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As they saying goes, you have to dodge the trap every time, they only have to get you once. Sooner or later we all will slip up if we’re subjected to endless con attempts.

Shame that the guardian describes Powell’s statement as ‘blistering’: https://www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/speech/powell20260...

It reads to me more as ‘tepid’. He’s obviously trying to be as apolitical as possible, but I don’t think that’s going to help.


If Trump and Rubio are not credible, then there is no way to determine the intent of any military action, so the bet is impossible to evaluate.

That’s pretty funny.


You can for the most part evaluate intent based on actions. There are some actions which can have multiple possible intents behind them, where things get trickier. But in most situations, there is one primary consequence of something, and the action needs to be taken with deliberation, hence you can state with high certainty what the intention was, based purely on what was done. Consversely, if a person has complete freedom to complete some action, but chooses not to, then we can say their intention wasn't to do that thing.

Intend and action don’t have to align if the people with the intend don’t know what they are doing.

“If Trump is not credible”!!??? If??!

Fool me once shame on you, fool me twice shame on me, fool me 500 times, I want to be lied to”

Similarly no one believes Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was to “denazi-ify” it as Putin and the kremlin claimed many times among other things.

Neither was the troop building up in 2022 near Ukraine purely for training as repeatedly claimed by the top Russian officials.

Trump is equally credible.


Heh, it’s impossible for me to look at these without hearing the launch theme from Apollo 13 in my head. Such a glorious programme.


I like it but I really hate how they felt it "added drama" to put in a fictional argument

Swigert was nothing but capable and professional and nobody blamed him (even in anger) for the oxygen tank explosion


I think I read (on HN?) that the number 5 engine shutdown saved the spacecraft and it's glazed over in the movie. I think they really didn't pay a lot of attention to it but if it didn't shut off it had a high probability of blowing up


I think this sums it up pretty well.

"When I am weaker than you, I ask you for freedom because that is according to your principles; when I am stronger than you, I take away your freedom because that is according to my principles,"


That’s exactly right.


Yeah, except there aren't even principles at play here. For example, streamline all regulatory approvals, oh except for disfavored groups: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/12/speed-act-passes...


It’s just pure reaction. Liberals favor renewable energy, so MAGA opposes it. Liberals favor climate science, so MAGA opposes it.


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Do you have a good example?


The two recent examples I can think of are the Gaza ceasefire, as well as the general concept (and not actual implementation) of re-industrializing the USA in the context of China's dominance.


"re-industrializing the USA"

Call me when the party starts. Many of the decisions this administration has made are having the opposite impact. The re-industrialization of the US (what little bit of it there is) is in spite of the trump administration, not because of it.


Well, people are still dying despite the ceasefire and the reindustrialization seems mostly to build data centers. What parts of these do you think are good?


Has there actually been a ceasefire in practice? People are still dying, guns are still being fired afaik. And the broader plan does not instill confidence with Tony Blair proposed as a technocratic leader of the area


I don't know. It's tragic but unfortunately not surprising there is still fighting.

My recollection is that during the early, and perhaps overly hopeful, days, left-leaning media avoided saying Trump's name when reporting on it.


Of course I have no sway, politically or otherwise, but I would have happily given credit to Trump where it was due if it panned out.

But Israel does not seem to have abided by the ceasefire, and the larger peace plan now feels like it's going to be stitch up for the Palestinian people.

It is definitely tragic


I tried to help them steelman this but the only couple examples of good things I could come up with, I’ve not seen liberals complain about. Hm. Coming up blank.


Does any leftist have an example of anything good Trump has done?


Not that I think he has the legal authority to do it, but I am not really opposed to dropping the penny.


The 2018 farm bill was at the top of my list. But they just repealed all the good they accidentally did with it so never mind.


Trump seems to be really into kei trucks all of a sudden, if he follows through with allowing their import that seems like it could be good


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All these come from the white house press directly which has painted them in a glowing light but it remains to be seen if they are actually good things. The administration is crooked. Nothing they do can be trusted. Especially when they attack science and reduce funding for critical programs


He’s announced having done more things I might have liked, than he’s actually done. Lots of crowing about crap that never happens.


Which of these have been met with scorn by liberals? You seem to not get the idea...


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After significantly more searching, you managed to cite less criticisms of Trump’s “good actions” by liberals than you managed to cite “good actions” themselves, and then to top it all off you tried to weakly justify that conclusion with some trite aphorism about individualism encompassing many outcomes.

Weak!


Yes, you're right, I should google to make your arguments for you!

Listing a bunch of white house links and then 2 criticisms (edit: he got it up to about 6 criticisms of marijuana legislation, wow!) which aren't even really about the action but more about the general malfeasance of the administration is an extremely weak supporting argument behind "liberals criticize anything good Trump does the same way conservatives criticized anything good Biden did", because we can identify plentiful examples of naked hypocrisy around the criticisms of Biden - see the autopen debacle for one hilariously manufactured self-owning example.

It must really be quite trying to justify Trump's actions, I'm amazed you have failed to use any of that energy on introspection.


