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Cake day: March 31st, 2025

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  • there’s a couple of big failures in american defense industry (like shipbuilding) but F35 is not one of them. the alleged killswitch is not likely a thing because first, it could be used by the most probable adversary, and they already shown capability in EW; and second, it’s not necessary because it requires constant stream of spare parts and maintenance. as if it’s worth it, ask any remaining iranian radar operator for firsthand opinion

    some countries switched to euro made jets anyway, but these aren’t likely to be doing the job that F35 is cut to do anyway (SEAD)

    there’s already euro alternative in development, for which americans were explicitly not invited (GCAP, FCAS). there’s also the everything else part of military, half of euro countries make now artillery (both tube and rocket) so these can be bought locally too








  • it’s maybe because chatbots incorporate, accidentally or not, elements of what makes gambling addiction work on humans https://pivot-to-ai.com/2025/06/05/generative-ai-runs-on-gambling-addiction-just-one-more-prompt-bro/

    the gist:

    There’s a book on this — Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products by Nir Eyal, from 2014. This is the how-to on getting people addicted to your mobile app. [Amazon UK, Amazon US]

    Here’s Eyal’s “Hook Model”:

    First, the trigger is what gets you in. e.g., you see a chatbot prompt and it suggests you type in a question. Second is the action — e.g., you do ask the bot a question. Third is the reward — and it’s got to be a variable reward. Sometimes the chatbot comes up with a mediocre answer — but sometimes you love the answer! Eyal says: “Feedback loops are all around us, but predictable ones don’t create desire.” Intermittent rewards are the key tool to create an addiction. Fourth is the investment — the user puts time, effort, or money into the process to get a better result next time. Skin in the game gives the user a sunk cost they’ve put in. Then the user loops back to the beginning. The user will be more likely to follow an external trigger — or they’ll come to your site themselves looking for the dopamine rush from that variable reward.

    Eyal said he wrote Hooked to promote healthy habits, not addiction — but from the outside, you’ll be hard pressed to tell the difference. Because the model is, literally, how to design a poker machine. Keep the lab rats pulling the lever.

    chatbots users also are attracted to their terminally sycophantic and agreeable responses, and also some users form parasocial relationships with motherfucking spicy autocomplete, and also chatbots were marketed to management types as a kind of futuristic status symbol that if you don’t use it you’ll fall behind and then you’ll all see. people get mixed gambling addiction/fomo/parasocial relationship/being dupes of multibillion dollar advertising scheme and that’s why they get so unserious about their chatbot use

    and also separately core of openai and anthropic and probably some other companies are made from cultists that want to make machine god, but it’s entirely different rabbit hole

    like with any other bubble, money for it won’t last forever. most recently disney sued midjourney for copyright infringement, and if they set legal precedent, they might take wipe out all of these drivel making machines for good









  • slightly more seriously: lots of lemmy users came from reddit, but mostly from older demographic (because of old reddit phaseout) and more FOSS-oriented, privacy-aware, tech-literate part (because of API shitshow/alternative apps blockage). there’s some barrier to entry (choice of instance) that would filter off the least technical users. there are some prominent programming oriented fedi servers (programming.dev, infosec.exchange). lemmy in general seems to be more lefty than reddit, less americacentric, and i guess that over half are linux users. i suspect that because of combination of technical skill and older age (compared to reddit) lots of lemmitors have well paying technical jobs (again compared to reddit) which allows/requires them to live in nicer parts of their countries (not specifically cali)



  • “People are planning 10 gigawatt data centers,” Schmidt said. "Gives you a sense of how big this crisis is. Many people think that the energy demand for our industry will go from 3 percent to 99 percent of total generation

    I reasoned that the former Google executive might have bought Relativity Space as a means to support the development of data centers in space.

    absolutely not peak of bubble type bullshit, please give microsoft-sized theranos more money, nothing weird or stupid is happening there

    last time i’ve seen someone wanting to put compute in orbit it was cryptobros trying to avoid everyone’s jurisdiction, presumably to do some financial crimes there. turns out you can get away with this on earth, so it’s unnecessary