Erdogan is not going to do shit about the zionist project, at least voluntarily, but it would be something if the zionists gets too carried away in their invasion/occupation of Syria (like bombing Turkish troops) that forces Erdogan to actually do something material.

My cats wake me up in the morning around the same time, regardless of when I go to bed.

The model also bans export of any/all AI “technology”, so any release of weights would be banned since it could in theory be downloaded by a user in China. It might even ban the publishing of academic papers on AI.

Weight leaks for semi-open models have been fairly common in the past. Meta’s LLaMa1.0 model was originally closed source, but the weights were leaked and spread pretty rapidly (effectively laundered through finetunes and merges), leading to Meta embracing quasi-open source post-hoc. Similarly, most of the anime-style Stable Diffusion 1.5 models were based on NovelAI’s custom finetune, and the weights were similarly laundered and became ubiquitous.

Those incidents were both in 2023. Aside from some of the biggest players (OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, and I guess Apple kinda), open weight releases (usually not open source) have been become the norm (even for frontier models like DeepSeek-V3, Qwen 2.5 and Llama 3.1), so piracy in that case is moot (although it’s easy to assume that use non-compliant with licenses is also ubiquitous). Leakage of currently closed frontier models would be interesting from an academic and journalistic perspective, for being able to dig into the architecture and assess things like safety and regurgitation outside of the online service shell, but those frontier models would require so much compute that they’d be unusable by individual actors.

Now do Fort Detrick.

The point wasn’t that this work culture was good, but rather it doesn’t make sense to single out China when it’s endemic to the tech industry worldwide.

I don’t know what tech companies you worked for, but when I was working for a software company, I was averaging 45 hours in a client IT position, and all the software devs/engineers were definitely working at least 55-60 hours. And that was during normal periods: things definitely went into crunch mode around version releases and client go-lives. As far as I can tell, this is true across the broader industry.

If you’re a top engineer (or any similar senior position) for a western company, you ain’t working 40 hr/week. 50-70 hours a week is going to be the norm for that type of position in the west as well.

Based. The west has long relied on international brain drain (caused by imperial wars and neo-colonialism) to accumulate the “best and the brightest” and put a stranglehold on the tertiary/quaternary sectors. It’s amusing to see the shoe on the other foot, especially after the western tech giants have worked so hard to suppress tech worker wages.

I know the article is a threadbare simile, but it more than misses the whole point of Galadriel’s character in the books/movie. For even someone like Galadriel who meets this beyond-human ideal of beauty, purity and “goodness”, the power of the One Ring to dominate life is so corrupting that it would simply turn her into a new Sauron. Which is why after failing to resist temptation, Galadriel leaves Middle Earth and goes into the West. If there’s one point that is hammered in repeatedly throughout the Lord of the Rings, it’s that such absolute power cannot be used for good, despite anyone’s best intentions, and the only recourse is for it to be destroyed.

It’s buried in the article, but yep it’s a Boeing.

I can’t believe that some actually Vax-maxxed. Absolute legend.

It’s a hoax/transphobic rumor, allegedly from various unsubstantiated reports of schools keeping cat litter or litter boxes. The only case of this actually happening is keeping cat litter on hand to clean up large spills as an absorbant (specifically, it’d be used for cleaning up hazardous spills, like a chemical or blood.)

Either the banking crisis that’s been predicted over the past year due to high interest rates and bad debt, or perhaps there’s more that will come out about how JPMorgan Chase directly facilitated Jeffery Epstein’s operation in the Virgin Islands.

Wow, they discovered the copium index.

I hate how some people/reporters conflate maglev (with a technology that can work) with hyperloop/vacuum trains (which is a technology that doesn’t).

I agree that D&D will always exist, I am just personally uninterested in the direction the game is going with the OneD&D, and I think the source of this muddling path is do to the failure of the original business maneuver with the OGL revision. I don’t really see things getting better under Hasbro, so any major shakeup might be a good thing overall.

Kinda .

I don’t think Tencent would be a particularly great owner for the D&D brand, but they might have been more hands-off than Hasbro went it comes to mucking with the business model, and a major shakeup for D&D could be good. Honestly, WotC (or just D&D) could be doing better if it was an independent operation as opposed to subsidizing the Hasbro revenue sink.

From reading the article, “pre-recorded” and “artificial” voices are already prohibited for unsolicited calls, so I don’t see what this ruling would actually change other than a slight clarification. It’s not like robocallers are actually prosecuted in any meaningful way.

Hasbro has no clue what to do with the game since their games-as-service, closed ecosystem plan went kaput after they backed down on the OGL revision (which would have been necessary to shut out other VTTs and ensure player & DM subscriptions). I think the recent lay offs of senior people in the D&D related teams suggests this as well. This article doesn’t seem well sourced at all, but a shake-up would be very interesting at this point.

Side-stepping some of the speculation and impact on the traditional market/fanbase, I am curious about the interest in D&D in China, as a Tencent acquisition would presumably make it much easier to market the game there. From the searching I’ve done, there doesn’t seem to be a ton of interest in D&D, and there’s no official translation into Mandarin. The movie didn’t do great at the Chinese box office, although Baldur’s Gate 3 did fine? Obviously, if Tencent does put together a subsidiary to design a version for the Chinese market, I’m not sure if they’d want to start by translating/adapting existing books or using the ruleset to design a bespoke version (either with a fantasy setting or based on relevant Chinese IP.)