I'm a liberal, and the current administration de-scheduling Marijuana federally is a good thing. Also, a broken clock is right twice a day.


Examples?


The principles are difficult for you to detect because your values are things like truth or integrity. Their values are just about forming hierarchy.


This is of course the standard human view of our ingroup vs our outgroup.

The MAGA people, believe it or not, say very similar things about you.


I’m sure they do. But you can see the results of the current administration here.


They are lying.

It's a problem how many people seemingly have broken lie detectors these days. I blame social media for this one: far too easy to find a truthy bubble that validates your beliefs.


They say much worse things about me! Donald Trump, the leader of the MAGA people, released a Christmas greeting calling me scum (https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/1157772703684...) - I've never done that and would never do that to even my worst political opponents. I don't understand why people persist in drawing this false equivalence. Are you in a media bubble where you don't see the things Trump says and does?


That is very much in line with their principles. A more accurate quote for them is

"For my friends, everything; for my enemies, the law."


"Rules for thee but not for me."


They're not the first with this line of thinking.

> When our enemies say: well, we gave you the freedom of opinion back then - yeah, you gave it to us, that's in no way evidence that we should return the favor! Your stupidity shall not be contagious! That you granted it to us is evidence of how dumb you are!

-- Joseph Goebbels, 1935


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Another example of leftists not understanding things that are obvious. Just because you're protesting doesn't mean you can do things that would be illegal if you weren't protesting. That I have to explain this to you is really annoying.


Oh you definitely can, this is often the point of the protest.


I guess they can try, but in this era of ubiquitous surveillance it’s hard to imagine they would succeed in secretly entering a home.


Isn’t this more that they’re buying a part of an upstream supplier than a client?


"Synopsys will use Nvidia technology to improve its compute-intensive applications" Nvidia is basically giving them money for them to buy GPUs ...


I suppose the hope is that they don’t, and we wind up with commodity frontier models from multiple providers at market rates.


I was very interested to see in that rebuttal that they explicitly called out ‘datacenters in space’ as a means of ‘exporting’ solar power to the earth.

> As the Weinersmiths point out, the ease of generating solar electricity in space is foundational to space development. They focus on the challenges in beaming power back to the Earth, but the “power” could be returned to the Earth in other ways, such as by doing energy intensive manufacturing in space, with the result that we do not need the power on the Earth itself. One modern idea that O’Neill did not consider is to move server farms in space, where power is cheap and you can dump heat into space with a black piece of metal. If this was done on a large scale, the carbon impact of data services on the Earth would drop greatly even if power is not beamed back to the Earth. There are almost certainly other ways we can use power in space to do things in space that benefit people on the Earth.

So the original article seems to think that cooling is a significant challenge and that solar power in space is not ‘that much’ more effective than on the earth, and the other that cooling is trivial and that solar power is easily obtained. I’m inclined to go with ‘space is hard’ as that seems to comport with my other readings, but obviously the critique of ‘a city on mars’ is advocating for space exploration and is so motivated to minimize the difficulties.


I find it hard to believe that launching and operating data centers in space would turn out to be cheaper than solar, wind, and batteries down here on the ground.


From the rebuttal: "We are at the start of an upward curve of technology development that if allowed to continue for another 50 years, will make it as easy to reach space as to fly to Australia."

People were saying that fifty years ago. Didn't happen. Go rewatch "2001". And read NASA's "The Tyranny of the Rocket Equation". There's only so much you can do with chemical fuels.


  >read NASA's "The Tyranny of the Rocket Equation"
This essay by Don Petit? https://web.archive.org/web/20120503175355/https://www.nasa....

He calls for "new paradigms of operating and new technology," which is what SpaceX delivers. On-orbit refilling gives the advantage of orbital assembly without the cost of separate spaceships. Instead of Petit's "building the pyramids" Shuttle example, SpaceX is cranking out water towers.

Certainly that's a new paradigm vs the old NASA way. Don't forget that NASA was forbidden from working on depots due to a certain senator's conflict of interest.

https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/296094-nasas-space-launc...


I guess these things aren’t literally exclusive, but it’s pretty amusing that elsewhere the rebuttal argues that we’re deep in a great stagnation which we need space exploration to pull us out of. (In the bit where he is arguing against the idea that we should wait a century and then maybe try to colonize space with greater technology)

> The slowdown in GDP growth is not mere paranoia, but an economic fact. Part of the problem with seeing clearly the stagnation all around us is that we need to compare ourselves to what might have been, not to the 1950s as the authors do.


I slightly have trouble believing that Mr “Stop wasting tokens by saying please to LLMs” Altman is not considering how his models can be optimized. I suppose the real question is how accurate are the utilization numbers in the article.


I stopped paying attention to any specific thing Sam Altman says a while ago. I've seen too many examples of interviews or off the cuff interactions that make me think very little of him personally.

For example, I could see him saying not to waste tokens on "please" simply because he thinks that is a stupid way to use the LLM. I.e. a judgement on anyone that would say please, not a concern over token use in his data centers.


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