level data analyst for a large mulinational, US based import export firm… so its moderately informed spitball guess.

This is Great Depression 2.0, this will make the GFC look like childs play. This is tens or hundreds of millions of people (globally) going broke, becoming homeless, starving to death levels of bad.

The only way to prevent that at this point is … well basically step one is America needs to impeach and imprison every Trump administration member… but that is uh… not guaranteed, to say the least.

Every ‘goal’ my family gave me and then forced me into pursuing?

Sure, they praised me when I accomplished those things.

Every goal I actually chose for myself, and achieved?

At best, absolutely no help of any kind when I’d ask them for help, general constant dissuasion and negging, and then after I achieve those goals, massive, massive passive aggressive jealously and constant belittling.

I now live several states away, don’t communicate with them, and have finally been able to establish a sense of self, and self-esteem, based around my own assesment of what are good traits and goals, instead of basing them on trying to please incompetent bullies.

…

If your goals are, as you say in another post, learning how to make a vidro game, learning to draw, learning basic programming/web design…

These are literally all goals that pretty much most people with sufficient spare time and diligence could figure out the basics of and even become decently competent at with a few years of time… not even in a formal education setting, though that could likely help.

Your goals are extremely reasonable, your family is being ridiculous.

Are you guaranteed to become wealthy via pursuit of these goals? No, of course not.

But you aren’t guaranteed that in most other careers or lines of work either.

If you don’t already have gobs of money and/or influential connections… chances are, you never will.

Unless you are like abadoning a fairly solid career path that you’re already significantly time/money invested in, and just completely abandoning all means of keeping yourself able to eat and sleep indoors for the full time pursuit of hobbies…

Then no, there’s nothing wrong with wanting to learn more skills.

I try to keep between 68 F and 72 F, but uh, the thermostat’s method of measuring the actual temperature in the apartment is completely, laughably busted, so… hot days it goes on 62, cold days it goes on 84.

No. Autism is not a reason to be a bigot.

Autist here, completely agree.

Many subtle, more context dependent social cues took me a lot longer than NTs, Allistic people, to figure out… though I excelled at school and have gone on to hold highly technical data analysis/reporting, db admin type jobs.

Blatant bigotry is… not a very subtle or context dependent thing to understand.

This fairly young 19F girl comes from a bigotted family that has completely or mostly normalized this kind of behavior, and has also infantalized her into believing Autism and ADHD are excuses for her poor behavior, as opposed to explanations.

Right wing bigots tend to treat Autism (and really any mental disorder) as basically ‘they’re retards, just expect them to be shitty, and also I am a hero for raising a retard baby’, as opposed to actually taking time to learn the ins and outs of how their minds operate differently, and learn together how to bridge that gap, with a bit of accomodation coming from both sides.

This often results in infantilization of the kid, of just taking away their agency, instead of actually putting in the extra work to help them build up their agency and tweak or tune their worldview to be a bit more aligned with, or at least aware of, how much of the world doesn’t operate by the rules that an Autistic person would default to.

(Just go look at how RFK Jr apparently think we are literally pants shittingly stupid and will never pay taxes or go on a date… given the Kennedy family history of literally lobotomizing his own aunt I think it was, for her mental disorder… yeah not looking great for us NDs with this frat boy fail son with a brain worm where his brain should be as fucking Health Secretary.)

Right wing idiot bigots are not very good at critical thinking, so… yeah, it makes sense that they also suck at teaching critical thinking.

I have often seen this produce many additional behavioral problems in other younger Autistic people… because their idiot familes basically Munchausen-by-proxy their Autistic kids into beleiving they are far, far less capable generally than they actually are.

In a sense, her family was probably bigoted toward her by treating her as a caricature of what Autism actually is during her most fundamental developmental years… needlessly stifling her mental development… so now she is doing the same and broadly being bigoted toward other people with other ‘labels’ that fit into other ‘boxes’.

This girl needs to learn to stop excusing her bigotrd shittiness by pointing at her mental conditions.

There are plenty of people with Autism and/or ADHD who … yes their minds work differently, but they aren’t all raging bigots, thats on her.

