Bombing people doesn't really help them.

I see Israel has started its usual tactics of destroying all the civilian infrastructure in Lebanon, in preparation for annexing part of it.

Months? They have been converting some motorway here for *years*. I think we are about 4 years in now, I lost track. It's taken so long that they started out making it a "smart motorway", realized that those things are deathtraps, and now I'm not sure what it's going to end up as.

We have had average speed cameras in kilometre after kilometre of 50 MPH stretches for many years too. Some of them seem to have been forgotten about because there hasn't been any work or cones there for years, and most people speed through at 70.

To be fair, the US didn't start the war, Israel did. Trump was just too weak to avoid getting dragged into it, and now he doesn't know how to end it.

Of course Israel doesn't want it to end, they want to keep bombing Lebanon and annexing parts of it to build their Greater Israel.

The way to stop nuclear proliferation in the Middle East is to disarm Israel. They have somewhere between 100 and 200 nukes, and multiple ways to deliver them (aircraft, missiles, submarines). They also have the "Samson Option", where if Zionism is on the brink of extinction they are threatening to launch them indiscriminately. Europe is within their range, by the way.

What really helped with smoking was first nicotine substitutes like patched, and second vaping.

While many people do regain weight when they come off these drugs, maybe in time we can find ways to prevent that, or find better drugs like this one that either keep the weight off or which they can just take forever and are cheap.

You make it sound like people have a free choice about their lifestyle, but that seems exceedingly unlikely given that a) three quarters of Americans are making these bad choices, despite likely knowing what the good choices are, and b) what we know about modern life and the pressures people face.

About three quarters of Americans are overweight or obese. So at most you can say some people an exceptional ability to regulate their weight effectively without assistance.

People have been arguing for years that people need to do more exercise and eat more healthy food. They have been trying to regulate food producers and advertising to make healthy eating easier and more affordable. These efforts have failed. You can argue that we should try harder, but realistically the chances of it working seem to be quite low. If medication turns out to be the way to force the issue, well I'm not going to begrudge anyone who takes that option.

I was watching a video about this recently, and it's not just Brazil. China has their own, of course, but also Europe is developing one, and so is the UK. Basically everyone wants to get away from Visa and Mastercard.

I think what really pissed off the US is that the Brazilian system only charges 0.33% per transaction, compared to 1-2% for Visa and Mastercard.

Maybe the game box should have a list of when all the licences expire, since apparently a licence is what you are "buying".

Optimius won't do any of that stuff because Musk consistently overestimates how good AI is at vision. He can't even get his cars to stop crashing into stationary objects. A decade ago he promised they would be fully self driving within months, no driver oversight required, and he's still assuming that the huge breakthrough that makes vision actually work is just around the corner and he will be the one to make it.

The method that Musk is attempting has been tried many times before, always ending in failure. You can't just teach an AI to recognize more and more objects until it becomes competent. You can't just teach it more and more facts until it understands the world. The kind of intelligence needed to do seemingly simple tasks like folding clothes is much more general than that.

Seems like an industry problem. It's ridiculous to license a car for a fixed amount of time. Back in the day, a licensed car would be in the game forever, and there was no way to turn it off. The terms have got worse for the consumer, but that was not made clear when buying the game.

For online games they could release the source code of the decade old server, and a patch to allow the use of third party ones. Or a patch to let you play the game offline.

Also remember that this is Europe, so the law on things like this is generally biased towards the weaker party, the consumer. Norms and reasonable expectations count for a lot. Having a button that says "buy" when it's actually just a temporary licence isn't very responsible.

I wonder if it's already happened. I can imagine a law firm creating an LLM based on the writings and court transcripts of a particular judge, and then using it to test out different strategies to see which is likely to be most effective with them.

It's the name of a specific technology that they call "isolates". A lightweight container system designed for this kind of application.

And then the savings can be used to bring down the cost of healthcare, right? Right?!?