Automation is always incremental.

I’m an accountant. Components of the job have been being automated or systemised for many decades. Most of the tasks that occupied a graduate when I was one 20 years ago don’t exist anymore.

Not because AI is doing those tasks but just because everything became more integrated, we configure and manage the flow of data rather than making the data, you might say.

If you had to hire 100 professional programmers in the past, but then AI makes programmers 10% more efficient than previously, then you can do the same work with 91 programmers.

That doesn’t mean that 9 people were doing something that an LLM can do, it just means that more work is being completed with fewer programmers.

Plenty of sea snails that large.

Abalone are snails, they’re a delicacy.

I’m sure it’s possible but I suspect it’s simply not cost effective.

Removing grease requires hot water, harsh solvents, and scrubbing. If you’ve ever cleaned an oven or bbq or whatever I’m sure you’d agree that it would be very difficult to automate.

I don’t understand the question.

You have a vending machine in a train station cooking greasy popcorn all day. Is there a machine that can clean that ?

Baked on greasy-buttery-ness is very difficult to clean.

Is that really what’s happening in the picture OP posted? Like someone puts foil wrapped morsels of… food in there once a week and the machine just keeps a couple hot and ready to go?

Seems very unappealing.

That said here in Australia the food you get at gas stations / road houses is more or less the same, just that there’s a person to heat it up and hand it to you.

Needs to be cleaned every day.

This isn’t even on the radar, there’s no support for this at this time. Just a few nutters got an audience with the king and now there’s an article about it.

Same in Australia.

This is the answer.

Writing a playbook is authoritarian.

God that fucking bot.

The bot itself is only mildly offensive, but the fieflord bot-love is just repugnant.

About a month ago news did a “feedback about the bot” thing, in which they declared undying love for the bot above all things and declared any input other than breathless support for the bot to be vote manipulated misinformation.

There were about 3 mods involved, all contradicting each other, and themselves, very condescending, and very sooky and sulky. “One of the mods almost resigned over this!” kind of stuff.

You had to start every comment with “look I know you guys are doing your best and investing all your free time as volunteers but…”

Yes. I think it would be hard to find anyone who thinks chagossians should not be consulted in determining what happens with their island.

The stark reality is that it’s probably just not possible, in any meaningful way.

I have first hand experience in this type of negotiation with community / minority group trying to navigate the best outcomes for them with their limited resources, although of course nothing so dramatic as deciding what to do with an island.

The first problem you encounter is that their is very limited governance within the group, or no governance, or extraordinarily poor governance which is acting against the best interests of the group. Straight off the bat you can end up mediating internal disputes which might be generational feuds. For chagossians, you might ask who gets consulted and are they reasonable representatives of the group.

The next problem you encounter is that the demands of the group may very likely be unreasonable and unachievable, and the group might become hostile if they are unmet. For example you might think possible outcomes in this circumstances are stay with UK, join Mauritius, or become a sovereign nation. What happens if the group demands a fourth option, a new island, in the mid latitudes, unpopulated, potential for local fishing industry, et cetera. You can’t really negotiate with a group that would make such a demand.

Another problem is that, well, the stark reality is that maybe the Chagossians don’t really have any meaningful options. What’s the point of negotiating if the only potential outcome is being subsumed by Mauritius and accepting whatever they will provide.

In addition, no matter how much you consult with them, there will always be someone that says they weren’t consulted and they’re bitter because they didn’t receive their new tropical island.

Finally, if things need to be resolved in a timely manner, then involving the Chagossians isn’t going to achieve that. The only option is to hand them over to Mauritius and let them manage all of these issues that have been simmering away since the dawn of time.

I don’t really know anything about Chagos, but is that really what the islanders want? A quick google suggests the islanders might find it difficult to agree.

Most micro island nations just aren’t viable as a sovereign nation in 2024. They need air travel, health services, telecommunications, building materials, food imports, education, et cetera. Sadly they just aren’t able to produce anything of any value with which to pay for all of those things.

In many cases they end up trading their sovereignty for political positions. It looks like there’s already a detention centre for sri lankans in Chagos. China will happily pay then millions a year for them not to recognise Taiwan as a sovereign state, which is kinda ironic.

Nauru is a fairly interesting island nation. They sold the rights to their phosphate (bird poo) 80 (?) some years ago, and after it was extracted they were left with a moon scape. Sadly they squandered the money with some comically bad investments, including a broadway production IIRC. Health outcomes are pretty terrible.

It looks like there’s already a military base in Chagos, so I guess that’s something they can trade on.

Another problem with sovereignty is migration rights. If you’re born somewhere like that you would absolutely want the opportunity to go to university in Australia or UK or similar.

Sure, or you could go outside and play on some days.

Obviously this guy is a scum bag but what even is his angle here?

“look at me being punished for breaking this law everyone universally thinks is a great idea”

Imprisonment is always the least-bad option out of a bunch of bad options.

I’m not really into the “send a message” aspect of punishment, I don’t want this guy punished so that others of similar mind fear being punished.

However, I’m glad that his imprisonment clearly demonstrates that our society has resolved that nazism will not be tolerated.

If the price is this idiot being more extremified then so be it.

Sorry, my guy seems like a nit wit all the way up and down.

If you want to sell mods as a side hustle that’s great, but don’t form a company with the explicit enterprise of infringing the rights of one of the largest and most litigious rights holders in the world.

No one cares about catching specific phishing campaigns.

I gave up on this years ago.

Figuring out how they got hold of your email won’t be very satisfying. It’s not possible, but if it were you would find it’s some obscure forum you signed up for 10 years ago to make the search function work, which hasn’t updated their forum software during that 10 years, and is now leaking email addresses.

Point is, the horse has already bolted and now your email address is on the lists that get sold on the dark net. There’s no going back.

My understanding with spam / phishing is that most email providers will identify and remove 95% of it. gmail will catch 99.9% just because of the volume of emails going through their servers. I personally would pry my eyes out with a fork before using gmail so I’m stuck receiving 5% of spam. It’s nothing really. Every day (or several days) I look at my inbox, action and archive as appropriate, and delete the rest. It literally takes less than 1 second because I would have to “delete the rest” anyway.

As others have mentioned, “catch-all” email addresses are one method to kind of mitigate or manage the problem, but ultimately I’ve found it to be a cool trick but ultimately inconvenient and maybe pointless.

I think you’re pretty much talking about the fundamental attribution error. It’s a cognitive bias whereby we interpret the actions of others as the result of their character, but attribute our own behavior to external situational things.

I think another component of this is generalisation, like how often does someone have to do mean things to qualify as “an asshole”. Once in a lifetime? Once a year? Every day? All day?

I used to think I was a super nice person. These days I will absolutely acknowledge that there are times when people would think I was a bit of an asshole. I think sometimes it’s unavoidable if you don’t want to be everyone’s door mat. For example, when you disagree with someone sometimes you can just let it go to keep the peace, but if you feel strongly about it for whatever reason and have to stand your ground, it’s easy to end up looking like an asshole.

They want $100 a barrel. Russia is selling too much at say $90 a barrel. If the Saudis flood the market so it’s only $80 a barrel, it will really fuck Russia’s shit up.

Saudis are hoping Russia starts playing their game with the price fixing.