I remember a few more terms and phrases…

But… ok so this may also sound ridiculous, but basically, when I speak in Japanese, I find my tone just naturally shifts to be lower, bassier.

I am decently good at singing in English, and am a baritone.

But when I just normally speak in English, its usually a bit higher pitched than the middle point of my singing range.

… But when I speak in Japanese, it is either at or lower than the middle point of my English singing range.

I do not do this intentionally and am not sure why… I do this, lol.

Maybe it is again trained into me from associating shouting out numbers and osu in Japanese with very intentional diapraghm/breathing control from Karate?

Restricted Item. Please ask employee for assistance.

Because it was generated by an LLM that assumes this one to ten iteration function is the entirety of all of what the code needs to do.

I can count to ten in English (native), Japanese (did Karate for about a decade) and Spanish (took classes in middle and high school).

I can … read and listen to Spanish and maybe understand at about a 2nd or 3rd grade level… very much out of practice.

I would not say I can speak Japanese or understand it … basically at all, unless the conversation entirely consists of either counting, or using nouns describing Karate forms, lol.

The first time I dated … a combination weeabo and owns her own horses, horse girl, who was actually taking Japanese in college to major in it…

She asked me a very grammatically basic question in Japanese, a yes no question…

And I responded ‘Osu!’… and then quickly learned that that is not a standard Japanese word for ‘yes’, that would be ‘Hai’, and that Osu … basically only contextually makes sense in the context of a dojo or some other sports/military type setting.

Apparently in proper/normal? Japanese it is a casual greeting amongst martial arts practitioners… but I was literally drilled to say it as an enthusiastic, affirmative response to any command.

EDIT: Also, this will sound insane, but I swear to god this actually happened: Many years after the aforementioned clarification from my at the time gf… I later encountered a man who told me he was … a yakuza, specifically a yakushi… we chatted for hours, he showed me how one of his fingers had been severely busted at the knuckle.

He explained to me that… there had been a fuckup on his part, but his… direct superior decided to basically accept some of the blame for the fuckup of this guy I met, and struck him with the blunt side of the blade instead of the sharp side… and then exiled him.

Which was why he was in America, and could no longer safely return to Japan.

Anyway, he explained to me that the reason why… most Japanese say ‘yon’ instead of ‘shi’ to mean ‘4’ … is because ‘shi’ is also the character/sound that… basically means ‘death’.

Which then circled around to why he referred to himself as a ‘yakushi’.

As he explained it to me, it meant that he had both dealt, and been sparred from death.

… I have no idea if what this guy was saying is actually true, if he actually was a yakuza… but he did tell me these things and seemed very serious about them.

It is astonishingly easy to get basically any LLM to output a simple iteration from one to ten function in all of those languages, and more.

Here’s Assembly:

    newline db 0xA  ; Newline character

section .bss
    number resb 1  ; Reserve a byte for the number

section .text
    global _start

_start:
    mov ecx, 1  ; Start with 1
    mov edx, 10 ; End with 10

loop_start:
    cmp ecx, edx  ; Compare ecx with edx
    jg loop_end   ; If ecx > edx, jump to loop_end

    ; Convert number to ASCII
    add ecx, '0'  ; Convert number to ASCII
    mov [number], ecx  ; Store the ASCII value in number

    ; Print the number
    mov eax, 4        ; sys_write system call
    mov ebx, 1        ; File descriptor 1 is stdout
    mov ecx, number   ; Pointer to the number
    mov edx, 1        ; Number of bytes to write
    int 0x80          ; Call kernel

    ; Print newline
    mov eax, 4        ; sys_write system call
    mov ebx, 1        ; File descriptor 1 is stdout
    mov ecx, newline  ; Pointer to the newline character
    mov edx, 1        ; Number of bytes to write
    int 0x80          ; Call kernel

    sub ecx, '0'  ; Convert ASCII back to number
    inc ecx        ; Increment the number
    jmp loop_start  ; Jump back to the start of the loop

loop_end:
    ; Exit the program
    mov eax, 1        ; sys_exit system call
    xor ebx, ebx      ; Exit code 0
    int 0x80          ; Call kernel

Here’s FORTRAN

program iterate_from_one_to_ten
    implicit none
    integer :: i

    ! Loop from 1 to 10
    do i = 1, 10
        print *, i
    end do
end program iterate_from_one_to_ten

Here’s COBOL

PROGRAM-ID. IterateFromOneToTen.

