Disregard what ACAB tells you. There ARE good policemen out there. They just get buried

I went for the praxis of ‘be the lack of bullshit you want to see in the world’ and genuinely went to apply at my local PD, did the 12 hour ride along, the whole thing. I bailed immediately after seeing the reality of what modern US law enforcement actually is, on a ‘normal’ day in my safe, well tax-based and developed county.

It was bullshit. Any pretense of ‘Serve and Protect’ was immediately shattered when after a few hours of running speed traps on downhill slopes and on the periphery of speed limit changes, the cop needed to ‘show activity’ and decide to head over to the trailer park which has known migrants, and laid in wait for an ANPR hit - “hunting over bait” as he called it. And lo and behold (because this clearly wasn’t the first time this worked) it didn’t take long before he nabbed a Hispanic mom taking her kid somewhere. No license, because she’s undocumented, but still has a job and was trying to provide. “The law is the law” so she went to jail, the kid is crying hysterically, CPS gets called, and the entire time the cop is trying to play like he’s helping by intervening. That this is necessary. That she could be a dangerous driver, needs to take the driving test (which is a joke where I live), all while ignoring the reality that she’s not part of the problem. The laws are. We are.

It is almost impossible to effect meaningful change from within a structure that inwardly rejects oversight and reform, whilst outwardly enforcing policies against a population without compassion or adjustment to the scenario.

Fly high = very, very easy to spot for active radar and passive sensors. Which is why almost everything that isn’t yeeting glide-kit dumbbombs from half a country away, flys incredibly low. Like “scraping the trees” low, because hiding among the EM backscatter makes evading airborne sensors like AWACS or interceptor jets easier, and ground radar has a real hard time with that whole curvature of the earth thing.

So the Shaheds are going to be under 100m AGL elevation, which means the AA gun trucks and airburst-flak are the answer for Ukraine - so the counter is back to either dodging bullets, or dodging the defender’s location . The old Shaheds don’t, they blithely soak up Ukrainian gunfire without reaction before blowing up. These new AI powered models represent a big jump in credibility.

Swarming. Especially in areas denied by electronic warfare. Currently the Shaheds are built for cost (and sanctions) reasons, and are ‘dumbfired’ at coordinates/an object. GPS and inertial navigation fly towards the target, but it doesn’t make any decisions. Launch, set orientation, hit waypoint, next orientation, next waypoint, repeat until final attack phase.

What it can’t do is react. To anything: bad weather, Ukrainian EW/air defense, tall trees or buildings, other aircraft nearby, etc they just fly along their pre-programmed flight plan, providing any defenders with a predictable heading and airspeed to intercept and shoot at.

Add onboard autonomous AI and Russia has a lot more options.

• The camera sees/microphone heard a bunch of tracer bullets flying past? Start evasive maneuvering, diving and changing speed. Much harder to hit an approaching/leaving aircraft that is also changing speed and/or direction.
• Other Shaheds launched earlier are getting signal loss from EW or shot down? The remaining craft can send and receive that info to all the others, and re-route the pack around that area of air defense.
• Image recognition of high value targets like HIMARS or Patriot/IRIS-T allows the Shaheds to immediately ditch their pre-programmed mission, and all focus fire on that newly discovered target instead of the original hospital or apartment building that Russia was targeting.
• Data sharing among Shaheds in flight can allow more efficient use, so instead of committing a dozen or so Shaheds to a single target like a military command post to ensure at least a few get through air defense and hit it, now they can communicate if it actually has been hit or not, and refocus/divert the remaining Shaheds in that wave.

Essentially think of it as the difference between the dumbest box of rocks AI in a video game that doesn’t react, versus going player versus player online.

It’s unbelievably hot when you’re getting blown with enthusiasm though… Slurping away like my dick is the last ice cream cone they had at the store during an August heatwave is sublime, even a mid grade delivery gets upgraded when it’s clearly desired instead of a choice or foreplay obligation.

At some point…? After that kid popped off at him in PA, all the offline people I know were just pretty universally either “shame he lived” or “meh”.

You can only be a hateful and bigoted bully for so long before even the ‘apolitical normie’ can connect the dots between Cheeto’s stochastic terrorism, and someone turning that energy back his way.

My chief complaint is only being able to upvote this once, excellent OC 👏

I have yet to hear a real argument for lifting a truck whilst keeping the straight axle. The very, verrry marginal clearance gains for approach/departure angle while off-roading can usually be better achieved with a bumper delete instead, which doesn’t ruin the driving performance or increase your chance of rollovers. And instead of thousands spent upfront and extra maintenance cost later, removing parts is free.

Now, put some double wishbones and universal joints, that’s an immediately justifiable capability to pursue. But these mall crawlers with the magic pop-out steps are for emotionally stunted manchildren who are transparently buying into someone else’s idea of what a man is.

