I went to a minor national park over the summer (Abraham Lincoln Birthplace National Historical Park) and there was a map of the United States showing all the national parks in the country with a "Gulf of America" sticker placed over "Gulf of Mexico".
Readit Newscandlemas commented on Nine months later, is still the "Gulf of Mexico" to news outlets niemanlab.org/2025/10/nin... · Posted by u/giuliomagnifico
Kind of looks like the Stonks guy meme.
candlemas commented on Trevor Milton's Nikola case dropped by SEC following Trump pardon eletric-vehicles.com/niko... · Posted by u/xnx
“I don’t know him, but I was… they say it was very unfair. And they say the thing that he did wrong was he was one of the first people that supported a gentleman named Donald Trump for president,” the President said then.
The filing last month noted that “President Trump expressly decided here that Milton is factually innocent, the pardon did, contrary to the debtors’ assertions, wipe the slate clean.”
Absolutely disgusting. Now he's trying to pull 69 million in legal fees from the company.
"Milton, 42, and his wife donated more than $1.8 million to a Trump re-election campaign fund less than a month before the November election, according to the Federal Election Commission."
https://apnews.com/article/nikola-trevor-milton-fraud-trump-...
candlemas commented on Trevor Milton's Nikola case dropped by SEC following Trump pardon eletric-vehicles.com/niko... · Posted by u/xnx
Wow. Quotes like these really illustrate to me that I may have some massive blind spots and lack a lot of skills that help make people lots of money. This fellow is worth $3 billion and just spouts gibberish.
What skills does he have that I completely lack?
He doesn't have a conscience.
There is a very large scale crawler that uses random valid user agents and a staggeringly large pool of ips. I first noticed it because a lot of traffic was coming from Brazil and "HostRoyale" (asn 203020). They send only a few requests a day from each ip so rate limiting is not useful.
I run a honeypot that generates urls with the source IP so I am pretty confident it is all one bot, in the past 48 hours I have had over 200,000 ips hit the honeypot.
I am pretty sure this is Bytedance, they occasionally hit these tagged honeypot urls with their normal user agent and their usual .sg datacenter.
My site has also recently been getting massively hit by Brazilian IPs. It lasts for a day or two, even if they are being blocked.
candlemas commented on Bunker Busters probably failed to penetrate Iranian concrete popularmechanics.com/mili... · Posted by u/_1tem
Given the extremely vibration sensitive nature of centrifuges, significant damage may still have been caused without the bombs penetrating the concrete. Although based on the latest report from the Pentagon it may only have set program back by months.
How do they deal with earthquakes?
candlemas commented on How to Build Conscious Machines osf.io/preprints/thesisco... · Posted by u/hardmaru
The creator of IIT doesn't understand the universality of Turing machines. He thinks that because in CPUs the physical transistors don't have as many connections as neurons in the brain, that it's fundamentally limited and cannot be conscious.
He even goes as far as to say that you cannot simulate the brain on a CPU and make it conscious because it's still connection limited in the hardware. If you understand computer science you know this is absurd, Turing machines can compute any computable function.
He says "you're not worried you will fall into a simulated black hole are you?" but that is an entirely different kind of thing. The only difference we would get by building a machine with hundreds of thousands of connections per node is faster and more energy efficient. The computation would be the same.
Maybe he doesn't think consciousness is a computation.
Will the period between whole classes of jobs going away and a new social contract be short enough so that a Butlerian Jihad doesn't kick off?
I've never understood what the real reason we invaded was. I just know it wasn't what we said, or oil.
There were a few reasons but an important one is that Cheney, Wolfowitz, and Rumsfeld were convinced by Laurie Mylroie that Iraq really had something to do with 9/11 and everybody in the administration was paranoid about another attack. Wolfowitz also felt guilty about the George H. W. Bush administration abandoning the Shiites. All of them (except maybe Powell and Armitage) already disliked Iraq, felt like the first war was unfinished business, and didn't need much prodding to go after Saddam but the 9/11 connection they thought existed gave it urgency. Ultimately it came down to Bush and he probably thought it sounded like a good idea and not for any particular reason.
They're game testers.