ENVIRONMENT DIVISION.

DATA DIVISION.
WORKING-STORAGE SECTION.
    01  WS-Counter PIC 9(2) VALUE 1.

PROCEDURE DIVISION.
    PERFORM VARYING WS-Counter FROM 1 BY 1 UNTIL WS-Counter > 10
        DISPLAY WS-Counter
    END-PERFORM.

    STOP RUN.

I will be shocked if the Dem establishment doesn’t run Newsom and do their damndest to ratfuck AOC like they did with Bernie.

Sure, there’s a lot of time between now and a theoretical 2028 presidential cycle…

But I have learned to set expectations pessimistically and be surprised in the optimism direction, not the other way around.

Not only are they water soluble and easily washed out… the vast majority of them are also non toxic.

If you get paint on your mask, and it splatters through to your mouth… non toxic. Tastes terrible, but its not gonna harm you via ingestion. Much of the ‘paint’ is … basically just food dye.

…

… Also… a whole lot of police… just use paint markers (they are technically, legally classed as ‘markers’ because they aren’t firearms thus are not ‘guns’)… they use markers with pepper balls.

They just shoot miniature tear gas / skin irritant /eye irritant ‘paintballs’ as a less lethal weapon.

You can put a whole lot of different liquids inside what is basically a semi rigid gel/plastic capsule.

…

The old devious trick I remember was people would freeze their paintballs the night before a match.

Nowadays, I’m fairly sure if you are caught doing that, you don’t just get banned from that field/course… you probably get prosecuted.

Like a toilet bowl, mounted to the ceiling.

As I see it the only advantage is that it is not run by Elon Musk.

And by ‘advantage’ I mean the ‘advantage’ of using a corporate product that, so far, is doing its best to drive people away from an actually censorship resistant Fediverse, using inclusive rainbow capitalist language to lure in the large majority of people who are not tech savvy enough to realize they are basically lying to / misleading them.

That is literally how I read it as well, BlueSky is farming out server load to enthusiastic and dedicated users, while also just going ham on the PR / propoganda / marketing making themselves appear to be something they are not.

Unless I missed something and BlueSky is actually letting people run and custom configure their own relays at least semi independently… yeah, they’re basically being quite shady and misleading.

I was oversimplifying a bit such that it wouldn’t be overwhelming to a self-described uninformed person asking for an explanation.

Yes, there are multiple actual relays but they functionally constitute a single layer or class of components in a birds eye view of the whole system.

As far as I am aware, no one other than BlueSky runs the relays, or has the code to do so.

If I am wrong about that, I would appreciate a source indicating such.

Does anyone other than BlueSky actually run a relay?

On the bright side, at least our upcoming American cyberpunk dystopia is now more likely to feature a greater prevelance of lone wolf, broke, two bit hackers as a semi-viable lifestyle/‘career path’…

My experience as a person who has a lot of experience working with computer is basically thus:

When you solve a problem for someone, you are a magician.

When you can’t, you are completely full of shit and know nothing about tech and your entire life is a lie.

When you tell someone ‘hey I wouldn’t do that’, your experience and expertise means nothing if what you are suggesting would mildly inconvenience them for 10 minutes, or takes more than 30 seconds to explain why it is a bad idea.

When you tell them ‘hey have you tried this?’ your experience and expertise also means nothing if you cannot do it for them and also make it so it never breaks again, and also they will keep doing the thing that makes it break even though you explained to them how to not do that thing that makes it break.

… I may as well just start an IT flavored Rodney Dangerfield comedy routine, it would be much more fun and less stressful than always being a db admin/data analyst/backend dev/frontend dev/whatever else my job title now apparently includes.