I do want to see where China goes with soft power.

I’m ashamed about the amount of my life I’ve wasted in Genshin and Where Winds Meet, but it still feels like the a lot of their cultural exports haven’t cracked the “just exotic enough for broad global appeal” that big-brand anime or K-pop have hit.

If nothing else, imagine they treat it with the same strategic importance they gave industrial dominance. There would be a room full of very stern and sincere Vice-Ministers for Waifu Development and Fanboy Accelerstion.

One huge issue is that LLMs do weird and stupid things differently than how humans do them.

If you’ve developed an eye for reading human-made changes, you’re not necessarily going to recognize new and surprising failure modes as easily. It’s literally harder than regular code review.

Humans with modern tooling, for example, rarely hallucinate field/class/method/object names because non-spicy autocomplete keeps them on the rails. LLMs seem much more willing to decide the menu bar is .menuBar and not .topMenu, probably because their training corpus is full of the former.

Many things still fall back to VGA, like old projectors.

Transhumanity would be exciting if they had cool visions. I’d be all over raising a creche of draconic children.

But no, it’s just rich people gluing a Palm Pilot to their cerebrllum or doing a dance to shoo away the reaper.

All the best firms continvoucly morg these days.

I will say there was a period around the turn of the century where everything got very “My This, My That, My Everything” branded. I think after e-Everything but before iEverything. It felt like living in a world designed by a three-year-old in the “My” phase.

They did a whole WIMP BIOS design back in the Socket 7 era. AMI “WinBIOS”. I had it on a PCChips M560TG, whose most notable feature was that it cost $48 for an almost-working motherboard.

The complete silence of the powwrs that be abput the whereabouts of the lost weapon “Pluton”?

They look like the press kit for one of those Million Dollar Skank-off romance-game-shows. I assume Thursdays at 9, next day on Paramount Plus?

Floats for currency in a payments platform.

The system will happily take a transaction for $121.765, and every so often there’s a dispute because one report ran it through round() and another through floor().

Thwn I’d expect higher figures for musicians, swayed by the top .01% that suck up all the fame and royalties.

There’s also a longevity mismatch. The streaming device goes obsolete much faster than the display. At worst, you’ve got a bunch of buttons snd icons for dead services or “your device is no longer supported” tutning your home theatre into a dead mall.

It’s sort of like when they used to make low-end TVs with VCRs and DVD players built in. Nobody was doing that on top of the line sets because you wanted to keep it for 10 years, and the DVD player would give out much sooner.

I think one brand tried to make a modular component to allow for smart upgrades, but without industry standards, it was a predestined dead end. Thry should have just out a slot in the cabinet sized to fit a Roku/Fire stick and let customers swap them every few years.

While there’s some far-end “let’s eliminate cash” sentiments, a lot of the selling point of a CBDC is simply faster, cheaper settlement than current private platforms, so there’s a nonmalovent position.

Many central banks are pushing for the CBDC as a commercial or interbank-only thing in large part because if end consumers could just have an CBDC demand account with the Federal Reserve/Bank of England/ECB, it would squeeze out commercial banks.

I believe the huge mistake in HTML wasn’t having some sort of element-level addressability.

People went insane over “the page flashes for 15ms because we have to reload the header and footer and it doesn’t look NAAATIVE!” and the response was to SPA/AJAX everything, inviting a huge Turing-complete nightmare of possibilities when 95% of what peopleneed would be delivered with < form action=“blah” replace_with_response=“#foo” >

That and a dearth of native widgets-- a < combobox > and a < menu > that worked like the system menus might have kept JavaScript as the sick oddity it should be.

I’d be more interested in painting my claws if it didn’t manage to smell so. Considring you’re literally smearing it on your body to sit for several weeks, you’d think they’d have developed less toxic formulas that don’t smell like you tipped over the entire Tamiya display at the hobby shop.

I believe it’s actually symbolics.com, who made weird expensive computers thst ran LISP well during the 80s AI bubble.

Let’s not sell Insect Overlords short. They’ve been aroubd for 350 million years, they must know something.

Grok went into a new conspiracy k-hole?

There are two issues with human rights.

One is selective enforcement. There are a long list of countries with abysmal human rights records, but it’s too strategically convenient or economically essential to look the other way. Whrn was the last time they made a fuss about Jamal Khashoggi? Human rights only gets invoked when sabre-rattling is useful, not as a solid and consistent moral framework.

The other is that it’s a “luxury product”. Can every country support a modern human-rights model, or does it require a certain level of economic and political stability? It’s hard to maintain rule of law amid active insurgency, or if you can’t even deploy the bureaucratic state. Once you’ve gotten past that threshold, will both leaders and the broader population be eager to switch from the system that got them where they are? You’ve got to convince people that being able to write an anti-government op-ed is more important than security, or the price of eggs. This is a long term soft sell: berating countries for not measuring up to Western standards isn’t going to get them to make that choice any faster.

Not to mention I bent all the pins on my Cyrix MII ttying to get it in that stupid socket.