Of course, we need to make the asocial and undesirable ‘work-shy’ elements of society contribute their fair share to the fatherland’s struggle, the great leader has spoken! /s

The concentration camps didn’t begin as a policy of industrialized state murder, but grew out deliberate policy decisions that viewed people as problems that needed ‘correcting’ or eliminating, instead of viewing people as individuals. And we are seeing the same here today:

• Red triangles marked “political prisoners… [which] in Auschwitz were, above all, Poles.

• Green triangles marked “criminal”, imprisoned as a direct consequence of committing a forbidden act, or after release from prison in cases where the criminal police regarded the sentence imposed by the court as too lenient.

• Black triangles marked “asocial” prisoners, imprisoned in theory for vagrancy or prostitution, but in fact for a wide range of other deeds or behaviors, loosely and arbitrarily interpreted by the police. The Roma in the Birkenau “Gypsy camp” were classified as asocial.

• Purple triangles marked prisoners imprisoned for belonging to the Jehovah’s Witnesses, regarded as enemies of the state because of their pacifistic beliefs.

• Pink triangles marked homosexual prisoners, in practice exclusively German, who were imprisoned on the basis of §175 of the German criminal code.

And not just as a refresher/competency test! It should also be a chance to educate on updates like legislation that get passed, safety information and tips as research improves, and new traffic controls like double diamonds or roundabouts that weren’t in use when people learned to drive in their youth.

But at a minimum you should have to re-validate that you are a competent and safe driver every decade or so, agreed.

There’s a key difference between using a tool to crunch a known mathematical equation (because you cannot just say “find X” to the calculator) and having to punch in the right inputs - ergo requiring understanding - and simply asking the teacher for the answer.

Treat AI like the hermit oracle/shaman/divinator of yesteryear, and you’ll get the same results - idiots who don’t know how to think for themselves, and blindly accept what they are told.

Your Brain on ChatGPT

…LLM users displayed the weakest connectivity. Cognitive activity scaled down in relation to external tool use… LLM users also struggled to accurately quote their own work. While LLMs offer immediate convenience, our findings highlight potential cognitive costs. Over four months, LLM users consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels.

Outsourcing thinking from your brain to an AI literally makes you dumber, less confident in the output, and teaches you nothing.

Call me a Luddite or a hater, but if you’re one of the people who uses AI as a shortcut to actual thought or learning, I will judge you and disregard your output and opinions. Form your own basis of understanding and knowledge instead of a teaspoon deep summary that is frequently incorrect.

X to doubt. The UK threw out due process a long time ago, wave the ‘terrorism’ tag and egregiously Orwellian policies become law:

• Legalized warrantless arrest and imprisonment of suspects without trial or warrant for 28 days
• Permits freezing of a suspects assets without trial
• Allows unlimited imprisonment of foreigners suspected of terrorism without trial
• Military police permitted to operate on UK soil openly, even for non terrorism reasons
• TPIM orders without trial that permits electronic tagging, travel bans, limited house arrest, curfews and constant monitoring.

And all that’s before we even talk about the recent Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act nonsense.

Oooooh I like the spoken sound of ‘concubi’ but strictly aren’t concubines more so a pseudo-partner/marriage than a smash-and-pass like the incubus and succubus?

This is the line that even at my most cynical, I never thought Trump would go for/be allied to cross - fuck with the money directly. Ruin the bag for the capital class. Tariffs were bad long term but presented an opportunity for huge wealth transfer during that manufactured chaos’s period of ‘creative destruction’:

“He made $2.5 billion, and he made $900 million! That’s not bad!” Trump said, pointing to financial investor Charles Schwab and then NASCAR team owner Roger Penske

But then again, this loon is who he put forward in his first term, sooo yeah.

…what if we can do even better tho?

During COVID when nobody able to spray for mosquitoes there was a really cool resurgence - even in the suburbs. Came home from a bicycle ride late one evening, and swear every tree had Christmas lights strung up, they were chilling out and just glimmering in every branch.

I pushed the bike home that night and watched the show in the trees, a lovely coda to the day

I equally enjoy the 1 and 2 star reviews where they will openly state “product is great, no issues” but then immediately throw all that away because the version they bought doesn’t fit their grandpappy’s 1963 Barracuda, or “that table of six let their kids run around the restaurant, 1/10”.

The bipolar reaction of the average consumer is maddening, no nuance.

Proper scran, that

If you’re a business that’s serious about a supporting an actual charity like childhood cancer or homelessness, I’m expecting at or near 100% of profits to be donated.

Virtue signaling while pocketing essentially all of the proceeds is a super scumbag move. And that’s before the badge worship angle…

It’s okay, we’ve all been gotten by this too. It’s easy to look at an older piece of technology that has survived, and ascribe that to ‘things used to be better’ while ignoring the materials advances or better engineering that doesn’t require massive buttresses to stop building falling over, or why using MIM instead of forging is better for 95% of use cases, or how wastefully overbuilt things were in the past because they didn’t know how to build efficiently.

There is a flipside of planned obsolescence and value engineering something to death where the wrong material/spec is decided for profit reasons… but that is not a new phenomenon